throwaway77384

It's funny, I played around on the platform kryll.io for some time. It's a place where you can use decision blocks in a drag and drop manner to compose strategies.

They have a marketplace where people can share strategies, etc.

The marketplace always shows these massive returns, like "30% over the last week on BTC/USDT". Nowhere do they make it clear that this includes the natural evolution of the market (lol). Worse, if a bot / strategy works for many different pairs, it cherry-picks the one that happened to have good returns that week.

So far as I can tell, there are no strategies on the entire platform that outperform a bull market and in a bear market the strategies were always way too slow to pick up on things crashing.

It turned into a gigantic pyramid-scheme style scam, where the fanciest imagery / language for your BS strategy was what determined how many people ended up using it. Of course you get a cut of the user's fees paid for trading.

Honestly, the whole crypto-trading world seems incredibly dishonest.

If kryll actually had a working product, they would advertise gains above the natural evolution of the market and gains in bear markets.

They would also only charge fees on strategy profits. They do neither.

Another issue I ran into quickly, is the incredibly opaque fee model of many exchanges.

Take Binance: They will tell you the fees you paid for the last 3 months only, there is no place anywhere in the app or the website where they just tell you your cumulative spend on fees. And the 3 month fee CSV you can download has the fees in the cryptos traded, using their value AT THE TIME OF TRADING. So if you want to figure out the fees you paid, you have to build a thing that back-traces what a given crypto was worth at the time and calculate it from that.

With bot-trading, I can tell you that that gets real complicated real quick.

It's such a shame that so much of the crypto world relies on people being uninformed. I myself am a huge crypto fan and have done well just by holding. Trading hasn't worked out for me yet. I remain skeptical it ever will.

Two words: Public. Sector.

At least here in the UK (think NHS back office / government jobs) I can tell you, it's sort of unbelievable how little attention anyone pays to work getting done. At times I seriously looked around me, thinking "wow, nobody does anything, nobody admits it, and we are all in on it".

Fair word of warning, I didn't go into it wanting little work. I went into it wanting to accomplish something / get some work done and it nearly drove me crazy over the year I spent there.

There were many weeks, where by the end of the week I wasn't sure whether I had done any work at all. There will be meetings, which will take up most of your time, but outside of that, by the end, when I had given up on trying to achieve anything, I literally sat there coding all day and nobody batted an eye.

There was some remote working ability, which by now, thanks to COVID, will probably have increased a fair bit.

As far as April fools goes, this is a creative way to do it ;)

I applaud the effort. Very impressive work. I appreciate the free access to this, but will be buying, if / when I have time to work through some of the lessons :)

It might seem tangential to what you're asking, but I felt I learned more about 2d indie gsme dev from Yahtzee's Dev Diary, than most other resources out there: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/category/yahtzees-dev-di...

Particularly in a topic specifically about a product competing with google. Like, GOOGLE! It's almost impossible not to be more privacy respecting / enforcing.

Here's a fun perspective from someone who knows very little about maths, but has a huge interest in logic. I have a question for you: At what 'level' of maths or understanding do you reckon someone has to be in order to make sense of your introductory paragraph? Let me map out what happens in my head when I read that first paragraph:

> "I find that the most elegant way to understand exponential-related things"...

Okay, I know what exponential increase means. Something grows by an exponent of something. 2416...

> "is by defining the exponential as the function satisfying f'=f (with suitable normalization)"...

I don't know what an exponential is. A function, to me, is something I call as part of code, so I am not sure if I might be confusing the programmer and mathematician-definition of 'function'. I don't really know how to interpret f'=f in any way. (F-apostrophe equals f? Why?). I also don't really know how normalization plays into it. For me, normalization is something related to homogenising a series of things. Sometimes it can be related to normalising the volume of a bunch of mp3 files, or in other cases it can be turning a bunch of badly formatted phone numbers into a common format for a database.

> "In other words, it is the "eigenfunction" of the derivative, which is a linear operator. This is a very natural thing to ask when studying derivatives, ODEs, etc."

I have often heard terms like "eigen"-something, but this always causes me trouble, because I end up parsing it in German ("eigen" means "self" in German). So now it is the "self"-function of something? Okay, of the 'derivative'. Is a derivative the mathematician's way of saying "figuring out something you don't know by using a bunch of other things you do know"? I do not know what a linear operator is at all. I also do not know what ODEs are.

You see, I love logic and science and have been a programmer for so long, yet when I hear something like the statement above, I almost become despondent over the fact that seemingly I know nothing of the underpinnings or logical foundations of the things I spend my life with (aka computers and programming being born from maths...).

Anyway, just a random drive-by thought.

I had always suspected that Glassdoor would eventually succumb to this. Every metric is a gamed metric, after all. Why would Glassdoor be immune to this? Companies have very little to lose from bullying employees into leaving fake positive reviews. Yet they have much to lose from true negative reviews.

