thotypous's comments

thotypous | 4 years ago | on: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

> Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU).

Here at Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugarcane. And sugarcane farming is actually illegal in the Amazon. The President tried to make it legal, but fortunately his decree was suspended by the Judiciary [1].

I don't doubt there may exist a few illegal sugarcane farms in the Amazon, but given how huge sugarcane farming is in southeastern Brazil, I don't think any Amazon sugarcane would significantly contribute to Brazilian ethanol production.

> Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.

Soy is more of an issue for Amazon than sugarcane. But, just as you said, it is used to feed cattle, and the main issue resides in the cattle. Cattleman in Amazon usually adopt the extensive breeding system, so lots of area are required to breed cattle.

[1] https://www.conjur.com.br/2020-abr-21/juiza-suspende-decreto...

thotypous | 5 years ago | on: XLS: Accelerated HW Synthesis

Google is also investing some developer time on Bluespec since it was opensourced (https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc). I wonder if these projects make part of a bigger plan at Google.

thotypous | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is your company sticking to on-premise servers? Why?

This is really interesting!

How does Sia prevent hosts from precomputing the checksums to fake they are behaving but erasing the data itself? Does it checksum over random ranges of data?

Which source does it use for entropy so that the network remains distributed but nodes can't predict the ranges? Does it use the last block nonce?

Which checksum algorithm does it use? Is care taken as to not be vulnerable to prepend or append attacks from hosts who intend to host data partially whilst pretending they are hosting full data?

thotypous | 6 years ago | on: How to fight the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and its disease, Covid-19 [pdf]

Unfortunately, here in Brazil an old ban exists on selling ethanol, due to concerns of it causing accidents with fire and explosions. The only way for an ordinary person to acquire ethanol is in the form of - take a guess - hand sanitizers (or vehicular ethanol at gas stations, but it is inappropriate for that purpose). So currently hand sanitizers are completely out of stock and soap is the only alternative.