pzxc

That would be prohibitively expensive. The number of overly broad patents that patent trolls own is way too large to be able to challenge them in a cost effective way.

If you want to play offense rather than defense, your money is better spent lobbying to get the law changed so that overly broad patents are more difficult to acquire in the first place.

What you say is not untrue, but it's still bad advice to do it -- a security red herring. First of all, you don't know that 100% of mail servers ignore characters after the +, so you can't safely strip those characters or you might not end up with a usable email address. That goes double for stripping the dots/periods, which gmail ignores but many other mail servers do not.

On top of that, it's just as easy to set up a catchall email address -- an email box that accepts all mail for a domain, literally anything@mydomain.com. So a malicious actor could sidestep this security attempt with minimal effort, but it still inconveniences legitimate users despite being worthless from a security perspective.

The math books teaching the formulas for calculating interest is not the same as personal finance education. As a geek of course I knew all the formulas, I couldn't even take a math class my senior year because I took Calculus as a junior and they ran out of possible math classes for me to take. But although I knew all the formulas, nope, I can't recall any math problems, or any explanations/descriptions, relating to: how credit cards work, minimum payments, grace periods before interest starts, the fact that after paying interest you have to pay it off and wait a full period before the grace period resumes, how balance transfers work... and that's just credit cards, and just the basics, not the more advanced topics like travel points/cashback, signup bonuses, churning, etc which you probably shouldn't be teaching kids anyway.

Nor was I ever taught anything about savings accounts, tax-deferred retirement accounts, stock investing, etc. Although I hear stock investing in particular does come up in a lot of schools because it's "fun". But I never had any teachers let us play the stock market for fun, I totally would have been into that. I was never even shown a tax form in school, let alone had it explained.

I was able to do my own taxes because my dad showed me how. My mom showed me how to balance a checkbook, although that rapidly became useless knowledge when I could start monitoring my account online on a daily basis :) The rest I just kinda figured out, or didn't. My dad told me credit cards were bad but never explained them, ended up getting in debt, have been out of debt for a few years and now use credit cards responsibly -- "pay off in full to get the cashback, never pay interest". Nope nobody ever told me that either.

I believe you are completely incorrect, but fortunately the tide is turning. This article points out that 17 states now require personal finance education in high school, but 20 years ago only one state did (Illinois). http://www.businessinsider.com/high-schools-teaching-persona...

I certainly did not have it myself, and my K-12 years were from 1985-1998 in Indiana (public school). We had an accounting class. We had a government class that taught how a bill becomes a law and all that. We even had a home economics class where we learned how to make pillows and pigs-in-blankets. But no personal finance whatsoever, and certainly no economics until college.

I distinctly remember approximately 15 minutes of relevant personal finance education in all my primary school years, when one math teacher went off-curriculum at the end of a class to show us the magic of compound interest. (It blew my mind)

Everything else, from balancing a checkbook (no that wasn't taught in accounting) to filling out tax forms to how credit cards work was either taught by my parents or self-learned through social context.

You do realize how many poor college students have been taken in by credit card offers that used to be right on campus to sign up gullible freshmen, don't you? Fortunately I think that has fallen out of practice (it got enough publicity that colleges now realize it makes them look bad, I think). But for how many years have millions of 18-year-olds fallen into this kind of trap?

You think any of those people had personal finance classes? I seriously, seriously doubt that. I think the vast majority of Americans (until recently) did not have any such formal education on how to navigate money in the real world.

I don't have any idea the prevalence of this kind of education in other countries, though.

I really really like this creation of yours, and I've already learned a couple things from it.

However, you really really need to be careful about SQL injection. I can see that you tried to lock it down as much as possible, as far as I can tell the account the queries are running under only has SELECT permission (no update/delete/etc). However I was still able to get some data you probably don't want me to have...

This query returns a list of all tables in your database:

SELECT c.relname||'' FROM pg_catalog.pg_class c LEFT JOIN pg_catalog.pg_namespace n ON n.oid = c.relnamespace

And this query returns a list of users and their privileges:

SELECT usename||'', usecreatedb||'', usesuper||'', usecatupd||'' FROM pg_user

I guess your name is Andy based on your HN username, but who is Rusty? :) And that's just what I've been able to get in 5 minutes of trying, let alone a determined attacker.

