clienthunter

Regulation enables this kind of thing systemically. Let this happen a few times without regulation and the market will demand trustworthy solutions, not some politician waving a magic wand and declaring something safe. As we've seen recently that system doesn't work too well.

Everyone who lost money in this knew the risks. Nobody is calling for accountability beyond the guy that actually is accountable. How refreshing is that? How refreshing is it to actually have a name of the person who fucked up, instead of a stream of pseudonymous apologetic soundbites from banks/regulators/politicians?

Not to mention the fact this whole problem is completely self contained. There is no talk of rescuing MtGox with tax money, or the need for a "national debate" on how to run this shit in the future. If you didn't run MtGox or have money in MtGox or don't outright choose to be involve yourself in some other way then you can go to bed at night and sleep well knowing it is absolutely not your problem.

This, friends, is one example of the many long forgotten benefits of private trade.

We moan a lot louder than we cheer.

This is a win. We should celebrate.

You're absolutely correct.

I agree with both you and the fanboys on this point, however. Our current system is better than the old, for sure, but at the end of the day it is true that an insane amount of money is paid to these oligopolous firms as fees for doing a very simple job. Payment processing really is a case of moving database rows around, albeit in a highly available manner, yet they demand huge percentages. My bank goes down about as often as my Gmail, and the latter's free and deals with more information than my bank.

The present is better than the old, but very bad compared to what could be.

When did the world get so sensitive? I don't know if I grew up in some bubble of hate but where I come from people were brought up to be able to handle themselves.

> "Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me."

Today it seems more like "Sticks and stones may break my bones but that's okay because there'll likely be DNA evidence; names are not allowed because it breaches my human right to be."

I'm sorry, but my kids will be brought up to ignore names and to punch the bully back twice as hard in person, not in the press; and they will be taught to appreciate differences, not gloss over them and pretend they don't exist. Perhaps most of all they'll be taught to pity those that have brought politics-level bullshit into everyday life, and to rail against it at every opportunity. The Github meritocracy rug fiasco makes me feel physically sick - meritocracy is now offensive? We're now being held at gunpoint by professional victims who have a problem with professional status being merit based? Fuck me.

Humanity has been at war of one kind or another forever, when are we going to learn to stop trying to change each other and just get on with it? I never understand those people in bars who get into fights with others who say something they deem offensive. What a waste of time. Sure you might change the view of 1 in a 100, but that's 100 shitty nights out you've had. What's the point? And who's to say you're right and he's wrong? If you think there's such a thing as a moral absolute, I'm afraid you haven't thought long enough. Despite how the NSA might like things, we're all sovereign beings and no one has the right to dictate the contents of another's mind. So cluster with the ones you like and forget the rest. Life's too damn short.

Oh, and don't feel the need to tell me I don't know what it's like to be on the receiving end of this stuff. Just don't.

I use the workman keyboard layout. This was a complete mindfuck until I realised what was happening.

This man is peddling a book. I'm not saying that precludes his correctness but it does mean that the more analytical of us should apply a little more salt to our appraisal of his motivations than a journalist might.

The absurdity of this kind of thought is just profound. Thinking like this may be useful as a means of encouraging hope when all hope is lost, but Bitcoin is nowhere near there yet. Most of all this kind of talk smacks of deep desperation - "why won't people love me?"

I understand fully why one might feel so desperate. Bitcoin may have the potential to be truly revolutionary. Bitcoin solves the problem of orchestrating an international currency in a manner that limits the implementation details to the design, not banking/payment industry/political types who historically - for one reason or another - end up building in significant rigidities to the system.

It doesn't take a PhD in Economics to see the potential benefits of eradicating PayPal and consumer banks (although it may take one to see the potential pitfalls). More than this though, Bitcoin opens the door to truly free capital flow. It is possible to work in the Western world for a month or two and move, say, far East, and live like a king on the savings for a year or more. Why can't we just buy the stuff over there cheaply and consume it at home? One major reason is the rigidities in capital flow - it is hard, risky business in the current system. As a large company in a Bitcoin world you don't have to worry about a great class of risks of international trade, dumping money into the Cambodian economy is no longer a question of FX risk and "can I get it back out?"

