News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

roro159

What matters for the financial hedge is the existence of futures, which means the companies can buy something they know they will need at a known price months before they actually need it. The specifics of this operation differs depending on the actual financial instrument used, but the idea is the same, even on the opposite side (selling at a known price in the future).
Hashing the password in the client isn't very effective because the hash of the password now is equivalent to a password. If you have the hash you can just send it to the server and authenticate. Implementing this looks like a lot of trouble with little to no benefits, since you also have to take the regular precautions server-side anyway.
Re:Webpack not working if its Monday on Monday July 08, 2019 @07:01PM (#20387575)
Link to the GitHub issue in the tweet: https://github.com/JeffreyWay/laravel-mix/issues/2153

Link to the Webpack issue: https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli/issues/962

Apparently it's caused by a bug with OS-specific code to check the last time a message asking for donations to the project was printed, so it doesn't ask too much. And this checking only happens on mondays for some reason... There's literally a "if (now.getDay() === MONDAY)".

You just made a mistaek. :)
Re:Distributed Locks Are Dead; Long Live Distributed Locks on Wednesday June 05, 2019 @12:04PM (#20105789)
I think it's worth to add a few previous discussions about distributed locks.

Redlock is a distributed lock using Redis: https://redis.io/topics/distlock

Martin Kleppmann criticized Redlock and mentioned the fencing solution: http://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed...

Antirez disagrees with the analysis and the HN post has a good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065933

Blockchain != PoW. There are plenty of blockchains without the problems you described (like IBM's Hyperledger).
What you're missing is that Tether is not truly bankrupt yet. Yes, sane accounting would say their liabilities exceed their assets, but only because 26% of their assets are a high risk loan to Bitfinex. They still have assets > USDT supply. What makes the liabilities exceed the assets is the credit risk associated with the loan.

You can't undisputedly say Bitfinex won't be able to pay the loan. Maybe the frozen assets are real and will be unfrozen soon. Nobody knows. They aren't bankrupt yet, but in a very risky position of becoming so.

Another possibility is that you misread the article title, which seems kind of misleading. It says that only 74% of Tether is backed by cash or cash-equivalents. The loan to Bitfinex is neither, so it should be the remaining 26% (26% of $2.8B is $745M).

That being said, I agree with you on the Wiley Coyote point. Tether should be completely disreputable, not only because of it's risky situation, but because the whole move was completely shady. Silently changing the wording of the website, after assuring everyone that they had it 100% backed... I don't see how anyone can trust it anymore.

Re:The Samsung Galaxy Fold's display seems to have problems on Wednesday April 17, 2019 @04:03PM (#19685977)
The pre orders sold out in 2 days: https://www.droid-life.com/2019/04/16/samsung-quickly-sold-o...

The numbers aren't public yet, but it's probably low. I don't think they are dumb enough to expect this device to sell anywhere near the Galaxy S10 or an iPhone.

It may not be a huge sales success, but apparently it's above Samsung expectations.

Re:Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs on Tuesday April 09, 2019 @07:23PM (#19620020)
To add another example: one of VS Code's releases has interesting statistics of it's issues (https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_28).

They did some housekeeping for a month and were able to close 3918 issues, but in the meantime 2187 issues were created.

Open source project management at this scale is truly hard indeed.