ur--whale

The age old question: besides the obvious aesthetic attractiveness, is there really any kind of objective advantages to tube-based audio amps as opposed to solid-state semiconductor based ones?

The reason I walked away from Chrome a couple of years ago is because of the amount of information it sends to Google.

I'm curious to know where Safari stands in that regard: how much and how often does it "call home"?

Oh, and also : how much of it is Open Source? In my experience, Apple is particularly good at OpenSourcing lots of pieces while keeping the juicy bits proprietary. Can Safari be 100% rebuilt from source?

Conspicuously missing from the entire libra story is how they are actually going to manage the peg. How will they handle the custodian counter-party risk?

What I mean by that is: for libra to actually be a stablecoin, for every libra unit in circulation, FB and their merry band of friends will need to stash a frozen combo of {dollar, euro, yen} somewhere.

That "somewhere" is actually not easy at all to design from a financial infrastructure point of view: any institution (other than central banks) who will actually store that stash will have to:

   - be regularly audited by independent auditors

   - be risk-free (and there is no such a thing) or the peg will drift.

Worse, these custodians of what is already essentially virtual money are going to be sitting on a huge pile of currency and to guarantee the peg, won't be allowed to do anything with it.

I give it 6 months before that money is re-invested somewhere through some smart financial engineering.

Here's a cute way to generate Bitcoin key pairs using only bash and some fairly standard command line utilities (disclaimer: I wouldn't use it to generate production keys).

https://gist.github.com/colindean/5239812

This was actually put together at the Bitcoin dawn of time by a bitcointalk user called grondilu.

Here's the original (circa 2010) thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2461.0;all

>I guess OP thinks that vanity-eth.tk is a website with server side code.

I am fairly certain that very few people go and read the entire supposedly client-side JS code served by that site. It takes a very tiny bit of obfuscated JS to send 256 bit somewhere else.

[edit]: and when you generate a key pair that's going to potentially store multi kUSD in value, trusting anything that happens in a browser is - call me old fashioned - suicidal.

Aside from the obvious fact that the set everyday numbers (both rationals and reals) are fields, most crypto heavily relies on finite fields.

[edit] and come to think of it, I might be mistaken I don't think the notion of vector space and therefore the whole of linear algebra would work without a field for the underlying coordinates.

"I went on vanity-eth.tk and generated a public and a private key"

That people are actually still willing to do this in 2019 with BTC above 10K and ETH above 300 always surprises me, even if it's for a toy example like this article (as it might incite other less tech-savy people to believe it's ok to do something like that).