reqres

I've also had the same experience on my second product. Someone made an off-brand copy of about 18 months of work (testing marking, making prototypes, etc) right down to cloning my client libraries and removing all attribution. It was gut wrenching at first.

I couldn't agree more with your last point. Keep doing what you're doing - but more specifically, focus on solving the problem you have identified and studied. Chances are that you understand the needs of your market better than the copycats. In my case, the ability to meet the needs users trumped my copycats ability to copy my progress.

There's a lot of FUD going around when it comes to MongoDB write durability. Please read the manual.

Mongo lets the user decide whether or not to wait for fsync when writing to an individual node. This is not the default configuration. If you want it, you can enable it. You may complain that Mongo has bad defaults for your particular use case. It continues to have bad defaults to this day. Saying Mongodb is unable to acknowledge writes to disk is pure FUD.

Let the downvotes ensue.

>> But I think their new government is doing a great job to improve their situation.

Syriza was voted in to end austerity at minimum. They are nowhere near achieving this promise. Furthermore, their brinkmanship within the EU has made this even more unlikely.

All that has changed since winning the election is a steep degradation for the prospects of the Greek economy on almost every metric. The economic recovery early this year was snuffed out. Tax revenues have declined. Cost of sovereign borrowing is up. Bank deposits are flowing out.

I feel sorry for Varoufakis. He seems like a very sensible economist. Unfortunately the extreme elements of Syriza are driving Greece out of the eurozone and into much bigger trouble.

This article mischaracterises introversion by confusing it with shyness. Yes, there is probably a significant correlation between the two but they are separate issues. You can be an introvert without being shy. Furthermore, shyness can be overcome (as I have) but an individual's level of introversion is for the most part unchangeable.

It's not hard to find examples of excellent public speakers who are also introverts. Mohandas Gandhi and Barack Obama are two examples which spring to mind.

While i applaud the motivation behind cancelling the debts of Croatia's poorest citizens, the way it was done is likely to hurt them more in the long run.

Forcing banks to absorb the losses of this write-off will likely make it harder for the poorest to access credit in the future. Banks are not social institutions - they're pathological profit making entities. They will have no qualms with raising interest rates or denying credit altogether to compensate for the increased risk of doing business with their poorest customers.

The poorest section of the population do not borrow money for no reason. Borrowing is often required for emergencies (i.e. medical) or short term liquidity (paying bills on time). Just as importantly, it's vital for people who want to improve their economic situation by starting new businesses.

My primary concern is that banks starting to shut/price them out. The least well off will end up resorting to informal lenders (i.e. loan sharks).

Contrary to media perception, the FI I worked with did put a huge amount of resources into preventing illegal activity. Of course trying to avoid legal trouble doesn't necessarily prevent it.

In my brief and painful experience, FIs genuinely do avoid breaking the law. But they don't mind breaking the spirit of the law by finding a way around it.

I'd love to contribute to this project, especially since I wasted years of my life mining and forecasting data on financial institutions - it would be nice to put that skill to a good cause. But if the goal is really to make financial institutions more accountable, my years of experience working in the industry tell me this will be a largely fruitless exercise. I expect the yield on mining public data for that nugget of information to nail a financial institution is going to be extremely low if not nil.

Financial institutions only have to disclose the highest, most superficial levels of information to the public when it comes to the breakdown/allocation of their assets and liabilities. If you open up central bank data or the notes to a FI's financial statements, you will not find a meaningful delineation of where a banks assets are or what risk profiles they have.

Having worked in a very large commercial/investment bank and directly with the CFO, I know first hand that although banks avoid doing anything illegal, they will have no qualms with bending the rules in their favour. Most well run banks know exactly which rules are being bent and they will know exactly how to classify it in any public submission to prevent any smell. They have large finance and investor relations teams who pore over every decimal point in any report and have prepared answers to virtually all regulator questions.

The information you need to properly regulate banks are not in the public domain.

Take the last financial crisis for example. I don't think any publicly available financial statement or report would have told you that banks were holding onto a tremendous volume subprime mortgages classed as 'AAA'. This only emerged when huge holes appeared in balance sheets when the US economy slowed and a whole bunch of assets had to be written off.

The kind of remedy required to mitigate the chance of another crisis is a systemic overhaul of how banks are allowed to operate and how they are regulated. I'm sorry, but holding them to account with data provided by banks themselves will not yield much result.

