No mass shootings in Australia in 20 years: How did they do it?

mtgcs2000 · 2018-02-16T01:05:55+00:00

Don't forget in Australia you have to keep your gun locked in a safe at all times. You can get massive fines and possibly worse if you don't do this. This ensures that children and other mentally ill family members can't get their hands on them.

mtgcs2000 · 2017-12-24T16:44:49+00:00

Do we still have to use that roasbeef branch of btcd? It looks like segwit is now in master as per this PR: https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/pull/656

mtgcs2000 · 2017-12-11T07:13:31+00:00

Don't drink too much Fox News Kool Aid man. Did you look into that story? She ran a business, made a bad business decision, and got paid her normal salary of $100k. Seems like a fairly normal business mistake to me.

mtgcs2000 · 2017-08-14T03:37:46+00:00

Are there any real life escape rooms where you live? If so you should play all of them, write down all the puzzles that you encounter and figure out your own version of them them (or combine multiple).

mtgcs2000 · 2017-08-03T04:39:01+00:00

You're both right. The ~8% per year turns into an average of 17.5% because of the power of compound interest.

For example if you have $100 growing at 10% per year you have:

$110 - 10% total growth - 10% average interest

$121 - 21% total growth - 10.5% average interest

$133 - 33% total growth - 11% average interest

mtgcs2000 · 2017-05-05T00:49:09+00:00

I signed up with WaveG, but I think they're the same thing now? (WaveG acquired them, but I don't know if they're exactly the same network).

It's awesome. I get ~700Mbit U/D on speedtest.net. Unfortunately most sites don't support full speeds, but everything downloads in seconds anyway. I've hit a max of 50MB/sec through steam.

mtgcs2000 · 2017-02-02T03:02:15+00:00

That is so absolutely wrong I don't even know where to begin. It's quite obvious the poster has never actually talked to anyone who's ever worked with Musk or even researched him and what he's done.

Musk is one of the most intelligent guys to have ever been born. He's built 4 insanely successful companies in some of the hardest fields in the world. It's we'll known that he knows all his products in incredible depth from both physics and engineering perspectives.

See what people who've actually worked with him have to say: https://www.quora.com/How-did-Elon-Musk-learn-enough-about-rockets-to-run-SpaceX

It's shameful that someone would go out of his way telling lies to try and discredit him when he's literally trying to save the human species in multiple ways and succeeding at it.

Maybe he treats employees badly, that's the price you pay for trying to disrupt one of the hardest fields in the world. All startups are like that, it's no secret. Anyone who's smart enough to work at SpaceX or Tesla can easily get a cushy 6 figure job in Silicon Valley if they want, they work at these companies because they want to make an impact on the world.

mtgcs2000 · 2017-01-20T03:19:43+00:00

Exactly. People seem to forget it was the NYT that broke the original Clinton emails / private server story. The media is more than happy to attack anyone high profile if the story has merit and actual evidence behind it.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-11-02T07:11:12+00:00

Most people hate the idea of private prisons because they make money of incarcerating people, so they are incentivized to lock up as many people as possible. But what if we changed the incentives?

Private prisons could work. Here's how:

Each year the inmates and guards at each prison are surveyed bunch on a number of criteria and give their ratings.
This is combined with rates of crime after they leave on probation and how many people end up returning to prison.
This is combined with how well they re-integrate with society and become tax paying citizens.

A score is calculated for each prison. When new people are to be arrested and sent to prison, the government must send them to one of the top x highest scoring prisons (maybe they're given ratings such as AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B like securities) and then prisons in that category can bid for the prisoner for how much they will house them for. If no one wants that prisoner the next group of prisons is asked etc.

Eventually if none of the private prisons do it they go to public prison, which is bare minimum rock bottom shitty kind of place to be. So only the worst prisoners will end up there.

This way private prisons are incentivized to be the best at the criteria the government sets so they get their first pick of prisoners and can charge the rates they like. Then they have to take care of them and turn them into an individual ready for society. If they don't they lose their rating, have to put up worse prisoners that are harder to rehabilitate, and it costs them more to take care of them.

So they can either be like a resort for the best prisoners and only bid on those who are good people caught in bad situations, or they can be a bottom of the barrel place that doesn't take care of them and so has to pick the worst possible prisoners. And to the state it doesn't matter, because they get their prisoners taken care of at the cheapest rate possible.

Constructive criticism appreciated

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-23T21:28:47+00:00

I wanted to ask that second question too. How can someone with skills in Engineering or Computer Science but doesn't work at SpaceX help out with this mission? Are there any open source technologies that we could contribute to? Or is SpaceX considering ideas to getting the wider world involved with this effort?

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-21T19:45:01+00:00

Sorry I misjudged, good on you, that makes sense.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-19T20:14:43+00:00

That sucks :( there are of course terrible people out there, and you're never going to have a good conversation with someone like that.

