By building on blockchain, you can save work building trading systems and enable cross-pollination (Take advantage of all the tools and bridges because of composeability).

That period also excludes all the work and progress in phones it took to get there.

> I’ll ignore DeFi because I know it doesn’t necessarily sit well with HN

DeFi is revolutionary. The idea of programmable finance and bank which can be created by anyone (we have 12 year old engineers with complex defi financial products) is nothing short of eye watering. On top of it, all the primitives are composeable which makes risk stacking possible. That's capital efficient for the capital owner compared to tradfi.

You can criticise the grifters in the space which are too many but what it enables is amazing to me.

It means they are not complex. Honestly, none of the DeFi projects are (it's flash loans and currency speculation across the board).

And none of them are banks.

At least in India, most of the venture capital startups are copies of existing products but with discounts and rewards attached through VC investments.

The timeframe for return on investments is too low for any risky bets. You aren't going to end up cashing out deep tech in few years.

On one level I'm very pleased to see this stuff funded, because it wasn't really 10-15 years ago.

On the other hand, what worries me here is that this stuff is entirely secondary and subservient to other services, its potential revenue completely depends on the success of businesses further up the food chain. And if things start to really slow down, I worry these will be the first to suffer and a lot of these startups (which seem to be hiring for a lot of the interesting work) will shutdown.

I feel like the risk profile is such that I'd never buy most of the products being built. I don't want core business infrastructure sitting in the cloud of a startup which might not exist tomorrow due to missing a VC round or an agile pivot. I also don't want an integration of 50 different cloud services.

I'm glad to use established open-source technologies. I'll also use AWS or similar big players if open source doesn't exist. However, most of the niche proprietary startups just don't make much sense here to me. I'd invest a lot of money and take on a lot of risk.

I do feel like there is big money in value-adds: hosting open-source solutions, consulting, etc. A lot of non-tech companies are struggling with data, ML, and visualizations.

There's a feedback loop here. Once these startups start shutting down, the above problem will be recognized, cascading their collapse.

I do think there was a deficit before that this wave of stuff is working to remedy. In the mid-2000s, companies like Google and Amazon had a competitive advantage because they had the inhouse talent and $$ to build e.g. Bigtable, MapReduce, Dremel, Borg, etc. before anybody else had those tools. Then there was an awkward few years (early - mid 2010s) where everyone and their dog was trying to clone those in the open source space. And now we're in a situation where there's startups whose whole business model is structured around providing "big data" or "data transformation" etc. tools etc. They look like compelling places to work, on account of the interesting work they do, but I worry about their viability.

I'm okay relying on AWS.

I'm not okay having one company handle email, another columnar database, another tabular database, another map-reduce, another streaming / logging, and so on. I understand why each of those might be better than their AWS counterpart, but for business continuity or for security, it's a train wreck.

I'm usually okay relying on hosted versions of open source platforms, since if something goes very bad, I can move over to hosting them myself. Even there, I hesitate with things really central to continuing operations. But for the 95% of other stuff, I find something like hosted postgresql or redis to be most robust.

A company specializing in redis will beat my IT staff. On the other hand, it's low-risk. A lot of companies disappear in a few weeks, but it's rare that they disappear overnight.

Gas is used for token in that context and is also a common word in crypto referring to transaction fees.

I'm surprised by the connections made.

Taking a single look at the second link referenced, it is glaringly obvious that the tokens' abbreviation is GAS.

The swastika is a completely different symbol and unrelated to the Hakenkreuz. The swastika has never directly been referenced by the Nazis, they projected their own values into the form of the symbol.

This is not true. "Hakenkreuz" is literally just a German word for swastika, etymologically a descriptive one in German instead of a Sanskrit loan word.

Contrary to popular misconception, there is no inherent difference between a swastika as used in religious imagery and a swastika as used by the Nazis. The difference is context.

In the sense that a dictionary translates one to the other and vice versa, sure, you're correct.

This is just plain wrong, I'm not sure what the counterfactual is here. The Nazi symbol is rotated by 45 degrees, the other one isn't. Context doesn't matter one bit, they're two distinct sigils. You could make the argument that the swastika heavily influenced the creation of Hakenkreuz, but they are two distinct symbols.

No, you are incorrect. The Nazi one is often "rotated", but it is not always. It's quite easy to find photos where it is not, such as this from Nuremberg in 1937. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/nuremberg-rall...

The religious swastika does not have inherent directionality; its orientation depends on the context in which it is used.

I have a hard time understanding why so many people want them to be two different symbols. The symbol is not the problem, but the meaning it conveys, right? The context matters, see the difference between Germany and Finland - both used the Hakenkreuz, but they are not the same, as the context is different, isn't it?

