vectorpush

Hindsight is 20/20. You can look back on many innovations and say that they'd be impossible to imagine in the past, but that doesn't have any bearing on the inherent viability of a given idea. I'm not saying that the Zuck/Chan moonshot isn't a worthwhile endeavor, only that examples of past skepticism prove nothing about what is actually possible.

I agree, I'm only pointing out that in terms of genetics, the term hispanic is even less precise because it is commonly used to describe any person that originates from a region where Spanish is predominantly spoken (i.e. covering a much broader range of peoples without regard for genetics).

I agree, though I find people commonly reference various nationalities as if they represented a "race" of peoples. I'd also point out that "Hispanic" is an even less genetically precise term than "Mexican".

I'd hardly call uniformed commentary on the internet "political correctness drowning the exchange of ideas", however, it's ironic that those accusing the author of racism are inadvertently casting support for the racist idea that arbitrarily defined racial labels like "Mexican" have an inherent meaning that supersedes the actual genetics; the article is literally a case study of how our crudely defined racial groupings are insufficient descriptions of underlying genetics.

Most people think about it, it's just that most people process these ideas through the filter of religion.

A PaaS is not serverless either. We embrace the fluidity of language because that is the pragmatic choice, but using counter-intuitive terms with misleading semantics is not pragmatic so we should reject such terms instead of muddling the meaning of well established terms of art.

Everyone can pretty much agree on what constitutes a "server" so I don't see why we should use confusing terms that belie our shared understanding of this term.

And a large part of it does have to do with politics... what's your point? Obviously non-political content is not what I'm addressing here.

Can you elaborate on this reasoning?

I'm not sure the GP would agree with your sentiments, however, NPR pretty clearly slants to the left. All their hosts lean to the left and the composition of their multi-guest panels usually include a balance of viewpoints that lean more to the left.

Still, among popular news sources on both the left and the right I think they are about as fair as they come. Certainly on NPR the hosts are not hostile towards opposing views and you can tell that they make an effort to let dissenting callers and guests be heard even though its often clear that they disagree. I also find that NPR tends to invite guests that are respected within their community instead of guests that are intended to showcase a weak or poorly supported viewpoint.

I'm not trying to bait, I am genuinely curious. I think it's possible to recognize bias in NPR and also recognize bias in Fox News or Breitbart. Maybe they can recommend a news outlet that they view as more impartial, even if not perfect.

Don't you feel a little disingenuous making a flippant deceleration of what is true without substantiating it?

Out of curiosity, what are your trusted news sources?

> I didn't say the hackers would steal it from the bank, but even so that wouldn't matter.

Well that's what I'm talking about because that's what happened with the DAO and what happens quite regularly to blockchain wallets. If the DAO money was pooled into a bank account instead of on the eth blockchain then the money would not have been stolen by a hacker - end of story. The banking system also has additional measures in place to ensure that large unauthorized transactions can be quickly noticed and reversed, even across international boundaries, I know this first hand because I've personally reversed international bank transfers of much less than 100 million USD.

> No, you don't get it. The point is to remove Kickstarter, etc. The projects themselves are still an issue of course, but that's at least the point of the exercise.

I'm afraid you're the one who doesn't get it, my point is that "removing Kickstarter etc" is of dubious benefit because Kickstarter style businesses work just fine 99% of the time without the added risk of a hacker stealing everyone's money with complete impunity.

> it's one of the risks inherent in the classical system. Every third project has a horror story about frozen funds and that's not counting what the individuals themselves go through before they donate.

Having your money temporarily frozen by paypal is not even close to the same thing as having it permanently stolen by hackers.

> Only if you wouldn't donate to WikiLeaks or a related project.

This has nothing to do with my point which is "smart contracts add risk with nearly zero benefit". If you want to send bitcoin to wikileaks, nobody cares, that has nothing to do with pooling your money into a smart contract.

> No, you haven't acknowledged them. You're a thirsty equine by a large body of water but I can't do this last bit for you.

