Readit Newspsn commented on Why Bitcoin is Volatile aka I Told You So evolvingtrends.wordpress.... · Posted by u/marcfawzi
If you and your whole family live in the U.S. and you have a couple credit cards, a debit card, and a bank account, Bitcoin is going to seem pretty useless. For you, the US dollar does just fine.
But the rest of the world isn't like the U.S. I visited Latvia recently, and my bank refused to let me withdraw money. Florida is full of Cuban Americans who want to send money to Cuba. Many people are imprisoned. The world is full of borders that make moving money difficult.
Bitcoin's market cap is moving towards where it needs to be to float all of those transactions. Even if no one uses it to store value, and no one uses it to buy groceries, it is still immensely valuable just as a means to move value from one location to another. Even if no one holds Bitcoin for more than two weeks, it will still have a market cap far north of a billion dollars.
I'm cautious about your Latvia story - its sounds to me like the bike was worried about fraud. Thats pretty common - about half the times I go to the US, I have to ring up the bank and get the card unblocked.
That being said, there are countries attempting to control the flow of money. Argentina wants to enforce its price for the dollar. Cyprus wants to prevent everyone taking their money and running. and so on. However, most of these countries see attempts to circumvent their controls as illegal. I feel its unwise to get my hopes up about bitcoin for this sort of transaction for that reason.
psn commented on Ask HN: Google employees, why is G+ more important than your users? · Posted by u/dsl
I'm not sure if reproducing a dead comment violates some kind of unwritten HN guideline, but here it is:
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Gthrowaway1 2 days ago | link [dead]
The Google bashing is well deserved. Even people at Google despise Vic Gundotra (just check memegen.googleplex.com today), yet this incompetent figure is allowed to continue alienating users and driving Google's brand into the ground.
Vic, do us a favor: Go back to Microsoft and never return!
Disclaimer: I work for Google.
I can't help but feel that if someone deletes their comment, its polite to respect their wishes and keep the comment deleted.
psn commented on Calgary man becomes world's most travelled canoe.ca/Travel/TipsTrend... · Posted by u/victoro
Israeli border control will give you temporary insert pages if you're worried about it affecting your travel to other countries. You just have to ask.
To me, this comment is the essence of hacker news. Guy goes around the world. Guy visits tons of dangerous places and miles of border paperwork. One presumes he did a ton of research. And yet, there's a guy on the internet saying "oh, here's this thing you missed".
Sorry if you take the huff.
This article is barely about Russia at all. It's mainly about wealth! privilege! inequality!, which is a perennial favorite topic of the NYT.
You aren't expected to read this and thing "omfg, Russia is so bad". No one in the US is thinking this - all they are thinking is "omfg, if inequality keeps growing, the US will be like this". This is of course nonsense for various reasons (we don't have gypsies and therefore the bottom 50% will not adopt gypsy cultural indicators, and our inequality seems to be merely differing rates of positive growth).
Note that many of the Americans on this thread are posting about Detroit, Appalachia and even Oakland (!?!?).
drive by comment: I don't know what you mean to imply by Oakland (!?!?), but... I took the amtrak south from Oakland, and I was shocked by the level of poverty thats visible from the train.
Hah. I recall antispam companies doing the same thing - once they got big enough, they demanded money from major mail exchanges. I'm sure companies paid out rather than risk long legal cases and poor PR.
"The .doc file format was also obfuscated,... it was effectively a dump of the in-memory data structures .... It's hard to imagine a corporation as large and [usually] competently-managed as Microsoft making such a mistake by accident "
They didn't use a binary on-disk format by accident, nor was it a mistake. The folks who wrote word knew that what users would want to open and save files as fast as possible, on hardware thats weak and tiny by today's standards. Going for a format that resulted in the smallest possible files and the fastest possible reads and writes makes sense in those conditions.
psn commented on Attacking Tor: How the NSA targets users' online anonymity theguardian.com/world/201... · Posted by u/brkcmd
One heartening aspect of the Snowden revelations as a whole is that they have pretty much just confirmed that the things we thought were strong (public crypto research, tor) are in fact strong and the things that we thought were iffy are in fact iffy(Certificate Authorities, Unvetted Crypto, Cloud Services, The Wires, Implementations). This bodes well for the prospect of navigating out of this whole mess successfully since on the whole we seem to have good instincts about what is trustworthy and what is untrustworthy. I think that it actually has tended to clarify thinking about security so that fewer and fewer engineers are able to delude themselves into trusting something that they know deep down is really untrustworthy.
I agree with your post generally, but has Snowden said anything about CAs? I did expect to hear that at least one has signed anything the NSA put in front of them, but I don't recall Snowden providing "proof"* of this.
* I'm in no position to verify anything Snowden leaks.
psn commented on We Like You So Much and Want to Know You Better nytimes.com/2013/09/29/ma... · Posted by u/jseliger
I'm a employee of a large tech company that's being parodied here, and I found this really disconcerting. The scenes with the boss and HR are completely different to my experience. No one cares what I do at the weekend. No one cares about my social media presence. No one cares if I use the company's products or not.
A few clear examples: one of my grandparents passed away, and the company was as supportive as possible. I asked if I could work from my parents house to be with my grandmother, and I got back "You can work from another country for an open ended period. If you aren't getting anything done, let me know, and we'll call it compassionate leave". There are people who go out socializing, but I've never felt pressured to go along. There are people who work long hours or the weekend, but again, I've never felt pressured to do that either.
Edit: When the company was newer, the employees worked very long hours and weekends. They worked, mind you. Everyone I know from that era is remarkably well off. The vast majority of the early employees have retired to spend more time with their wealth. I'm much more concerned, as a person, about either the big companies that do massive crunches (see ea spouse) or the startups that fails despite everyone working really hard, the employees don't get the 100 million dollar payday.
Why think the man who does not exist exists? why not assume pando made him up, and made the whole story up? The story isn't so implausible that people would doubt it. If anything,the story is toogood - count the number of times the man comes across as a bad guy. Randian of the worst kind? tick. Used to work in wall street? tick. In HFT? tick. Why did he grant an interview if he was trying to keep his business secret? I don't know if the story is made up, but its ringing bells in my head...