ProblemFactory

> if banks only loaned for the rate of return of a job, we'd have engineers and no one else.

But is it really worse than the current situation - where people borrow to study something enlightening but economically questionable, and then struggle for decades as they can't pay the debts nor declare bankruptcy?

I agree that studying arts is worthwhile, both for the individual and society as a whole. But there has to be someone to tell the 18-year-olds that they can't borrow $100k for it, or they are making things worse for themselves.

Perhaps if banks adjusted loan amounts to potential future income, then arts faculties will be forced to lower tuition fees. And some students will correctly see that they just can't afford it - better to discover that before starting instead of after graduation.

I'm not sure why you are so upset by my comment.

Of course I can figure out the misleading advertising from property developers, it's common knowledge and has been going on for decades. If I become interested in buying a place one day, I'll look up planning permissions around the area and judge the risk of the neighbourhood changing.

But that doesn't mean that we should accept or approve misleading advertising.

It's not even a case of "who knows what might happen here in the future" - they keep advertising the views when they themselves are building in front of it, and the basement has already been poured.

> why is there such outrage about taxing option and RSU income?

There is no outrage, or even opposition to taxing income from selling options and RSUs.

The problem arises because in some situations options and RSUs are considered "income" as themselves, not a potential to make income when they are sold.

You get some options in an early-stage startup, and have to pay tax on that. But you can't actually sell your options - there is no market, and often you aren't even allowed to sell them before the company is acquired or goes public. There is still a good chance that the company will go bust before either of these happens.

So you have to pay a tax bill years before you actually earn income, and potentially without ever earning income from your options.

High-end apartments is still more housing. People moving into the high-end apartments will leave some other, perhaps cheaper apartments free.

Property developers in the city where I live are deliberately deceptive about this.

They buy a large plot of land near the coastline, build condos on the far land side of it, and sell the condos advertising "bay views". Once the first block is sold out, they build the next one in front of it closer to the coastline, and sell more "bay views".

It's crazy how they can get away with advertising the view even if construction on a building that will block the view has already started.

The hardest part might be noticing in the first place that your FaceID model has drifted away from only your face.

> I don't have to backport all the stuff to older releases. My own policy is that any previous release will receive security patches

Besides it being easier, isn't not porting feature patches the entire point of Long Term Support releases? People use LTS because they don't want any unexpected behaviour changes, only security updates.

> Estonian ID card uses 2048 byte keys which means generating a private key from a public key takes 140.8 CPU years

To clarify, 2048 bit RSA keys are fine. But the smartcard that generates these used a too predictable algorithm for generating the keys.

Estonian business climate and taxes are attractive, and it's possible to handle the paperwork almost remotely.

But in the end it does not matter. If you live and run your business from country X, then that country is going to treat your business as a local one no matter where it is registered.

But you need to get the "id as whatever" first.

Let's say you get the id from a HTML form as a string, and want to pass it to the library. Do you need to first convert it to an int? A uuid.UUID object? A custom ID class in the library? Is passing None allowed?

A type declaration on the get_product() function would tell you, and let the compiler to check your code for mistakes.

In the US, the Social Security Number is widely regarded as a "secret password". Not as an identifier, but authentication credentials.

If you know the SSN and a few other personal details (like address and phone number), you are assumed to be that person, and can get access to their accounts and sign up for credit cards or loans over the phone or internet.

But every company that uses SSN to authenticate you also must store the SSN, it will be visible to their employees, and recently SSNs, addresses and many other details of most adult Americans got leaked in the Equifax hack.

If this sounds completely crazy and insecure, it is. An ID number should not be a password, it should be a public primary key. And some other method should be used to actually authenticate the person - one that does not ever require handing it over in plaintext.

The "problem" with SEO and adwords consultants is that the good ones would be working for the most lucrative verticals: insurance, consumer finance, medical lawsuits, etc.

If your small SaaS business can afford to hire them, then they aren't worth hiring.

> AMA was intentionally focused and the mods were asked to enforce question rules

I don't think the mods had to be even asked to do it. The AMA was posted in /r/space, and widely advertised in /r/spacex. There was a group effort to get technical BFR questions upvoted from /r/spacex members.

I would guess that even without any outside influence, the mods and most voters did not care about Tesla questions - Tesla only matters to the extent of "does it help finance Mars plans" for them.

> if the moderators are enforcing "on-topic" questions in an Ask Me Anything

Every subreddit has its own moderators, and they set the rules for content in that subreddit. Reddit generally never interferes with the content or moderation of a subreddit, unless it gets into illegal or "bad publicity in national media" territory.

Elon decided to host the AMA in /r/space, so the space enthusiast moderators there get to decide how to run it. If they decide that they want to see Elon answer space questions, and banning Tesla questions helps with that, then it's their subreddit and their choice.

> Nevermind the toaster — clothes add up surprisingly fast.

And your shower curtain, food in the fridge, extension cords and cables, business cards, books that you got as gift but never read, and so on.

Most people have tens of thousands of dollars worth of $5 items in their home. But in the stress of losing your home in a fire, you will forget about all of them unless you have a good walk-through video of the entire place, opening each cupboard and looking under each bed.

Something along the lines of "1 year of free upgrades, then upgrade pricing" is a good idea even without considering OS compatibility.