This is a great step forward on the way to homogenising international capital stores i.e. ceteris paribus, rich people buy where things are cheapest, like in Cambodia, thereby flowing capital to, and driving up prices in, Cambodia. Cambodians get richer and the West gets poorer. Bitcoin has the vague potential to be the great equalizer.

We have seen some evidence of this at work in the EU with the Euro, if you look past the troubling dynamics of transition. Imagine how very different the US would be if every state had a different currency and payment processing rules, the diversity in income would be profound.

An educated economist will see a great many problems with this utopian vision, but will likely agree the aim is noble and that the basis - Bitcoin - is the closest thing we have so far to a workable solution.

Bitcoin may be as revolutionary as the fanboys want it to be, even if they don't understand why. My personal thought is that Bitcoin will soon be seen as the thing that started it all, but the solution won't be Bitcoin itself. There are too many problems - no matter how many times you read that a fixed supply currency is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it really isn't. It's also woefully easy to steal and the mining/verification mechanism is far too resource intensive and encouraging of looney speculation making its value at any point in time completely impossible to reason about.

If you love BTC today, don't spout bullshit strings of meaningless words in some grandiose display of being ahead of the times. Make it stronger and better because if you don't history will judge this whole thing very severely in 10 years time, when it really is just a way of buying drugs and hitmen.

This is really secondary to the actual real value these things would represent. Yes, they must be limited in supply, just as money must be - money would be useless if it grew on trees.

Your comment really only deals with the inflation rate of hashcash, which is a nominal thing and can be discounted in the presence of efficiency.

As I explained at more length in a comment on the post itself, the value of these things is a function of the dirty spammy goods they represent. To quote myself...

> Just as money is "stored labour", hashcash would become stored mail order viagra.

Interesting you should choose Kotlin over Go. What's your take on it? I'm a big Jetbrains fanboy but haven't played with Kotlin yet.

Dear Government,

We have nothing in common anymore. We're just too different on every level that counts. We've tried to make it work - or rather, I have - but it's no good. You never respond, most of the time you don't even acknowledge me or what I say.

I'm not happy. You're not happy. It's pointless.

I'd leave you if I could, but you won't let me and I don't see that changing. I know you'd harass me, stalk me, spy on me, and treat me like a criminal. Isn't it funny that you'd take notice then. You're nothing but a sociopathic bully, set in your ways, blind to the reality of your actions.

I couldn't leave anyway, there's no where to go - you've seen to that. But I can't keep doing this.

I've begged, pleaded, screamed, and shouted. Nothing works.

As I sit here a perfectly normal, law-abiding, person - wellies on the porch, tea in hand, dog at my feet, plates in the dishwasher - I've come to the only conclusion I can.

People will talk. Most probably won't understand. I'll get tarred with the brush of ignorance and called all sorts of names. As they try to compute the double life I'd led and the lies I'd told they'll only confuse their moral compass further. I'll probably get hurt badly. But it'll all be worth it.

Maybe it's not your fault that you're the way you are but I have no choice now, I have to put me first, I'm sorry.

I going to have to kill you.

________

Disclaimer for security services/LEA/whatnot: this is fiction designed to evoke thought, specifically the dynamics of how extremism comes to be. I am not the character in the above piece, but I am capable of sympathising with him - which is kind of the point. It is categorically not meant with menacing intent or as a threat so you can put your Communications/Terrorism legislation down. Isn't it fucking sad that I have to write that?

Is this actually type safe, or type safe up until you include an untyped gem and the whole thing becomes indeterminate? Does the typing actually improve performance over straight jRuby?

Can it handle method_missing and *_eval?

Also why is it closed source?

edit: sorry I didn't mean to sound aggressive. please interpret the stream of questions as extreme curiosity.

> In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on streets, are about a third of U.S. rates.

Britain here.

This is absolutely false. We uniformly view cyclists as the greatest danger on the streets. No joke, ask around.

I would suggest the reason for our better stats is down to a) a bloody difficult driving test; b) the thing inside a lot of us that makes the nervous/apologetic stereotype actually be true also makes a lot of us quite risk averse and cautious; c) drink driving is a big no-no with very practical consequences near 100% of the time; d) education of how to cross a road starts at a very young age, the result being no jaywalking laws required and watching people cross busy, fast moving roads in cities looks like doing the same in some developing country except we're proper pro at it; e) the speedbump pandemic, an enormous pain in the arse to have them every 3 ft in residential areas but probably highly effective; f) many, many (most?) pedestrian-accessible roads predate almost all vehicles and are twisty, narrow, and generally difficult to navigate; f) motorways/dual carriageways (70mph) were designed in such a way that they are not at all accessible on foot; g) B-roads (60mph usually, narrow) join 2 interesting places through vast expanses of farmland, there's rarely a reason to be on foot near them.

