pyalot2

Warren Buffet said the same thing about Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.

On the whole, he might be right about 50% of the time there, so, about as good as tossing a coin.

Facebooks data collection is sleazy at best. You may claim that users give them the data "willingly", but the fact is that facebook collects users data even before their users have an account there. Management of the settings around privacy are also practically impossible. Facebook also ran into privacy snafus countless times.

Timbl's words are meaningless when he speaks on the web as he's himself bending over backwards to appease corporate interests, control, restrictions and rubberstamped DRM.

Timbl is planning on using DRM to enforce it, of course.

That guy has lost all credibility calling for anything on the web by rubberstamping DRM into it.

New Yorkers coverage is always kinda meh. Like, why quote random reddit users? They could've quoted Gavin, Eric, Andreas etc. Also, that's a lot of words in that article to say the bitcoin subreddit went apeshit over Newsweek.

I know right. Edit: jep, that's me they're quoting.

Modern airliners are also flown by entire teams of ground crews, among them Rolls Royce support engineers that monitor an aircrafts engines in realtime every second of operation trough its entire lifespan trough the hundreds of sensors embedded in each and every engine.

This way, most problems an engine would develop that would be hard to spot by ground service, are detected and acted upon long before they threaten the operation of the engine and airplane.

Elitist much?

So first you go on like:

  I think a line needs to be drawn in the sand so that we know who is the real deal.
  There is a stark contrast between being a writer and being a professional author.
  Calling everyone authors who puts words on a document and submits them to the public devalues the word so much, it makes it meaningless.

And then you mention:

  In order to join these organizations you have to earn ‘x’ amount of money over a single calendar year, where the specified amount for indie publishers is a *multiple* of the requirement for traditionally-published authors minimum income, because it is easier to make money by going indie

Facepalm. Let me translate that for you. You're proud of your "real authors" tax, basically. It works like this: If you run a marathon that takes say 4 hours usually, you're considered a "real runner" if you make the run with your legs shackled if you make it below 24 hours. But if you don't use shackles, you're only a real runner if you make the marathon below 4 hours. At the end of the marathon the fastest shackled runner gets a gold medal, and those who made it without shackles but slower than 4 hours get nothing.

Let me propose that this definition of a "real author" is the most arbitrary and meaningless award achievable. It conveys zero information about the quality of the author and is arbitrary biased to favor those who masochistically forgo better profits just so they can wear your meaningless "real author" badge of honor.

Not only is the criteria arbitrary and meaningless, you also reward "real authors" by exhibiting economic stupidity.

Are you really sure, that's what you wanted to write? Really?

Well, 100% isn't reachable. But a high confidence is reachable. The thing though is, your PM isn't asking you for 100% confidence. He's asking you to make every single 2 hour tasks into a weeklong research and engineering project.

So sure, tell him everytime he asks this, it'll take you a week to make sure.

1) OP is an asshole

2) I accept bitcoin as payment for web development freelance services (specifically WebGL/3D development). I do it because, I'm not troubled by the exchange risk, and because the only way that people can pay otherwise is wire transfers from their bank. These are costly, slow, and increasingly, they fail. There's many reasons why they fail, but they basically boil down to that banks suck. And don't even think that PayPal would be better. Conducting business trough paypal is basically, much more risky than being exposed to bitcoins volatility.

It's extremely refreshing to send out an invoice, and receive payment within seconds, and have it securely confirmed, irreversibly within an hour.

Liquidity is what makes markets fluctuate less generally. Part of bitcoins high volatility is directly attributable to the dearth of exchanges. The dearth of exchanges is directly attributable to regulations that're difficult to comply with (mainly because of the license cost and difficulty of the process), and to established Banks/MSBs not willing to use their already being in compliance with those regulations to explore bitcoin.

The regulation so that Square, Paypal, Dwolla and every other bank can participate in Bitcoin EXISTS.

KYC, AML, etc. exist. The SEC exists. MSB and Banking licenses exist. SEC regulation on exchanges exists.

These regulations are expensive for startups. But they're a nobrainer for established institutions because they already qualify.

There's nothing the "community" can do to make regulatory compliance easier for Banks and MSB'es. Because Banks and MSB'es are ALREADY licensed, regulated and in compliance.

The whole thing is a red-herring.

Fundamentally flawed understanding of bitcoin, economics, cryptography, pseudonymity and pretty much everything else.

It's funny how people who projected their ideals into something, are now becoming disillusioned by the lack of something in bitcoin, that was never there to begin with. That can't technically be there, at all.

Sure for simple things, of which there are many, ORMs can work sufficiently up to a point.

But, the problem is that, you rarely get to go to your boss and say, well, this thing we've been using to do, you know, our data stuff, it's completely wrong. We need to throw everything away and start from scratch.

The only situation in which you get to say that, is when you're explicitly make it clear that you're writing a raw prototype that'll not scale, and that nothing short of a complete rewrite is gonna be required as soon as you finish (and even then, it can turn out tricky to actually do that).