EDIT: Sorry for being a jerk/cynic about this effort. I'm actually a big fan of OpenCorporates. But I'm still a bit disillusioned having quit in 2011.

Since a headset could occupy your entire field of vision I would imagine that any setup could be replicated in virtual reality.

The display technology and software is still a long way away however.

Where is the company based?

Perhaps an expert could weigh in here, because I don't really understand the controversy.

The "third parent" provides mitochondria which, by my understanding, doesn't affect the genetic makeup of the baby. In other words, the parents' genes which form the nucleus are intact and unmodified. Isn't this more akin to receiving an organ transplant than genetic manipulation/selection? Or am I missing the point here.

To add to the tradeoffs point - it would be great it you could generate a pareto efficient frontier given the users "desired traits".

This may just be my own personal gripe but I get serious information overload from component buying. A nice frontier could filter the dozens of options to just a handful with meaningful tradeoffs worth considering.

I was in a similar situation to you when MongoDB was a lot less mature. Postgres was my "go to" store and I was a very skeptical of the Mongo hype.

My view would be to use Mongo if it's just a small project. It's a good time to learn exactly how Mongo is different and get a first hand experience of what the trade-offs are.

Started a UK postcode and addressing API in the midst of developing another (eventually failed) project - partly to scratch my own itch and partly because the existing offering was in a bit of a sorry state.

Was profitable within 2 months despite some idealistic pricing on my part. The feedback and kind words from my users over the past year has been incredibly humbling.

I don't think "stupid political bickering" fairly characterises the situation. Ukraine is slowly descending into civil war with large chunks of it being (or threatening to be) annexed by Russia in the chaos.

Normally I'm all for technological progress. But maybe just this once I'd be OK with postponing our advancement as a spacefaring species if it means we can get a peaceful resolution in Ukraine.

Wouldn't that present a horrible UX in some cases when paying with bitcoin? You'd have to wait ~10 minutes to access your purchase while the transaction is confirmed

Figure source: http://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

I think you can get a rough sense of whether this is true by using Beta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_(finance)) - Beta represents the riskiness of the stock relative to the market as a whole

After a quick google it seems Facebook's beta is ~2. So a NASDAQ fall of <3.5% is an indication that something other than a general downturn impacted Facebook's price

Please correct me if my understanding is wrong

> IMO you are underestimating that AWS expands all the time in _every_ direction.

I think I can see where you're coming from but I strongly disagree that AWS will protect its market share by adding more products.

Each new product doesn't just bring utility in terms of what customers can do - it also brings disutility in other areas. New products dilute marketing (what are you selling?). It dilutes the allocation of internal resources (maintenance, R&D, marketing). It increases cognitive overhead for customers (E.g. the product range is a mess -EC2/S3/SWF/SQS/SES/SNS/FPS How is a customer to keep track of what's going on?).

My assertion is that for the average customer - new AWS products only bring headache and zero benefit. Because most people just won't find the need for it. Also AWS don't need to care. They will not meaningfully improve the core offering to the average user because it's the high end customers that will move the needle at the end of the day.

The logic you present is correct from the incumbent's perspective. But followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to the downfall of the incumbent according to Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. The incumbents will continually cater upmarket to their higher value customers while the challenger picks up more and more low value customers. But there's only so far upmarket you can go until you run out of customers and that's when the low end challenger has completely consumed the incumbent.

I think much of this thread is a testament to the lower value customers being ignored. Things about how DO is much less complex, simpler and as a result cheaper.

Here's part of a great talk from Christensen describing the same logic but in the Steel industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FxFfymI4g

I think in a nutshell you're describing Clayton Christensen process of disruptive innovation (or more specifically low end disruption). AWS is catering more and more to its most demanding users. This exposes them at the lower end to developers who aren't as demanding but prefer something simpler that better fits their needs. The way this narrative ends is that DO eats up AWS from below

Out of curiosity, which plan were you using? The basic $5 VPS?

Surely there are better ways to fix the problem by means other than boycotting financial services.

Also, if your sentiments were generalised across the population it wouldn't just be the banks suffering. We'd have a massive credit crunch. Regular, honest people wouldn't be unable to get mortgages or business loans.

I think the broader point is that financial bubbles will happen with or without supposed regulation. The question remains what can be done when it happens?

Without a centralised monetary authority you lose an important tool to manage a crash.