It's even worse than that. The earth is 93 million miles from the sun (1 AU), so when Mars is on the opposite side of the sun it's at least 180 million miles away, with the sun in the way.

The numbers expressed by GP for how far Earth is from Mars is actually referring to how far Earth's orbit is from Mars' orbit, not the distance of the planets themselves at various positions in their orbits.

> e.g. if a block costs ~70k USD of electricity and you accept a tx for more than 210k USD after 6 conf then if the sender is a purely self interested actor in a perfect market their rational decision would be to spend a bit more than 210k USD in electricity to mine 7 blocks.

The math doesn't work that way.

If you take all the bitcoin mining operations in the whole world, China and every other country, put them together and somehow duplicated all that under your own control, so that you own as much as everyone else put together, you own 50% of the global hashrate... that only gives you a 50% chance that you will mine the next block, let alone 7 in a row.

The chances of mining 7 blocks in a row, even if you own as much as everyone else in the world put together, is less than 1%.

And it would cost billions of dollars worth of ASICs to get that 1% chance.

I can't see this without claiming the nerd cred of being the first to identify it as the password Data uses to lock out the computer in the ST:TNG episode "Brothers".

For extra credit, I will point out (which you may not know EGreg?) that the password he speaks verbally, and the password that appears on the display visually, are NOT the same and differ by a few digits near the end, a small mistake in production.

The lightning network could fix everything, or fail spectacularly. I think an even bigger danger than failing spectacularly is if they take too long to roll it out. Other cryptocurrencies are already gaining some favor because of the situation BTC is in now with the high transaction fees.

It has a good chance of working, in my opinion (the lightning network), if they don't dawdle too long. But the clock is ticking.

From a sales point of view, Nvidia actually doesn't care that much about researchers, they make up a small percentage of sales. They care about gamers (VR has been a big help), and especially cryptocurrency mining where customers will buy multiple video cards at a time (kaching). There are even blockchains now that are resistant to ASIC mining, where GPU mining is the best again. (BTG for example)

I suspect that from Nvidia's viewpoint, cloud providers are a middleman and make GPU usage more efficient, which threatens sales. Why should I, ask a cryptocurrency miner, buy 4 new video cards when I can rent unused time that has already been paid for by someone else at the data center? (if the cost is cheaper, which sometimes it is)

Though I question how they intend to enforce this new provision of theirs given that GPU cloud usage is already widespread.

This article is blog spam. It was written by someone with only a rudimentary understanding of the topic, which is pretty evident if you read it.

The entire purpose of this article being written was to get a good looking (SEO-wise) back link to the domain "businessmacroeconomics.com". If you look at all the links in the article, they are almost all to major news media publications (safe links to make the page look good). Then the real link appears at the end of the second-to-last section (the perfect spot for SEO). It's the only link not to a major news outlet, and if you look at that domain/website, it's some guy selling a book no one's ever heard of.

This article was 100% paid, for SEO purposes and written by someone who has no idea what they're talking about. They just ramble for 500-1000 words to get good (human-sounding) content so that google will trust it's a good backlink to the author's website and put him at a higher rank in the search results.

Either a voting ring got this post to the front page of HN, or 29 HN readers (at the time of this post) were swindled into thinking there was any substance here at all.

I think maybe it was downvoted because it misses the point, just as the article misses the point. Behavior change would be nice but the real benefit here is accountability. So what if there were 1.6% (made up number) rate of reported bad behaviors, and now the rate is still 1.6% -- the point is that in those 1.6% of cases, there is now the best kind of evidence to ensure that the facts are represented accurately when these cases are adjudicated. That accurate portrayal of facts will actually protect both cops and citizens.

True, enforcing stored-procedures-only is an antiquated methodology that is frowned upon these days. But not because it doesn't work -- rather because it's a bad idea to put your business logic in the database itself, which is what usually happens.

The more modern equivalent, is to just have an "app server" that sits in between the web (DMZ) and db tiers. The app server can basically be just another web server that provides an API for the actual web server to use. So from the web server's point of view, it still has restricted access, but you get to write all the rules in your normal backend architecture/language rather than building them with stored procedures and triggers and all that.

Besides, the "rarely a use case" isn't the same as "never", and if you can envision any scenario where it would be worthwhile to go to extraordinary means to ensure security, I think "we have all the data needed to commit identity theft on half of all Americans" counts. If stored procedures is a convenient way for you to limit the impact of a breach from your web server/DMZ, then do it if you have data that important. Do 20 other things that are inconvenient too if it gives you defense in depth.

