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Saved by @Jacobtldr

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

 How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.
For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."
One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt
And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
"Hey patio11 could this happen in traditional finance?"

Ill-timed liquidations can and do, but attacking someone doing something not-risky to force a liquidation is harder, because of many built in safeguards.
One, you can actually borrow in your unit of account (e.g. dollars), and $1 = $1, so you can't convince a brokerage that a $100k debt is actually $130k.

Two, if you regulated financial institution has a goof in your data feeds causes you to mechanically disadvantage retail...
... your most likely outcome is having an internal meeting and saying "Which do we dislike more, covering their losses out of our equity OR getting our knuckles rapped by the regulators, paying a fine, then covering the losses with our own equity?" and choose door #1.
Three, it is enormously hard to pervert the most popular real markets in the world and that is a game you actually don't want to win, because the first prize is frequently go-directly-to-jail.

This is not the consensus viewpoint among engineers, who do not have good calibration.
Like if you somehow did security research against e.g. the monthly Treasury auction and somehow caused it to invert expectations around reality, that would plausibly have $X0 billion in consequences and you could make out like a bandit.
And also literally everyone you had talked to for the last several years would be taken out for tea by friendly serious federal agents.
("Do you really think that would happen?"

For the treasury auction? Oh heck yes I do. Expect a turf war between the money people and the terrorism people over who gets to lead the investigation.)
Crypto enthusiasts would probably suggest me to disagree with them on this, and I actually do not at all:

The financial system is in part of broader systems of state control. Seriously attacking it at scale would be treated indistinguishably from "kinetic" war.
"So is the state going to seriously come after crypto people then?"

While they flatter themselves into thinking they materially challenge the government, following their own logic pretty closely, if this were actually true their conferences would attract precision munitions.

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.

The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.

This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.

"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
TECH
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):


Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.


"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."


Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
CRYPTO
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.


I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.
FOOD

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Jared Spool
Jared Spool
@jmspool
A common misunderstanding about Agile and “Big Design Up Front”:

There’s nothing in the Agile Manifesto or Principles that states you should never have any idea what you’re trying to build.

You’re allowed to think about a desired outcome from the beginning.

It’s not Big Design Up Front if you do in-depth research to understand the user’s problem.

It’s not BDUF if you spend detailed time learning who needs this thing and why they need it.

It’s not BDUF if you help every team member know what success looks like.

Agile is about reducing risk.

It’s not Agile if you increase risk by starting your sprints with complete ignorance.

It’s not Agile if you don’t research.

Don’t make the mistake of shutting down critical understanding by labeling it Bg Design Up Front.

It would be a mistake to assume this research should only be done by designers and researchers.

Product management and developers also need to be out with the team, conducting the research.

Shared Understanding is the key objective


Big Design Up Front is a thing to avoid.

Defining all the functionality before coding is BDUF.

Drawing every screen and every pixel is BDUF.

Promising functionality (or delivery dates) to customers before development starts is BDUF.

These things shouldn’t happen in Agile.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.
TECH
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Aditya Todmal
Aditya Todmal
@AdityaTodmal
The absolute best 15 scanners which experts are using.

Got these scanners from the following accounts:

1. @Pathik_Trader
2. @sanjufunda
3. @sanstocktrader
4. @SouravSenguptaI
5. @Rishikesh_ADX

Share for the benefit of everyone.

Listing all scanners from @Pathik_Trader Sir first.

1. Open

2. 80-20 Reversal Setup


3. Fake

4. Trapping Inside Bar (Positional Setup)
TECH , STOCKLEARNINGS , STOCKS
R for the Rest of Us
R for the Rest of Us
@rfortherest
Setting up Git/GitHub to work with R/RStudio can be challenging.

Here's a thread to walk you through the process step by step.

This thread also lives in blog post form. #rstats

Preamble: the best overall resource, and one I rely on extensively, is Happy Git with R by @JennyBryan and @jimhester_.

If you have additional questions about Git/GitHub + R/RStudio, this should be your first

The first step to set things up is to install Git.

Chapter 6 of Happy Git with R lays out the process for Mac, Windows, and Linux users.

I’m on a Mac so Git came pre-installed on my computer. I was able to verify that I had Git installed using the terminal in RStudio.


The next step is to configure Git.