Context is everything. The German Army still uses a version of the Iron Cross, but the context is different - using the same symbol on a flag from the German Empire has a vastly different meaning.

[1] For example: https://books.google.de/books?id=VbkNkkgHvYgC&pg=PA1&printse...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you take a symbol, rip out its symbolic meaning, replace the symbolic meaning with a completely new symbolic meaning, in my opinion you end up with a new symbol that may share some visual aspects, but has nothing to do with the other symbol in terms of what a symbol actually is - conveying symbolic meaning. It's still going to be a new symbol with different context, and calling a Hakenkreuz (as used by the Nazi regime) a Swastika is more likely incorrect than correct.

Appropriation and following complete perversion of the original symbolic meaning does not make the resulting output interchangeable with the original symbol.

"Ich selbst hatte unterdes nach unzähligen Versuchen eine endgültige Form niedergelegt; eine Fahne aus rotem Grundtuch mit einer weißen Scheibe und in deren Mitte ein schwarzes Hakenkreuz"

As established[1], the word Hakenkreuz was already used at that point to describe the swastika, including in the original religious meaning. So he wrote "a black swastika". Translating it as "hooked cross" is IMO like translating "kindergarten" to "child garden", technically correct, but weird.

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but assigning new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.

Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1 or the neck of a german officer in WW2?

I'm not sure whether or not there is a definition of symbol. If you define a symbol as a character or icon paired with a certain meaning, then you're right. But that would imply that e.g. the weird S[2] everyone draw at school was a different symbol every time. Would you agree with that?

[1] see my link to the old book, or just search on Google Books for "Hakenkreuz" in the 19th century [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S

I'm not sure, this symbol is not known in Germany or at least has not been when I went to school there, but if the general context, meaning or reference of all of these S symbols is the same, and no matter the exact visual representation the intent behind it was the same, then yes. It's probably the same symbol, but again I'm not an expert on symbols.

> Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1 or the neck of a german officer in WW2?

Yes, the intent behind displaying the symbol is different. I believe it could be regarded as a new iteration of this symbol.

> I'm not sure, this symbol is not known in Germany or at least has not been when I went to school there

Interesting, it was when I went to school! Maybe it's not as universal as the internet thinks it is. But the meaning surely was different, in my class it was used by the class clown as a personal symbol of approval :D

Neo-Nazis have spent years spreading misinformation about this, because (ironically) conflating the two allows them to use Nazi imagery more openly and with a greater degree of plausible deniability[0]. Unfortunately, that means that the vast majority of people who don't know any better[1] end up falling for the propaganda, because it sounds believable.

[0] You'll see a low-effort verison of this on places like Twitter or other Internet forums, where people will write U+5350 in their display name or signature, and when called out on it, will immediately claim that "it's religious and you can tell by the direction it's pointing" (which is wrong). Of course, actual Neo-Nazis will openly use that exact character (U+5350) as a Nazi symbol with no concern for the direction or orientation - because, again, it's not about distinguishing the two; it's about creating plausible deniability through confusion.

[1] eg, people who are not Hindu (and therefore would be familiar with its religous use) or Neo-Nazis (and therefore would be familiar with its Nazi use)

Furthermore, “Swastika” has not once been mentioned or used by the Nazis. Hitler in Mein Kampf referred to it as a hooked cross, and while they probably knew about the Swastika itself, assigning a completely new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.

In fact, as far as my current knowledge goes, the in the English speaking world wide-spread mistranslation of "Hakenkreuz" to "swastika" was a deliberate mistranslation by a British Christian priest that has propagated into mainstream “knowledge”.

This is mind-boggling revisionism. The swastika was a well-known symbol even in Europe by the beginning of the 20th century, recognized as an Eastern ("Oriental") symbol, and Europeans even had a general, albeit bastardized, understanding of its meaning. In fact, you can still see examples of pre-Nazi swastika use in parts of Europe today, in older buildings and designs, although those have been getting replaced over the years. Most recently, Finland's air force dropped the swastika from their imagery. They had adopted the symbol in 1918, by which point the swastika was a popular symbol in Europe[0].

It's wild to claim that the Nazis were somehow completely unaware of the symbol they were using, especially because the Nazis themselves were so open about their (revisionist and ahistorical) beliefs regarding the "Aryan master race".

You're trying to draw a distinction between the word "Hakenkreuz" and "swastika", and that distinction simply does not exist. "Swastika" is the original, Sanksrit name for a symbol that was (and is) used in religious imagery, and which was later appropriated for political purposes by far-right authoritarians in Germany. Those Germans used a German descriptor for that symbol, but there is no question about where they got that symbol from, because they made zero efforts to hide it.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645

Adolf Hitler literally explains his use of the symbol, and its origins, in Mein Kampf. There is no "may or may not", unless you are somehow trying to argue that Adolf Hitler is not an authoritative primary source on Nazism.