TFA stands for The Featured Article and always has, though I can understand your misapprehension because of RTFM which does use F as you suggest.

Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, in your head say "left, middle, middle, right." Repeat until natural, then change it to be "this one, this one, this one, this one." Repeat until natural, then repeat some more until you can do it by the pattern alone without verbalizing anything internally.

Or don't think of it as counting, just think of it as a drumbeat. Bah-bah-bah-BAH. Bah-bah-bah-BAH. Make sure to go slow enough that it's actually four seconds and not two (whole beats, not half-beats). But the end goal is to not have to think about it at all. It may require thousands of repetitions.

It was arbitrary for George Washington to decline to run for a third term as President, feeling that two terms ought to be enough for anybody. And it took over a century for that wisdom to be codified into the 22nd Amendment.

Because TimeWarner and Cox are just as bad on customer service, and AT&T/Verizon are losing marketshare fast and may become obsolete. (DSL being behind the curve on bandwidth and fiber not available in 99% of areas)

At this point I'm starting to think the best shot we've got is if Tesla swoops in and saves the day with very-low-earth-orbit satellite internet service. Even that's not a guarantee because who knows how they'd operate as an ISP, maybe no better than what we've already got. Add onto that the fact that attempts at net neutrality are being rolled back and we may face the prospect of internet slow lanes, and the picture may be getting very bleak.

It's not just hard to do, it's impossible. For a cloud provider anyway. Given that your software has to be capable of executing Bitcoin transactions itself, and the VM manager sits at a higher level and controls allocation and access to your VM's memory (to isolate it from other VMs), you are at the very least trusting that (1) when your cloud provider says they are using VMware or whatever standard software they aren't lying, and (2) that VMware itself is securely designed to limit its own access (and access of its own operators) to the underlying VMs.

If you don't want to trust your hosting provider with anything, you have to own the hardware.

Try selling something on Craigslist without requiring cash-up-front as payment and tell me how safe and secure it is. Fake money orders and cashier's checks are a lot easier to manufacture than fake cash.

I'm going through this right now as well. I ran my own business for 7 years, making content websites monetized through google adsense, building games, and freelancing, among other things. The primary source of revenue was adsense, and it paid the bills enough for me not to need a "real job" for years. 18 months ago, the adsense revenue started to dry up, and in an effort to make some additional income, I started looking for a normal job again.

I ended up reluctantly taking a job working for the State of California, mostly because the schedule was flexible and it was a 5 minute commute. In the last 18 months I've gotten two promotions, including one four months after I started which is unheard of in state service (and which my bosses had to fight HR to get). I spearheaded the acquisition and implemented of a version control system, which no one hear had ever used (they were just FTPing files all the time, risking overwriting of others' work etc), and got buy-in from all the developers who now say they couldn't imagine working without it. I also now wear a variety of hats besides programming including sysadmin work, dba work, architecture design, etc. My bosses rely on me more and more everyday just for my opinions and advice, let alone the work I do.

Yet now, when I send out my resume, it's almost always crickets. A year and a half ago, when the first item on my work experience list was "failed entrepreneurship", the response rate to my resume was about 80% (not even talking about interviews, just getting a response at all). Now it's more like 20%, all because the first item in my work experience section is my current job working in public service.

I admit, many of my coworkers probably deserve the reputation that public sector work has. A significant number of them are clock-watchers that the bosses don't even try to assign anything important to, because they know they don't give a shit and can't easily be fired (union), they are just filling a chair waiting for their public pension to accumulate over 20-30 years. Nevertheless, I also list on my resume all of the above, including the pioneering (for us) work I've accomplished here implementing version control etc. I never intended to stay here more than a couple of years, but I also never intended for this job to have such a negative impact on my job prospects.

I think I am probably going to revise my resume to leave this job off completely, and just say I've been working for myself for 9 years instead of 7. I predict sadly that this will return the response rate back to what it was before I had this job.

The title should be changed. Elon Musk was not interviewed. A sci-fi author was interviewed about his opinions of Elon Musk re: Mars. Title is very misleading.

Reciprocated playful office banter is fine. It's childish but it's okay to be childish with someone who wants to be childish also. Unreciprocated playful office banter should not exist.