Lots of reasons, none are fear.

Binary blobs running on user boxes can collect direct, identifiable, evidence. Spying an IP address from afar that may or may not be proxied/NAT'd is flimsy circumstantial evidence at best.

I've thought the same myself but reading that post made it clear to me that such thing couldn't really have much in common with what we call Ruby today.

The solution for the performant/distributed/concurrent/data-intensive problems of today and the future seems, to me, to be in the functional space. I know it's trendy to say that but it's the smart people - Rich Hickey, Simon Peyton Jones, etc - who are driving this evolution. A language with a GIL and zero immutable primitives just doesn't seem to have much to contribute. The idea that Twitter was at scale as a Rails app once upon a time is just absurd to me now.

Incidentally I creeped on your bio and saw you created obvious. I read about Obvious a while back and, although I must admit I haven't used it directly, it really had a strong influence on how I think about structuring Rails applications.

I think what you say about Rails is true. Rails isn't a framework, it's a lifestyle.

I also started to question whether Ruby's type system was just too loose for serious work and was yearning for something as pleasant as Ruby but with at least some type safety. Then yesterday I read this relatively old post https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/217617 about adding static typing to Ruby. There's a lot of recognisable names in the thread, but the posts from Eleanor McHugh nearer the bottom really helped me understand the power and utility behind the apparent simplicity.

Not sure I agree with the idea that `Rails == UI`. A lot of the time I'm trying to fight Rails on this as decoupling HTML means refactoring HTML which isn't fun.

I use Rails as a thing that controls boundaries, a glorified CGI really. It's a router, input sanitizer, and general plumbing that spurts out JSON every now and then. It's a mid-level wall in a fortress: server + OS deal with TCP, Rails + Rack handle HTTP, Rails handles raw user input, proxy objects handle Rails, the actual business logic handles proxy objects.

This is the only workflow that allows me and Rails to be long-term friends:

When a request comes in to the API (say, change password) the controller will sanitize and confirm presence of the right params and collect things like the current user. It'll then pass these off to a proxy object e.g. `CustomerPasswordUpdater.update!(user, new_pass)` which will validate length, entropy, etc and perform any necessary crypto. Then that data gets passed off to another proxy object which abstracts over ActiveRecord e.g. `UserPersister`. There's literally nothing inside the model itself. The core `Customer` object is nothing but a decorated window on the relevant data (accessed through unambiguous proxies e.g. `UserReader`, never directly through the model).

This may seem a bit framework-inside-a-framework but the result of this approach is that specific chunks of logic - your logic, the stuff you write on a whiteboard - is clearly identifiable in these small unambiguous classes.

The grand upshot is that I can plan my application on a piece of paper, write all my logic in plain old Ruby with plain old RSpec and plain old gems at breakneck speed, and there's no stupidity like tests hitting the DB or 40 minute test runs in sight.

Once all that's done wiring it up to Rails takes a day or two. At any point I could write a few new proxy objects and drop the whole thing in to Sinatra&Sequel/ Sinatra&Neo4j/ Sinatra&PStore/ Whatever&Whatever. At no point does the logic that defines and encapsulates the actual business problem that needed solved need to be touched.

This seems waaaaaayyy too polished in all respects for an app designed to break the law. I would not be at all surprised if those prebuilt binaries were sending your details off to the MPAA.

Replace "JSON" in their diagram[0] with a variable and you can describe every webapp ever.

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/espresso-logic-raises-1-6m-...

These concerns are remarkably similar to my recent experience[0] with the Apple software update, which nobody on StackExchange seems interested in answering. I'm still very much interested in educated opinions on that matter, if anyone cares to take a look. I'd be particularly grateful if someone with knowledge of TCP could explain to me whether or not all those duplicate ACKs are of concern. (Note that I understand the question's assertions on code signing may not be correct)

  [0]: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/52357/what-is-going-on-with-my-download-of-the-recent-apple-security-update

Although I didn't say it explicitly in the particular sentence you quoted, I did say (pseudo|a)nonymously just after. I'm not suggesting identifiable health records should be searchable by all!

