srdev

> I don't need to look at the post you're responding to, I wrote the post you're responding to

You do because that's the context of the point I am making. Right now you're having an argument with some point I didn't make, and it's coming off as a bit silly.

>In the court of law where Ulbricht was tried for drug trafficking, the murder for hire thing is a crazy rumor.

First of all, I'm talking about HN here and the persistent need for posters to pretend like the specific evidence we have of Ross being violent was shaky. It's not. We have very good evidence that Ross was a violent person. I wasn't making claims about whether that should have been used in sentencing, so the fact that you keep harping on that is weird.

Second, the fact that he tried to hire murderers was material to the criminal conspiracy charges. So it's not just "a crazy rumor" from the courts point of view. The current way sentencing works is that evidence introduced in the trial can be used for sentencing as long as it meets some burden of proof , and this evidence was there and met that burden.

My gut reaction here is that the burden of proof should be higher (ie an actual conviction) and that the sentencing in question was highly inappropriate from a social standpoint, but I don't have background in law to understand why the rules are the way they are.

At the same time I'm not going to rally behind a guy who incompetently tried to murder people as a way to express my distaste for the American justice system and the drug war. There is such a thing as picking your battles and this is not the hill I want to die on. I am aggrevated that people who share these views seem to be stuck on Ross and are trying to retconn away the evidence rather than pick a better battle to fight. There are myriads of drug war victims and avenues of tackling the problem, but we're going to try to bang a square peg into a round hole here because the guy is a white upper-middle class programmer and we think Bitcoins and Dark Webs are cool? Right.

The strongest statement I will make is that the life sentence is clearly unjust. People should be given second chances with very very few exceptions. Ross should be one of these people.

> Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by Ross Ulbricht that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed?

Yes. That was literally a critical piece of evidence at the trial. The defense tried to claim that it wasn't Ulbricht's and failed.

Take a look at the post I'm responding to here. A lot of people in this thread are acting like the murder for hire thing is just some crazy rumor when there is a really compelling body of evidence behind it. Reasonable people can disagree on whether it should be a factor in the sentencing in the drug trial, but to act like there isn't a very high probability of Ross having attempted murder is.. Well it's not reasonable.

> When one side of the argument is based in real-world impacts, and the other side has nothing but an appeal to existing rules, it's a pretty good indication that the rules need changing.

One side is based on a "claimed" real-world impact. Its somewhat plausible but ultimately isn't backed by real evidence.

This is not the slightest bit amazing. You're being purposely obtuse by removing any and all context here.

The evidence in question, Ross's journals and chat logs, were presented in trial and subject to rebuttal. He wasn't being tried for those crimes; those charges are still pending, but they were material to the case and the defense failed to dispute them. At the present moment, it is highly probable that he intended to have 6 people, including the innocent roomates of his targets, murdered.

No. Intent and context matters. USPS/FedEx/UPS are businesses that primarily perform legal services, and follow US laws when its discovered that they were used for illicit purposes. On the other hand, Silk Road was built from the bottom up as a black market to service illegal goods. The idea that they just provided an anonymous marketplace and that unfortunately had illegal stuff happen on it is transparent lie that ignores the work Ross and his team put into promoting it as a drug marketplace.

Context and intent are important and laws aren't computer programs.

That is because a lot of people are simply ignoring the evidence available since they have an ideological stake in Ross's non-violence. The balance of probability here is that Ross intended to kill 6 people and fucked it up.

Do you have a journal proven beyond a reasonable doubt to have been written by icelancer that includes them discussing how they paid to have a person killed? And did you also confirm that the payment for that supposed hit was transferred? Because these facts were shown at Ross's trial. Its alleged because he hasn't yet been specifically convicted on these charges, which are still pending in Maryland.

> Thanks for the informative reply. A CPU might not be functional as in Haskell with recursion and types, but it is a weaker kind of functional in the sense that given the same inputs it will return the same outputs - it has no state, and even memory access is just a function to set or read from an address and those functions never fail, never throw null pointer exceptions, etc. Do you disagree that a circuit is more an example of data-flow paradigm than an example of the state-machine paradigm?