I have checked every workplace on Glassdoor prior to applying, taking things with a pinch of salt / applying some awareness of what reviews seem fake (like the famous split between loads of 1-star and loads of 5-star reviews, which tells you something is fishy, like loads of products on Amazon have).

I think I'll dial up the awareness for future purposes...shame.

This looks really interesting, but the website died from the amount of traffic hitting it, seemingly :/

"Perhaps I'm some sort of freak? "

You're clearly not. It's sort of astounding to think that someone could get to that age and not have learned the lessons in life that teaches one to listen and own up to mistakes.

Some sort of nepotism perhaps?

It's not age-ist to point out that you would have expected someone of that age to be more self-aware.

People that cannot own their own mistakes are downright dangerous. The older, the worse.

It's sort of odd, because some people can just 'slip through', all the way to the top (failing upwards, I believe it is called), because if you perfect the art of not admitting mistakes, some people mistake that for confidence / skill (and often, the more money you have, the easier it becomes to do this).

Ah, thank you for the additional info.

For the time being I am probably not doing anything complex enough to warrant switching away from Dokku.

As a single-person operation, I have to keep a pretty fragile balance between effort-of-setup (I can deal with a bit more effort than Heroku) / control-over-setup (I need Dokku's finer-grained control, with more effort).

One day I may outgrow those requirements, however. Who knows. I will keep Apollo in mind for that :)

This is extremely useful information, thank you very much. You have helped me feel more confident about my setup.

Cloudflare free in front: Check

Regularly updated system behind firewall, sound framework: Check

Regular cron-job DB-dumps + daily Hetzner backup + code etc on git: Check

Load balancing: This is a new one to me. Excellent! I had wondered about how to do some kind of two-machine load-balancing and eventually, failover. Still finding it tricky to wrap my head around how I'll keep my DB consistent between the two systems, etc, but so far I'm nowhere near the size where this is needed from a performance perspective. This is about redundancy only, so far.

Very helpful, thank you!

"Google Chrome is still delivering the leading performance on Linux."

Yup, same here. I use FF for everything, but occasionally have to use Chrome for something. Whenever I do, the performance difference is noticeable. But I ignore it, because I use FF out of principle.

These new JIT speed-ups paired with the potential for properly hardware accelerated video on Linux make me hopeful for future discussions with people who will (unfortunately, so far, rightfully) claim "but Chrome is faster", which you can't argue against....

How does this compare to Dokku?

Been using Dokku for a year now, and it is quite a joy.

Admittedly, I'm not in the 1000s of requests per second space that many other people operate in (I'm in the internet equivalent of the Mom & Pop website hoster space). I've found Dokku does everything Heroku does, but I get to control it all, which is really nice.

Never tried Caprover or the other container solutions, because I'm not big enough to even exceed single-instance sizes at Hetzner.

My main worries nowadays are:

- What if popularity shot up? How far does my solution scale?

- Hackerzzz. Who is out there just trying to damage something. Not sure it's as bad as the media will have you believe it is, but I still want some relatively strong opsec.

- Disaster recovery. I want to control as much of my stack as possible, so I can fix things when they go wrong, but I just can't seem to shake that eternal worry of 'what have I missed?' in the production DB

I find it quite hard to strike a balance between over engineering things (boy do I wish I had a load balancer that automatically detected an issue with a node somewhere and then did some sort of seamless failover without losing whatever transaction was in progress at the time lol) and just trusting that the thing will work when it has to.

The promise of platforms like Heroku is undeniably less hassle, or a worry-free life, but I don't know whether black-box models can ever truly provide that.

This is the most perfect description of what life has turned into for me. Thanks. I like the clarity.

Thank you for the elaboration. And thank you for sticking with me here :)

So, if I am getting this right, we have the following factors: Person A makes a statement (this could be an impostor or not-impostor), Person B observes that there is an impostor at work (or not) and Person B could either be educated or not and lastly, whether they agree or not.

So we have the following possibilities:

1.) A -> non-impostor -> B educated (B trusts A based on shared knowledge, easy)

2.) A -> non-impostor -> B uneducated (B has to trust A, A made argument well enough to convince B, but B has nothing but a 'feeling' to rely on)

3.) A -> impostor -> B educated (B immediately figures out A is a sharlatan based on knowledge, argument ensues...or it's just obvious A is no good)

4.) A -> impostor -> B uneducated (B has figured out A is an impostor, but that could be for who-knows-what reasons and is therefore less valid)

And the conclusion here is that in case 4.), the person has used their lack of education about the subject matter as a way to add weight to their statement (or to embarrass the impostor further), when, in actuality their lack of education just indicates that they have little reason to participate in the discussion in the first place.

Am I now kind of getting it? I feel I'm being slow today, but it bugs me when I don't understand something.

I'm probably about to embarrass myself, but I got stuck on this comment. I am trying to make sense of it and I can't. Can you please help me out:

When someone says "I'm not an expert and even I can see that...", they are presumably implying that even without the technical knowledge required to spot an obvious 'fake' or 'quack', perhaps an impostor, they can still identify said impostor.

