portent

8 ms·

1.
by portent 5y ago
The same can be true of dollar bills. A bag full of dollar bills from a drug deal is fungible with a bag full of dollars from your salary. But you can be arrested for the former, and not the latter. Dollars are fungible with dollars ($1+$
2.
by portent 5y ago
re: surprisingly they don't say infinity I'm not sure it's that surprising, the expectation is only infinity if you think the person making the payout has the capacity to pay an infinite amount. The second you think this amo
3.
by portent 6y ago
I think the UK government realised its mistake, and is trying to unwind it as safely as possible. "From 3 December to 9 December, which will be known as the ‘student travel window’, students will be allowed to travel home on staggered
4.
by portent 8y ago
The poster is using an interview technique of creating an imaginary scenario, e.g. "deal with a work colleague who is advocating a sub-optimal position". This seems entirely reasonable. It seems to me that you've jumped to a
5.
by portent 8y ago
Traders typically provide two prices - the price they will buy at and the price they will sell at. Their profit comes from the spread between. A good trader does not care if the market moves up or down, they make their money on the spread
6.
by portent 8y ago
You might then be interested to know that the Federal Reserve bank has its own dedicated police force/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Police
7.
by portent 8y ago
I'm sure technically you are right on the written wording of the law, but you can be technically right on many subjects and make the wrong business calls. Avoiding a vanishingly small regulatory risk by making real damage to your comp
8.
by portent 8y ago
Many regulated industries need to store data for multiple years, often in a secure format e.g. WORM storage
9.
by portent 8y ago
That's a great and informative answer, only minor comment that I think OP said the project was 2 years but the database portion was 1 month of that 2 years. Still I agree better not to roll your own stuff unless it is absolutely critic
10.
by portent 9y ago
A good option can be to use your own data center for base load, and on top of that use AWS for traffic spikes. That way you still have the flexibility to adapt quickly but at a lower cost, once you reach a certain scale.
11.
by portent 9y ago
Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that
12.
by portent 9y ago
I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme. A pyramid scheme
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by portent 9y ago
The "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" applies to the US. What if the hacker lives somewhere else? Then that law does not apply to him, and the action was not illegal.
14.
by portent 9y ago
I have been to the NY Federal Reserve Building and seen much of the gold - from the outside of the open door of the vault. This is the highlight of the public tour of the FRB in lower Manhattan. There are many different cages inside the v
15.
by portent 9y ago
OK so in specific case of apple story is complicated by the onshore/offshore tax situation, but it could well be that they have more cash than they know what to do with - in which case returning it to shareholders makes sense instead o
16.
by portent 9y ago
Sure - if a stock is undervalued, then anyone buying it should get a good deal. But that's bit different from saying that a stock buyback will always increase share price.
17.
by portent 9y ago
On the point about taxation, if you have a choice between dividends or share appreciation, I agree with you that share value appreciation gives more flexibility to better manage tax liabilities. But you answered as a fact that a share buyba
18.
by portent 9y ago
I think it's much more subtle point than buy-backs increase share price, otherwise it opens up some basic arbitrages. The point is, the share price already incorporates the value of the assets used for the buy-back, so buying back sha
19.
by portent 9y ago
Yeah but if you transfer an asset (cash) out of the company, all other things being equal, the value of the shares must go down. This McKinsey article is old but explores the topic in some detail. http://www.mckinsey.com/bus
20.
by portent 9y ago
Here you are confusing the secondary market for shares (an existing shareholder selling to someone else) with the primary market (new issuance of shares). The primary market for shares absolutely benefits companies by giving them large amou
21.
by portent 9y ago
Personally I don't understand why a buy-back should increase stock price. Sure, there are fewer shares - but the value of the company has gone down (it has less free cash, i.e. fewer assets) and the two effects should exactly offset ea
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by portent 9y ago
This article by Ben Horowitz seems relevant - he mentions his history of managing teams by metrics. I like this quote: "Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs." http:/&#x
23.
by portent 10y ago
> Revenue is absolute. Money either came in or it didn't. Sadly nothing is that absolute. Plenty of revenue scandals out there. A typical example of this: a large supermarket hasn't made enough money for the year, and asks its
24.
by portent 10y ago
Anyone who wants more revenue can get it. Just sell something at a loss. It happens more often than you think! That's why - in the long run - profits matters more than revenue. Of course in a land-grab situation the normal rules of g
25.
by portent 10y ago
my point is that even running the code doesn't help you answer the question. It runs for a year and doesn't halt... so will it ever halt?
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by portent 10y ago
Well... the compiled assembly doesn't give you any more information than the code snippet. The issue is not so much how this code is translated from higher abstraction level to lower abstraction level... the issue is, that this code re
27.
by portent 10y ago
What you are saying sounds intuitively true, but the mathematics of Chaos Theory showed that it is not actually the case. What my code snippet is doing is running a sample of a particular chaotic function that was originally inspired by bio
28.
by portent 10y ago
OK, well we can always say that the heat-death of the universe renders all problems irrelevent, but it's a bit of a cheat in my opinion. The original poster seems to imply that knowing the code means that you can know the behaviour of
29.
by portent 10y ago
code can be very simple, and we don't always know what it will do. Simple example: can you tell me if this snippet of (python) code will ever terminate or not? x=0.5 while x<0.6 or x>0.7: x=3.59*x*(1-x) print x ... and
30.
by portent 10y ago
Terrorists do threaten national security, but very rarely provide an existential threat. It's hard to imagine a terrorist group causing the collapse of the USA.

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