This is all kinds of wrong. CPUs have tons of state. Registers, program counters, TLB, CPU mode, cache, etc. You're just abstracting all that state away as "input," Using this criteria, you can say that a C program with a global buffer is stateless because the global buffer is just an input for the functions.

You're incorrect on your mental model of functional pureness anyway. Functional languages have state, it is just that the state is immutable.

> For a CPU to take the next step and decide what work to do at each clock cycle it needs only its inputs - it need not inspect the previous work it did in order to decide what to do next - it simply reads the next opcode the user wants to execute, and does it. That means it is referentially transparent. Which means it's tons more functional than C.

Incorrect. A modern CPU will often look at different stages in its pipeline in order for other stages to progress. This is one of the reasons you have instruction re-ordering. You can also hit a point where you have to flush the pipeline and start your operation over because you had a branch prediction miss.

In other words, CPUs are highly stateful. You are simply incorrect.

> But it makes you wonder why anti-bitcoiners create discussion boards when they have no stake in bitcoin's failure

It's actually pretty simple to explain. Buttcoin was the invention of the Something Awful community, which exists primarily to mock stuff on the Internet for comedy purposes. The fact of the matter is that the Bitcoin community is stuffed to the gills with all sorts of absurd and ill-informed beliefs which make it a rich source for mockery (and thus comedy). Given that this behavior is so common online, it's curious that the Bitcoin community doesn't seem to get why this is happening.

Im sure you can do that with a phone. Im not sure what the drone adds to the equation.

The actual computation done is not computationally useful. It only "secures" your bitcoins in the sense that an attacker has to put more economic input into their attack to match the economic input of the mining network. The act of mining does not even check whether the transaction is valid - that is done by the host that decides which transactions to include and the rest of the network deciding to propagate a mined block. Mining just churns through a single hashing algorithm to deliberately expend power. You could also secure your network by introducing trust and actually securing the trusted nodes, without having to create an ecological travesty.

Police do not react well to being filmed. What will likely happen is that your drone will be confiscated as "evidence" or destroyed. Its not as if cell phones do not exist to fill the same role here.

The 97% loss in value of the dollar is brought up again and again as if it's some shocking fact. But that drop happened over a century, and fiat money is not expected to be s long term store of value. So really, that "shocking"drop is a non-issue unless your retirement savings account was a bed mattress.

That doesn't really answer much. Is he claiming the email is out of context or simply fabricated? Either one sounds a bit bullshitty to me.

That doesn't really apply when the execution is cloned as well. This phrase typically implies that there is a way to make a mark on a product beyond the initial idea. Marketing and leveraging existing user base is not a laudable contribution.

I agree. I am just providing a charitable reading of the quote, assuming that the phrasing of the general point was poor.

Well we know what they claimed, which is that they were a pregnant woman who was laid off because of outsourcing but mysteriously she was the only one who lost her job. It may not have been a discriminatory firing, but that would be one hell of a coincidence.

We don't know if what she claims is accurate, true, or even if this company exists. Any comments made are in the context of her statements and assuming they are accurate. Obviously, if she is mistaken then consulting with a lawyer would help reveal that. Telling her to investigate a lawsuit is the correct course given the information we have, and I don't feel any need whatsoever to give the employer a benefit of the doubt. If they are in the clear, then that will be revealed if said employee's lawyer states she has no case.

In the past we've documented interpersonal issues in the performance review and developed goals around fixing any glaring issues. But coworkers are also expected to be professional and raise issues that are actually affecting team effectiveness, and not just complain about a person because they are not fun or personable.

You don't have to get pregnant to be a parent. This fact doesn't have any bearing on the discussion.

