HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Ambele

26 karma · joined June 18, 2019

submissionscomments
Ambele··on California’s Criminal Cops
Singapore.

Amazon's had an episode in their tv series: The Giant Beast that is the Global Economy where they covered corruption throughout the world. It showed who's living with it and who's stamping it out better.

Direct link to the episode: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07NVPSSK7/ref=stream...

Ambele··on I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score
If you don't have a credit score or a credit score of 0 due to a thin file, you can get one by using a cash-secured loan of $500. The loan amount doesn't really matter so you can pick the smallest loan they offer. Then you're basically buying yourself a credit score for $50 or less. Don't use online lenders because the one I used (selflender.com, name & shame) kept my $500 principal despite claiming over and over that they sent a check that never arrives. If you do this, use a CU or bank branch instead so that after you pay it off, you can stare them in their money-loving bankster eyes to politely demand your $500 back.
Ambele··on I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score
Could Sift be the next Equifax?
Ambele··on Robinhood Traders Discovered a Glitch That Gave Them ‘Infinite Leverage’
If someone loses 50m, it could become a problem for everyone with a margin account or everyone with a cash account and uninvested cash in their Robinhood account due to Rehypothecation Risks.

But first it would be a problem for the owners of Robinhood private stock as their shares are severely diluted for huge equity infusions.

Ambele··on Robinhood Traders Discovered a Glitch That Gave Them ‘Infinite Leverage’
It's funny because this is how money is created in the American Economy -- through recursive loans like this from banks. Since most money is digital now, nearly every loan becomes another person's bank balance and every bank balance is subject to be lent out. With a federal reserve requirement of 10%, the theoretical max leverage ends up being 10x so $100,000 of bank-created money for every $10,000 entering the banking system. This assumes the system works as intended and a bankster hasn't yet found a Robinhood-like glitch in the financial system to create unlimited money.
Ambele··on Life Is a Ponzi Scheme (2009)
^This. I weight my allocations based off market cap so 91% of my investments would go into index funds and no more than 9% overall goes into Cryptocurrency -- 6.5% of which goes into Bitcoin and 2.5% might go into non-Bitcoin cryptos.

I think the whole crypto market is pretty speculative. Either the ultimate Bitcoin replacement will be a nice fork or airdrop off of Bitcoin or the ultimate Bitcoin replacement will be something completely separate and will gradually render Bitcoin worthless.

Cash is also a pretty underrated asset class too.

Ambele··on After Spike in Deaths, New York to Get 250 Miles of Protected Bike Lanes
Maybe for a couple of days a month, some cops may be rotated onto a police bicycle?
Ambele··on Think young people are hostile to capitalism now? Wait for the next recession
I agree. Retirees and the elderly vote much more than the youth. Unless that changes, policy will continue to be more favorable towards retirees and the elderly.
Ambele··on Think young people are hostile to capitalism now? Wait for the next recession
It typically takes a reduction in interest rates of 4% to pull the economy out of a recession. Interest rates are at 2% right now so if we enter a recession, it'll be a doozy. Europe has been testing out negative interest rates and are finding out that negative interest rates are not stimulating the economy. The fed is expected to try out quantitative easing mostly by buying various dated treasuries from the open market and a lesser amount of the toxic debt banks are holding like CDOs or mortgage backed securities just like they did in 2008/2009. This all assumes a recession will happen which is debatable. If a recession was guaranteed, the stock market, which functions as a leading indicator, would already be down and it's not -- it's relatively flat.
Ambele··on Xi Jinping's daughter has returned to US to resume studies at Harvard
China respects certain aspects of the U.S. That's why they steal our patents and knock-off our products. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The best nations copy the best aspects and ideas from other nations.
Ambele··on Dealing with China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost
I wish I could recolor the usernames of the smartest people on HN like you, so I'd be able to quickly discern in future articles whether a bright and smart person like you is commenting.
Ambele··on Dealing with China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost
Xi and China's party enjoy the power that comes with control and unity. Heck China doesn't like the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the South China Sea being 4 distinct areas. Other nations might be fearing China now that it has grown rapidly from 1T GDP to 13T GDP. Other nations don't really have an influence on whether China will split into smaller regions quite like how China has an influence on whether international corporate lobbiests will try to lobby (successfully or unsuccessfuly) for Trump's impeachment.
Ambele··on Dealing with China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost
I think the issue is that China wants to be #1 while America doesn't want to be #2. No one wants to be #2.
Ambele··on How Much Money Do Parking Lots Make?
The timetables could be deemphasized if you could see the public transportation moving live on a map. The homeless housing aspect could be reduced if a phone or app was required for the upscale public transport.
Ambele··on I gave control of my Robinhood account to an AI for a week
"Note that I am trading about $1000. Losing it all will not kill me, though it would be mildly annoying since that’s my current sum total of retirement funds."

There are some things this author should be optimizing for in life and investment returns are certainly not yet one of them. Hopefully this article allows the author to get an AI/ML career so he can build more equity!

Three things I've learned in investing and finance is that 1) knowing one's age versus their equity value gives you a pretty good idea of their investment skill, 2) bad ideas are louder and more seductive than good ideas, and 3) paid advice is usually the only consistently good source of advice.

Ambele··on Robinhood: Cash Management
This seems like a retaliation after Schwab then Ameritrade then ETrade reduced their commission fees. The Robinhood team never ceases to amaze me.
Ambele··on Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong
China also sometimes tries to hold businesses hostage that try to leave.

https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/china-d...

Ambele··on United Kingdom Budget Visualization
I was surprised that £69 billion (9% of the budget) goes to Wales, Scottland, and Northern Ireland. That was until I found out that all three are part of the UK and they contribute to the tax revenue.