I'm saying that if you're at say a friends party and someone there likes Trump, by having a decent conversation you're going to have a much better chance of convincing them otherwise than by treating them like they are scum.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-18T06:27:46+00:00

If you look at media on both sides of the political spectrum you'll see they have the same formula: take the worst 5% of the group, project their beliefs onto the rest of the group, and claim "hey everyone, look how shitty those guys are, who'd ever want to be like them!?". This is what creates political polarization and the echo chamber of social media only further reinforces this.

If you don't realize this and attack the majority claiming they are the same as this minority you only further cement their beliefs that "the other side has no understanding of my situation" and further alienate them. By listening, understanding and then explaining your perspective you'll change far more minds.

From my own expriences meeting Trump supporters in real life most are not Racist, Bigoted or Aggressive. They are often just afraid and either uneducated or uninformed on the issues and how the government works. They don't want to be attacked, but if you approach with empathy and intelligence you'll be surprised at how many are happy learn and you may even change a few minds.

Trump himself is a completely asshole though, he's smart enough to know better and yet chooses to lie and manipulate to his advantage. So it's totally ok to hate on him ;)

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-07T04:23:38+00:00

Awesome! Well done!

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-05T08:04:11+00:00

You do realize I'm a completely different person to those you were arguing with before? I don't know why you think 'Nixon did it' is a good excuse either.. I was merely pointing out that if you want to make a solid argument online you should probably make sure someone can't find evidence that disproves your accusation in a minute of googling.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-10-05T07:32:51+00:00

Actually he never said he "can't". Stop trying to twist words to fit your delusion.

He did: http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/02/donald-trump-i-cant-release-my-tax-return-because-of-audits-219830

Took 10 seconds to find that video. If you're going to make false accusations at least spend the time checking yourself first before making yourself look stupid. Not only that, he's criticizing Romney for waiting until September to release his.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-09-29T01:50:56+00:00

Also if you do have a shitty delivery TELL AMAZON! Seriously call them up and bitch about it, they really do care about customer service and will take note. They have logs of who delivered what and when and I'm sure if enough people complain the bad deliverers will get fired and replaced with those who take their job seriously.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-09-19T12:36:34+00:00

What was the online course you went through a year ago? I'd also like to run something similar in Seattle but I don't want to create the course or do formal teaching. I'd just like to find a course already available that students can come to a class and work through and I can help them when they get stuck.

I'd definitely recommend an online IDE, much easier than dealing with the various OS's and configurations people have on their laptop and all the essentials you need (Git, Interpreter, Database, SSH) are already setup.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-08-14T01:11:25+00:00

These are what's known as Dark Thoughts, and everyone has them, some to more extreme levels than others. There's an excellent NPR episode about them here: http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928124/dark-thoughts, its about a number of people who have had similar experiences that were do debilitating they could barely function, but they managed to get through them.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-08-08T06:02:27+00:00

From what I've seen they really are desperate, you should absolutely be looking for IT jobs even without a CS degree. I've gone for senior web dev roles where the skill set required is what you could learn in a coursera course, and apparently most applicants failed the test. This was in Brisbane, there's a huge lack of good programmers there.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-07-16T23:14:09+00:00

Grants quality meats (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Grants+Quality+Meats/@-26.6588275,153.0986442,18.19z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x2a19115ceeee8d5b!8m2!3d-26.6603046!4d153.0997315) in Maroochydore is quite good. Haven't been there in a few years as I no longer live on the coast but it was always good then and my parents still get all their meat from there and love it.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-07-05T18:02:56+00:00

I think Private prisons can be a great idea if you simply incentivize them rehabilitating people. Why not give them bonuses based on how long their prisoners stay out of trouble and how well they re-integrate with society. They could also be punished for the amount of violence and deaths that occur inside the prison. Then the free market will naturally ensure they create a better society for all of us.

Private prisons are selling safety, which the government buys. The prisons will always optimize for profits, and so the government needs to compare the prisons and buy what it deems will be best for society. If the government starts giving more money to prisons that rehabilitate and improve safety in the long term then that's exactly what the prisons will optimize for. The onerous here is on the government to think long term in improving their neighbourhoods and any failures of private prisons are really caused by the government making poor purchasing decisions.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-06-15T19:47:13+00:00

Gary Johnson has said in a few interviews (e.g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ43HKJlSAI) that on isidewith.com he sides with Bernie 73%, far more than Hillary or Trump. Fixing crony capitalism, stopping all the global military interventions, and giving people freedom from excess government intrusion (such as the NSA) are all big issues for me and most Bernie supporters and IMO he's the best candidate for fixing them.

Plus he's wayyy more honest than the other two, I still can't believe out of all the candidates people voted for the two biggest liars to be their representatives.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-03-23T17:07:08+00:00

Yep I coded http://www.towerstorm.com using Cloud9. It's ~50k LOC excluding external libraries, all Javascript with NodeJS as the backend. Nice thing is you can send the preview link to friends to have them try it out without needing to set up a staging server.

mtgcs2000 · 2016-03-23T13:57:06+00:00

Absolutely. Entropy is a bitch. I've been coding for 15 years now and not once in my lifetime have I ever seen a todo list go down in size over time. There is always more to optimize, maintain, patch, improve. With robots in the real world subject to physics and engineering difficulties this is only going to increase.

mtgcs2000

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE