HN user
You have made a devastating OPSEC mistake. You have disclosed that you have around 6 months left of money. You have probably also stored it in just one bank account. If some weird transactions end up siphoning off your balance, you will have no money left to defend yourself. The secret service guys know this. The freelance crook at the bank knows this too. Be careful or you will be toast.
Everybody with enough financial net worth to make sure he does not just die but will be died. Strange transactions on your accounts, my friend. The balance is almost gone. Is that why you have had an accident?
Because they need to get hold of all information possible. They must know where you live. They must know what your net worth is. They must know in what bank and other accounts you are holding this net worth. They must know what other freelance crooks work at these banks. All of your financial holdings form a bounty on your head. At some point, you will not die. You simply will be died.
There is simply too much money to be made in knowing where someone lives and in what bank accounts, 401k, and IRA accounts his net worth is stored. This person will not just die, my friend. This person will be died.
That is how they end up stealing your bitcoins too. All of these QUANTUM INSERT computers have now been targeted at getting hold of your wallet keys. Your money will be gone.
Staying in the banking system will not help either. The sum of the balances of your holdings in the banking system forms a bounty on your head.
They know who you are. They know where you live. And they damn well know how much money there is to be made in dying you.
You will not die. You will be died.
Do not hold any monetary values anywhere without them knowing where it is, because that amounts to money laundering, you criminal terrorist!
Anybody supplying contractors to the NSA. From the central banking database you know how much money they have in what bank account. From Facebook you know if they could be dead by now. The sum of all monetary holdings of any of these targets forms collectively a bounty on their heads. Do you really need to see Edward Snowden's stash of documents to understand this? I don't.
Since they know who you are, and since the central banking database knows how much money you have in what bank accounts, and since they know who your friends are, it is no problem to demographically calculate that you could reasonably get a heart attack now. Of course, you made quite a few strange large purchases just before you died, but only your friends would know that these were strange. Your balance is pretty much gone. You seem to be no longer keeping them up to date on what you are doing? Facebook is simply a gold mine, because any money that you are holding in bank accounts forms collectively a bounty on your head.
These rules look like they came from the low-intelligence paper belt. We do not write rules like that. They must simply be part of the tool. Otherwise, they do not count. What they now did, was to create an opportunity for someone who knows that he is incompetent, to invent a new job for himself, that is, "checking up" with his more competent colleagues, who contrary to him are productive in writing code, on this style guide. Rule number one: Anybody who wants to "enforce" this kind of rules must demonstrate that he is capable of writing a parser that can apply them. It is simply bad practice to create that kind of opportunities. It is bad practice to create that kind of jobs. Therefore, this kind of documents must be rejected.
In many ways, and definitely in more ways than one, India is a fantastic resource, with their talent and tremendous headcount. India is definitely not a "pirate" state. I believe to have read that the Indian Navy is even involved in protecting merchant shipping lanes off the Somalia coast. The only qualms I have, is with the licence Raj, the paperwork kingdom, that ruins business opportunities all across India ...
India would have the talent and the headcount to be anything it wanted to be, if it were not for the one missing ingredient: the ability to leave people's freedom alone. Many of factories in China would now be in India. Larry Page is in the market for another location. Mark Zuckerberg undoubtedly too. If India painstakingly managed to develop the ability to rein in their paperwork kingdom, the so-called "license Raj", Silicon Valley would have moved there a long time ago already. Until now, India just can't. It is simply impossible to reduce the incessant harassments of their bureaucracy. They will terrorize everybody. At the same time nobody else will ever agree to put up with them and be terrorized. They will not move there. They will keep flying out the Indians instead.
Balaji Srinivasan makes a lot of sense. The paper belt used to run the show. They are now losing that power and trying to claw it back with yet more paperwork. I am entirely favourable to the idea of curtailing, thwarting, and thoroughly undermining the regulatory bullies in the filthy paper belt. They have no legitimacy.
Ok. So, they've managed to "save" that dinosaur from an instant death, delaying the inevitable to a next, future round of corporate heroics. What about all the smaller companies that had to dump their staff on the streets and did not get massive bailouts for their "salvation"?
If you move from Stripe to another payment gateway, you will not lose all your users. Microsoft has monopoly access control to the other users, who are needed to make your skype extension useful to the user using your extension. That is why Microsoft control over such user directory is unacceptable.
...and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses...
The solution is not to ship a half-baked "word count" feature by default, that some journalists will like and others won't, but to make sure that the application is thoroughly pluggable.
From there, people can set up entire plugin repositories in which journalists can find dozens of plugins that all specifically apply to journalist situations.
Why not have our cake and eat it too? We'll have a very small core application, while everybody can click and install whatever extensions that apply to their specific situation.
Furthermore, why would non-journalist users have to deal with journalist-specific plugins installed by default? It would just confuse the 80%.
Bloatware is NOT the solution to the "80/20" problem. This is and example of the real solution:
Before destroying jobs that people -- such as the cleaning lady -- may need to feed their families, can you try to back up your accusations with something more than racial remarks?
