srdev

Its getting pretty tiresome for people to host super-alt-right events and then claim that they're moderate or politics-free. If your event is called "BasedCon" then you're knee-deep in politics and those politics are not moderate.

Spinning the spaceship is a pretty hard problem. There's all sorts of constraints on how fast you can spin it for a given radius, and you have to spin it fast enough to be useful. The end result is that you're looking at a pretty huge spaceship that will take a lot of power to start spinning. Its not unreasonable to look at a smaller-scale solution given a world of limited budgets.

Benford's Law requires that the numbers being analyzed typically occur over a wide distribution spanning orders of magnitude, which typically doesn't happen in trading (except over very long time periods).

None of those frameworks are slim and fast. No framework is going to admit that they are bloated, and many will claim to be slim and fast, despite the fact that they are not.

I've gotten a lot of flack for saying that advertising and marketing are terrible industries and need to be chopped down by 95% or more, but I think this only supports my point. They can't stop themselves from trying to hook into everything so that they can track and "engage" the user.

I've gotten a lot of stink eye by strongly pointing out that the users don't want to be "engaged" with your brands and that people are creepy for having that expectation. They just want a product or service that works well. Somehow along the way we convinced ourselves that all of this is normal.

For the endless commentary on Trump profiting off the presidency, Trump running an "organized crime family", Trump this Trump that, we have actual hard, concrete evidence that a Vice President's cocaine addicted son was selling access to the office (presumably to fuel his addiction), and on top of that his father lied constantly to the American people about it.

The dispute is that we don't agree on whether there is concrete evidence that the vice president's son sold access to his office. Hunter certainly capitalized on his name, but to this point there is no hard evidence that this resulted in political access to Biden, that Biden accepted any money, or that Biden gave any favors with regard to Hunter's associates. If you can't prove any of those things, then hammering on it endlessly with no new evidence or any change in the story would be journalistic malpractice.

From my point of view, its not just about whether the company is private but also how easy it is to substitute the service. Twitter and Facebook are not close to the only means of publishing information. I don't think that people deserve any particular audience for their speech, so the ability to substitute other publishing methods alleviates concerns about censorship on my part.

On the other hand, its much more difficult to switch ISPs, so I would be very concerned about censorship at that level. Things like search engines which are substitute-able but held by few hands and difficult to replicate privately are more of a grey area in my opinion.

Not sokoloff, but that would be a reason to move to another mail provider. If Twitter is censoring speech then the correct option is to move to another service or host your own speech. People talk about social media monopolizing the discourse but the only barriers here are network effects, and people can move to other forums (I, for example, do not use Twitter or Facebook and still manage to have online discourse). This is different than if it were censorship at the ISP level, where there are physical and legal barriers of entry which make switching a difficult or impossible option.

That just demonstrates that there isn't an easily definable political neutral. From my point of view, the "Burisma scandal" got all the attention it deserved. The reason the media isn't harping on it is because it wasn't a scandal, and one political party was desperately trying to make it so.

In the same way, a lot of people would say it would be neutral for media to present arguments that global warming is not man-made, but people who care about scientific fact would claim that even presenting the skeptic argument is non-neutral, sense you are signal boosting an argument with no basis in reality.

Is there much in the way of software development and data engineering? I clicked on some of your links but the focus was on engineering jobs involved with building the physical infrastructure, which sort-of matches my expectations. But it also means theres not much I can reasonably do to contribute.

Can you use mechanical drives for long-term storage? I would expect that any long-term storage would involve a strategy including backups and redundant devices.

Small amounts of money can have outsized effect on a market if it’s thinly traded, which crypto markets tend to be.

It’s used in nearly every climate change discussion. Its not particularly profound or thought provoking.

Ideas like fascism rarely spread because they’re better. They’re simpler which makes them more appealing. Better ideas also tend to be less appealing on the face of things because they’re more complex.

Can you elaborate on what the bin packing problem is?

