SegFaultx64's comments

I know you said "Other than treating what is possibly ADD" but I went down that road for decades and the only thing that _really_ ended up making a difference for me was Adderall.

What’s funny about this take is I can’t tell if it’s super leftist and “lock up the bankers” or super capitalist and “we will never know show did this”.

Schrödinger's Comment

She wasn't rope soloing she just didn't aid climb as most routes on El Cap are typically done.

Seems like pretty clearly GP isn't familiar with the definition of dynamic programming in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming

Re: Alex Honnold

Climbers in general have a really lanky build. They are basically carrying their bodyweight up long walls so being bulky is definitely a disadvantage. That's not to say that some climbers aren't extremely muscular. But, for example, Adam Ondra is probably one of the strongest climbers ever and he doesn't look absurdly muscular.

Also many who end up taking these loans don't have reliable access to transportation, making shopping around logistically difficult.

A few companies do, including Uber. The real issue is that the American banking system is insanely slow and outdated so transferring large sums rarely is way more economical than doing small sums frequently. ACH takes 1-3 days. Push-to-debit is expensive and not universal. Cutting checks daily would be a nightmare and raises a whole other set of issues around check cashing.

People are working on this from a tech perspective, but we are not there yet. In other countries this would be a lot easier to implement because the underlying banking infra is just more sophisticated and modern.

Yep, absolutely. However there are ways to bring that into "the system" and regulate and monitor it just like other payroll functions. There is no reason that payday advances couldn't be done without those negative externalities if they we setup and structured correctly, rather than just your boss slipping you cash.

The way it actually works is that people get payed before their paycheck if they need it at zero interest. When executed correctly there is no debt the money they took is just deducted from their paycheck.

This is how payday advances worked for most people before the age of complex payroll systems. You used to be able to ask your boss to get payed early for the time you had already worked. Now that is really hard because "the system isn't set up like that"

You can find out more by googling it.

Payday loans are much more akin to debt bondage, in that they are _often_ the start of a debt cycle that is extremely difficult to break.

There are far less exploitative options out there for providing this service though. See emerging fintech offerings like: https://www.earnin.com/, https://www.dave.com/. There is also a concept called earned wage access that helps solve this issue and there are a few emerging players in that space as well.

"The invisible hand" isn't perfect and sometimes regulation helps push people towards better options. We don't let anyone provide medical services and assume the market will sort it out, so there is at least a _potential_ argument that the same should be true for financial services.

We went really deep on this recently, as we looked to migrate off Keen.io for that exact reason (only time based queries, also it's really slow).

We didn't look at MongoDB due to too many people on the team having been burned by it in the past, but after looking at a lot of stuff we settled on Redshift with a Postgres database in front of it using dblink and foreign data wrapper. This allowed us to have extremely fast reads of common queries with only a 5 minute lag on data becoming available.

It's amazing what you can build with Postgres. I might write up a blog post about our exact strategy if that would be interesting to people.

That exists (or at least it did). I think the name of the app is Flutter, I know Jason Calcanis invested in it and they presented at Launch Fest last year.

And, fun fact, the Olympic village is now a prison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Correctional_Instituti...

I agree with a lot of this. Especially work around credit algorithms and alike is fraught with immoral (or at best amoral) choices.

The question is if it is more immoral than working on something like a self-driving car, that is going to yank jobs out from under a huge chunk of the population. I really don't know what the answer is.

Market efficiency and the number of humans involved are unrelated.

When people talk about market efficiency they are talking about the markets ability to quickly allocate capital where it is needed at a "fair" price.

I think the comments about the industry being largely parasitic are generally correct. They real issue is that if there is a 100 billion dollar transaction taking place and you can make that happen 1% more efficiently any fee you charge up to a billion dollars is a "good deal" from a purely economic standpoint. That is unless someone is able or willing to deliver that same gain for less fee.

That is exactly the arms race that has so inflated the sector.

Not going to comment specifically on the judgement (I agree in general terms).

However that is a vast mis-understanding of what a lot of the brain power at an investment bank goes towards. It isn't just equities it is fixed-income and economics as well.

But beyond that it isn't just about valuation. It is everything from working on how to actually clear transactions, building dark pools and similar platforms, research and building very real tech on blockchain, building security and infrastructure tooling.

Goldman literally invented a programming language (although it is showing it's age at this point). They make very robust Open Source contributions: https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections (just an example).

Regardless of if what they do is immoral or silly or both, they are building interesting stuff and solving hard problems.

A better organization to direct a dig like that at would someone like Bridgewater, they really are just trying to value equites, and fixed-income.

Yep, there is also a pretty decent tech scene driven by a couple of local successes (mostly RPI affiliated):

Apprenda Commerce Hub Vicarious Visions etc...

Cleveland is fine if you are reasonably well off. Like many run down urban areas it is currently going through a substantial revival (driven mostly by "hipsters" opening vegan restraunts and the like.)

I can only imagine it would be miserable to be truly poor in Cleveland, especially as it continues to gentrify.

I second Troy (I hate Albany but that is personal preference). They are also reasonably safe considering how improvised they have been in recent times. Prices in Troy are already starting to climb, so get while the getting is good.

One thing I will say is that both are very small compared to a NYC feel, and public transit is awful.

This has been brewing for a while. I don't know most of the people involved but they post youtube videos of their meetings. isaacs is involved and get is the creator of npm so that is a good sign. As I understand it this is a direct backlash against joyent's governance of node and it's slow release cycle.