DANK_YACHT

I'm not saying that if you buy an option that ends up OTM that you'll globally lose money, but in the context of that one specific trade you lost. Perhaps you're willing to take that loss in order to achieve some other goal, but my statement was about a single contract, not a general collection of trades.

For options trading, there is always a winning and losing side. Someone is always harmed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-11-17/blacks...

The tldr is that they bought credit default swaps for debt owed by Codere SA, and then offered the company financial assistance to restructure with the requirement that they pay their existing debt late to trigger a default.

The original commenter also made a random assertion: "doing math is not thinking." The person you're responding to attempted to provide a definition of "thinking."

Financial instruments are incredibly complex. It's very dangerous to engage with them unless you fully understand what you're getting yourself into. Other people have a huge incentive to exploit any weakness in the financial asset, even in regulated industries. For instance, BlackRock bought credit default swaps in a Spanish company, and then paid that company to default on its debt, thus making a profit at the expense of the counter party. Regulation isn't going to magically make complicated financial instruments safe. People should be aware that they're dangerous and to stay away.

GStreamer has a much more sane CLI interface. FFmpeg generally works better than GStreamer, but it's definitely possible to make a better command line interface.

The issue with FFmpeg is that it's complex, so you need to understand what all the options do, but the interface is also complex, so you need to understand how to format what you want to do, even if you already have a good understanding of what you want from FFmpeg. E.g. the order of different options matter, applying some options to one stream vs. another, chaining filters together, formatting the filters, specifying the output options, etc.

The patent approval process isn't perfect. Had you violated the patent, and had Google sued you, you could always argue prior art. What would your evidence be?

They’re probably referring to the diameter of a circle. The way it’s written is unclear, but not necessarily an error per se.

This seems like programmer error. Don't put restricted fields into types you're deserializing off the wire. It's like accepting user input and directly inserting it into a database without any validation.

A little known fact is that rental assets depreciate in the eyes of the government. This is why you can deduct depreciation from rental property on tax returns. The corollary to this is that damage to those assets happen against the depreciated value. For instance, if there is a bathtub in the unit and it hasn't been replaced in many years, then the effective value of that tub is 0. It doesn't matter if you actually damaged it or not, the landlord cannot come after you for the full cost of a new tub.

As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue.

How did you come to that understanding? Did you dedicate your free time to studying the impact of meat eating, or was it part of your legally mandated education? A lot of people scrape by, barely able to make ends meet. They have children that require attention, or problems that require immediate action. They may have debts to pay, and no social safety net to help. At a fundamental level, they may have poor critical thinking skills. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to take the time to understand the consequences of every purchasing decision.

A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment.

But the package says it was humanely raised by family farms? Your trips to the grocery store are going to take a very long time if you need to do a supply chain analysis of every purchase.

If a person cuts down a tree for profit, and the removal of that tree is problematic, then that person is to blame. It doesn't make sense to blame someone many steps removed from the crime just because they, in a very indirect way, provided a very small incentive to commit the crime. The impact of the individual's consumption on the entirety of the industrial farming system is so small that, even if the individual consumer were to blame, they would be guilty of nothing more than the tiniest infraction. The issue with industrial farming arrises from the collective sum of demand, and thus requires a collective solution, i.e. centralized regulation.

Yes definitely. No analogy is perfect.

The entire point of electing someone to represent you is that they should take care of things for you without bothering you too much. Imaging you hire a lawyer to represent you in court and you constantly need to petition your lawyer for changes to your legal strategy, or you hire a doctor and you constantly need to correct their course of treatment. In such cases, would you say you've hired a good doctor or lawyer? Why is it the responsibility of the masses to petition their representatives? Why isn't it the responsibility of the representative to understand an issue and reach out to possibly effected constituents for a wholistic view of an issue?

and the biggest one imo is dietary choices.