Overall the budget is nicely balanced. I wish the US ran a deficit as small as the UK's.

Ambele··on Yahoo Customer Data Security Breach Litigation Settlement
I bet with the right commands (ex:SQL Injection Commands), you could make this settlement fund print out it's records. Look at how unnecessarily verbose and pretty the error message output is: https://yahoodatabreachsettlement.com/x

I haven't tried it but it looks ripe for attack. A security noob could try using SQLMap and Nikto. If that were to happen though, would there be a class action lawsuit against the class action settlement team?

Ambele··on Ad.watch – Breaking open Facebook's machine of political persuasion
This is a fantastic website and I'm excited to see how it will look in 2020! It seems to be missing some political actors though which makes it appear like some democratic candidates aren't spending money on ads which isn't the case. Some candidates are being tracked; others aren't.
Ambele··on Will America's debt doom us?
If you believe that inflating the debt away is a viable strategy then I have a 100 Trillion Zimbabwe dollar note to sell you for 40 cents. The Zimbabwe government tried that and look at what happened to their dollar! Also, I have a loaf of bread to sell you for $1,000.

Nowadays, America's largest export isn't soybeans or corn, it's the American Dollar. See this link for more info on the Petrodollar: https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-petrodollar-3306358

Ambele··on Will America's debt doom us?
Yes this will doom us if it is not taken care of but I expect the American people will get smart and elect congressional leaders that will care of the growing national debt before we default.

9.8% of all of our government's revenues (tax dollars) are wasted on paying interest on the $22 trillion dollars of national debt(1)(2).

1) https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55342

2) https://www.usdebtclock.org/

Ambele··on What happens to tech workers when their skills become obsolete?
I'll be the first in this thread to start listing off technologies other than Flash. We're at the point now where if you include JQuery on your resume, recruiters are less likely to hire you. Ruby used to be trendy for startups, Python 2.7 used to be popular. Angular 1.x beat off BackboneJS, MeteorJS, and EmberJS but even Angular was completely rewritten in Angular 2.x and superseded with React.
Ambele··on SoftBank is asking for the WeWork IPO to be put on hold
> WeWork could cut the valuation for its IPO to under $20 billion and may even postpone the offering, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing unnamed sources. The company had been valued at $47 billion in its last fundraising round.

> According to the report, SoftBank is concerned that if WeWork goes public at a valuation much lower than its private-market valuation, it might hurt the firm's ability to raise its second Vision Fund, hence its choice to pressure the company into dropping its IPO plans.

Ambele··on China’s middle-class growing increasingly anxious as prices rise and yuan drops
That article was taking over 15 seconds to load and made the fan on my computer sound like an airplane taking off. Hard pass.
Ambele··on How Safari and iMessage Have Made iPhones Less Secure
> Apple requires that all iOS web browsers—Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or any other—be built on the same WebKit engine that Safari uses. "Basically it’s just like running Safari with a different user interface,"

> As a result, Apple has insisted that only its own WebKit engine be allowed to handle that unsigned code. "They trust their own stuff more," Henze says. "And if they make an exception for Chrome, they have to make an exception for everyone."

> iMessage has innate privileges in iOS that other messaging apps are denied. In fact, non-Apple apps are cordoned off from the rest of the operating system by rigorous sandboxes.

Ambele··on 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
>Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous

But it can be used anonymously and probably in some industries is still used anonymously. A counterparty that is willing to swap anonymously acquired and sent altcoins for Bitcoin can provide a privacy conscious individual with anonymous Bitcoins.

If using proxy-chains, Tor, or a real person in another country to broadcast your trade isn't your cup-of-tea because you don't trust them, there is still another less practical way. If you secretly give someone your Bitcoin private key (for example: written on a small piece of paper), you can give or trade those Bitcoins to someone without the network knowing about the transaction.

>so most likely it is the same entity, or a transaction partner.

Conceivably, the transaction could be broadcasted from an important individual's hacked phone or computer without a trace. This is where being innocent until proven guilty becomes important.

Ambele··on 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
Bitcoin can be anonymous though in certain use-cases. You can create a new bitcoin public/private key pair on a computer that has never (and will never) touched the internet. Once you send the coins from an address to this new address, the network will now know the IP address of the sender, but it won't know anything about the unknown recipient.
Ambele··on What Happened to the Guys Who Invested Their Life Savings in Cryptocurrency?
The S&P500 Market Cap is 24.30T. Bitcoin's market cap is $184 Billion. Therefore for proper hedging, you should put 0.75% of your assets into Bitcoin. For every $100k, that's $750.

Put it another way, you should put 132x more money into stocks than you should Bitcoin. If Bitcoin were to steal market cap from the investment markets, you'd be well positioned for transition. If Bitcoin were to become worthless, you'd still be well positioned.

Bitcoin will one day become worthless but it may be a while before that happens. The speculation is whether the new universal currency will kindly be available to prior bitcoin holders as an airdrop or fork, or whether it will be a brand new cryptocurrency without any ties to Bitcoin. So far, no cryptocurrency has overtaken bitcoin and the next 10 by market cap don't look like they will overtake it soon.

Planning for the additional (and painful) tax complexity in advance is advised. If you don't how to do taxes yourself, it won't be fun to pay an bitcoin-specializing accountant $300-$800 each year because you bought Bitcoin once.

Ambele··on Hong Kong protestors using Bridgefy's Bluetooth-based mesh network messaging app
That first link from Google is highly NSFW. A fully nude woman appears on the screen from some scammy local dating ad network. Has their DNS been hijacked?
← PreviousPage 2 of 3Next →