Disqus - Latest Comments for guan

Re: Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

Guan Yang — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 20:30:43 -0000

I understand that the domain name is the same. But based on the description in this blog post, I expected that when I go to a Cloudflare proxied site in the Tor Browser that has onion routing enabled, it would be automatically onion routed.

I am not looking at the domain name to verify this. I am clicking the “i” button next to the address bar in Tor Browser, which shows me the Tor circuit being used. There I can see whether the site is onion routed or uses an exit node.

And right now, for both cloudflare.com and for a site of my own that uses Cloudflare and which I enabled onion routing on, it’s showing an exit node. That’s also the case for perfectoid.space.

Indeed, when I go to perfectoid.space in Tor Browser 8.0.1, the site itself says “You appear to be connected via an exit node.” And that is confirmed by the Tor circuit viewer, which shows an exit node instead of full onion routing.

Re: Introducing the Cloudflare Onion Service

Guan Yang — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 09:00:26 -0000

How do I see this in practice? When I visit cloudflare.com, or one of my own sites that uses Cloudflare with onion routing enabled in the "Crypto" tab, in Tor Browser 8.0.1, and appears to use an exit node and not onion routing.

Re: The State Does Not Enforce Most Agreements

Guan Yang — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:33:23 -0000

It appears that gambling debt resulting from legal gambling can now be enforced in the UK. But of course your point still stands—I don’t think there was an explosion of gambling activity after they legalized it in 2007.

Re: The State Does Not Enforce Most Agreements

Guan Yang — Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:14:00 -0000

Here’s an argument from Bryan Caplan on what role reputation can play in health insurance markets. And he also points out that state enforcement of contract law may not be necessary in the insurance context.

Re: How Hackable Are Your Security Questions?

Guan Yang — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 13:00:33 -0000

Amazon Web Services allows “Security Challenge 1”, “Security Challenge 2” and “Security Challenge 3”.

Re: How Hackable Are Your Security Questions?

Guan Yang — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 12:33:13 -0000

To recover lost passwords to sensitive things like financial accounts, you could require the customer to come to a physical branch and present ID. If it’s a business that doesn’t have physical locations or that’s not practical, it could be something like submitting a photo of yourself holding ID and a unique code (to ensure that it’s not a recycled photo).

Facebook has a method of letting your friends verify that you are you. I’ve seen some attacks on that based on the fact that most people just hit “verify” without checking first, but an improved version could work for less sensitive stuff.

Re: Why are the Danes so angry with Goldman Sachs? - The Term Sheet: Fortune's deals blogTerm Sheet

Guan Yang — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 12:05:57 -0000

Don’t forget that it’s the Danish government issuing the put option, not DONG.

Re: Bitcoin Is an Expensive Way to Pay for Stuff

Guan Yang — Thu, 02 Jan 2014 18:40:10 -0000

Bitcoin transaction fees are, by default, a function of transaction size (in kilobytes), not transaction value (in bitcoins). The default appears to be 0.0001 BTC per thousand bytes, and that's also the minimum.

Transaction size is only vaguely related to transaction value, and depends on the number of inputs (how many different addresses you're funding the transaction with) and outputs (how many different addresses you're sending too). If you have an address with a large number of coins—say, 1,000 BTC—and you're sending them all to a single recipient, then the transaction will be relatively small, and as far as I understand, the network will process it at a cost of 0.00001%.

On the other hand, if you have received a lot of small amounts over time and you want to consolidate them in a single address, or if you have a complicated script (rule for when the coins can be released), you could end up with a big transaction of small value, and a large percentage fee.

Re: Don't Worry, Time Warner Cable Is Just Having A Massive Outage

Guan Yang — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 12:06:49 -0000

It’s a problem with Level 3, a backbone provider. However, it’s also Time Warner Cable’s fault because they should be quicker to reroute traffic to other providers.

Twitter is accessible through Level 3, NTT America, Telia and various peering links. It looks like most other US ISPs use NTT America and Telia to connect to Twitter.

Re: Sadly, 20-Second Cell Phone Charging Probably Still Just a Dream

Guan Yang — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:09:52 -0000

Chris Gammell and Grant Trebbin pointed out to me on Twitter, even if the supercap itself could store enough energy and was capable of charging that quickly (and supercaps can indeed be charged very quickly), a charger that’s capable of delivering that much current would be quite something. A smartphone battery these days might be 8 Wh, so you need about 1.5 kW to charge it in 20s. If you can do this at 95% efficiency, there’s 72 W of waste heat you have to handle. That would require a heatsink larger than most people would be willing to accept in a phone charger.

Re: Predictions of Bike-Share Carnage Are a Mirage and a Distraction

Guan Yang — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:20:43 -0000

Exactly. I have a bike and even have bike parking in the basement. But I’m often too lazy to carry the bike up the stairs, and sometimes I want to make a one-way bike trip, or only bike part of the trip.

Re: T-Minus 10 Days to Citi Bike Launch

Guan Yang — Mon, 20 May 2013 22:20:37 -0000

Don’t forget that they will be able to track at least the number of bikes at each station in real time. They can send trucks to move bikes around even when the distribution doesn’t fit a regular pattern.

Re: Discount rates: A boring thing you should know about (with otters!)