> the Nazis not once used the term Swastika

I don't know if this is true (and I'm disinclined to take this claim at face value), but even if it is, it's besides the point. The fact that the Nazis openly took a symbol from another source, admitted that they did so because of the connection to that other source, and then appropriated it for a different purpose is what's relevant, not the fact that they chose a German descriptor when talking about that symbol instead of using a loanword.

> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."

> "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."

Nowhere, in the whole book, is the Swastika and its symbolic meaning mentioned as a direct inspiration for the Hakenkreuz. Instead, the Nazis attributed their own ideology to the symbol, but not even to the Swastika itself, but to it's form, and furthermore that doesn't change anything about the Swastika itself.

Wikipedia states;

> The swastika was also understood as "the symbol of the creating, effecting life" and as "race emblem of Germanism"

You know what, I'm going to attribute huge penises to the McDonalds symbol, so any big penis is from now on Ronald McDonald.

1. the Swastika symbol has been around a long time, been used by many cultures and countries, is basically universally recognized

2. but when the Nazis used it, it's not Swastika, because they called it something different, so there's no way to know if they were influenced by the identical symbol that everyone already knew about

2) No, it might have been influenced in some way, but it's still not the same symbol. Neither symbolic nor visually.

Again, just to be clear, it's not that "it might have been influenced in some way". It's that Adolf Hitler specifically talked about his reasons for using the swastika in his manifesto.

> Neither symbolic nor visually.

As explained at length elsewhere in this thread, the two symbols are not visually distinguishable without additional context. You can easily find religious uses of a swastika which are literally visually identical to Nazi uses of a swastika.

Take a look at this book from the 19th century, about the religious symbol, notice the name: https://books.google.de/books?id=VbkNkkgHvYgC&pg=PA1&printse...

The orientation does not matter, take a look at the Zeppelintribüne of the Nürnberger Reichsparteitagsgelände - it had a gigantic Hakenkreuz on top, in a non-angled configuration.

The man himself in his book Mein Kampf wrote,

> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."

> "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but assigning new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.

> Hakenkreuz is not “literally the name for a swastika”. Hakenkreuz literally translates to hooked cross.

But it literally is the translation for swastika. There are books from the 19th century talking about the Hakenkreuze in buddhist temples. And yeah, you can translate it to hooked cross. But English is not the authoritative language on this topic, German is, as the Nazis did not speak english (as their native language).

(Original Nazi sources ahead)

Take a look at this edition of "Volk and Rasse": https://www.google.de/books/edition/Volk_und_Rasse/n9sZAAAAM... On Page 465, there is a description of a "racial school" in Berlin with the name "Swastika". Because it's the same symbol. This Book was published by the Rassehauptamt of the NSDAP, directly by the Nazis.

The Hakenkreuz as a religious swastika is also being mentioned in this book: https://www.google.de/books/edition/Der_S_A_F%C3%BChrer/wdU7... Published for the SA, also directly by the Nazis. They directly reference it as "also a swastika, like our swastika".

No, it is not. Even Hakenkreuz, in German, does not translate to Swastika.

Hakenkreuz is, as typical for German, made up of two distinct words - Haken, hook, and Kreuz, cross.

It is very likely that "Hakenkreuz" had simply at some point developed upon seeing a Swastika and trying to visually describe it in German, which would make it a pointer/reference. A lot of German words have exactly this mechanism of origin.

Now, I'm not trying to argue with you that a Hakenkreuz simply used to be a reference/pointer to a Swastika, BUT it was only until the original reference was appropriated and perverted by the Nazi regime, making the resulting output most definitely a new and distinct symbol with a new, distinct symbolic meaning.

"This tempel has a big, golden swastika" could be translated as: "Dieser Tempel hat ein großes goldenes Hakenkreuz" or "Dieser Tempel hat eine große goldene Swastika", neither of them is wrong, even today.

I’m not responsible for lack of education and mainstream misconceptions, I can only tell you facts.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Hakenkreuz

> The swastika symbol, 卐 or 卍, is an ancient religious symbol in various Eurasian cultures, now also widely recognized for its appropriation by the Nazi Party and by neo-Nazis.[1] It continues to be used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indic religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Appropriation and following complete perversion of the original symbolic meaning does not make the resulting output interchangeable with the original symbol.

Even Hitler himself in his book Mein Kampf states;

> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."

