micaksica

> This crappy voting system didn't write itself.

One of the downsides of programming being easily accessible and easy to get a job in is that there is no required standards body to write code. There's no way to fix this. The best you can do is refuse to hire people that worked on these or similar systems, and I'm sure they will find jobs somewhere within the government-contractor software engineering space.

IMO Occam's razor ends up here. Electronic voting systems do two things very well: obfuscate the system in a way that is relatively incomprehensible to a layman, and provide plausible deniability in the case of manipulation. Even if manipulation is discovered, you can chalk it up to a "bug" and re-run the manipulated election again. People are stupid, and most ordinary people only want to believe there's malice involved when they've run out of more pleasing cognitive options.

I believe that if this site enumerated all the ways that you can maliciously use computerized vs. paper voting systems, we would show a hell of a lot more benefits to a manipulator than a voter.

> If I go see a doctor, I have no idea if I will end up with a $40, $400, $4000, or $40,000 bill until the bill comes months later and I have to pay it. NO IDEA.

This is what's really strange about the American healthcare system. For everything else in America you can either get a price up front or an estimate of total costs up front. Why should going to the doctor be any different than going to a mechanic? Pay advertised flat rates for issue diagnosis, and get estimates for the problem.

Yes, in cases of emergency you can't really shop around too much, but the majority of the time you're going to a doctor, you could at least call and get estimates of how much things will cost. It's not even possible to do this with most healthcare organizations. If you call your doctor's reception and ask "how much will it cost for this visit?" they'll tell you they don't do billing and they won't know until it's processed by insurance.

Price transparency in the healthcare market - or at least some decent estimate of it - would be a great thing to see. American healthcare is ridiculously inefficient because it appears wholly designed to be byzantine.

> Unbelievable that these companies take security for their prized assets way less seriously than I do.

A lot of engineering teams unfortunately see strong security as a hurdle to fast development, and/or security is put as a lower priority to feature development or other deadlines. A lot of business units see security as a cost sink and have the "there's only so much we can do to protect ourselves, if they want it they can get it" or "it won't happen to us" mentality.

On the other hand, some companies have security built deeply into their lifecycle, and really care.

No. I hear both simultaneously as well.

> their graphs (at least on Android) have no labled Y axis!

It's the same on iOS.

I can't say I'm happy with Robinhood. It's dumbing down something that can get you into a world of financial pain if you don't know what you're doing.

If they want to target people that don't understand what they are playing with, they shouldn't be giving away options/crypto access/margin buying to people that don't understand those concepts. Expect a lot of people to lose a lot of money. /r/stupidfinance has some pretty great posts in which people were left in the cold after playing with fire in RH.

So far, that's been me at every n+5 years or so.

While I guess this is something, I would be curious to know what types of users are being targeted with these NSLs, and for what crimes. While it's natural to think "Islamic extremism and terrorism" as that's the usual natsec rallying cry, I wouldn't be surprised to see these being used for other purposes.

Reddit says they were making about $500K a day in mining fees.

There are plenty of absolute crackpot petitions on there at this stage that undermine the legitimacy of this one by being placed alongside it. I believe this motion is futile as well.

I'm not very fond of Tim's product, but I agree with him in his perspectives on SF and the Bay Area in general. Too much of it feels toxic at this point, and it has felt that way (to me) since about 2011 or so. It pushed me further and further into a state of introversion. While I used to go out and talk to people, I got tired of people wanting to talk "the mono-conversation" as he called it. It's been great for professional development as I have a lot more time to tinker with things, but it certainly hasn't helped me too much socially. I don't really care about who's funding who, who paid for what, what shit that founder just bought in Hayes Valley, or who's sleeping with whomever. I just want to poke at things, find bugs, and make shit.