Under normal circumstances - I don't think Banks directly price for inflation unless it's a financial instrument specifically linked to a certain measure of inflation.

I worked in a bank for a few years - doing credit risk in both consumer (cards, personal loans, etc) and investment banking (bonds). When it comes to consumer loans, like cards, mortgages, personal, etc, the basic formula is the cost of funds plus a margin that reflects the risk (i.e. card loans more risky than mortgages).

Cost of funds relates to how much it costs for the bank to obtain those funds - its an aggregate of various wholesale market rates, the composition of its deposit base, and a bunch of other things.

Inflation risk is something I never had to factor - but it could have just been because I wasn't working in a time with a major inflationary shock

No - he means inflation. It erodes the value of the balance that is owed making it easier to pay off

The rate of inflation is how modern central banks are graded on their performance. In countries like the UK or New Zealand, it is the primary benchmark and the main metric that is targeted. The story is a bit different in the US where the Fed is mandated to watch over prices AND output + employment.

Although its not the same as economic output - having stable prices is important to support growth or a recovery. Deflation prolongs a depression - this was the major motivator for quantitative easing in the last financial crash.

I should correct myself - I should have said "low + positive + stable" inflation and not just "low inflation"

You can't talk about central banking authorities as a single type of homogenous system. There have been and are many different kinds of central banks over time and across borders. Each are run and incentivised very differently. Each operate with different levels of competency and available data. Each can be motivated radically differently - e.g. some are basically run by the government and are prone to political pressure whereas some are run by relatively independent committees (such as Canada, UK, New Zealand).

But Central Banks have the ability to make a huge difference in the quality of life/standard of living in a country depending on its competency and understanding of the economy. If you take the US as an example and compare the response to the 2 greatest financial crashes in the last century. The Fed in 1923 operated under poor information and took the exact wrong course to mitigate a financial crash by contracting monetary supply. Contrast with the Fed in 2008 to date (despite complaints) - its steps in producing massive quantitative easing was the exactly right thing to do. Given their likely responses, there are many more jobs and more economic output today than would have existed had we swapped the 1923 and 2008 federal reserve - I don't think many economists will disagree on that point.

With a decentralised currency like Bitcoin, my understanding is that monetary factors cannot be controlled. So you'd lose a very important tool when it comes to regulating the economy/applying course corrections over economic cycles.

It's still early days of allowing independent (i.e. apolitical) monetary policy committees from controlling money supply/interest rates, but we are and have been in a unprecedented period of relatively low inflation for the past couple of decades. This is despite the greatest financial crash since the great depression.

I'd say there is good grounds for saying this is a great human invention - although probably not on a par with sanitation.

No the system isn't perfect - it is structurally flawed like all other systems - but it has worked well and the negative side-effects can be managed

I'm trying to find the name of a suspected logical fallacy that I think some founders make... wonder if anyone can spot it?

It goes something like: 1. Established product A has traits X,Y and Z and is a billion dollar business 2. Our new Product B also has traits X,Y and Z and so it will be a billion dollar business

Example I saw the other week from "Why Bitcoin Matters"

> A mysterious new technology emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, but actually the result of two decades of intense research and development by nearly anonymous researchers. Political idealists project visions of liberation and revolution onto it; establishment elites heap contempt and scorn on it. On the other hand, technologists – nerds – are transfixed by it. They see within it enormous potential and spend their nights and weekends tinkering with it. What technology am I talking about? Personal computers in 1975, the Internet in 1993, and – I believe – Bitcoin in 2014.

Please note, I'm not knocking bitcoin here. I'm just wondering if this is indeed a fallacy and has a name.

I don't think anyone is debating whether taking a photo during a serious meeting is a good idea

It's wrong to unnecessarily fire someone in front of their colleagues. It destroys morale and it's essentially a form of public humiliation. A better response would have been to ask to put the camera away and remind people it's a serious meeting.

Governments can always invent a new denomination. Mostly its been in the other direction (take off orders of magnitude)

But the scenario you're citing isn't the central issue when it comes to deflation. Deflation leads to a negative spiral because it pays off to defer any kind of spending - thereby slamming on the economic brakes. Notable example is Japan in 90s - deflation has been a major factor in its meagre growth then and even into the 2000s. The BoJ's unwillingness to adopt a sufficiently expansionary monetary policy likely exacerbated the problem