bd_at_rivenhill

14 ms·

91.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
Not sure why it doesn't belong on HN; it's part and parcel of the same institutional culture that gave us the prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Check out the details on one of the most infamous civil forfeiture cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/w
92.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
Seems like the best solution is that there should always be a way to reset the firmware to a hard-coded factory default which represents the state that existed when the machine came off the assembly line. In this way, a bad firmware update
93.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
By qualitatively different I mostly meant to point out that TMI and Fukushima were both LOC accidents at water moderated reactors, while Chernobyl was of a much more dangerous variety. This was motivated by the fact that the OP glossed ove
94.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
One issue with the review of previous nuclear disasters: Chernobyl was qualitatively different than Three Mile Island and Fukushima. The latter 2 designs were both water cooled and water moderated; both suffered loss of coolant (LOC) event
95.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
Any electronic trading system is capable of experiencing severe errors that have nothing to do with HFT; some of the most common examples involve manually keying an incorrect price or size for an outgoing order. The sort of safety mechanis
96.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
Depending on the market and the instrument traded, it can be very rare for "natural liquidity" to generate trades (e.g. mutual fund trades with individual investor through their brokers) and most traded orders interact with some sort of liq
97.
by bd_at_rivenhill 14y ago
Failsafes are triggered irregularly and are thus prone to bugs. It is also very rare to go back and review data with a separate implementation of the failsafe to see if the normal implementation is functioning incorrectly in certain circum
98.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Who cares about the reviews, building cheap ripoffs of Apple products is now a time-honored route to success, just ask Bill Gates.
99.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I'd estimate that about 1/8 to 1/4 of the purpose of the laws he's breaking is to protect commuters from harassment and the remainder is to protect the profits of businesses like the kiosks that sell candy, drinks, and newspapers on some of
100.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I've lived in New York, and it's just a fact of life on the subway, kind of like the way that it stinks on hot summer days. I'd rather that the police and the court system spend their resources on real crimes because I can always ignore th
101.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I doubt that it's possible for you or your attorneys to understand every single law that applies to your situation, so you are almost certainly breaking some law or regulation somewhere. The difference between you and this guy is that he p
102.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
There are times when these "symptoms" have a positive effect on your life and times when they have a negative effect. These medications give you the equivalent of an "off" switch for use when they are undesirable, if you have the disciplin
103.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Would you call it "slave labor" if you're working for yourself? I don't think that the said drugs would greatly help in any of those areas Perhaps you should try them before you start expressing an opinion. There is a great deal of diver
104.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Yep that's me, always interested in this sort of thing.
105.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Does this get any easier if you do the original incorporation offshore?
106.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I've been waiting for something like this to happen. If the teachers' unions could get behind this on a national level and coordinate the creation of open access online texts for all subjects, then I might start thinking that they're somet
107.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
HFT is a disruptive technology that has been the target of lots of FUD from entrenched institutions and politicians looking for a "scary" issue to flog. Most of the practitioners are fairly small (relative to other investment firms) and te
108.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
There has been relative gain by a very important class of investors: individual retail investors. If you trade individual stocks for your own account, you've seen a steady decrease in the amount of spread that you have to pay to get your o
109.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Italy and Spain are dangerously over-leveraged in a low growth environment and thus vulnerable to a speculative attack that pushes interest rates up long enough for them to go into default. It is not clear yet whether the European establis
110.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I think these parents are trying to get their kids out of schools that can't even enforce basic discipline in the classroom. There's a big difference between an environment where teachers don't know anything worth much serious study or eff
111.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Doesn't work that way; property taxes in the geographic region of the school district go to fund the schools in that district and nowhere else (if you ignore the effects of equalization lawsuits). If someone living in a low-tax district pu
112.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
The power of the Federal government was much lower before the Supreme Court allowed the abuse of the commerce clause to get so far out of hand.
113.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
It already looks sillier, alcohol prohibition didn't lead to the loss of thousands of lives and breakdown of civil order in Mexico, didn't fuel a sustained rebellion in Colombia, and didn't handicap the prosecution of a war in Afghanistan t
114.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
The US government is able to borrow at a low rate because there are few good alternatives: the Euro and the Yen are both terrible choices, the Pound is not particularly good either, the Australian market is too small to absorb significant i
115.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
If raising taxes to the level of Germany would cause such a massive outflow of capital (which could be taxed at the exit point) then why does Germany have so much capital? You're missing the fact that there are significant cultural differ
116.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Greece's failure will invite a sustained speculative attack on Spain and Italy which would probably require coordinated actions between European and non-European (i.e. American and Chinese) governments to stop. I agree that the crisis is a
117.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
The most important thing for day-to-day economic health is to make sure no one loses retail deposits You're ignoring the money market here. I just looked up some numbers, and Forrester research peged the amount of deposits at FDIC insure
118.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
Did Europe just save Greece with this bailout? Not yet, and probably never. ... If Europe can't save Greece, why is it trying? Don't buy this line of reasoning, Greece must be saved or all of Europe is in a for a very difficult peri
119.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
The banks take this risk not just because they expect that there will be a bailout but also because the Basel Accords allow them to treat sovereign bonds as riskless when calculating their Capital Adequacy Ratio, making those bonds look lik
120.
by bd_at_rivenhill 15y ago
I see it differently: there's nothing wrong with a common currency and separate fiscal policy as long as you don't try to maintain the fiction that all sovereign entities have equal credit risk. Excessive/unexpected devaluation is just de

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