338 karma · joined December 13, 2012
Just planning at the moment, mostly trying to get the overall concept in my head before I write it down and put it on the wiki.
Will probably be years before I even get to coding anything.
If anyone is interested in helping me brainstorm though: https://github.com/OrganizedIntelligence/Jackal
He's doing it to build up his bid for the 2016 presidential election, and maybe a little to please his daddy.
I'm positive it has nothing to do with embarrassing the Obama administration.
Indeed, the FBI doesn't have customers either.
If the government wants it to be legal to assassinate you, they will make it so.
edit: I can't help but appreciate the fact that you and I are arguing over my usage of the word semantics.
Another thing, semantics are the last thing you want to rely on for protection from a government sanctioned assassination.
Even if you don't consider it gambling, you judge a stock brokers talent based on their average return of investment for their portfolios.
Unless that average is increasing every year, its hard to say they are improving their talent.
Not many brokers and traders work on improving their ROI, they focus on compounding the capital they have at targets like 1% to 3%.
The law of diminishing returns also plays a big role in a stock brokers career, there are swing traders who may make only a few transactions a year, then there are day traders who make hundreds of trades a day. There isn't a strong correlation of hours trading to profits.
Comparing this at all to programming is like comparing apples to kittens.
I'd say all the blame lays on her.
When you know your gaming a system by either buying a drug from a dealer, using a crooked doctor to write your prescriptions, taking more than your prescribed dosage, and not reading the warning label on the bottle every time you take a dose out of it, its hard to believe that you didn't understand the consequences of what you were doing.
I'm prescribed adderall and your comment dissuades me from taking it 100x more than this article does, even more than the warning label does.
Even if you were exaggerating anything, I found more keywords to research from just the first paragraph than I would get out of 10 of these types of NY Times articles.
Almost sounds like you're confusing escrow with insurance?
Your refund would come from the middle guy entrusted to securing your funds until your goods were delivered as promised. If your goods are not delivered, or if what you ordered was nothing like what was promised, the escrow service would simply send your bitcoins back to you, instead of sending them to the merchant who tried to defraud you.
These services would likely charge a transaction fee for the service.
Even silk road offers an escrow service that is apparently effective enough. The scammers on silk road typically try to con you into closing the transaction before delivery of any goods, so one red flag that you may be looking at a scammer is a number of early settled transactions in their history.
If someone wanted to do something like this more mainstream, they could develop a third party bitcoin escrow service that offered an order history, rating or feedback system, and transaction comments from both parties. You could even develop a rating score formula similar to a credit score, where older accounts with more history, have higher scores, which make it much harder for scammers to use throw away accounts.
Bitcoin itself may not be illegal, but the encryption schemes may be illegal for private citizens to use in some countries, especially ones that don't want their citizens communicating in secret.
I imagine in the future internet, domain registrations will be just as anonymous (like .onion on tor) as bitcoin, no reason domain names can't be decentralized (different tld's of course).
Don't judge, even Napoleon Hill had them.
New season of American Idol (or is it X factor now?).
Its so strange to see one specific skill being targeted.
Even stranger: http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/05/the-rise...
In this article Forbes talks about how programmers are basically the safest and smartest investment an entrepreneur can make, but now they are saying that investing the time to learn to program yourself is a waste of time?
I could understand if the headline and tone of the article was something like "could learning to program compliment your current skills?", but right off the bat they are attacking the idea of acquiring a new skill.
Does anyone really come out worse off if they miss a season of American Idol to learn programming instead?
Some people may feel like learning to read will make them more money, so these people shouldn't learn to read, they will be wasting their time!
Some people may want to learn to read because they remember those awesome bedtime stories, and would like to read them to themselves, these people are wasting their time too because they just want to learn to read to escape reality!
And so on...
Just because someone has one silly motivation to learn to read, doesn't mean it will be a waste of time acquiring the skill, because it has many applications beyond the original motivation.
Programming is the same thing, and since so many things rely on code, it may be just as important in the future as knowing how to read.
At the very least, learning to code is empowering, and its hard to imagine someone suffering negative consequences from learning this skill.
and don't think for a second that the Jovians have forgotten about that. :(
All success?
> Where you are born, who your parents are, etc.
This is only true up to a certain point. Obviously if you were born in the ocean and your parents are dolphins, you're going to have a hard time starting and running a coal mine.
Every time I hear someone talking about the role luck has with success, they are usually giving examples of how bad luck makes success impossible.
Nobody here insisting that there is more to success than luck is trying to say something like "people in North Korea just need to tough it out". We're talking about the millions of people who have every opportunity to be successful, but don't do so, because they are unwilling to commit to what they perceive to be too risky, and too difficult. The attitude you and the parent stress is the attitude that keeps so many people lower than they should be.
Successful people usually are not successful on their first try either, how many times do they have to fail before you would attribute their success to their efforts and not that "well, 3,847th time is always a charm"?
> Running a startup is hard work. No-one disputes that. But if you are in the position to run your own startup you are incredibly lucky. There are a lot of people out there that might be far better entrepreneurs than you, but because they weren't born into a situation that gave them a good education and the ability to take a risk, they never will.
Nobody is born into a situation that ~20 years later destine them to run a startup.
The type of person who takes charge of their life, also takes charge of their education, you cannot learn some of the skills it takes to be a self made person.
Risk appetite isn't something predetermined at birth, and it isn't learned from someones environment. You can develop the ability to take risk from surrounding yourself with successful people, just as easily as you develop it from having nothing left to lose, and realizing how much you've been overestimating your worst case scenarios.
> Running a startup is stressful, but don't try to pretend that there aren't enormous upsides. You can do whatever you want, you can work with whomever you want.
If what you want to do is work and focus on success, then you can do whatever you want, but there are plenty of moments where you will want to be doing something else. This is called self-discipline, its just like the discipline normal people are subjected to, if you ignore it, you lose your job, or your startup fails.
> How many other people in the world can do that?
Not as many as I would like. There are organizations like Kiva that aim to give those less fortunate an opportunity, and hopefully more pop up that make it even easier.
> The guy earning minimum wage in his factory job, spending all his salary just to keep out of poverty- if he fails, he is fired, and he and his family are screwed. He is the person whose face is much more likely to be covered in actual dust and sweat and blood.
He can also get another factory job. Try failing a startup and just starting another, its going to be a lot harder than pounding the pavement and submitting resumes.
> Being in this industry is a position of extreme privilege. Harping on about it as if it's a heavy burden to bear is utter nonsense and only helps the perception of "startup folk" as deeply out of tune with how the rest of the world works.
Anyone harping on it as a burden has the wrong attitude, and frankly I would be surprised if they lasted.
It is definitely not extreme privilege. These companies don't just start themselves and adopt whoever has the winning ticket. You have to have a good idea, and you have to be willing to act on it.
Many people have good ideas, and could grow a successful business out of their idea, but they have the wrong ideas about what is stopping them, so they never try. These people come from the same communities as any startup founder. The difference is a founder dares to challenge the beliefs that have been crammed down their throat, even if everyone around them insists its a bad idea.
I wonder how much of a stretch it would be to imagine some court ruling that trees could be considered man-made objects if they were planted by humans.
Ignoring a problem usually doesn't make it less of a problem.