In stock trading, we say that there are a million reasons to sell and only one to buy. Sales aren't a particularly good signal, since they can be very specific to ones' personal situation.

We’re not. The problem is with the “everyone got one” part. Every time I’ve discussed this issue personally with a republican they act indignant when I assert that the ids need to be free and trivially obtainable. Usually grousing about the cost and “laziness”.

Proper key management is a hard problem. This is a fact that the cryptocurrency scene has been relearning for years now.

You're not thinking probabilistically nor in terms of risk. There's no way to know for sure that an exchange is insolvent or at risk of becoming insolvent, but there are signs that increase the probability. Being run by amateurs is one such sign. Other signs are lack of insurance, persistent withdrawal issues, persistent arbitrage opportunities, lack of security reviews, poor technological practices (there are posts about the original Mt Gox codebase's poor handling of passwords for example, before Mark took it on), and misleading public statements.

If you bought the line that traditional banks were simply unable to process more than 10 wires a day, rather than it being that Mt Gox was so risky that they refused to process 10 wires a day, then you need to work on critical thinking. Likewise, exhortations that banks were placing restrictions on exchanges because "they were scared of Bitcoin" rather than being because these partners were shady and didn't have sufficient controls should have been met with suspicion.

And yes, Coinbase was also risky. The fact that things worked out doesn't mean it wasn't risky to begin with. I didn't give them any money for the first several years they were in business specifically because I saw them as high risk. In hindsight, Coinbase had the benefit of having backing by VCs with real business experience and subsequently hiring people with experience in the space, which reduced risk.

That's a pretty big point by itself. Lots of people with pre-7 phones looking for an upgrade that don't need or want all the X features.

My observation is this:

The "killer app" of Blockchains are the trustless nature of the system. In most practical application, allowing actors without a trust relationship to interact with the log is not a significant requirement of the system. Once you remove that requirement, there are technically superior approaches to maintaining a ledger.

No, because there is a block reward too that subsidizes the miners, so you have to account for that too.

We don't really know the relationship between transaction rate and electrical usage in a mature BTC system, because mining is mainly used to prevent double-spends and the minimum required mining rate to support a given transaction rate is a game-theoretical concern and not a technical one. We can only really observe what has happened so far in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

I think that depends on how much mining hashing power scales with regard to transaction rate. From a technical point of view, there's no reason that the hash rate has to increase to process more transactions. But from an economic and game theoretical point of view, increasing transaction rate makes the network more valuable, which makes attack rewards more valuable, which necessitates a higher hash rate. I'm not sure anyone has sussed out what the relationship is between transaction rate and minimum necessary hash rate.

On a per-transaction basis? No.

Those costs specifically end up being reified in the fee those processors charge to their customers, so we can determine an upper limit to how much is spent on energy in that way.

You're assuming that a global system must be trustless. This is not really a requirement. Heck, in most cases its not even desirable.

These companies handle orders of magnitude more traffic than Bitcoin and also provide services beyond just processing transactions. The comparison is not useful.

That sentiment hasn't been the norm for at least 8 years. Obama was highly disrespected.

I guess it depends on how much writing the actual code factors into your enjoyment. Most people I know enjoy building systems. Working with a boilerplate-heavy language is a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things, and is balanced out by having a robust ecosystem to build their product in.

I'm with you on this one. I understand frustration at "trick" problems or problems that make use of little-known algorithms or approaches. But there seems to be this sentiment that doing basic traversal and manipulation on data structures like a tree is burdensome. I simply can't trust in your abilities as a software developer if you need Stack Overflow to traverse a tree. You do need some fluency with basic data structure and algorithms, along with the ability to adapt them, in order to do non-trivial software development.

Great performance, a massive community, top tier support by partners and vendors, deep talent pool, and a huge ecosystem of libraries and products. Nothing else even comes close.

People have a tendency to trash talk it for being verbose, but writing the code is a vanishingly small portion of the engineering effort, and if you're hand wringing about whether it's fun to write then you're optimizing for the wrong things.