In this case that seems to me to be a valid statement. Albeit one of relatively low value, since nothing much has been added to the discussion. All we now know, is, that the impostor has overreached and even laypeople can call their bluff (and an additional audience member has confirmed this to us). But that's it.

I want to see how this is often the preface of someone missing something non-obvious though? What is the non-obvious thing in this case, that the parent commenter is missing?

I'd like to add that this was swiftly resolved upon John's help. Thanks to the CF team for sorting this out.

Thanks for getting in touch. That is indeed a huge discrepancy. Ok, despite saying I wouldn't, I will on this occasion let you know the ticket number, so that you can see your end what's happening. Thanks again.

Ah, I am not sure I did. I do however have a few contacts at CF, which I will use shortly as well. Thanks again for your input!

This is very interesting. Thanks for the input. Seems you have had a much better experience. Interestingly I would rate mine as blocking-level priority, aka what my previous employers would have treated as the most critical. Hard to judge though.

As a kid I literally preferred being hospitalised for weeks on end to school.

As bizarre as that may sound, hospital was like a refuge for me.

And school wasn't even that bad.

I would absolutely love to have a new web browser out there. The internet needs this. Is it Windows-only? That seems slightly odd.

Yeah, from reading the replies here, I am beginning to think that I frequented some rather harmless parts of the internet, while left-right-and-centre, people were getting seriously harmed. It's quite eye opening :/

Teenagers are complicated creatures. Admittedly, this stuff seems impossibly extreme? Maybe I am indeed rather naive. I must have frequented much more harmless online communities. I never understood the appeal of SA or 4Chan. At the same time I can see how, as teenagers, people can get sucked into these communities, where edginess lures one in with some kind of false promise of 'freedom' from the rules of a society that appears to have rejected oneself. Even if that rejection may be self-imposed. At some point it's just a competition for who can say the most horrific things. I don't know how one would counteract this. The funny thing is, I also cringe at what I wrote online as a teenager, but I never took it to these extremes. However, recognising it (and 'hating' oneself for it) is a first step in fixing the problem, hopefully.

Well, I am trying to think back to my former self, back in those mid to late 90s days. It's hard to conjure up that mindset accurately. However, I would say that there was certainly a lot of immaturity to go around. There was no doxxing, there was relatively little racism. But there was a lot of sexism. I guess nerdy male-teenage dominated gaming forums of the 90s were places where women certainly did not feel welcome. I think re-reading what was said back then nowadays would probably be rather cringey. A lot of discovery of boundaries and exploration of social extremes occurred under the monicker of a kind of new-found freedom we'd been given as teenagers by the web. And that probably drove a lot of people (especially women) away. I think I lamented that fact back then, and I lament it now. It's always been my hope that I was part of inclusion rather than exclusion, but I probably failed at times, assuming an edgy 13-year old has no idea how to conduct themselves properly online. Yet, back in the day I do not think harm was intended, even when harm was done. Nowadays I wonder whether harm is intended. I am no longer active on any communities really. I post so rarely. This is one of the exceptions, as I do find it an interesting topic. I would honestly love to know whether I actually hurt anyone online, ever. I hope I did not, but if I did, then all I can do is attempt to be more aware in the future. Which, naturally, 20 years later, I am and continue to be and try to improve. That journey never ends.

You are right, I don't think it was ever naive, or ok. Thinking about it, what we used to call Trolls back in the day (1998 ish gaming community boards) were just annoying users. They were considered shitposters and bans were handed out swiftly. At the same time I'd say the discourse online was more coarse, less aware of political correctness, or racial / gender sensitivities. It's hard to think back to the mindset of my former teenage self, but perhaps what's known as 'trolling' today didn't even exist back then. I've never seen someone get doxxed on the forums I frequented. But then, people were also paranoid enough to not let themselves be doxxed, perhaps? This is all so long ago.

I keep thinking back of the days of the wild west of the internet, when I was a teenager. Back then, 'trolling' felt like it was done in 'good spirit', and it seemed as though everyone was sort of 'in on it', maybe because people shared similar values and knew there was no ill-intent behind the 'trolling' of the old days. But at some point (and I suspect it has something to do with money, as always), it turned into a weird team-sport. And political. It's no longer acceptable and needs to end.

"Bridi, 50, was arrested on Sunday in Cyprus on an INTERPOL Red Notice. Correa, 36, was arrested yesterday in Olathe, Kansas, where he will appear in federal court. Ahmad, 39, was not arrested and is still at large."

An INTERPOL Red Notice! You'd think these are terrorists, human traffickers or drug lords. Nope, they share films before the films are supposed to come out.

I understand that one should not try to profit from piracy. I also understand that the people who are orchestrating the operations that lead to films being leaked ahead of time should indeed be stopped, but isn't this all a bit overly dramatic, when there are real problems to be dealt with in the world?

Thanks!