969 karma · joined May 3, 2013
Personally, I don't think people change much. I doubt she thinks she did the wrong thing, and would not hesitate to do it again if she went back in time.
Politics vs Ethics. "I think marriage equality is politically correct" vs "I think someone who violated their own country's privacy law and had a hand invading a foreign country which resulted in the deaths of thousands shouldn't own my data".
One is inherently a political issue - state-issue marriage licenses. States can say "yes this marriage is valid." The other is non-political, a bigger question of human-kind and what is always correct.
I'm giving my data to a company to hold. They appoint someone who has no problem spying on my personal data and using it for their own _political_ ends, who has no strong concept of privacy? I dislike their ethical conduct. I'll be taking my data else where, thanks.
I don't inherently disagree with her politics, I disagree with the ethical clash. It's a social contract: I'll give Dropbox my data if you promise to be kind with it, and then they appoint someone who doesn't give a fuck about that concept.
I disagree. You have design-as-a-service with things like 99designs.com, you have great templates with WordPress, you have Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks that get you 90% of the way there (works on different form factors automagically, lots of flexibility), you have style guides for native iOS and Android apps...
You don't "automate" design, you share it based on principles that just about everyone likes. Your design doesn't need to be unique, but your idea and purpose do.
Design seems a lot easier to get 90% of the way there than get code to a point where programmers are less needed.
A list of emails and names feels a lot like trying to cause a panic to get people to dump Coinbase.
Most people in high school aren't thinking super-hard about their careers. They're thinking about school and college. Even then, kids learn about "big" achievements - RNA, species classification, electron shells, WW2, White House scandals, etc. You're aspiring to be someone if you're in an area where you have scholastic resources, not just some programmer. You're not looking so hard at money. If you're in an impoverished area where graduation rates are abysmal and you're not even being taught science, the odds of being a professional athlete or pop star look about the same as going to college - a whole different set of challenges. Let's assume we're talking about high schools with resources to even have computer classes.
Paying more money doesn't make it a sexy profession - there are plenty of "famous" programmers that the HN crowd knows about, but none of their achievements are public. Creating a business like Amazon or Facebook doesn't have the same personal allure to most people like inventing a vaccine for polio does. I bet if you asked a classroom of high schoolers who Jeff Bezos is, 85% of the room would have no idea. There's no _personal glory_ to being a programmer.
With law, you can help people's lives directly - same with being a doctor. There's a social value to those professions that seems obvious and immediate (even though it might be far from the truth). Most people want to do good in the world, and being a programmer has no obvious correlation with that. It doesn't entice students because there's no history written about programmers, no scientific experiments you do in classroom, no math taught that correlates with programming. It's in academic isolation until college, and by then, it's too late.
Coinbase acts as a nice middleman where you can securely link your bank account, and for this convenience Coinbase charges you a higher fee than the exchanges. They procure your coins, handle the financial leg work, and suddenly you have access to bitcoins.
I wouldn't worry about it. I've used both quite a bit. It was a huge pain in the ass to gain access to Mt Gox. Coinbase is just better imo. The support team always comes through for any problems.
If I were doing thousands in transfers, I'd absolutely be using an exchange. They're also a small start up, funding or not.
Their support team has always come through and usually eats the cost difference if it was a bump on their end. I'd just wait it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
It is not backed by any government, it is not legal tender, and it is not state issued.
It has no intrinsic value, you're right about that part.
http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/
You'd need a LOT of regular PCs to match even one simple asic. A butterfly lab's jalapeno does ~5 gigahash/sec. You'd have to infest 500 decent PCs to achieve that, and then wait about a month for about a tenth of a bitcoin.
So to get 1 btc in a month, you'd need to infect 5k PCs without them noticing that "damn, my machine is really pegged" and "golly, this laptop is awfully hot and my battery dies really fast...".
It has happened, but realistically you could just buy a miner and be done with it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-b...
They were able to get ~240 machines, at a time when CPU mining was making them ~$350/day. Decent, but worth all the time to write the software and distribute it? Eh, probably not.
I disagree with all of his points. His carbon footprint/malware/Gresham's law points can all be countered with "incentive to mine leaves as the reward goes down, difficulty goes up, and total remaining coins decreases" which means less people will mine. For hideous markets and tax evasion, yeah, you can do both of those with fiat too. It's not a concept exclusive to bitcoins.
Most CS comes down to logical operations and the scientific method.
Problem -> Research -> Hypothesis -> Experiment -> Analyze -> Results -> Reapeat until problem is solved.
You can program if you can reason well enough.
I think it's a pretty neat idea :)
Mmm... Although if it's legit I'd use it, but only if it's open source.
It wouldn't follow you (although that could be done); it was stationary and one of the big requirements was safety (don't want a robot arm slapping you in the face while coding).
Unfortunately no, the source isn't on github, although I should put it up there.
A large group of kids learn to pass the test and move on. There's very little unstructured exploration or debate, on the whole. I had some excellent teachers and classes in high school, and I had some awful ones, but I damn sure never had freedom to mentally explore interesting topics in-class. High school was a means to an end; just a way to leave home and go to college. Personally I didn't take that approach but I know a lot of people who did.
At that point, a student's approach is "do academia to get to next stage". It doesn't make you care at all about Shakespeare.
And for families that are monetarily burdened by college (read: every family, save a handful), you're not going to go waste $40k/year for something with no prospects.
There are so many moving pieces, and while I understand that, $293M for one piece. Half a billion for a website.
Christ.
Paying sign ups also increased, but not quite as much.
At that point, if the bartender knows some of her backstory or friends or anything - maybe only has a first name - things get much simpler.