It keeps customers who bought just before a new release happy, and removes anxiety about whether you should wait until next release to buy.

> Maybe this is a generational thing?

A factor of mobile and Mac app stores, where people have gotten used to buying an app for $1.99 with free upgrades for life perhaps?

Charging money for a "compatibility with latest OS" upgrade is entirely reasonable - it requires new work and testing from the developer. Not backporting compatibility to 3-year-old versions is equally reasonable.

It's still more generous than subscription models, as you keep the option of not upgrading any of your software (including OS) if you wish.

Need? No.

Perhaps I've been corrupted by the mattress salesman talking points, but it seems sensible to optimise spending money by the time spent doing certain activities.

For me that means that spending on a comfortable work area - desk, chair, monitors, keyboards - comes first. Then maybe sleeping areas. I have avoided upgrading the bedroom only because of the confusion of understanding what is good value for money so far, as there are no returns or free trials of mattresses here.

In comparison, most people way overspend on their cars, which they might use only one hour per day.

> a link directly to the page that would let me make changes to the reservation, with no security barrier at all.

This is most likely intentional.

Most business travel gets booked by assistants / travel agencies / client reps / etc. They are going to use their own account when booking tickets, and then forward reservations or boarding passes to the actual passenger. That passenger then wants to for example reschedule in a hurry when a meeting overruns, or change seats or meal choice without having to explain their seating preferences over the phone (is 25C still available? No? Then get 27A).

Security wise it would be better to have some sort of delegated permissions system, where the travel agent can add email addresses who are allowed to access the booking, you then have to create an account with the airline and prove that you own that email... but I don't see the airlines pissing off their most profitable customer segment with extra hassle to add protection against misforwarded emails.

> Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo

GMail was different because it offered an outlandish 1GB of mail space, when everywhere else you got 1-10MB mailboxes. Since it was launched on April 1st, most people did not believe it at first. And (at the time) huge space allowed users to keep and search all old email, instead of deleting old emails being a weekly chore.

> In terms of new features, it's relatively light

In a way that actually sounds like a good way to release things.

* Release 1.11 LTS with final feature updates for people who want to stay on Python2.7,

* Release 2.0 which is mostly a refactoring & internal cleanup - so for Django users on Python3 it should be a simple upgrade, and you get real life testing on it,

* Start adding features once the refactoring seems stable.

> So it would a "Credit ID," Passport Number, DL #, or something related. What's the difference, it will need to be stored next all your stuff, awaiting to be stolen.

It should not be a passport number or driver's license number. It should be the original, physical passport or driver's license that you present in person. The physical object is much harder to steal or copy, and can be revoked.

You should not be able to open credit lines or accounts with a business without appearing at least once in person first.

Credit and existing credit records would still be easily available.

The only change would be that you need to present photo ID in person to open new credit lines... which doesn't seem that unreasonable really.

> since when does u2a protect against back-end breaches?

It doesn't have to. For 99.999% people, the two most realistic threats are:

* There is a keylogger on some computer where you access your Dropbox, for example at a print shop, * You use the same password on many sites, one gets compromised, and automated bots try to access your Dropbox account.

Even if cities decided that it is in their best interest to limit the number of taxi drivers, there is no good reason why the license should be transferable property that can be bought, sold and rented.

If a taxi driver quits, the city, and not the previous driver should choose who is the best candidate to replace them.

Taking out loans that you don't need, not spending the money, and paying them back on time (with interest) should be a very positive credit score indicator.

It shows that the person is planning ahead, is careful with not overspending even if they have cash available, is organized enough to make all the monthly payments on time. To me that seems like a better signal than someone who does need the loan.

How would a person who takes out the same loan, but actually spends the money be a better credit risk?

Yes. If you steal the ID card or passport of a person who looks like you, you can do most things in life in their name. Take out a loan, travel the world, get married, etc.

The major benefits compared to SSN authentication still are:

* It's a physical object, you have to be physically present to steal each one instead of getting a hundred million at a time.

* Most people would quickly notice that their card is gone, report it, and get it revoked. You only have between a few hours to a week to use it, not the next 50 years.

You can get the incremental security easily at home: swipe over your card with a strong magnet. Now card thieves (and you) can only use chip & PIN payments.

As a warning before trying this for real: most ATMs annoyingly check both the chip and magstripe, so you won't be able to get cash out even in countries where chip & PIN are the widely used in payment terminals. Found out by carrying my cards in a phone case with a snap-close magnet.

Eventually banks are going to stop issuing cards with magstripes on them. But this will take years, until everyone has both on their cards and both readers in their terminals.

> Of course, if there's a numpy function that does what you want, you'd use it in real life. But what if there isn't?

I have been in this exact situation, a numerical algorithm that was missing from Numpy but the rest of the project is in Python.

The solution is:

1. Write a Python function that operates on numpy arrays,

2. Add a few Cython type declarations to loop variables,

3. Mark the source file as "compile with Cython at runtime", which seamlessly turns the Python function into a C library.

The end result was a 1000x speedup compared to pure Python, very close to numpy built-in functions working on similarly sized arrays. And it needed only about 5 lines of setup code and type declarations for a few variables - all the code could still be Python and use all of Python even in the compiled files.

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean.

I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit.

The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans.

I guess that it's fine if you reach the limit on a few servers, but if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. Has someone tried to use these hosts just for cheap file servers?