Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
I think he is referring to the F-35 only here. On military discussion forums it is the consensus that the F-35 is superior to everything else out there with the only exception being that the F-22 has superior air to air combat capabilities.
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
I worked on online casino software for several years and we had a number of bugs like this. They would usually involve someone writing a client to hit our API directly and fiddling with the xml messages. The operators would usually catch the issues within hours, turn off the game and often deny the players their winnings, if it was a legitimate win. Several people wound up in jail for exploits.

In the early days of the company it was a fairly significant problem with incidents pretty frequently. The lack of QA and a release process really bit them a few times as well. A game was put into production with the result hard coded to a win. Goes to show that just because a company makes software that deals with money and is financially successful it does not mean they are at all competent. It took 9 years for them to turn things around and transform the company into a highly effective dev shop, at least by industry standards. I am proud I was part of that. Unfortunately the industry had some major problems in 2009-2010 and they ended up having to find a buyer who even more unfortunately does not appreciate or understand developers or software development.

We did integrations with many other gambling software companies and not a single organization was what I consider competent. I would love to see a new company with serious technical chops break into the world of online gambling and school the crusty behemoths. Hard to do however because of the network effects and importance of reputation and deal making.

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
I agree there is a lot of fraud and greed in the cryptocoin community which makes it risky for people new to it or the naive. For people who have done some reading or hung around for a while it's usually pretty easy to spot most scams. In cases like Monero it was probably a something the developers missed. The important thing to note is that the community fixed that oversight within a month or two.
Comment · 12 years ago
Premining and instamining (where they just start the coin with x coins in the devs wallet) are fairly common practices among new cryptocoins. They are usually frowned upon by the community but not always as the coin developers will sometimes keep a 1-2% for use promoting and developing the coin. Which most people consider fair. An 80% premine like bytecoin is ridiculous.

It is very easy to tell if a coin has been premined by checking the state of the block chain for the number of outstanding coins. The coins with large premines are usually outed withing an hour of their release.

Comment · 12 years ago
Love the story, reminds me of the early days of Primecoin where I had my first exposure to cryptocurrency code. I spent the first two months of it fighting to stay ahead of the curve as well and had a blast. Not nearly as successfully as Dave however and my wife wasn't too happy about me spending every waking hour when home from my full time job on it.
Comment · 12 years ago
It looks like they may have added some growing possibly linear function to the unemployment rate instead of a constant starting in 2009. All the better to push their fear mongering agenda/sales tactic I guess.
Comment · 12 years ago
She doesn't mention what methodology and practices she used to reach her conclusions. Did she study the same type of bugs in the same type of environment and climate in an area that was not close to Chernobyl or a nuclear plant? Did she take steps to avoid confirmation bias, such as double blind sampling? How did she gather and analyse her statistics? Without reasonable explanations for those and more her data is not sound.
Comment · 12 years ago
The issue is that by providing housing subsidies more money would be put into the demand side of the rental market. This would most likely cause rents to rise as there is now more money to spend.

In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.

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