Teasing friends is fine and good, all fun and games, but I think it builds deeper and more meaningful relationships to build people up rather than tear them down (even in jest). I don't make friends with people who tease routinely (all in good fun), but that's my choice. I tolerate it from family, because, family.

By the way, most school bullying starts as unreciprocated teasing. Yeah, teasing is childish and I too think friendships are better without it. Maybe it means I take myself too seriously, but I prefer to compensate for others' weaknesses (especially colleagues and spouse) rather than point it out to have a good laugh about it.

And if you're a kid, you're not going to be the one who complains about it. You don't know words like introverted or strategies like "haha that's funny, let's change the subject", you're just going to grin and bear it. And then the teaser (in total innocence, not maliciously) is going to be like, "well he always grins when I do that"...

Security Essentials is bundled starting with Windows 8, but it's been renamed to "Windows Defender". Same thing though.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I have a question. If liquidation preferences have such little value, why is it so common?

Is it because founders for the most part accept whatever the VCs dictate, even things that benefit the VCs only slightly but still get thrown in because the VCs pretty much get their way no matter what?

I am not the most advanced SQL developer by any means. Why is UPSERT needed/advantageous when you can do this?

  update [table] set ...; if @@ROWCOUNT = 0 insert into [table] ...

Okay, but the vast majority of roads do not have 4+ lanes in one direction, and the vast majority of roads do not have a sign indicating a different lane designation.

I'm not sure how that disadvantages you. You get paid for the time you work. Seems fair to me. So you have to stay a little extra and be bored if there's not enough work rather than being able to go home early. Boo hoo. For every one of you, there are ten people in the U.S. that get asked to work 45, 50, 60 hours a week for the same salary they were getting for 40 hours. Now that is to the advantage of the employer. You sometimes don't have enough work to fill 8 hours and have to sit there and be bored? Cry me a river.

I much prefer to (and currently do) work salary. I like being able to go home early when I finish my workload ahead of schedule, just like you. And I'm fortunate enough to have an employer that doesn't demand more than 40 hours even if the workload is high. But when it comes to employers taking advantage of and exploiting their employees, a salary structure can be far more exploitative than hourly wages.

Now, for hourly workers, reducing them to part-time and hiring twice as many people as you needed if they were full-time, so you can avoid having to provide the benefits that are required for full-time workers (health insurance, etc) -- THAT is the way to expoit hourly workers. Not making them sit at a desk twiddling their thumbs in order to get an extra hour of pay, that's not exploitation at all. I'd be thanking my employer for letting me do that if I were you.

California is the worst about this and if that's where you live may be giving you a false impression of the US as a whole. It's probably because in California, 18-wheelers are required to stick to the right lane and have a lower speed limit (55 instead of 65). That's not true in most other states.

I, too, have noticed that people here tend to just pick a lane (usually the left one to avoid trucks) and stick to it no matter the speed they're going. However, my experience in the other two states I've lived in (Florida, Indiana) and the other 35+ states I've visited, is that most people in the US know that the left lane is for passing and are somewhat more considerate about this.

Drivers have trouble merging in all 50 states, though. Half the people merge as soon as possible, thinking it's more polite to merge sooner rather than later (or just not wanting to fight for an opening or get angry looks from people who believe merging early is better), and half the people merge as late as possible, attempting to do the zipper merge which is actually the most efficient means of merging and what everyone should do.

If a topic gets 40 comments before it gets 40 votes, it gets auto-penalized even with no flags. (too controversial)

There are also other mechanisms, such as vote-ring-detection, that can kill a topic as well.

(That is my current understanding anyway, I am not HN staff, and I am not saying whether I agree/disagree with any of these mechanisms, just stating them to help alleviate your confusion about why some topics may be doing very well and then suddenly die -- it's not always because of flagging)

There are a few grammatical errors in these documents as well that do not inspire confidence.

Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent.

Considering the laws of the 50 states are sometimes very different, and these documents cover a wide range of legal topics, I think you'd have to be an idiot to use these documents without running them by a lawyer in your state, because they might not have the consequences you think they have.

Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.

www.uslegalforms.com has been around for a long time now, and they at least have state-specific documents. Use them if you're going to use anything without consulting a lawyer. But really, pay a lawyer, it's worth it.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.