They should fire someone for well-documented causes, in which case there is no issue. I happen to think that it should be non-trivial to fire someone. If they are a poor performer then it shouldn't be hard to actually document that. If you're going to outsource a division, then lay off your pregnant women along with the rest of the workers that are going to be part of that lay off. Singling out a single pregnant woman for a pre-emptive firing, separate from the rest of her coworkers, reeks of discrimination and should rightly be cause for lawsuit.

> You would be surprised how many employers are afraid to boost female/minority hiring because they are afraid of opening themselves up to lawsuits if the need to let that person go in the future.

I wouldn't be, actually, because people in general tend to hold onto unfounded ideas. I find that its pretty simple to fire someone in a protected class in practice if you are actually professional about it and document the reasons. Its just not trivial, which is what bad employers tend to want.

> Edit: Downvote away. The truth is, rushing to judgement and vilifying an employer without having facts is only going to make this problem worse.

Lawsuits are how facts in disputes are established. The question is whether there is enough doubt here to warrant a lawsuit, and it really seems like there is.

Its perfectly fine for a candidate to look for a culture fit.

The problem here is that familial status is legally protected, so by bringing it up it puts the interviewer in a tight spot. If I reject a candidate who states such things, then there may be lawsuit risk, and my superiors may not be sympathetic to the fact that I did not ask the candidate.

Unfortunately, I don't think theres a way out of this problem. Family friendliness is probably the most important culture question for anyone with a family. The only solution I can think of is to dig up information online from previous employees, but that is a crap-shoot for small companies.

"Important" was a bad choice of words on Mark's part, since its a value judgement that is necessarily going to differ from person to person.. However, he essential gist of what he's saying is true. If you don't have kids, you can spend more time focusing on things other than taking care of your kids. I'm a dad and it does take up a lot of time and limits what I can focus on. My only disagreement is based on a personal value judgement of whats important; raising a child is the most important thing to me, but that's not a universal truth for everyone.

First of all, your use of the term "breeder" is pretty disgusting and you should feel ashamed of using it.

I'm a man and maternity leave does not bother me despite it being "discrimination" on the face of it. For one, maternity leave isn't really equivalent to vacation. Taking care of a newborn baby is very hard, exhausting work. To add to that, giving birth is a pretty physically traumatic situation that a woman does have to spend time recovering from.

Ultimately, no two people at a company are going to have identical benefits. We should try to be fair and equitable, but that means different things to different people, and is not always clear-cut. I can either wring my hands that someone somewhere may be getting a better deal than me, or I can actually go ahead and try to improve my situation. I don't see any point in trying to knock down women who want to be mothers because they may be getting a benefit that I'm not.

And finally, there are strong arguments for mandatory maternal (and paternal) leave from a societal perspective. I'm not going to rehash them here, but they're there if you really want to understand the other side.

I really hope you looked into suing them, because that was transparently unethical and illegal.

Bitcoin transaction fees are lower currently because they inflate the money supply to reward transaction processors. This puts downward pressure on the price. Once the inflation is cut off, its not clear what will happen with the fees. If the hashing power stays constants or decreases while the user-base increases, then low fees might still be feasible, but its unlikely to pan out this way.

Speaking from a technical perspective only, there is no way that Bitcoin can process transactions at a lower cost then a centralized method. A distributed log backed by proof of work is necessarily more expensive than a trusted, central server. Most claims of cost reduction come from the elimination of features, such as chargebacks, which will then be implemented by third party, resulting in unbalanced comparisons.

Supporters also point to smart contracts as cost-reducer, but the surface area where smart contracts can be made to work without human intervention is low, and I doubt many of these hypothetical cost reductions will be realized.

Not sure what the deleted post is referencing, but Google is using a fixed-wing design. To deliver the package, you tilt the entire drone up to do VTOL. At this point you can lower the package. In theory, it will work and have higher efficiency than a multicopter design. I'm not sure whether or not Google has had any success with it.

It can also be used to analyze space complexity. So generically saying "complexity" is also correct.

Banks handle orders of magnitude more transactions and also offer many services beyond the basic Bitcoin network. Thats a dishonest comparison.

We do track those numbers. They've been dropping.