Lon7

In most variations of such a calculation the expected number of planets would be 0. The fact that the actual answer is >= 1 might suggest that the calculation is not an accurate representation of reality.

Manipulative, maybe. But why grossly? All you are doing is making the other person feel good. It should be encouraged and celebrated. If you have a choice between making someone feel neutral, or feel great, why wouldn't you choose great?

Added to my list of crypto projects that look interesting.

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Bank of America and Bitcoin both have market caps of ~$290 billion. Bank of America usually sees huge trading volume for a stock and it traded about $1.8 billion of volume today. BTC/USD alone has done $3 billion today.

I realize it's not a perfect comparison, but I think it highlights the fact that large sales aren't going to just decimate bitcoin's value.

I think the cool thing about this idea is that "cats" is just one possibility. It can work just as well with nearly anything that requires proof of ownership or uniqueness. Maybe property or mineral rights, or stock and other securities, etc.

I know I guy who has "Rape Me" tattooed on his chest. It's his favorite Nirvana Song. For the most part, tattoos are a form of art and expression. Phrases such as "death wish" or "kill me" are pretty common, and are absolutely not meant as instructions. The idea of DNR is pretty popular in certain artistic circles. There is an incredible amount of ambiguity in this situation.

Yes. The same applies to when you trade bitcoin for other cryptocurrencies. Although it is technically one transaction, if you want to be safe you should treat it as two separate transactions:

1. Selling the bitcoin for USD (this is taxable)

2. Using the USD to buy whatever it is you want.

It still outperforms every other asset class. http://charts.woobull.com/bitcoin-risk-adjusted-return/

I'm not at all surprised that there are women who code and want to share that with others. I'm thrilled that there is more and more of this type of stuff on Instagram. This is how we reach audiences we normally wouldn't.

I think an important thing your average non-cs grad developer can learn from her story is the importance of networking. Maybe networking isn't the quite the correct term. But she put herself out there starting at 15, wrote and shared what she did. I'm sure she made a lot of contacts, even if only through the internet. She created an image for herself. Without that there is nothing to set you apart from everyone else in your situation. So it's not surprising that she had multiple recruiters reaching out to her during bootcamp. Good for her.

If you are interested in these questions I think it will be worth it to spend some time and do a bit of research, no?

You can look up Peter Singer and Yuval Noah Harari to start with and read what they have written about this. I mention them because they write well and mainly stick to scientifically supported ideas.

I haven't decided where I stand on the issues yet, but with a little research it has become apparent that you can have a very healthy diet without any protein form animals.

I've also discovered that more and more philosophers, ethicists, biologists etc, are starting to make the argument that our factory farming of animals may be the the worst crime in human history.

No, the bitcoin is held in escrow, requiring 2 of the 3 parties to sign off before the funds are released.

This doesn't prevent all fraud but it seems to work pretty well for dark markets.

Even with a rig like that it will take around 10 months to break even. Ethereum will be moving to proof of stake in the future. There is no set date but it could be in approximately 1 year. At that point all these gpu rigs will need to switch to other less profitable cryptocurrencies.

We're reaching the point where it may not be possible to break even before Ethereum switches to proof of stake. Consequently, it's recently become easier and cheaper to buy gpus suited to mining.

Amazon shareholder letters seem to be becoming the new Berkshire shareholder letters [0]. They are friendly, engaging, and most importantly, written by an author who steadfastly holds by principles that haven't changed in decades.

If you haven't read any of the berkshire letters you really should.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Garage doesn't literally mean garage in this context. Another way to put it is: Most fast growing tech companies are started by young people barely into adulthood on a laptop.

I see a lot of late 20's in your list, and a lot of companies that started with one person writing some code on a computer.

In proof of stake a single node decides what the next block added to chain is. This node gets the block reward and any transaction fees. They don't have to do any calculations, they simply get to decide, according to a set of rules, which transactions are in the next block. (Ethereum complicates this a bit by having multiple nodes "bet" which blocks will be accepted, instead of just one node choosing the block)

In order to decide who gets to be this node, people Stake coins. The probability that you are the chosen node is proportional to the number of coins you have staked. If you are chosen, and you do something against the rules, like double spend coins and try and add this to the next block, then you lose your staked coins.