Nowhere, ever, was the Swastika and its symbolic meaning mentioned as a direct inspiration for the Hakenkreuz. Instead, the Nazis attributed their own ideology to the symbol, but not even to the Swastika itself, but to its form, and furthermore that doesn't change anything about the Swastika itself.

It is not the same symbol.

If we're going to argue about the visual aspect of the symbol, please look at this image and tell me if these two symbols look like the same to you.

https://i.imgur.com/kK6aBK0.png

How does your selected sentence help your point?

> The swastika symbol, 卐 or 卍, is an ancient religious symbol in various Eurasian cultures, now also widely recognized for its appropriation by the Nazi Party

Also you tried to pick the two visual representations that are the most different, but the first image in the article[1] has the subtitle "The swastika is a symbol with many styles and meanings and can be found in many cultures."

The second image's subtitle says "The adoption of the swastika by the Nazis and neo-Nazis is the most recognisable modern use of the symbol in the Western world."

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/Fo...

I have to say I find it odd when people choose to die on a hill of being obviously, provably wrong about something Nazi-related.

Obviously nationality does not relate to knowledge or expertise in symbols in any way, and that association is a little bit far fetched to be quite honest with you.

I'm not sure why you would project this specific intent into my comment, as I was originally replying to something completely off the topic of symbols and the Swastika or Hakenkreuz.

I'll probably get hammered for saying this, but: no, that's not true.

There are many variations of the swastika, and it's not as simple as "look which way it's facing" or "see if it's tilted". That's a common meme often repeated on the Internet, but it's not true and it's trivially falsifiable, because it's quite easy to see religious uses of the swastika with various different orientations and directions. It's also not hard to find examples of Nazi imagery - both from the 20th century and contemporary - which uses an untilted swastika. Context is what differentiates them, not the direction or angle.

> I'm surprised by the connections made.

As someone who works in incident response, I'm more surprised by their statement, because it really falls short on every level, even if we take it at face value.

I'm more surprised that nobody on the team managed to notice the obvious Star of David in that image. Even without the text, it's an astoundingly bad look for a company in the financial space to use that imagery, and if their claim is that nobody involved in the design spotted the issue, that's itself quite concerning and raises even more questions.

I'm also surprised that an account that currently has 8 million followers is trying to blame this on an intern. Intern projects don't just happen to get publicly presented like that on a whim. Even for small companies, but especially for ones verified Twitter accounts and which are trying to be taken seriously, brand presence is very actively managed and a lot of effort goes into every post.

"Blaming the intern" is a tactic that people used a decade ago, but you see it much less these days because it stopped being plausible. And if we're expected to believe it here, then that just raises more questions about how they managed to provide an intern with unfettered access like this to announce a product with (apparently) zero oversight at any point.

Increasingly more people see the world through a very limited set of prisms. Lots of people online tend to see everything through racism/sexism/whateverism and will make connections where there are none. It's an easy way to discredit the people you're talking with by inferring meaning.

Critic Zelensky on a specific topic: you're pro Putin

Critic a woman politician: you're sexist

Use a company that used the word "gas", you're obviously antisemitic

Once it's out there on twitter &co nobody will even attempt to verify the facts (in this case the two obvious explanations you provided) and will just parrot the thing ad infinitum

There's certainly some amount of what you're pointing out, but given how much of modern politics and communication is done in dog whistles, with people making this level of borderline content and then going "how dare you think I'm intending anything by this accident" when they make an "accident" weekly, it's becoming more important to at least be suspicious of "innocent mistakes" by people who should know better.

A company with this much money and international reach is crazy to do a major branding move and then be shocked that people misinterpret it. It's unfortunate that people assume the worst, but at this point, personally and in business PR, you have to understand that people will assume the worst, so to release something like these anyways is either an intentional choice or negligence.

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Can you give an example?

All DAOs are essentially corporations. But not all are legally registered corporations. "LAO" (Legal Autonomous Organization" is the moniker for legally registered DAOs.

There's a few thousand Ethereum based LAOs listed on this site: https://aragon.org/aragon-govern

Also you explicitly say LAO instead of DAO. Under which country's jurisdiction does the LAO fall?

Please don’t tell me about European derivatives like KnockOuts and Warrants. These are more expensive than a margin loan on FTX.

I'm often surprised by how responsive dang is despite being an individual whenever I email HN.

The only thing you can do is complaint to relevant authority in your country.

Dang is actually a General AI robot built by sama as a hobby.

I kid, he's actually just a really great person who cares deeply about HN and it's community. And also one of the nice things about HN is that it's not trying to make money, so WE are actually the customers.

This timeline is broken. I’d like to visit another, please.

On Discord it would be impossible for a person to read through just all newly created Discord channel names. It handles over a million messages per minute.