cloakandswagger

They're good, but the transcripts really demonstrate just how hopelessly naive RW is. She printed classified docs on her work printer, emailed them from her work email and then confessed to FBI agents without consulting a lawyer.

It doesn't excuse what she did, of course, but it's clear she didn't grasp the gravity of her actions.

I've never heard of that rule, did you just make it up?

My best advice from a fellow 30 year old: Try to find an in-home caretaker that also knows programming.

They're uncommon but invaluable when you find one. My caretaker is a young man currently in school for computer science. He comes by once a day to check on me and gives me brief programming lessons while heating up my soup, helping me up the stairs or doing jigsaw puzzles with me.

I find the cynics much less tolerable than the crypto-evangelists. HN is a haven for them: bitter, jealous people who never miss an opportunity to trash crypto when it's up or mock it when it's down.

This likely isn't the end of Bitcoin just as its numerous other 30%+ corrections didn't stop its rise. Whatever happens, I'll be proud to have participated in such an important new technology while avoiding the leagues of cold and timid souls who jeered from the sidelines.

Coinbase is only supporting Bitcoin Cash because there was a large and very legitimate class action lawsuit headed their way if they didn't.

And is subtly racist.

That's where hardware wallets like Trezor or KeepKey come into play. Any transactions are signed on the device and sent back to the computer; your private keys never leave the device.

The "March for Science" that happened earlier this year had estimated attendance of 1.07 million.

Now go to Google Images and search for "March for Science". Nearly every sign I see is either political in nature, elevating science to a level of religion/infallibility, or casting science as a fashion/meme ("Scientific is the new chic", "Science isn't wrong", "In science we trust").

That was poor wording. It was in reference to the science "cheerleaders" who, from my own observations, are often equally as clueless about science as there anti-science counterparts.

> We have too many people thinking it's okay to discredit scientists and scholars because they don't understand how research works.

And a similar number of people who elevate science to the level of religion, marching in its name and developing a brand of hero worship for scientists when they too know nothing at all about the scientific process. Both are forms of anti-intellectualism that are growing in our polarized political environment.

Gold isn't worth $1.2K per ounce because of its "non-financial use", and has been valued throughout human history for its scarcity. I'm fairly certain kings weren't making crowns from the stuff 500 years ago because of its conductive properties.

I only worked in finance for a brief time, but the operating procedure at my job was to formulate models in Excel, then validate them in a formal QA environment before using them in production.

I really doubt any major finance player allows someone to whip up a spreadsheet, plug some numbers in and start trading off that information. Excel is valuable in the early stages because it's fast, powerful and easy to collaborate in. Trying to eliminate it just because it's Excel is dogma.

And now that it's a proper application they have to worry about authentication, down time, security, documentation, maintenance, and the customization and changes they could once do in an instant now requires filing a feature request, waiting for it to be implemented and deployed...

Even as a software developer I will freely admit that Excel is the right tool for many jobs. We shouldn't be so eager to transform workbooks into formal apps unless there is a really good reason to.

All those lost profits are the price of hubris my friend. I was wary of Bitcoin until it hit $4k, when I put aside my ego and reassessed its value, realized I was wrong and bought in.

The longer you go on trying to call peaks and slandering crypto as "human stupidity", the more cognitive dissonance will form, followed quickly by the rationalizations needed to dispel it.

A straw man for what? Once your net worth reaches a certain level, it would be silly to let it sit in any one asset, whether that's a specific currency or commodity or whatever.

Diversifying with a deflationary asset like Bitcoin is a wise strategy, one that is likely responsible for its $160B market cap.

You're completely wrong about crypto being a zero sum game. Wealth is created in crypto the same way it's created in the stock market, with changing perceptions and opinions on value driving the underlying asset's value.

Dump large amounts of ANY asset and it will crash. It's only crypto that gets accused of having a "fake" market cap though.

