codingmyway

I used to work with a consultant who was a bit of a maverick and would regularly get dismissed from his clients after he ignored all the top brass and immediately went to talk to the people on the floor to find out what was really going on. Nearly every time his radical solutions and reports, which made sense, would just get filed in a drawer because they got rid of middle management. He didn't care if they implemented his ideas. He'd just move on to the next.

They want to detect overcrowding of stations which means before people have gone through any barriers

They've been collecting data for at least 3 years. It's only the detecting of attempted wifi connections but it's the best data source fro predicting overcrowding of stations. A lot of what they tried out to manage crowding during the Olympics is being refined and used to manage passenger flows so some passengers are sent on different routes.

You can only be anonymous by blending into a large anonymity set. If the very act of using the privacy features singles you out as being part of a small set that is trying to be covert then it makes things worse.

Half expected he answer to be 'owns 20 other houses'

A better approach might be to just stop them acquiring the things that ordinary folks need in a bid becoming rentier parasites, namely homes.

In a world where food is abundant (for now) that's what keeps everyone else poor. Limit their ability to become greedy landlords and they'll be forced to invest in real businesses and take risks.

This can be started on a local level and enforced easily by only allowing people who live in the homes or community trusts or government to own them.

If some billionaire owns 10 ferraris, has millions in offshore accounts and a super yacht why should anyone else care? It's not taking away from anyone and creates demand for luxuries that wouldn't otherwise exist and create jobs.

Sweet irony would be if you could use their own AI research to help

Bring back 'long life' insurance, the one where the money of those 'lucky' enough to not run out of money before they die goes to the survivors who need it.

It became taboo and phased out or banned because of obvious conflicts of interest and incentives but if managed well to not enable those incentives it could make a come back.

I was expecting something negative too but that just shows how negative people's assumptions/biases are regarding these things.

For someone working with UK/West European clients the time zone means you can enjoy the daytime and work in the evening which I prefer. The 9-5 is too engrained from last century workhouses to change but doesn't suit a balanced lifestyle

Slippage is the word I was thinking of.

"asset holders (i.e. mostly the upper classes) essentially made bank, because debt got extremely cheap and the value of the currency declined. The average saver lost money, or at least yield, because it didn't make any sense to save money"

So if you're a saver, this is the problem that bitcoin solves. A way for savers to protect themselves from being robbed by central bankers to bail out asset speculators.

Bitcoin is also easier to take with you when you relocate. Bitcoin is a weapon is the battle of savers vs debtors.

Very little. They are just used as a boogieman to focus the narrative of those who don't agree with the path toward layered scaling or who have an ulterior motive to cause conflict within the community

Domain names were the bitcoin of the dot com bubble. The digital asset that if you got in early has largely gone up ever since.

Bitcoin yes, definitely, Ethereum maybe, other crypto tokens that have gone up as much or more like Stratis or NEM probably not without a large drop off as you affect the market (can't remember the technical term)

I take heart in knowing that most of the people who made money were developers, especially from ethereum which I bought to play with.

Be careful of getting emotional about it. It could well be techies and goldbugs who knew about it early on and regret not buying earlier that succumb to fomo last after stewing over it too long.

It's best to buy just enough to assuage your feelings so that you're comfortable with whatever happens and then forget about it.

With so many being created, cryptocurrencies will come and go so speculating on which will become the winner is a time consuming obession. As dev Andreas Antonopolous says the best investment you can make is in learning the tech.

Solidity and other smart contract developers are in serious demand, paying stupid salaries as every finance company plows money into them. The space is still full of opportunities for developers if you look forward and around and not back.

Yes, it's from more technically savvy to less technical so to some degree from young to old. Not exactly of course but it's the one countervailing flow to the housing and other asset bubbles and debt transfer which have massively transferred wealth in the opposite direction.

If nothing else, cryptocurrency might do one thing that is needed, if only roughly and imperfectly, and is to distribute wealth from the the old to the young.

It's the one counterbalance to the debt based asset bubbles of the last 40 years that have transferred wealth to pensioners at the expense of the young

Makes me think that laws like this should be more like programming (for humans) and easily reverted when they are found to cause bugs in behavior but somehow laws have to be fixed with new bills on top of the old.

The law books are the biggest bunch of out of date legacy code that nobody understands apart from a few overpaid experts and is in need of a massive refactoring.

The outcome will likely depend of how many miners switch to the b-cash chain. I can see both sides dumping to try and convince the market that theirs is the real bitcoin and that the other will be worth(-)less. Likely to be a lot of volatility but b-cash proponents who favor growing the blocksize are big enough in number that I think both will survive, at least until that chain hits real scaling problems.

That dream is one that many have tried to achieve but it's what I call the software paradox: any system or framework that is capable of doing everything is so complex to learn and configure that it's nearly always easier to build something bespoke from scratch

I'd add very long hours sat (or even stood) at a desk. Coding on the beach is less depressing.

This is classic Minsky ponzi finance. I wait to see revelations of fraud and corruption that have been hidden too.

Bubbles have their uses. An enormous amount of money and effort is thrown at a new technology in the hope of getting the bit that sticks.

Most will lose and go broke but a lot of infrastructure gets left behind that later, more considered, businesses build on.

True of the railways, the automobile, telecoms and the internet.

Most crypto currencies will be worthless but systems be created to allow me to buy shares from you with no broker or stock exchange, to track the ownership of patents and property publicly, to enforce government spending to prevent cronyism and uses that nobody has yet thought of.

Best investment is to learn the skills.

Ironically that might be a reason for the later increase in the price of ETH compared to ETC as corporate types like the idea of being able to 'roll back' the chain in the event of fraud or a serious bug and don't appreciate that the DAO fork was a one-off event where the majority of the stakeholders were in favor due to their foolish purchase of DAO tokens.

TFl has the data and City Mapper use a lot of it but with their own additional heuristics.

Anyone can write an app that consumes the data. https://api.tfl.gov.uk/

London underground trains are fitted with sensors that can tell the weight of each carriage and there's a good chance that the data will be available via Transport For London's API, if it isn't already (I worked on the API two years ago)

City mapper has their own data sources but a lot is still from the public API that TFL provides for free with the reasoning that app developers will do a better job than TFL could.

Microservices seems to be the latest cargo cult technique being pushing without really considering whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Some consultants always need another thing to push that a particular company's problems for them so therefore it must be applied everywhere.

As a non american driving in the US what strikes you a lot of the sheer swathes of parking lots, retail parks, advertising boards and drive through McDonalds, KFCs and Taco Bells that go on and on for miles. How there is enough business left in the internet age to keep these from becoming concrete wastelands I don't know.

Maybe. 2008 to 2012 were actually the best years for me, both for life and jobs. I even managed to get a contract straight back from my travels in 2010 at a rate that I haven't beaten since. The economy didn't totally shut down. My issue was getting a mortgage but if I hadn't had a gap I could have got one even then as I had a good deposit.

It's the aftermath of QE and years of zero rates that I wasn't prepared for so it turned out to be a very expensive break.