rwallace

30 ms·

331.
by rwallace 9y ago
You're not reading what I've written. But I was waiting for someone to bring up the broken window fallacy. The answer is that the unspoken assumption on which it is a fallacy is that resources in the economy are otherwise optimall
332.
by rwallace 9y ago
As it happens, this guess is incorrect. I've never been involved in cryptocurrency other than as a curious spectator. I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other. Do you agree with the general principle that when the heuris
333.
by rwallace 9y ago
> If the 'false impetus' did not exist, that investment would go elsewhere, and create value for society in more efficient ways. Actually no, it probably wouldn't. Most likely, the money would be hoarded and the people wou
334.
by rwallace 9y ago
> There’s a logic to the maze you have to run to expose fraudulent financial accounts. In an economic system where U.S. consumers carry $12.73 trillion in household debt, you shouldn’t be able to just call up, say “it wasn't me,” an
335.
by rwallace 9y ago
No, I'm pointing out how this does in fact cause net value creation. Sure, when somebody mines Bitcoin, the dollar value of the Bitcoin is purely on paper. When they send dollars to chip manufacturers to buy mining hardware, the moveme
336.
by rwallace 9y ago
This is an "apart from that, Mrs Lincoln" - there is no analogy, because you're leaving out the destruction caused by hurricanes, which is their overwhelmingly most important result.
337.
by rwallace 9y ago
Sure, if you spent a million dollars buying CPUs and destroying them, that would create value. In practice, there are always ways to spend a million dollars to create more value (e.g. buying CPUs and using them to do useful computation!), s
338.
by rwallace 9y ago
On the contrary, mining does create value, by creating a demand for computing power therefore financing the development of more advanced lithography, one of the very few areas in which our species is still making substantial progress. Now i
339.
by rwallace 9y ago
The problem is that housing is not a free market, and there's an uncanny valley effect: free markets are great, socialism is not without its own benefits, but a non-free market has the advantages of neither and the disadvantages of bot
340.
by rwallace 9y ago
So you're saying the open ISA still doesn't allow access to the command processor? What sort of things does that preclude? Suppose you decided to write a game directly to the hardware instead of via DirectX or OpenGL, or a molecul
341.
by rwallace 9y ago
OP says you can't access the command processor on a modern GPU, but I thought that changed recently, now you can program the GPU hardware? http://gpuopen.com/amd-vega-instruction-set-architecture-doc... Am I missing so
342.
by rwallace 9y ago
My claims have been all about the people that need the help. Stop, take a deep breath, go back and actually read my last few posts. How are you going to look someone in the face and tell them that they should be glad that the service th
343.
by rwallace 9y ago
Er, you've got it the wrong way around. Failure to divert flights would leave money on the table - there's no profit in potential customers who would have been willing to pay you for a service that you don't deliver. It'
344.
by rwallace 9y ago
Being lucky enough to be first in the queue doesn't make you more morally deserving any more than being lucky enough to be rich. Worse, making it illegal to raise prices constrains supply so that a lot fewer people can be helped. I&#x2
345.
by rwallace 9y ago
No, the free market reaction is that all the airlines notice airline seats from the Caribbean are way more valuable right now, so they divert resources from nonemergency areas to put on extra flights out of the Caribbean, as many as the air
346.
by rwallace 9y ago
Yes. None of these fantasies bears any resemblance whatsoever to anything in real AI research. What's going on is that the predisposition of the human brain to believe in shadowy figures and apocalyptic futures is as pronounced as it e
347.
by rwallace 9y ago
Upvoted this submission because it contains three very important lessons for technologists: 1. Never, ever accept a cofounder arrangement where you deal with the code and someone else deals with all the money. 2. If someone starts trying to
348.
by rwallace 9y ago
He didn't do that. He asked permission to do it. It takes a particularly shitty mindset to respond to that by sneaking around behind someone's back and complaining to his boss.
349.
by rwallace 9y ago
> There is at least one possible upside: Fire ants love to eat ticks. The area where the fire ants landed may be crawling with stinging ants for a while. “But it’ll have absolutely no ticks. So it’ll be lovely from that perspective,” say
350.
by rwallace 9y ago
> Now that we've discovered EM, have we exhausted the basic knowledge about the world? I don't know whether there is more basic science to be discovered, but even if there isn't, there is plenty of technology to be invente
351.
by rwallace 9y ago
Be careful of that. Lots of people have come to grief because they assumed because their boss, teacher or whoever seemed friendly, it was okay to confide in these people about some personal vulnerability such as a health problem, the way th
352.
by rwallace 9y ago
What's the actual fatality rate in buses per million miles travelled? It might be not quite as good as planes and trains, but I'm pretty sure it's far better than cars.
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by rwallace 9y ago
Just as different kinds of processed food vary in how bad they are, so do different social media sites. I think HN is like pizza: yeah, it's not perfectly healthy, but which of us is going to live a perfectly healthy lifestyle, and piz
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by rwallace 9y ago
I don't think it's valid to prioritize access on the basis of social status, but I do think it's valid to prioritize need before entertainment. If you're playing a game and someone comes along who needs to fill out a job
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by rwallace 9y ago
If you're planning to trust that strategy with your life, first check with a lawyer to make sure it will actually work. Remember, making an argument about how you think the law should work, and a prediction about how it will work, are
356.
by rwallace 9y ago
By that definition there's no such thing as an airgapped computer, unless you are talking about computers created by an alien civilization that arose in another galaxy from an independent origin of life. The useful definition of the te
357.
by rwallace 9y ago
As I understand it, while the talk is about speed, the real issue is reliability: in rural America if you try to get broadband, some of the time you'll get a few megabits per second, which is enough to get by, but a good deal of the ti
358.
by rwallace 9y ago
Why would that last be a good idea? You're throwing away a good business with 70% gross margins - for what? Okay, to concentrate on something that might be a good business with 99% gross margins, but is the difference between 70% and 9
359.
by rwallace 9y ago
I know someone who uses a 1080p TV as a monitor for his gaming PC. The picture quality is poor; it's too blurry to be tolerable for work. That's okay in this particular case, since he uses a different PC for work, but that one nee
360.
by rwallace 9y ago
Separatism and terrorism are orthogonal. There are separatist movements that resort to murder, but there are also separatist movements that campaign peacefully.

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