the_local_host

But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more".

That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.

Indeed. I'm struck by the contrast between this complaint from the author...

> It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more

and this other complaint...

> The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer.

The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion, and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.

People wouldn't stop spending money on weapons in a Bitcoin world. If the global economy is dominated by a small number of people who got in on Bitcoin early, against a vast majority who are born with no Bitcoin and no way to get it except from those who already have it, strife can be expected.

To the extent that inequality, competition, and unfairness create tension, that tension doesn't go away just because there's a different set of people at the top.

I was a late convert to "full stack" myself. Just go directly to Typescript and run a linter on the code before you execute it.

It seems like more than a programmer should have to do, but eventually you'll forget about the extra tools and have decent pseudo-compile-time error detection.

> As journalists, we all view this as a horrifying assault on the public’s right to know, and on our own status as brave defenders of the public good. And that is all true, for what it’s worth.

The author really should have left this perspective out of the essay; it's vain and distracts from the valid larger point.

If powerful people can "no comment" the Washington Post and other significant outlets because the media can no longer extract a penalty for doing so, then they only really have to worry about crossing each other. The public interest is likely to suffer as this trend continues.

(edited for clarity)

"To lie" is an overloaded term - it can mean "to rest in place" or "to tell an untruth".

I think the author intended the "rest in place" version; as such it should have been "has lain hidden".

EDIT: Yep reply post is right "lain hidden", I was making that correction here at the same time.

> I hope big tech buries the NYT.

I don't. I do wish Cade Metz hadn't made a mess of this story though, because it's a story worth pursuing. As the impact of Silicon Valley's policies on society continues to grow, it would be good to understand where decision-makers are getting their ideas.

It's not a terrible question, and even if the reference to God is via Erdős, there's still a reference. I think it's evident in the sciences as well, e.g. "God does not play dice with the universe."

1) Why would it be prohibitively expensive? In the face of severe enough penalties, most people would simply report their transactions as required, and report who they transacted with.

The number of transactions that needed to be investigated would be a small percentage of the total, and possibly traceable through means other than cracking keys.

2) Regardless of whatever zCash is, my point is that Bitcoin's immutable and complete ledger lends itself to complete surveillance. The math may be uncrackable, but the users are not, and privacy would go out the window if they're forced to transact with registered IDs.

> The original idea of Bitcoin was to have a currency that wasn’t in government control

I've never understood this. With an immutable ledger of all transactions, governments simply have to make it illegal to transact anonymously (or pseudonymously), watch the blockchain, and investigate any un-attributed transactions.

It would actually enhance governments' surveillance capabilities against anyone not willing to run the risk of trying to obscure their identity, which I expect would be most people.

If you can intimidate the participants, the inescapable math of the whole thing becomes a tool that can be used against those participants. You don't need to control a currency if you can control anyone who holds it.

I think you're underestimating the usefulness of scapegoats. If biased results exist, a lot of people look more effective. If such a bias is discovered, only a subset of those people will be blamed.

One more reason to bootstrap instead of taking on investors.

> Your observation about young people with four-figure net worths thinking it’s rational to gamble it all on options is pretty much this week’s equivalent of those living paycheck-to-paycheck “investing” in the lottery.

But when you "invest" in the lottery, you don't get to help blow up a hedge fund. I think many of the retail participants in the GME phenomenon find some entertainment value in what they're doing.

That said, I do think Robinhood makes it too easy for people to put on positions that they simply don't understand. The fiasco with "1R0NYMAN" comes to mind.

> [T]here's no real reason why ALL companies need to have their stocks compatible

I think it would be way harder to trade a basket of stocks (e.g. pairs trading, going long one and short the other) if you had to worry about mismatched settlement dates across the different stocks; it would be like trading spot against a one-day forward.

> It boggles the mind people think hedge funds can't profit off a mad rush like this...

How exactly would they do it? Shorting it again would involve calling the top for a stock whose price recently has been unpredictable, but very high.

Writing options seems nuts for something this volatile. I guess they could "buy volatility" with a straddle but again what would the numbers have to be on this where they turn a profit? It's not like the rest of the market is underestimating the volatility, it's evident to everyone.

BlackRock had 13% of GameStop. That's more consistent with taking a real stake than just happening to own it along with a piece of everything else.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackrock-investment-game...

Moreover making a rational decision isn't necessarily the same thing as making a moral decision.

Anyone who removes the "you break it, you bought it" scenario by denying you access to production is actually doing you a huge favor.

It'll be a win/win situation if baseless allegations of fraud are punished, and every detail of how voting machines work, including source code, are made public.

The author missed a genuine opportunity to wrap it up with "Wrote The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class? Definitely, definitely Michael Scott."

No one will do it after support in the tools is killed off either. People will use the last versions of the tools from wherever they can get them, and workarounds for any issues that are discovered will become part of the folklore surrounding the code.

I kept feeling like I was reading the same thing over and over and just not finding out what exactly Amazon is doing now that it won't be able to do in the future. Skimming the links to the blog post and FAQ didn't help much.

Whatever it is it's pretty deep in the weeds. It looks like the intent is for most users to be unaffected; non-AWS cloud providers to be unaffected; even AWS's Elastic Cloud to be unaffected; but AWS has to stop doing something with specific regard to Elastic Search and I can't figure out what it is.

This seems to good to be true. From https://money-legos.studydefi.com/#/dydx :

    Borrow x amount of tokens. (Withdraw)
    Call a function (i.e. Logic to handle flashloaned funds). (Call)
    Deposit back x (+2 wei) amount of tokens. (Deposit)

It looks like unlimited leverage for flat fee.

I don't think it makes sense to handwave the cost of an option to borrow to 0 in a scenario where arbitrage is assumed to still exist. If anything is going to become perfectly efficient first it's the arbitrage ("free money!").

Wouldn't a lender charge money for what is essentially an option to borrow contingent on the arbitrage transaction going through?

What's striking to me is that prehistoric art in parts of the world that were unlikely to be in communication with each other tend to hit on common themes, e.g. the frequent depiction of animals (as opposed to depicting humans, which is apparently fairly rare). Where does the impetus come from?

Brostep may be Dubstep Disneyland, but I'm not sure if being unconcerned with filing music in the right subcategory counts as "lagging".

I'm not sure I'd know about this if the statement wasn't notable for its coarse language. Moreover it's not just a case of criticizing someone who didn't know about the issue, it's criticizing people who are telling people to do something without understanding the risks.

> "I get upset when people simply tell me keep on trying. When someone is trying to do something, I think the best thing to do is to help lower the bar for them by staying at their side"

This is brilliant.

I think it's more likely that there were one or more manual steps in generating the graph, and someone just kept going with 2020 instead of typing 2021. The author should explain what went wrong there if this reaches their attention.