You raise interesting points. I think you are quite correct in saying these things are likely to happen. But I wonder whether hiding such information is actually the most efficient strategy. I mean if some divine power gave us all the ability to see inside each others minds, and ergo all the bullshit, lies, and politicking that makes up a great deal of human interaction was to evaporate, wouldn't the world be a better, more forgiving place? Obviously this is all a bit esoteric, and the game-theoretical analysis of moving from the status quo to a world of almost creepy honesty would almost certainly show that it could never happen, but I find it a useful thought nonetheless.

Government privacy breaches are one of the things I despise most about current Western society. I am - day in, day out - one of those guys calling for ministerial blood.

However I have long thought that proper open access to health data could be as revolutionary as, say, antibiotics. The government can do whatever the hell they like with my data - on the condition that anyone else can too.

Can you imagine what insights could be gained with canonical graph schemas for individual (but (pseudo|a)nonymised) health records and a bit of statistics/ML? I think it would change the world, but it will never happen unless people like us get our hands on it. No amount of management consultants will innovate on the same scale as the tech community; saving lives through Github and AWS sounds like the only thing I'd do with my weekend.

On a side note, I think the same argument could be applied to a great many public services. I recently emailed my doctor a letter from one of my private doctors in PDF format for addition to my records. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, he printed it out and gave it to a secretary to scan it back in, because the Java app that manages this stuff has very tightly controlled boundaries. Shortly after that I overstayed on a trip to a different part of the UK and desperately needed a top-up of my meds. The solution? Print a prescription and mail it to the pharmacy by next-day post, because Scottish NHS and English NHS computers are incapable of communicating with each other. How long would it be after going open source before all this BS is obliterated? I'm thinking months.

Please do.

As much as it was oddly enjoyable to see my life as a 1990's British chick-flick movie trailer, I did not relish all of the details. Like my most liked post in 7 years having 18 likes. Or digging up photographic memories of things long repressed.

How are they rendering these so quickly? There was no noticeable delay in the page load. The HD version is a 4.15MB mp4, with 1.19billion active monthly users that's 4.939PB of video to prerender. I thought perhaps they were rendering it either in the browser and passing a bytestream to the SWF (they're not), or starting the render on the server and streaming it down before it completed (unlikely as the video is coming from akamai). Anyone know?

"Person-hours".

Freer capitalism will maximise choice relative to alternatives. You are correct in saying it will not provide complete choice, for example I don't expect there will ever be a day - even if I had all the money in the world - where I could pay every last person on the planet to chant my name at once. Some things despite being physically possible will always be unattainable. Capitalism maximises the set of choices.

You are not beholden to company executives - you simply stop giving them your attention and money. Only in the case of monopoly and oligopoly can you be at the mercy of executives. Such problems are very real and the solutions much more difficult than those imposed by governments and moral crusaders, but they are necessarily worsened by the same. The reason we - at least in Europe - have a horrible banking industry is because the regulation around starting and running a bank is so complex it has the effect of restricting bank ownership to a very small subset of the population. The same is true for the insurance industries and many others. In the case of banking bail-outs mean that no matter how badly a bank is run, it will never go out of business (in Europe anyway). This is truly absurd, extremely damaging, and 100% the fault of people with moral agendas trying to force it upon the rest of us. You could own a bank, I'd love to consider you for my next account, but the incumbents won't allow that. I am beholden to shitty bankers because of the government.

My point is that there is no way to viably change the status quo - the merits of doing so are irrelevant. We should accept this and not spend our time trying to change others, or wishing they were different, but rather channel our own energies into things constructive for our own time on this earth.

Thanks! I have answered your question in my own mind many times.

I want to live in a world where there is true freedom. I want a purer form of capitalism with heavy reductions in current government control that inhibits the ability of us all to do things today. I want them to live in a world where the very concept that one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd, and certainly not their reality as it is ours.

My solution involves only the absolution of control from those who should never have had in the first place, and enforces nothing on anyone.

I said their chief pleasures 'may' be those things - a list suffixed with 'etc'. My aim was to get the reader to have an idea of the kind of person I was talking about rather than construct an exhaustive but useless and pointless list of their activities.

Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.

I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.

I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.

Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.