Unfortunately, most people who get themselves into the ORM mess don't realize that this coming for them in the future. So they don't go their boss and make the prototype proposal. This all but cements the entire failure of the project right then.

I've been there with SQLAlchemy in late 2006, and I vowed never to return.

Let me state this, SQLAlchemys pool/engine/SQL-Api is great, and it's got nothing whatsoever todo with ORM.

But SQLAlchemy does contain an ORM, and it does become unmaintainable just like every other ORM. It roughly goes like this:

1) You use the ORM

2) Things get slow

3) You write a bit of custom mappers

4) Soon all your logic can't be operated without custom mappers

5) Congratulations, you've now written all the handwired code you would have written without an ORM, plus all the ORM code on top, it's now unmaintainable, full of bugs and oversights AND slow.

And that about sums up everybodies experience with ORMs unless they do trivially small things. It's at this junction people begin thinking about solving this ORM problem. And they learn it's bloody hard.

Obligatory XKCD reference: There are N ORMs on the market, they all suck. Let's solve all these problem and do a new ORM to rule them all. There are now N+1 ORMs that all suck on the market.

Best of luck with that stunt.

I didn't lose any on Gox, I've been warning people off gox since 2011, and more often since late 2012. Everybody who didn't have his head stuck in the sand saw this one coming from a lightyear away.

But that doesn't mean you should insult the people who did get hurt by gox. They lost $55m in fiat and 770kbtc (around $0.5b). They're in a bad place right now, and they're gonna learn their lesson without pissing from on high.

Charlie, if you know everything better, why don't you just go out and do it?

Nobody is preventing you from coming up with awesome-inflationary-proof-of-stake-charlie-coin. NOBODY. The source to the variety of coins (there's more than a hundred) and the variety of non proof-of-work based ones, is all online, on github mostly.

You're just sitting on your blog bemoaning and insulting the community, and you do jack fucking squat.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Git push or shut up.

You don't want to do that? Well that's grand then, you're just sitting there on the sidelines with no investment either way and spouting your bullshit theories but no willingness to put your money where your big potty mouth is. that's rich Charlie, really grand.

Point stands that are people who, for whatever reason, had assets on Gox. And they got hurt real bad. Although people have been trying to warn everybody off Gox FOR THE LAST FUCKING 3 YEARS, they still got there.

And insulting people who just lost real money in whatever fashion. It's just not considerate. But, if Charlie had been there, the last 3 years, warning people off gox, well, I would emphasize. BUT HE HASN'T. Stross the dickwipe wasn't there, trying to wean people off Gox. He has only opened his piehole today, because it's the hip talk of today. It's shameful and illconsiderate. It's also showing an astounding lack of empathy as to be basically psychopathic.

Stross is a walking talking psychopathic incident waiting to happen.

Doesn't Charlie understand that real people got hurt here? I find it incredibly insensitive to post something like that.

Yes people should not have kept their stuff on Gox. People have been warning from Gox since 2011 (where has Charlie been there? Nowhere, ahyes, hindsight 20/20 and all that?).

But it happened, and now there's lots of angry and hurt people. Maybe not add insult to injury mkay?

Has some strange black flickering (screenie http://i.imgur.com/dUOSudN.png).

I'm a webgl developer and WebGL works perfectly fine otherwise (no crappy driver, no crappy GPU etc.)

Browsers: Firefox 26/27 and Chrome 32/33 (error visibile in all)

OS: Linux Ubuntu 13.04

GPU: GTX-780

Driver: nvidia 331.20

Art? Fun? That kind of thing?

Has some strange black flickering (screenie http://i.imgur.com/dUOSudN.png).

I'm a webgl developer and WebGL works perfectly fine otherwise (no crappy driver, no crappy GPU etc.)

Browsers: Firefox 26 and Chrome 32.0.1700.107 (error visibile in both)

OS: Linux Ubuntu 13.04

GPU: GTX-780

Driver: nvidia 331.20

Have you looked at all these sites that load really slow (well above 5000ms), and that get instantly wiped out if they so much as make HN frontpage?

Did you know that most of those are hosted on one or another garden variety of cloud hosting? (we shall not mention the guilty, they know who they are)

Did you know that you'll loose about 90% of your visitors if your page doesn't load within 400ms?

No, go ahead, get your cloudwhatever hosting. It's the end-all be-all solution for everything.

Consider the people who haven't been screwed yet (in the future). If Gox manages to survive this and expand their customer base, it's wash, rhinse and repeat. Nobody wants that.

Bravo, spot on headline. Wired, are you reading this, maybe take an example?

There's something which tells me it won't work, and I can't prove it yet. But I think it's provable with a relatively straightforward simulation.

If you can read caniuse's table, you'll see that WebGL's actually supported on mobiles. You can get a more quantitative view from http://webglstats.com/ if you'd like.

It's not legitimate criticism, because ARB_robustness exists. It's pure FUD.