jmaistre

The Ashley Madison data breach was such a disaster for the company because it saved its customers' real names and credit card numbers. It didn't have to do it this way. It could have processed the credit card information, given the user access, and then deleted all identifying information. To be sure, it would have been a different company. It would have had less revenue, because it couldn't charge users a monthly recurring fee.

This seems to me the wrong way to solve the problem. The crazy thing about credit cards, social security numbers, and bank account numbers is that these numbers are supposed to be kept secret and private, and yet you need to constantly give them out to people. Everyone you write a check to gets your bank account number, every place you buy from gets a credit card number. This is insane.

The right way to solve this is that Visa and Master Card need to develop a standard to make super easy to generate a unique payment number everytime you make an online purchase. Then that should be built in as a browser extension or component. So I browse to a site, click to pay with my Visa card, and Visa automatically generates a unique code for that site and fills it in on the form.

Also it is insane that someone can steal my identity by simply knowing my social security card. The right way to solve this would be to have an indentity provider that has a short 10 second video of myself on file. Then, when I want to sign up for a credit card or bank account, I take a 10 second video of myself using my cell phone, granting approval to open the account. A staffer at the credit card company then compares the video with the video on file with the identity provider, and verifies that it matches. The identify provider also sends a message to an email address or mobile number on file, so that I am alerted that someone is opening an account in my name. Using these two simple safe guards, identity theft would be much, much harder. A video recording of a person is very hard to fake, much harder to fake than a signature.

A final key innovation would be if email providers would make it super-easy to generate aliases per site. I do this myself manually with fastmail, but if there was a simple browser extension that would automatically create an alias and fill in a form, that would be great, because I could have a unique address that all funnels into one place, for everything I sign up to.

If books and blueprints for advanced technology were available, I wonder what is the potential for leapfrogging technologies. So instead of burning coal to power steam factories, we could skip straight to powering electric generators via dams and turbines. Water power fortunately is not going anywhere, and provides a considerable amount of electricity.

The big issue is energy for transportation and for growing crops. I wonder what the prospects for things like switchgrass based ethanol are. I see promising news reports, but nothing has come of it yet.

I hope we can agree that inequality of opportunity is an intrinsically bad thing.

If parents are allowed to invest in their own children, then inherently, you have inequality of opportunity, since parents have different means and will invest different amounts.

while at the same time worrying about a system that allows Harvard attendees like Mark Zuckerberg to do that but provides virtually no opportunity for students at Orr Academy High School in Lawndale to get to Harvard

If Harvard accepted 10X as many students, it would not be Harvard. If Harvard accepted students based on a lottery, it would not be Harvard. Other than increase financial aid even more, it is not clear what additional actions Harvard could do to increase equality of opportunity, that it is not already doing.

Imagine that you are a little behind in soccer ability. You never played soccer in high school or college, you are not the most athletic person. Now in your 20s you want to sign up for a soccer league. The local league has multiple divisions for different ability levels. What do you do? Do you sign up for the highest, so that you can be exposed to great play? Or do you sign up for the division that matches your own ability? The answer for most people is obvious. You sign up for the division that matches your own ability. If you sign up for a top-level league, no one will pass the ball, and when you get the ball, you'll have it taken away so fast you won't have a chance to get better.

The idea that the best way to help someone who is behind, is to put them with those farthest ahead, is completely insane. Yet that has been the policy behind affirmative action, behind integration-via-fiat, and behind eliminating tracking in grade school. It is not helpful to be in classes with people who are far ahead of you, as you won't get the practice on the basic, foundational topics that you need. You will be lost, and then fall even further behind. On the other hand, if you are grouped with people of your own ability, you have the opportunity to work hard, be among the best in the class, and feel much greater personal satisfaction. (See again how many nerds who despised gym class end up later liking casual ultimate frisbee games -- such games among people of similar ability level ends up being a lot more fun).

I use SpiderOak, since it allows for client-side encryption (zero-knowledge on their part, they have no way of seeing my files).

In our society we're seen as weak if we cry.

Isn't this the case in most societies? My sense from history is that is only acceptable for men to cry at extreme events -- such as death of a wife/child/brother, or the loss of a kingdom. The other common trope for crying is if a peasant or low-level official is begging the forgiveness from a king who is about to terminate him. But in the modern society such tragedies happen less often. I cannot think of a time in my own adult life when crying would have been justified.

"But, more seriously, as a counter, I've spent most of my adult life trying to be less 'manly' and more male (xy-chromosomer )."

Out of curiosity, what does that mean? Were you getting in bar fights or what?

I've spent time trying to become more manly in some ways. I started lifting weights, speaking with my deeper vocal cords rather than head voice, having a bit more of a sense of command, learning how to dish it back or take it in stride if someone gives me some jocular ribbing (rather than getting defensive or avoiding that person), not being whiny under any circumstances, etc. I think that modern western culture overly feminizes men, and it has been a good experience for myself to try to be more masculine.

I have an iPad Air 2 and use it every day. My main use cases:

1. Reading. I love reading the old, free PDF books available from Google books and archive.org. The OCR doesn't work well, so you really need to read the original scanned image version, which requires a big screen and a fast enough processor (a phone or older model tablet won't cut it). I also moved from using my Kindle to the iPad for reading ebooks, since it is much faster to thumb through the repetitive parts of non-fiction books using the iPad.

2. Playing games with my girlfriend. Our favorite date activity is going to a bar or hanging out on the patio, having a drink, and cooperatively playing some trivia or puzzle game on the iPad.

I previously had a Nexus 10, but it was too slow to read scanned PDF's and it crashed all the time. The iPad Air 2 is much, much better.

One of the most valuable startup skills is to know which kind of debt has a low interest rate and which kind of technical debt has a high interest rate. Certain things - lack of tests, poor build system, poor deploy system, very poorly structured code - have a very high interest rate. Every time you create bugs, you waste time tracking it down and fixing it. Every time you check something in that breaks the dev environment for the rest of the team, you create bugs. On the other hand, messy code that is isolated to one system, or an architecture that has a bit of copy and paste, are usually not too big of a deal. Going on some deep dive to create some "generalized framework solution" is almost always an error.