In all fairness, this isn't much different from commodity ETFs promising that they have a warehouse of gold or silver somewhere that matches the market cap of the fund. There's no easy way to completely, 100% verify this, so people just trust them.

From 1968 to 2004 the average home value in the US had an average 6.4% YoY growth[1]. An index fund will grow your money much faster than that, all without saddling yourself with debt or exposing you to the risks of the housing market, both as a whole and in your area.

You were lucky to buy your house at the bottom of the 2008 housing crash, it doesn't mean that houses are a good investment today.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/mortages-real-estate/1...

>For most people, buying, owning and then selling their home is the accepted and straightforward path to financial independence.

This commonly held wisdom seems to be a holdover from the pre-2008 days, and I wonder how much longer it will last.

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-us-housing-market-grow...

Unless you're buying property in a coastal city, odds are good that your home value will, at best, stay the same year over year. If you buy a house in flyover country it might actually depreciate.

Add to that the costs of a mortgage, property taxes, repairs, buying/selling fees and home ownership seems like one of the worst possible investments to me.

So what if my thoughts run counter to some UN document? It's interesting that you evoke it in such a religious manner, as if that alone should shut out any discussion.

At the core of this is the old, philosophical question of, "Is it better to let one hundred criminals go free if it means not wrongfully convicting one innocent man?"

Considering that we are talking about bail (meaning 1-2 weeks in jail, not a lifetime in prison) and we have justice systems that are right 80-90% of the time, I lean towards the more pragmatic statistical approach.

The "internationally recognized human right" thing seems like a thought terminating cliche, not sure why that should be the end of the discussion.

Bitcoin's value is backed by its hashing power and all the resources required for that. Arguably a foundation just as valid (and more ethical) than a nation state's guns and bombs.

True, but it's more likely they're guilty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate#cite_note-5

Typical bails are so small already that I can't seem to get riled up over this particular "injustice".

An assault and battery charge will generally get you a $10K bail. Assuming the typical bondsman charges 10%, that's a measly $1,000 to be walking the streets again after assaulting someone.

I can already hear the stampede of justice troopers coming to tell me that $1,000 of emergency funds is too much to ask of your average accused criminal. How many of you would be amenable to say, a $100 charge for an ankle bracelet? Or a work-release program that allows them to attend work while waiting for trial?

Even being generous you'd be lucky to generate a $0.25/day profit mining Monero with a normal desktop. Factor in wide variations in electricity cost, the wear on PC components and fluctuating currency value and this is simply not practical.

This idea is predicated on an intellectually dishonest premise that mining crypto is "free". Naive do-gooders will run this app without realizing the hidden costs.

This is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:

> “If generating money out of thin air by using a computer program seems absurd, that’s because it is,” Grayson Earle, who dreamed up and co-leads the project, told In Justice Today

Does this person actually understand how crypto mining works? (Classy of them to take a swipe at the very technology enabling their project, by the way.) Even with a GTX1080 TI, at $0.12/kWH you'd be lucky to make $0.01 of profit per hour mining Monero. Most people will be mining at a loss, meaning a direct donation would be more efficient.

Secondly, the whole idea of raising a general fund to pay the bail for accused criminals is absurd. How are the recipients selected? What happens when they actually do abscond and the money from the fund is lost?

Bail serves an important purpose in mitigating flight risks. Why don't the authors of this project work on a technology solution that accomplishes that without collateral? Say, a cheap GPS tracking device or smart phone app.

Not sure how much of a secret this really was. One of these convoys got stuck in the Syrian desert on its way to Iraq and was widely reported on.

In all fairness, the comment he was responding to literally equated a nice view to breathable air.

His lack of financial planning was the most astonishing part of the story to me, even more than the naive optimism around starting a restaurant which seems to be a trap lots of people fall into.

Chancing your family's meager nest egg on a long shot gamble when you have a wife, kids and a mortgage is shockingly negligent.