So instead of rewards being proportional to hashing power, they are proportional to staked coins.

This is still being tested, but it's going pretty well.

> All the good bits of blockchain, we already had in git

This is not true at all and shows a common misunderstanding of why the blockchain is useful.

The big breakthrough with blockchains and crypto currencies has very little to do with it it being a ledger with signed hashes. There are two main "good bits" of the blockchain:

- it provides a consensus algorithm to agree on a set of updates to the ledger. Not in git.

- it provides a mechanism for anyone to take part in this consensus algorithm while preventing sybil attacks. Also not in git.

Many of these systems are designed such that if you do have the computational power to attack the integrity of the chain, it is actually more profitable to put that power to use for legitimate mining.

Having 51% of the computational power does not let you just make up transactions on your own or transfer funds to your own wallet. What it does allow you to do is pay a counter-party, receive some product from them, and then go back and create a new chain where you paid yourself, instead of the counter-party.

The ethereum whitepaper has a nice explanation of this. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper

I really really hope they have fixed their supply issues this time around. I live in the 4th largest city in North America and I was unable to get a Pixel within a reasonable amount of time.

Well, it's no closer to centralization than proof of work is. If one, or more than one party working together control >50% of the staked coins you are left with the same result as one party controlling 50% of the hashing power.

One Way is through Proof of Stake, which Ethereum will likely be moving towards in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

There's two parts to this answer.

First, the numbers thrown around are that once you own 15 diversified stocks you have reduced your portfolio risk by 70 percent. That's not bad. At this point your volatility may not be that different than a market index. Of course it's different for every set of stocks, but I think this is a safe-ish guideline. So in that sense you are not missing out a whole lot.

Second, and more importantly, it is very simple to put together 15 stocks with a low volatility, but also with very low returns. This is because the vast majority of the returns of an index come from a very small number of outperforming stocks. It's like the 90-10 rule. 90 percent of an index's performance comes from 10% of the stocks. Those aren't the exact numbers, but when you only pick 15 stocks, it is very likely that you will totally miss out on all outperforming stocks.

Here's an article that talks about this in more depth and uses real numbers: http://www.efficientfrontier.com/ef/900/15st.htm

To be fair, the "train-wreck" the blog comments on was predicted by Kahneman himself back in 2012. In fact, as shown in the article, he was personally urging researchers to question and check if the priming research studies were actually correct.

But you are right. I still see his book cited all the time in popular media. He should be much more vocal about what he got wrong.

Orbits of planets were calculated long before General Relativity. I believe we put a man on the moon using newtonian physics. Many types of medicine is successful without us knowing exactly why.

Just because technology that is built on top of science works doesn't mean that it is 100% correct. It isn't that our theories are outright wrong, but they probably still are incomplete or are only approximations.

The common numbers thrown around are that with 20 stocks your portfolio risk is reduced by 70%. The corresponding ratios follow. So in that sense it's not that bad.

Of course that's just one form of risk. The less attractive aspect of a 20 stock strategy comes from the fact that the majority of the market's returns come from very few stocks - The 80/20 rule applies pretty well here. With only 20 stocks you'll probably miss out on the few winners that contribute all the market's gains. It's very easy to end up with a 20 stock portfolio with low risk/variance and low returns.

Of course if you are Buffet, then your goal is to pick 20 stocks that all outperform.

It was mentioned in the presentation. It has it's own sim card - something they called an "electronic sim" I think.

I was really hoping that the watch would be able to share a cellular plan with the phone. I'm not sure I'm willing to buy another cellular plan just for the the watch.

Gwern's fascinating self experiment on LSD microdosing is always worth a read when this topic is brought up. He found that there was no measurable effect.

https://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing

The headband was actually very cool by the way, and I do believe it worked as advertised. I'm just not convinced it's a great method method to learn meditation.

I have mixed feelings overall with the technological aides available for meditation now. I think they are causing more people than ever to take up the practice which is great.

I bought one of those $300 headbands that "monitored your brain wave" while meditating and had all the apps. A chapter or two into the book I realized how ridiculous it all was. They might have helped establish a habit, but I was never going to progress very far while using them.