vec

5 ms·

31.
by vec 8y ago
We don't need to defend the inept killer cops to posit that vigilante justice is even worse.
32.
by vec 8y ago
I'm a complete layman whose only knowledge of the financial system is derived from podcasts and magazine articles, and hindsight is always 20/20, but wasn't this always an obvious sucker bet? As I understand it, a hedge fund
33.
by vec 8y ago
The grandparent talked about treating it like fantasy sports, and if they advertised themselves like, say, Draft Kings does then it would be one thing. As it is, though, the more thoroughly you trust their representation of how their produc
34.
by vec 8y ago
If you understand what you're signing up for and still want to dabble in stock trading for fun then sure. Go wild. Everyone needs a hobby. But the homepage of robinhood.com has the following call to action above the fold: > Investin
35.
by vec 8y ago
How much are you willing to gamble on the prospect that you're in the top 0.1%? And before you answer, consider that you haven't been evicted so you're obviously not in the top 0.01%.
36.
by vec 8y ago
I do believe that people with limited access to capital can't understand the markets as well as institutional investors, and you should too. It's not about intelligence, it's about access. The rich have more current informati
37.
by vec 8y ago
Offering stock trades with zero fees is pushing you to make a bad decision. The vast, vast majority of investors should be making as few trades as is humanly possible, and the small fraction who should be making frequent trades are essent
38.
by vec 8y ago
> (At least I can see _why_ people (wrongly) thought RDF would; no idea how they arrived at that misconception of blockchain) There was briefly the bad idea that "NoSQL means we don't have to care about our schemas anymore&quot
39.
by vec 8y ago
You're not wrong, per se, but you are parroting the fundamentalist party line. Maybe I've just got a unique perspective on the issue (I'm a Unitarian Universalist; everyone at my church respects my atheism as a sincere and pe
40.
by vec 8y ago
> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anyt
41.
by vec 8y ago
I am ignoring the commission aspect of the service, because in practice there often isn't any. Tips are frequently pooled, meaning all three servers in your hypothetical would end up with the same cut of the day's take regardless
42.
by vec 8y ago
You're right about "rewarding exceptional service" being a lie, but I don't think it's correct to frame tipping as "burden sharing". If the muffin just cost 20% more and the untipped barista got paid a hig
43.
by vec 8y ago
As to the first point, the headline is "Facebook says millions had phone numbers, search history and location stolen". 2FA phone numbers have to be stored, but they should _never_ under _any_ circumstances be released to other use
44.
by vec 8y ago
> Facebook should have also designed their auth system more carefully, but that's a separate issue. It's not a separate issue, though. One of the main ways they could have been more careful in designing their auth system was by
45.
by vec 8y ago
Well, for a start, we could be a lot more thoughtful about who we're willing to accept funding from.
46.
by vec 8y ago
I think that misunderstands the purpose of non-rigorous surveys like this one, which after all only included the "125 [out] of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC", because that's who had signed up for the mai
47.
by vec 8y ago
One underrated option is not to keep extensive personalized records on your entire user base in the first place.
48.
by vec 8y ago
If by "nice things" you mean salmonella and grease fires, then sure. Not to defend Boulder, specifically, but when thinking about regulations it's really easy to tally up "all" of the costs and benefits without cred
49.
by vec 8y ago
> "Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience." If I understand his critique correctly, it's that macroeconomics has used mathematical rigor and internal consistency t
50.
by vec 8y ago
Moreover, our industry has a questionable habit of describing all kinds of human accomplishments as "brilliant" "innovations" done by "geniuses". Being a competent professional engineer requires some raw intell
51.
by vec 8y ago
There's a line for a signature that the flap of the envelope ends up glued over the top of. There is no identifying information visible on the outside of a properly sealed envelope. The envelopes have to remain sealed until they'r
52.
by vec 8y ago
I live in Colorado. A couple of weeks before the midterms I'm going to get a packet in the mail containing my ballot, instructions for filling it out, a pamphlet where every candidate on the ballot gets a paragraph or two to make their
53.
by vec 8y ago
> is remarkably stable - until it is not I think we're saying mostly the same thing, just with slightly different framing. We have one mechanism for maintaining a stable store of value (centrally managed fiat) that in practice seems
54.
by vec 8y ago
> Yes, you have paper money in your possession that is only worth as much as a centralized bank SAYS it is... Do you really want to bring volatility into this? Because in the real world fiats are orders of magnitude more stable than cryp
55.
by vec 8y ago
I can exchange value today without a banking system in place. I have some paper currency in my possession, and if that doesn't work there are plenty of commodity goods available to barter with. You'll notice that even in situation
56.
by vec 8y ago
"Proof of work" means the total number of hashing functions, from the point of divergence forward, used in signing the blocks. Consensus doesn't work like you're implying. If it did, I could spin up a peer on N+1 AWS ser
57.
by vec 8y ago
> Bankers go away People will still need loans. People will still want low risk investment vehicles to "store" their wealth in. At least some sizable number of them will want an institutional actor to handle operational securit
58.
by vec 8y ago
Nope. The whole point of proof of work is that it informs clients which version to consider authoritative in the case of a conflict. If my tampered copy has higher proof of work than the peer with the correct version then, by definition, mi
59.
by vec 8y ago
> Programmable blockchains allow generalized applications requiring decentralized trust. Yeah, they don't really though. They allow a few extremely specific applications requiring decentralized trust. The trust guarantees only hold
60.
by vec 8y ago
Yes, but if you have a mechanism (either technical or institutional) that you trust to attach real-world goods to your blockchain in a sufficiently correct and tamper-resistant manner, why not just let that mechanism manage your ledger dire

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