cloakandswagger

The HN frontpage just got shotgun blasted with this "story" plus one about a Russian billionaire who owns Facebook and Twitter stock.

I counted at least 6 topics posted within minutes of each other with the exact same variation of title. Just flag and ignore.

Is there something inherently wrong with looking out for your own best interests? Or in this case, the best interests of your country?

The biggest problem is the one the author mentioned at the end of the article: If Tesla takes too long, they might be outpaced by more mature competitors. That demand will move elsewhere or dissipate if it isn't capitalized on.

Despite all the emotion and opinions about Catalonia, what you said is absurdly stupid.

These are protesters being whacked with bats and shot by rubber bullets, with no reported deaths yet. Saddam killed 5000 people with mustard gas, and the current day Iraqi government employs summary executions against accused ISIS members. They are universes apart.

I'm sure there are individual Spanish nationalists that think the same about Catalonia. Central governments, on the other hand, generally behave rationally (read: in their own interests) instead of emotionally.

Catalonia is one of the highest earning areas of Spain, constituting about 20% of the nation's GDP. Their secession would be about as well received as New York or California's from the US.

This is why I never got the hype around Westworld. It's a fun concept, but the entire plot of season 1 could have been accomplished in two, maybe three episodes.

Mandatory voting, what an absurd idea.

If you can't get people to voluntarily participate in democracy then you have a failed implementation of it.

Furthermore, the ability to not vote is a powerful and necessary option, as it's hard for those in power to imply that they have a mandate if <10% of the population actually participated in it.

I don't know what mandatory voting accomplishes except giving those in power the ability to say, "Tut tut! No complaining! You got your vote, after all."

I would expect that some of the predicted effects of a "nuclear winter" would start to appear after a series of forest fires--albeit smaller in scope and intensity--but AFAIK this is not the case. What gives?

I appreciate the way the book teaches the realities of nuclear war. Some interesting things I picked up from the myth/fact section:

-Food & water isn't contaminated unless fallout particles enter into it. Thus any food/water stored in airtight containers is safe to consume.

-The US & Russia likely don't have enough nuclear firepower to kill every human being on earth (a commonly cited "fact"). This is based off of misleading calculations.

-Within a couple of weeks, fallout radiation would be reduced to the point that most people could leave their shelters.

-A bomb said to be 1,000x more powerful than the one used on Hiroshima is not 1,000x more deadly or destructive (16x more deadly is apparently more accurate)

-"Nuclear winter" is a discredited myth propagated by de-nuclearization supporters.

-Airburst nuclear weapons produce basically 0 fallout. The bomb has to burst on the surface to pick up particles of earth and debris to create fallout.

Nuclear war doesn't seem so bad now! :D

Of course, but no one that I know of implied that it did. Any grown adult should know that if the price of gold/oz is stated as $X, or the market cap of the stock market is stated as $Y, that it doesn't mean if all of it was sold tomorrow it would generate X or Y amount of dollars.

The $8B figure for BCH is using the exact same semantics that every other non-cash asset in the entire world uses. But because it's crypto we get pedantry like this.

So what you're saying is that the value of any asset that is not USD (stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate) is completely unknown, and the real "value" would be what that asset would sell for if every portion of it was instantly liquidated tomorrow?

That's not how economics work.

edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.

>since no one could supply that money if anyone asked for it

What does this mean? BCH can be sold for USD, and there are people willing to buy BCH. Therefore BCH created $8B in new value.

It's chicken or egg: index funds are successful because people invest in index funds, therefore index funds are...

There will be an inflection point where stocks in indexes are so overvalued that enough active investors (and passive defectors) cause a rebalancing. If they're overvalued enough, and enough of the general market participates in them, index funds could easily crash.

Apps like Robinhood are making active investing much more feasible for your average Main Street person. I certainly am not counting on the continued blind investment in index funds.

Maybe it just depends on the application. I've been doing frontend development with React and vanilla Javascript for the past 2.5 years, and I can't recall a single user-facing bug caused by improper dynamic typing.

Strict typing isn't always desirable, depending on the application of the language. With it you give up a certain level of developer productivity; appropriate if you're using Javascript for backend logic with Node, not so much if you're building simple views with React.

If that's the case then I'd suggest every software developer on this forum immediately switch careers, this one is doomed.

What impetus do the banks have to change credit rating providers, especially when it would come at massive cost to themselves and probably take months if not years?

The only one I can think of would be consumers refusing to open bank accounts or credit cards with them because they run Equifax checks, which seems improbable.

The statement released by Apache said that, if the attack did use the REST plugin vulnerability in Struts, then it would have been a zero-day at the time of use.

There's an important difference: consumers choose to fly with UA just like they choose to walk into Chipotle and buy a burrito.

The vast majority of EFX's profits come from services that consumers (effectively) don't choose to participate in.

I'm eagerly awaiting the technical details of the attack. If it turns out that their web server has 100% unfettered access to the database then I'll gladly pick up a pitchfork as well.

I'm wondering if Equifax is using Struts-provided REST for its entire architecture. If that's the case, gaining access to the web server was only the first step. From there the attacker could perform RCE on sensitive services.

Common misconception. They actually do need your approval, it's just that that approval is buried in the mountains of legalese you sign whenever you sign up for a bank account, credit card or loan.

Fair enough. I more meant that after an attacker has achieved RCE, no amount of encryption or other practices can protect sensitive info in your database.

Target lost tens of millions of credit card numbers and paid just over $18 million to settle every lawsuit against them.

People seem to conflate the way they think things should be with the way things actually are.

Equifax has an $18B market cap. Can you name one instance of a government imposed fine for improperly stored PII exceeding even $100M?

Furthermore, do you have evidence that the PII was improperly stored, or that Equifax's security practices were lacking in any way? The vulnerability provided full RCE, and I know of no info-sec magic that inoculates you against that.

Now would be a great time to go long EFX in my opinion.

The stock has been slammed while Equifax is being flogged in the court of public opinion, but I doubt this leak will have any lasting financial impact.

Look at the result of the Target and Home Depot breaches: whether you like it or not, the companies are still technically the victims here and no court is going to bankrupt them for data breaches that are more and more becoming the norm.

There are also pictures of Bigfoot and the "moon landing", doesn't mean they exist.

Are you saying that North Korea is an example of what happens when individualism runs amok?

On the contrary, North Korea seems like a collectivist's paradise. Total state control with omnipresent regulation. I wonder what the punishment for trading cryptocurrencies looks like there.

Citation needed

Reductio ad absurdum seems to be the statists' argument of choice.

While all but the most radical libertarians will concede that some level of regulation is required, nearly every collectivist I talk to implies that permitting any level of individual human agency would turn the world into a Mad Max hellscape.