This is becoming absurd. Your list of features is literally two vague sentences.

1. "People could transfer ownership of their support (and the perk it represents)."

2. "Users could have total control of their promised funds until each phase comes due, via an escrow with an agent they trust."

--

#1. The utility is unclear. Why is this useful and why do you think this isn't already possible with a centralized system.

#2. Smart contract is not necessary for escrow.

Smart contracts do not make things better, they just add complication and risk.

>Meat-space is no guarantee of contract-performance. It replaces one set of risks with another.

This is a false equivalency. "Meat-space" contracts aren't executable programs that can unexpectedly, anonymously, and irreversibly drain your bank account of 100 million dollars based on a legal technicality. In "meat-space" the legal system would have very easily halted this insanity instead of forking the entire banking system to evade the consequences of a single agreement. Smart contracts provided no benefit but severe consequences when the risks materialized.

There's risks of theft and mismanagement of funds in crowd-funding companies.

This is another false equivalency, "theft and mismanagement" is always a risk when you're lending people money, that's not the problem; the issue is smart contracts which add the additional risk of random hackers stealing all your money with impunity, a risk not present in "meat-space".

>* Paypal has frozen and seized many individual and project accounts*

Irrelevant.

> credit card companies are forbidden to let you donate to Wikileaks

Irrelevant.

> And hackers could still steal or burn some or all funds. And there's essentially no useful recourse here either. Sometimes the courts get revenge for us, but we're still usually out of pocket.

This is totally wrong. That kind of thing just doesn't happen. If a hacker steals your money the bank has an obligation to make you whole and the courts will absolutely see to it that you are made whole, especially if we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

> And a smart-contract with shares would offer a ton of features "for free". People could transfer ownership of their support (and the perk it represents), for example. And users could have total control of their promised funds until each phase comes due, via an escrow with an agent they trust.

I've already explained why it's not "for free", but you haven't demonstrated "tons of features". Escrows and agents already existed long before smart contracts, so that's not a useful feature.

The bottom line is, smart contracts are an absurdly complex solution looking for a problem, of which some probably exist, but the DAO was not an example of one.

Right... that's precisely my point. The smart contract aspect adds no value to the arrangement, all it does is increase complexity and add the risk of stolen funds.

Indeed. It seems to me that the only concern was building hype for the DAO (in order to solicit further investments) and ethereum in general. I kept seeing claims about how smart contracts would enable autonomous corporations to pay employees and run factories and other clearly impossible things, everyone was so excited about the possibilities that nobody sat down to critically examine what is actually possible.

I don't see this often discussed, but the DAO always seemed pretty shady, even prior to the hack. This was a system meant to function as an autonomous investment platform, but I couldn't find any details that explained exactly how the recipients of the investment funds were meant to be held accountable for the money they received. Ultimately, the eth would have needed to be cashed out into spendable money so that the business could pay for expenses and grow the company, but an eth contract is incapable of forcing the company to put fiat money back into the DAO and it's not a stretch to imagine a situation where the recipients do not agree to use the money in a fashion that is entirely inline with the intent of the investors or even fulfill any of the obligations stipulated as conditions of the investment. This was a scam waiting to happen even if the contract did function as intended by the authors.

Why ugh? They want to support the old chain for ideological reasons, what's the problem with that? Isn't that the whole point of these blockchain systems (i.e. that a centralized authority does not control the system)? I am a pretty big blockchain critic, but schadenfreude aside, I think the eth/etc split is a decent demonstration of the fact that these systems have legitimate resistance to centralized authority, even when ethereum's influential creator is the authority. It's not stable and eth's buggy contracts are not reliable, but as far as blockchain money goes it has lived up to the ideals of the enthusiasts.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.

My favorite sci-fi story, I might even admit it is my favorite of all stories. I've given it as a real book but the experience really benefits from the e-reader format because, at least for me, there were many terms to look up and many sections that I wanted to notate for consideration later. It's a challenging book but a very thoughtful and rewarding read. Highly recommended.

