nkarpov

Well you've flipped now to discussing the definition of useful, no?

First, gold is plenty useful outside value store: only ~30% of new gold per year is used for investment (this is per GS in 2015, I believe, and this is unlikely to have changed significantly one way or the other, pls feel free to correct me). The majority of remaining is used in mainly in jewelry & electronics (again per same source).

Second, on its way to providing for the point above, it employs hundreds of thousands of people full time that take that money to spend, save, invest aka. it works in the economy.

I'm not saying that bitcoin can't function like this or some similar way in the future, but it's a fact that it doesn't right now, and per this criteria I would say it's both more wasteful & less useful than gold. Bitcoin is simply plugged into your outlet right now and quite literally wasting energy unless you're using it to heat your home. That people have assigned value to the record of energy being spent is a separate phenomenon IMO.

I can roughly see the relationship but not smart enough to see immediately what it means without more thought. FWIW AFAIU the broken window parable is itself not without controversy.

My guess is that the increase of employment per increase of gold mined is higher than the increase of employment per increase of bitcoin mined.

he inherited an estate worth $100 million. It’s not exactly difficult to turn that into $1 billion (compared to, say, turning $10,000 into $100,000.)

And turning $1 billion into $10 billion is even easier!

You're right that there is always a race to build a new hardware platform. You're wrong that one literally replaces another.

How much of what you see in your browser do you retain?

I agree that it's a terrible format but why exactly is it a bad format to be graded on? If you are able to construct a good 5 paragraph essay then you certainly have demonstrated the ability to make a point, come up with arguments to support that point, coherently link them together, and finally to write them down using the language of your choice.

You're right - the format doesn't show up outside of school. And if we were being bombarded by 5 paragraph essays in the "real world" then we'd certainly have a lot of justification to this entire thread. But we don't. You just proved it. So what's the issue here?

...you're seriously nitpicking on the least important things here and then using it as evidence to say it's 'too weak for practitioners'... come on.

Although not completely related, this reminds me of Asimov's famous story... The Last Question. Must read.

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

This really does depend on how "reliable" is defined. At the code level, reliable is dependent on the actual programmer. This code must then be compiled/interpreted in order to to actually function. At this stage the programmer has lost control unless they are also in direct control of the interpreter/compiler - which is, of course, impractical and extremely unlikely.

Inevitably writing in high level languages sacrifices control for how the program looks at the machine level simply because you must depend on existing structures. The higher up you go, the less control you have of the final product. Writing in Python vs. C means that you have to think less about lower level issues and consequently are subject to problems that arise outside the scope of what you could have originally controlled - simply because you didn't have to think about a subclass of issues that you assumed were inherently solved for you.

So yes - if you take a Python program and rewrite it in C, you can get a more reliable program IF you properly solved the set of things that Python took care of for you in relation to your specific problem.

But this relies on the fact that you succeeded in rewriting what Python took care of for you. So we're back to where we started - it all depends on the programmer.

The article implies this in the final sentence:

All that said, I don't recommend using C unless much thought has been given to the decision - the resulting software might be reliable, but it will have taken a significant human effort to produce it.

And this basically negates that C is any more reliable than whatever other programming language. Despite the fact that I think a discussion of reliability of a language is effectively useless (at least the way I've framed it here, I'm open to other interpretations), I enjoyed the article - thanks for sharing!

Wasn't expecting such an awesome response - thank you!

While this is interesting, it really strikes me that there isn't that much data available. Would this pattern hold if you saw another 100 years into the past? Will it hold an additional 100 years in the future?

Cute, but... doesn't seem very significant?

This is not my experience at all.

I have noticed an increase in the number of ads but also not anywhere near what the author demonstrates.

I have to ask though, how many connections does he have through his Facebook account? And how many of those connections are 'good' (active) users of the site?

I can see why his page would be all ads if the connections he has on the website aren't producing any content...? In which case, sorry... I don't think this is Facebook's problem.

This isn't quite fair. The difficulty of writing completely secure software is out of comparison with the difficulty of finding vulnerabilities.

First, it's a numbers game. There are order magnitude more people trying to break the product than there are people trying to make it secure (dev team vs. rest of the world?). As a developer you are ALWAYS at a disadvantage.

Second, different objectives. As a vulnerability seeker you only have to find one weakness, while as a developer you attempt to write securely everywhere. This just isn't realistic. The best developers can do is try as best they can. There is no indestructible software.

Third, the response and fix time is actually good? If anything - 5 days is incredibly good turn around. We don't know what else is going on, what other crazy vulnerability may have been reported at this time or being worked on previously, etc. While security is important it is unrealistic to imagine that the team in charge of these kind of fixes is all that large or has infinite resources.

It is hard (impossible) to secure something like Facebook fully. I agree with the other sentiments that if anything their crowdsourcing efforts have been quite successful. If you are unhappy with a 5 day turn around - start looking for another solution. I think you'll be hard pressed to find anything 1) more secure, and 2) with quicker responses to security issues.

I think the exploration of the answer to this question is about the most frightening implication of this whole mess