cletus

45 ms·

331.
by cletus 5y ago
It's amazing to watch in real time Crypto Andys learn all the hard lessons that went into making the financial system they seem to despise. The common denominator in the examples in the article is that the crypto system at some point h
332.
by cletus 5y ago
Not to poorer countries it isn't. The cost of legal action quite literally scared off South American countries from adopting similar measures. And I wasn't clear: I don't oppose the Swiss government's action. Not in the
333.
by cletus 5y ago
Let's see how expensive that decision turns out to be [1]. EDIT: to be clear since there seems to be some confusion, I agree with this. The tobacco industry is quite literally cancer. I'm objecting to the ability for companies t
334.
by cletus 5y ago
Whenever I read anything like this I think people have a weirdly rosy view of the past. 30 years ago people have libraries and encyclopedias. Now billions of people take it for granted that you can have a handhold device in your pocket th
335.
by cletus 5y ago
This is the realm of the Fermi Paradox (which is a misnomer because it's not really a paradox at all). The key question is that if planets are so common and space is so big, why does it seem to be so empty of life? You bring up an argu
336.
by cletus 5y ago
People bring this up a lot. It's fair to ask. I do often find it comes from a place of wishful thinking. I mean I'd like to have FTL at my disposal true. But what we're dealing with now seem to be either hard physical limit
337.
by cletus 5y ago
Other commenters (rightly) pointed out this is a stretch to the term "habitable". What's becoming clear though is the only thing stopping us from lots of Earth-mass planets is the abilities of our detectors to detect ever-sma
338.
by cletus 5y ago
Look into Roman and Greek history. Slavery, the treatment of slaves, the attitudes towards minors (slaves and otherwise) for sexual purposes and so on. It's actually pretty abhorrent. Another example: the origin of the word "decim
339.
by cletus 5y ago
Two things spring to mind: The first is that how we think is deeply intertwined with language. There's tons of evidence of this, not the least of which is Helen Keller's description of her world before she learned language. We&#x2
340.
by cletus 5y ago
Does deuterium-tritium ("D-T") fusion really have a future? Net energy output is one thing but neutrons are the big problem. The two issues are energy loss and destruction of the container (aka neutron embrittlement). I see ITER p
341.
by cletus 5y ago
This is what a de facto aristocracy looks like. There are an awful lot of jobs and careers that are purely the domain of the wealthy. Unpaid internships and low wages are only part of the reason. Social connections are probably a far bigger
342.
by cletus 5y ago
This isn't necessarily deliberate. Example: years ago at Google we had proxies for Web traffic. Around lunch time you could hit an issue with HN where the traffic was blocked for too many visits from the same IP. There were thousands
343.
by cletus 5y ago
The ladders technically start from level 0. Google actually had L0s whose job, as best as I could gather, was to take things from point A to point B during, say, an equipment install. The SWE ladder however starts at L3. With extremely few
344.
by cletus 5y ago
A better way of putting it is the author has made that claim. That doesn't necessarily make it true. Likely several factors went into the levelling decision. If anything, the (assumedly) limited years of experience were a factor. It ma
345.
by cletus 5y ago
I had to comment on this: > it was because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs. This is almost certainly not the case. It was likely due to the answers given in the soft skills interview that belied a lack
346.
by cletus 5y ago
The best features of PHP are: 1. Core API of stateless functions. Compare this to the bootstrapping requirements of, say, Java or Python; 2. CGI-like resource management in that you tear down everything after a request. Many people get upse
347.
by cletus 5y ago
I assume then that you disqualify Python for the same reason? Python 3.x has decided that breaking changes in minor releases is fine. My favourite: string prefixes (eg s'foo', u'foo') were legal in 2.x, removed in 3.0, a
348.
by cletus 5y ago
Prior to GTA 5 coming out I would've been super-excited about this. GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas and GTA 4 were amazing releases. Why? Because they had a heavy undercurrent of satire combined with an historical aesthetic (the 70s, 80s
349.
by cletus 5y ago
tl;dr price controls didn't work (again) surprising no one who understands anything about how supply and demand work. If there's an underlying reason why costs are rising then a price control is just a band aid solution as the und
350.
by cletus 5y ago
In my experience it almost never works like this. The fish rots from the head. I've found bad managers are able to exist, even thrive, due to a culture of loyalty. Having worked in several countries this is a very Corporate America thi
351.
by cletus 5y ago
Watching Star Citizen has been a hobby for me like watching a train wreck is painfully slow motion. It came about at the same time as the revival of a beloved franchise Elite in the form of Elite Dangerous. ED didn't have the budget SC
352.
by cletus 5y ago
The author here would do well to and understand and use terms like "fixed costs" and "variable costs". There are large fixed costs in the power grid and the author is complaining that the retail price of electricity does
353.
by cletus 5y ago
> When central bank/governments lose control or get greedy you end up with hyperinflation. Instead you have hyperdeflation. Wonderful. > Derivates don't increase the money supply itself, they play tricks using the underlying
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by cletus 5y ago
> It's all fine and dandy until central banks lose control and inflation causes catastrophic issues. Genuinely curious: what issues are you specifically referring to? > BTC & ETH aren't deflationary as much as they are p
355.
by cletus 5y ago
This to me is another example of Crypto Andys so often just not understanding the financial system. I like this tweet [1]: > Honestly I think we emphasize flashy defi things that give you fancy high interest rates way too much. Interest
356.
by cletus 5y ago
This comment belies such a fundamental misunderstanding of the modern financial system it's hard to know where to begin. Moderate inflation is a feature not a bug. It drives investment and increases the money supply. On the opposite si
357.
by cletus 5y ago
I mostly disagree with this. To quote Joel Spolsky [1]: > Every time you provide an option, you’re asking the user to make a decision. At least the author differentiates on types of settings: > There’s a difference between product set
358.
by cletus 5y ago
> Ha ha ha. Not even a debate? You brought up paper ballots for voting and then blamed them for 9/11 and the Iraq war. If that's your definition of "debate" I don't think I can help you. > What's next, te
359.
by cletus 5y ago
Paper ballots are better than any purely electronic form. Like that's not even a debate except by people who are trying to sell electronic voting machines. The gold standard is either print outs from a voting machine or a ballot you fi
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by cletus 5y ago
I wish I remember where I saw this but someone described crypto like this: imagine you're a smart person who is super knowledgeable about something like software engineering, distributed systems and consensus. That's great. But th

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