> Uh, yeah. That's the entire point of Bitcoin.

The entire point of bitcoin is to avoid financial institutions? That sounds like a pretty big disadvantage compared to other forms of money that work well with financial institutions.

> That's not what a cold wallet should be. It should be a key.

A distinction without a difference as far as it relates to having all your money stolen.

> Sure, it makes Bitcoin a poor choice for speculators looking to get rich quick

It makes bitcoin a poor choice for the general population since most people fall into the category of "outsiders who don't understand the tool and aren't on board with the philosophy of why Bitcoin is important"

> this is good for Bitcoin ... The answer is, don't do that ... Make cold storage paper wallets and keep your Bitcoin there.

Only in bitcoin land is theft considered good for the ecosystem.

Only in bitcoin land does it make sense to blame laypeople for storing their money with financial institutions.

Only in bitcoin land is it a best practice to secure your money using a password written on a piece of paper.

Only in bitcoin land is it reasonable to expect consumers to do a better job of keeping their money secure than corporations with on staff security experts.

> Miniscule amounts of bitcoin really

Until it isn't. Good luck displacing ads with average wallet balances of "50 cents"

Internet users with browsers full of bitcoin... what could possibly go wrong?

> shilling your product

I'm not sure that a plug/PSA about a government program really counts as "shilling your product", we're talking about a program that was enacted by the congress and signed into law by the president, at a minimum it's totally distinct from plugging a product that you own or profit from.

> You may feel unconfortable with group differences being labeled 'race.' That's your problem, no reality's problem.

You keep trying to paint your opponents as unwilling to concede to your argument because it makes them feel uncomfortable, but pushing those imagined assumptions onto someone else's argument does not help your case.

> It's not just what the eyes see. It's susceptibility to diseases...

You can extrapolate statistical correlations based on any grouping criteria, so listing off correlations based on race does not prove that race is a fundamental description of genetics. I can list off numerous and similar statistical correlations based on finger length ratios but that doesn't prove that the length of your fingers is anything other than an arbitrary grouping; race just happens to be a socially convenient grouping mechanism because its criteria are based off of traits that are readily apparent to the naked eye.

"Differences in groups are real" doesn't mean anything, everyone agrees that differences between groups is a thing, that is the entire purpose of groupings, what you've failed to prove is that racial groupings represent anything other than "what the eyes see". The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what your eyes tell you because "eyes" are not a sufficient tool for genetic analysis, otherwise something like a paternity test would never be necessary because it would be apparent by looking at a father and child that they are directly related. Your eyes provide a crude signal for some genetic traits, not a definitive description. Your reasoning is akin to sorting boxes into groups based on their weight and then suggesting that weight classes are sufficient to describe the content of boxes because years of analysis based on weight has yielded statistical trends about particular weight class groupings.

Right. My point is that immutability doesn't mean anything when the government can simply arrest you and coerce you to reveal your password, it's no different than a gangster stashing cash in a hidden safe.

React supports stateless components, it's literally just a plain JavaScript function.

From the React docs:

> In an ideal world, most of your components would be stateless functions... This is the recommended pattern, when possible.

Immutability didn't stop the U.S government from auctioning off Ross Ulbricht's 44,000 bitcoins.

> The alternative interpretation is that the #DNCLeaks don't seem very interesting.

The e-mails contain details of strategic political planning on the part of the DNC, and although there doesn't seem to be much in the way of nefarious behavior described within, there is frank discussion of political strategy in dry terms that will damage the DNC's (and thus Hillary's) image even though this is how all political organizations operate. Unfortunately for Hillary, there is no RNC e-mail leak, so "this is how all political organizations work" won't be a sufficient defense in the wake of this leak and you can be assured that the conservative media is going to frame the content within these e-mails as cynically as possible. There is also the possibility that there is something legitimately damning yet to be uncovered.