Yes, let's blame the consumer. First of all, the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue. For instance, an educated consumer (many consumers are not educated btw) might understand that eating meat causes deforestation, but they have no way of knowing if their specific purchase is contributing to that. Second, blaming the consumer makes any solution almost impossible because organizing a very large group of disinterested people is very hard. It would be much more effective to regulate the relatively small number of meat producers that are perpetuating deforestation and let the market work out decreasing consumption through increased costs.

Ah yes, I forgot that two wrongs make a right /s.

I use pen and paper as well, but rather than print out all the source code, I write down the call stack. A calls B calls C, etc. along with the line numbers of the call. Much easier than printing out the source and you still have the IDE niceties like go to definition, find in source, etc.

We put our kid into daycare around 7 months old. Obviously every kid is different, but we're happy we chose that time. Around 7 months, our child had developed an understanding that we leave and come back, but was still young enough that separation anxiety wasn't a problem. The kids who start daycare at 1 or 2 seem to really struggle. She does get sick all the time, but it's becoming less frequent over time. It's annoying at the time, but her immune system is getting stronger and that is a good thing in the long term.

Why? Having shoes that tighten themselves sounds cool and convenient. Personally, I hate tying my shoes. If anything, the technology has failed by being so brittle.

Roombas could definitely be better. Mine gets stuck all the time. The reason I keep using it, however, is that it cleans a lot of stuff prior to getting stuck, so it still feels worth it to me.

Her idea was that some tech will change world so much that there will be 100X return.

Is that really so different from the VC approach?

Privacy regulations can make it very difficult for competitors to gain traction for incumbents

This is an oft repeated argument that makes no sense. The point of privacy legislation is not to increase competition. The point is to increase privacy. The government has other legislative tools to increase competition should it wish to do so.

I don’t know. My school wasn’t very good, so I can’t imagine it was on any type of approved school list.

Yea I was in school at the time.

I got a job at a FAANG by writing a for loop to check if a number was prime right around that time. The solution was completely naive and the interview was done over the phone in less than an hour. This is an anecdote, but there were some opportunities like this.

What do you mean you know very little? You would interview the firm and ask them what the discovery process was like. You likely wouldn’t care about the gritty details of how they sorted the documents. More important would be the scale of the discovery, the outcome of the case, and the cost. Unless there was literally only one firm handling this specific type of issue, then it will always be possible to compete on cost.

I’m not conflating class signaling with intelligence. It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said. My point was that college involves the exchange of ideas, and each student’s intelligence is a combination of their baseline intellect combined with the ideas they’re exposed to. Most of this idea exposure comes from other students. If the students you are surrounded with have good ideas, then the quality of your own ideas improves.

The biggest difference was that most people were interested in something. One friend was really into robotics. He introduced me to a lot of robotics concepts and he had a plan on how to pursue a career in robotics. Personally, robotics wasn’t my cup of tea, but I ended up with a lot of exposure to the subject. Another friend wanted to study AI, specifically neural networks. This was over 10 years ago, so neural nets weren’t widely deployed like they are today. Another friend was into music, and wanted to play music all the time. Even through I wasn’t super into any of these topics, each interaction was enriching to me and expanded my mind to include new and interesting aspects of computer science and software engineering.

Regarding phds, I totally agree that they are not effective workers usually. The desire to get a phd is almost like a mild form of ocd where people get obsessed with one particular problem and are willing to dedicate ungodly amounts of time to the topic. This is usually the opposite of what you want when trying to deliver something in the commercial sphere.

It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.

But not all top students in mid-tier attempted to go to Harvard. So if you were basing the "smartness" of these two populations based on this single decision alone, then the low-tier students at Harvard would be smarter because 100% of them attempted to go to Harvard, which was a smarter choice than the choice made by some of the students at mid-tier universities who chose not to apply to Harvard.

After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.

In my experience, peoples' first few years out of college has a huge effect on their career trajectories. People I know who had high salaries out of school continue to have high salaries. People who didn't get good entry-level jobs continue to struggle (relative to the rest of the pack, they're not starving).

I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.