giergirey

24 ms·

1.
by giergirey 6y ago
Does it not seem plausible to you that perhaps one factor in the reduction of poaching was local people realizing there was more money to be made from tourists drawn to see elephants, rather than from poaching them? Government action helped
2.
by giergirey 6y ago
Perhaps everything comes around again once sufficient people have forgotten the lessons from last time - e.g. maybe the story from the South Sea Bubble in 1720 of "a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobod
3.
by giergirey 8y ago
I think you're missing option 3, which is to avoid drawing a conclusion either way - assume that there's no definite answer, and that the experts' expertise is too narrow to support using their consensus outside small studies
4.
by giergirey 9y ago
I agree you probably won't see much benefit if most of your transactions involve cash-in-a-bank-account or coins on non-Ethereum chains. However, if: - Ethereum continues to grow; and - we continue to see more and more successful/
5.
by giergirey 9y ago
Yes, that's been my worry with many blockchain projects - it all sounds great until it needs to interface with the messy real-world. But - regardless of the merits of this particular project - I think there is still some benefit in hav
6.
by giergirey 9y ago
OK, suppose you want to sell Litecoins for USD cash in a bank account. Now, admittedly, it might be that today a one stop centralised exchange is the best choice for you. But by introducing intermediate Ethereum based tokens, you've br
7.
by giergirey 9y ago
Yes, https://etherdelta.github.io/ were way ahead of everyone else, if someone asks me for an example of an Ethereum contract that's solving a real world problem right now then they're the first one I think of. It
8.
by giergirey 9y ago
Yes, I also think exchanging tokens is one of the (few?) situations where a smart contract really is a great solution to a real world problem (as opposed to blockchain hype). Definitely an interesting area, I've been watching this spac
9.
by giergirey 9y ago
Perhaps that's kind of a limitation of the way Citus shards data across nodes - sometimes you have to denormalize a bit so it "knows" where a row should live? (I mean, I guess you could imagine a system that followed the fore
10.
by giergirey 9y ago
Relative deprivation certainly seems a better explanation than requiring some mysterious "fundamental universal rights" that people never knew they had until 18th Century Westerners discovered them. Maybe they're a bit like &
11.
by giergirey 9y ago
adding unnecessary jewels definitely used to be a thing up until the 1970s - see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_watch#.27Jewel_infl...
12.
by giergirey 10y ago
If andai is just connecting a full-function laptop to the internet with some ethernet-over-audio bridge, then you're right. But don't you think he has a point if he's talking about a simple, single-purpose device like an ardu
13.
by giergirey 12y ago
Another interesting similar idea - http://what3words.com/ .
14.
by giergirey 12y ago
One more personalisation data-point ... I get the Ping Pong Dim Sum restaurant chain as my top result when I google for ping pong! Not entirely unreasonable since I am in London where their restaurants are located and I do eat dim sum more
15.
by giergirey 12y ago
The television delay for "live" sports seems to be surprisingly high (and has got worse since the advent of digital TV); we're talking 5-10 seconds here. Probably even more for streaming video.
16.
by giergirey 13y ago
Where do you draw the line? Some retail investors still rely on reading stock quotes in the financial section of their daily newspaper - should we force everyone to only change prices once a day?
17.
by giergirey 13y ago
Odd - if I go to https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/emails/new I get an untrusted connection warning since the SSL certificate is for *.desk.com, not support.coinbase.com.
18.
by giergirey 13y ago
Here's one security concern - What procedure do you follow when accepting files for inclusion in jsdelivr? I mean, what's to stop this scenario: 1. attacker uploads a poisoned version (say, with an XSS vulnerability) of a popular
19.
by giergirey 13y ago
Are you including the time taken to make the parser produce helpful error messages? That always seems like the hard bit to me ...
20.
by giergirey 13y ago
It is an exciting idea but the two obstacles I can see are: 1) When asked, people may say they want security and privacy - but in practice convenience and functionality win. 2) Among people who genuinely need secure communications, encrypti
21.
by giergirey 13y ago
You're probably right about what's involved in building a truly secure smartphone from scratch that we can trust. It's an interesting thought experiment, but I wonder if we can satisfy many use cases without having to build a
22.
by giergirey 13y ago
Pedant's note: Contrary to popular belief, witch hunts were rare in the Middle Ages. They took off in popularity during the Renaissance.
23.
by giergirey 13y ago
One thing the (otherwise thorough) article doesn't mention is whether to provide a machine-readable schema for the API or not. Some integrators do seem fond of being able to generate stub client code automatically ...
24.
by giergirey 13y ago
I agree - whenever interview processes come up, commenters mostly criticise the interview processes for excluding good candidates. But that's only one part of the equation - the number of unsuitable candidates that slip through is norm
25.
by giergirey 13y ago
I agree, it would be good to see Google setting the trend here by going HTTPS everywhere. Personally I think the next website I create will be all-HTTPS. The main reasons I encounter for not going HTTPS everywhere are: 1) Possible negative
26.
by giergirey 13y ago
Are you sure that the Google authentication token(s) sent over HTTP can actually be used to perform sensitive actions (e.g. reading/sending mail, changing settings)? That is, perhaps Google require an HTTPS-only token for sensitive act
27.
by giergirey 13y ago
I rather like this quote attributed to Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
28.
by giergirey 14y ago
I think "Mail Boxes Etc" is probably our UK equivalent of UPS Stores. Amongst other things, they can do packaging and labelling and act as a broker across the various couriers. I've had good experiences with MBE but I've only used them to s
29.
by giergirey 14y ago
I was under the impression though that the 30-40 years average life expectancy is commonly misunderstood? The mean life expectancy at birth might well have been 35 years but that's dragged down by massive infant and child mortality in the f