Guan Yang — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:34:09 -0000

A few words of explanation on Stern’s 0.1% pure time preference: When looking at discount rates from first principles, economists usually consider two different reasons why you might discount.

One is that we will be wealthier and therefore consume more in the future. Because there is diminishing marginal utility of consumption, our wealthier selves in the future won’t care as much about $1 of lost or gained consumption as we will. This accounts for 1.3 percentage points of Stern’s 1.4% discount rate.

The other is so-called “pure time preference”, which is an additional motivation for discounting that would apply even if we weren’t richer in the future. Some economists think that it simply doesn’t exist or can’t be morally justified when we are making decisions as a society. Stern takes the view that it can only be justified as an adjustment for the fact that the Earth might not exist in the future. (Another justification could be pure impatience.) He calculates his 0.1% pure time preference rate based on his assumptions about the probability that mankind will be completely extinct, for example due to a large asteroid.

Re: Chart of the Day: One-Third of Americans No Longer Have Decent Phone Service

Guan Yang — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:08:57 -0000

If both parties have good internet connections with fast upstream speed, you can often get higher quality calls with Skype, not least because the Skype voice codec is wideband.

Re: The Economic Record of the McCain Presidency

Guan Yang — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 12:53:51 -0000

I assume the hawkish FOMC members are hawkish for different reasons. Under President McCain, there would be no pressure from inflation hawks in the general conservative commentariat to always tighten. There would also be no political motive to tighten policy (or avoid loosening policy) to prevent Obama from presiding over a recovery.

Re: The Economic Record of the McCain Presidency

Guan Yang — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 10:15:04 -0000

You don’t think we would have much looser monetary policy today with a Republican in the White House?

Re: Saturday Pork Blogging

Guan Yang — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:42:59 -0000

You probably had flæskesteg. The cut is pork shoulder, roasted with the rind on and in a pan with plenty of water.

Re: Can We All Please Stop Whining About the Olympics Being Tape Delayed? Thank You.

Guan Yang — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:38:11 -0000

As others have pointed out, you need a cable subscription to view the online stream.

What’s really weird is that they’re still airing those stupid prison documentaries on MSNBC on weekends and CNBC in primetime, when it could be all Olympics, all the time.

Re: City of Berlin owes trillions of euros to small town

Guan Yang — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:27:12 -0000

Yeah, that’s totally ridiculous. Debt contracts aren’t normally adjusted for inflation unless it is explicitly inflation indexed debt, like the kind issued by some governments.

Re: Why do condos even exist?

Guan Yang — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 09:56:05 -0000

I’d love your thoughts on what the real alternative to condos is. It seems to me that it’s long-term residential leases. Long-term tenants would be somewhat secure against being kicked out because they can’t afford the apartment or the landlord wants to redevelop. My understanding is that they are not very common in the US. Why?

In the longer term, some co-ops might have a way to redevelop. The proprietary leases that actually allow shareholders to live in their apartments have to be renewed regularly. This almost always happens, because it’s impossible to get a mortgage if the proprietary lease expires soon, but I think the co-op has a lot more options available if they actually let the lease expire.

Re: How Big a Deal Is the Court's Medicaid Decision?

Guan Yang — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:49:40 -0000

For many of the same reasons it might be a good idea for states to administer Medicaid in the first place. (If you disagree with that, then of course it doesn’t make sense to involve the states in the Medicaid expansion.)

Josh Barro makes a case for state involvement here: http://www.forbes.com/sites...

“Because Medicaid is means tested, you need to monitor participants for their continued eligibility. Medicaid beneficiaries also often have many simultaneous social services needs, and it’s helpful to have one caseworker handling them all together, especially when your goal is to get beneficiaries to a point where they don’t need welfare anymore.

“In other words, Medicaid is about much more than making payments to doctors and hospitals. The federal government could build an apparatus to do this, but it would be duplicative, and you would lose the benefit of integration with other, state-run assistance programs.”

Re: How Big a Deal Is the Court's Medicaid Decision?

Guan Yang — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:42:24 -0000

I wonder if Congress could abolish Medicaid completely, replace it with an entirely new program that would be very similar to the intended expansion of Medicaid, give the new program a different name—Obamacaid?—and require states to adopt it in its entirety or forgo all federal funding under the new program.

Re: Open-source human genomes

Guan Yang — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:08:03 -0000

Don’t forget GenBank, which claims to contains all publicly available DNA sequences and is the largest such database. Publicly funded labs around the world generally upload to GenBank within 24 hours of sequencing. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Re: China Service And One Tiny Tiny Hotel Comment. Meaning Versus Nothingness.

Guan Yang — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:54:17 -0000

I'll have to browsing later on Tripadvisor, but I'm pretty sure I've seen American hotel managers respond in essentially the same way to guest complaints there. I should say that I interpreted the response exactly as Bluetwinkle did.

Re: Can Cheap Smartphone Apps Ever be Big Moneymakers?

Guan Yang — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:29:57 -0000

Photoshop Touch probably cost an order of magnitude less to develop than Photoshop, but even if the development costs were the same, they would only need to sell around 40x as many copies for the two products to be equally profitable. Not that many people buy Photoshop, so it doesn’t seem like such a stretch.

(Apple does take a 30% cut, but selling Photoshop isn’t free either.)