ef4

76 ms·

631.
by ef4 13y ago
I don't dispute that banks create money and greatly affect the money supply. Under normal conditions, the banks stay pretty close to their reserve requirement, so a hacker suddenly creating a gigantic new loan at a bank is likely to push th
632.
by ef4 13y ago
True, in that sense you're essentially forcing the bank to make a loan they didn't intend to make (which does indeed expand the broad money supply). If the bank had sufficient excess reserves, other banks would honor the new money. And toda
633.
by ef4 13y ago
No, hacking one bank doesn't really impact the wider money supply. The Federal Reserve serves as the bank's bank. It knows how much each bank has, and the individual banks are limited as to how much new money they can create in relation to
634.
by ef4 13y ago
Yes, and this is hardly a new observation. Governments have been debasing their currency for millennia, because it's an easier way to raise revenue than actually going out and taxing people for it.
635.
by ef4 13y ago
The address is also a public key. No one else can pretend to be the New Yorker unless they have the corresponding private key. If the address was just "newyorker.onion", you'd still need to find some way of safely verifying the public key t
636.
by ef4 13y ago
That vulnerability applies when accessing normal web pages via Tor. But that's now what the New Yorker has set up. They're hosting a Tor hidden service, and in that case Tor is necessarily encrypting the traffic end-to-end.
637.
by ef4 13y ago
Upsert is already possible in a single statement, though a bit unwieldy. create table people (uuid varchar, name varchar); with new_rows as (select (unnest(ARRAY[('xxx','John Smith'), ('yyy', 'Ben Bitdiddle')]::people[])).*), upda
638.
by ef4 13y ago
IANAA, but "return of capital" is non-taxable.
639.
by ef4 13y ago
> From time to time everybody can vote if he prefers to have more iPhones or more Android phones, vanilla ice cream or strawberry to actually produce the desired goods and that's it. This is the crux of the problem: it's not just final
640.
by ef4 13y ago
Even with full automation, you still have the problem of coordinating the economy as a whole, in a way that can't be gamed or controlled by any one person. And you'll need a way to rationally allocate resources that takes into account new i
641.
by ef4 13y ago
> if an economy is fully automated, there is no money - at least not in the way we currently understand it. No human is working and gets paid so there is no money to spend on goods. Not true. Labor is one way to earn money. But not the
642.
by ef4 13y ago
I can summarize the problem with the data in one sentence: a degree in computer science has almost no correlation with your usefulness as a programmer. So a glut of people with degrees does not imply that there is no skill shortage. Really
643.
by ef4 13y ago
I think it's likely that me or my programmer children are going to obsolete your accountant children long before they reach retirement age. Not entirely, of course. But enough that one software-equipped accountant will do the work of 100 of
644.
by ef4 13y ago
All true. But we technophiles are better served by downplaying this aspect of technology's advance. A large fraction of people are utterly freaked out by the idea that they'll be obligated to adopt new technology just to keep up. Better to
645.
by ef4 13y ago
> In modern society it is implied, that person taking drugs is losing their free will If that was really true, we wouldn't hold them criminally responsible for their actions.
646.
by ef4 13y ago
Or just don't accept below-market salary. The competition for good people is fierce, there's no reason you need to accept low pay.
647.
by ef4 14y ago
"U.S. Department of State consular officers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers collect biometric information (digital fingerprints and a photograph) from all non-U.S. citizens between the ages of 14 and 79, with some exceptions
648.
by ef4 14y ago
It is feasible to prevent Tor users from accessing your service. This is by design. (see https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en#Bans ) It is much harder to stop your users from accessing Tor. You can make it less convenient, but
649.
by ef4 14y ago
Economic behavior is not static. Industries use lots of free resources because they're free . It is not possible to say a priori whether they could be profitable with different input prices, because there are myriad complex ways to economi
650.
by ef4 14y ago
I used to laugh at the real estate ads touting "vibrant" Kendall Square. But those ads are actually coming true now. > and by far the best pedestrian-friendly traffic controls in the entire state. Yeah, among other things all of Cambrid
651.
by ef4 14y ago
I know many, many people who have successfully job-hopped around Kendall Square with no adverse impact from noncompetes. I suspect the reason is that the noncompetes are sufficiently narrow, and the software industry is a big, wide place. I
652.
by ef4 14y ago
> Fiat currencies have value because of the law. So when the value of the Euro swings 30%, it's because somebody passed a law changing its value? Zimbabwe's government wrote a law saying its currency's value was now zero? No. Any money
653.
by ef4 14y ago
Your argument applies equally well to any form of money. Money is a purely social phenomenon. It has value only because other people think it has value. There's no "inherent" value in any form of money. Whenever you hear someone say "inhere
654.
by ef4 14y ago
The article hit the key word: density. The unique thing about Kendall Square is the sheer density of geeks in general and startups in particular. Other places have higher absolute numbers, but not in such a concentrated space. Plus, from a
655.
by ef4 14y ago
After the last Bitcoin is mined (and actually much sooner than that), the profit from mining will have shifted away from new coins and into transaction fees. Mining new coins and processing transactions are the same thing. So the hardware c
656.
by ef4 14y ago
Yes, but I'm highly confident that a significant fraction of users are not using passphra.se or similar. They're making something up, and humans are extremely bad at generating high entropy that way.
657.
by ef4 14y ago
This actually misses the worst problem. Brain wallets are essentially unsalted. You can build a gigantic rainbow table once and then watch those addresses forever after. And you aren't attacking a single address at a time. You're attacking
658.
by ef4 14y ago
His point on trace-ability is true, and one that lots of Bitcoin supporters don't fully appreciate. The system is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous, which is not nearly the same thing. Here's some interesting work on getting to real anony
659.
by ef4 14y ago
Every form of currency suffers this problem in the beginning. There are really only two ways around it: easy convertibility into another currency that people already understand, or direct use-value of the currency commodity itself. It's a q
660.
by ef4 14y ago
Exactly. The original commenter's point is that they prevent someone from changing your password, but they don't prevent that person from deleting your account.

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