And start using ... ?
In my impression, the solution would be to create a marketplace website, in which employers and recruiters register/join, and which will automatically enforce the rules desired. From there, you can insist that all recruitment communication must go through the marketplace site. My experience is that marketplace software is tremendously efficient at social engineering ;-)
"the rule of law, democracy, and free trade"
All corruption begins with the corruption of language.
The rule of law? The rule of whose law? Democracy? Does that mean the right to vote for politicians who will continuously invent new laws and further restrict your freedom?
But then again, it is "free trade", that is the biggest joke. Does that mean: "free", as long as you don't trade in bitcoins?
"Liberals tend to believe that other countries cooperate with the United States because American ideals are attractive."
In the ongoing debate between politically-controlled versus theocratically-controlled law, the majority of the world population finds the "American" ideal (rather French-revolutionary, no?) of politically-controlled law not particularly attractive at all. The system amounts to asking the population to vote every few years for politicians who will invent new laws. The question then becomes: How many new laws do we need before all our needs for new laws are finally and entirely satisfied? The theocratically-controlled alternative on its side says: The only one who can create new laws and further restrict your freedom, may not even exist. So, my question becomes: What exactly would be wrong with that?
I have to object to the negative depiction of "theocratic country". The Law is essentially a list of forbidden behaviours, with optionally sanctions for engaging in them anyway. The idea that the only one who is allowed to extend this list with new forbidden behaviours, is someone who may not even exist, has become an attractive proposition again. In my impression, the alternative, that is, letting the politicians and their servants manage this list, has now become seriously discredited. Such politically-controlled alternative is simply a guarantee for an incessant and continuous assault on our freedoms. So, yes, according to the theocratic alternative, the one who has the right to further restrict our freedom may not even exist. That is indeed how I like it too.
A statement about facts belongs to the natural sciences. A statement about numbers (or dually: sets) belongs to math. A statement about statements, belongs to philosophy. Since the scientific method requires testability against facts, while (in this definition) statements can impossibly be facts in reality, it is not possible to apply the scientific method in philosophy. The same holds true for programming. Any statement about programming languages or programs is either mathematical or philosophical, but never scientific.
In my opinion, if the set of beliefs is orthogonal and irrefutable, it is a set of axioms. Orthogonal: It is not possible to derive one belief from another or a combination of other beliefs. Irrefutable: Counterexamples have not been found or counterexamples can simply not ever be found. It is obvious, however, that orthogonal and irrefutable do not mean "true". On the contrary, "true" means that a statement can be derived from the axioms, while the axioms by definition themselves cannot. Axiomatic systems are simply a form of rigorous and highly systematic beliefs, but not necessarily internally consistent nor necessarily consistent with reality.
In my impression, all valuable contributions made by an engineer can be expressed by a set of commits to a set of files. I do not believe for a second that contributions that cannot expressed in that way would actually be valuable. Can you give us one example?
If someone cannot write it, he will want to say it, and if he cannot even say it, he will want to come over to gesticulate.
Your boss may not understand what exactly you do, but he can surely see you come in, sit at your desk, and see you leave at the end of the day. How is someone who cannot program his way out of a paper bag otherwise going to manage things?
Libertarians and religious people come to the same conclusion by entirely different routes: Calling people to obedience to any other laws than the ones of the Creator, the original lawmaker, amounts to pronouncing a blasphemous heresy. Anybody doing that will deservedly burn in hell.
Jim Bell's theorem clearly demonstrates that the politicians have lost the monopoly on the use of force. At the same time, the politicians have never had any real or valid claim to legitimacy. Libertarians reject government claims to legitimacy on grounds of Occam's razor. Religious people reject it because such claims amount to paganism and often also blasphemy. Therefore, politicians will have to contend with retaliatory measures, which may make any of their attempts at keeping BTC small, irrelevant.
The currency of the Roman empire got debased (silver content of coins) until it became worthless. The combination of raising the debt ceiling and the practice of quantitative easing do exactly the same today. Eventually, even the imperial Roman treasury ("fiscus") began to refuse its own coins for payment of tax liabilities. They switched over to paying taxes in kind. So, yes, in my impression, history is indeed repeating itself.
The existing, politically-controlled system of finance and corporations has numerous and powerful enemies, hellbent on bringing it down, in whatever way possible. Furthermore, even without enemies, it is patently clear that the fiat money system is happily busy destroying itself: raising debt ceilings, engaging in quantitative easing, and so on. The libertarian movement is probably one of their smallest enemies in terms of headcount but at the same time it really looks like the most powerful one. If you read the original paper by Satoshi Nakamoto, you can see that the entire purpose of bitcoin is exactly to bring the current system to its knees. I hope that BTC succeeds in doing that and save its supporters from being dragged along in the quagmire, before the current fiat system finally destroys itself.
There is no moral value whatsoever in playing by politically-controlled rules. To libertarians your statement sounds very anti-libertarian and to religious people, your statement sounds like a blasphemous heresy.