This is covered in Chapter 7 of Happy Git with R , though I show what I believe to be a slightly easier process using the edit_git_config() function from the {usethis} package.
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Mateusz Czeladka | Plan \u20b3
Mateusz Czeladka | Pla...
@matiwinnetou
(1) Since some people laugh at Cardano project and it's peer review aspect, let me share a story from work for all of you
(2) There is company called Databricks and they open sourced recently a technology called: https://t.co/gpZyKKiMVD . This technology is super important

(3) In BigData delta allows one to perform DELETE and MERGE operations contrary to Hadoop + Hive where this is not possible, seeking through many partitions finding customer data to remove and then rewriting it is not only expensive as an operation but also very dangerous

(4) This promising technology is something that many companies, which have big data turn into as they need to be GDPR compliant.
(5) I was always reading and accepting all details from their website as given and the "truth"

(6) There is however an amazing Principal Developer at our company that found some of the claims from their website as dubious, e.g. ACID claims on such a distributed file system
(7) It turns out this is not the first time this company advertises something that is simply not true

(8) on another occasion this company made untrue claims about Cassandra database and this then became source of disputes e.g by dr. @martinkl - my fave expert in distributed systems
(9) All professional developers also know of course famous Jepsen tests ->
TECH

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AKASH
AKASH
@AKASHBH95801446
THE SCIENCE BEHIND YAJNA

Fire is, of course, one of the greatest discovery of mankind. Our control over the fire dramatically changed the entire human habits; earlier it was used to cook food, protection from animals and to stay warm.


Among the many applications of fire, one is Yajna (यज्ञ, yajña); also called as Havana (हवन) or Agnihotra (अग्निहोत्र).
Yajna is elaborately described in Yajurveda. In Yajurveda, Yajna is the greatest among all works (Karman). One can purify his /her soul by performing Yajna.

In Vedic culture, it is thought that the holy fire is the mediator between Gods and us; when the offerings are made to Yajna with chanting mantras, it directly reaches the Gods, who bless the people with rains, food, health, and good luck.

According to Apastamba Sutra, the definition of Yajna is Vedic sacrifice; an act by which we surrender something for gods e.g. grains (Anna), pulse, milk and milk product (ghee, butter, curd) fruits, plant juice (soma), etc.

As we said; Yajna is the contact medium for gods and

to seek their blessings.

There are many types of Yajna performed by Hindus for e.g.,

1. Rajsuya Yajna
2. Ashwamedha Yajna
3. Chaaturmasya Yajna
4. Vaajpey Yajna
5. Purushmedha Yajna
6. Sarvamedha Yajna
RELIGION
Aditya Todmal
Aditya Todmal
@AdityaTodmal
The absolute best 15 scanners which experts are using.

Got these scanners from the following accounts:

1. @Pathik_Trader
2. @sanjufunda
3. @sanstocktrader
4. @SouravSenguptaI
5. @Rishikesh_ADX

Share for the benefit of everyone.

Listing all scanners from @Pathik_Trader Sir first.

1. Open

2. 80-20 Reversal Setup


3. Fake

4. Trapping Inside Bar (Positional Setup)
TECH , STOCKLEARNINGS , STOCKS
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Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3
Anu Satheesh 🇮🇳...
@AnuSatheesh5
Thirumalai Murugan Kovil
#Panpoli
#TamilNaduTemples 🚩

Thirumalai Murugan Temple is located in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu. Muruga is worshipped as Thirumalai kumarasamy. Temple is situated near Kerala border and known to be where Shri Murugan gave darshan to Rishi Agasthiar


Devi is worshipped in the temple as Thirumalai Kaali amman

Sthala Puranam says that, there was a priest named Poovanbhattar of Thirumalai Kaali amman. Murugar appeared in a dream of the bhattar and said to find a Vigraham, lying in particular place which is of Thirumalaikumaran


Bhattar conveyed the news to the Pandalam Raja and they went to find out the vigraham. Surprisingly ants showed the way to find the Vigraham. Thus Murugan vigraham was found and Prathista was done here. There is a lake with pure water on the top of the hill


which is said to be created by Agasthiyar. It is believed that kannaki of
Chilapathikaram visited here before going to Kerala. Sapthamathrukkal also worshipped Murugan here. Kanthashashti Thiruvizha is very famous here.

Om Muruga
Muruganukku Harohara
🙏🕉🙏
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ArmaniTalks \U0001f399\U0001f525
ArmaniTalks 🎙🔥...
@ArmaniTalks
A relationship begins to get stiff when excessive patterns begin to form.

Too many patterns leads to a boring, predictable, logical lifestyle.

Get the emotions involved.

Do something spontaneous out of the blue moon & flip the script.

'What's wrong with the patterns?'

Nothing is wrong with patterns.

However, there is a problem when all you have are patterns.

It's boring.

'Can you explain why?'

Sure 👇

The thing with relationships is that it's meant to be an emotional experience.

It's very difficult to logically explain love, right?

'Right.'

Well this is where you want to steer the ship the right way.

1. Too emotional is bad.

2. Too logical is bad.

Let me break it down.

1. Too emotional

If a relationship is completely ruled by emotions, then it's too volatile.

You will never reach productivity if you are aimlessly only following each others emotions.

This lifestyle tarnishes any structure for the couple.

'So why do people do it?'

Because it's fun.

You may ruled by this stage in the honeymoon phase.

Normal.

You'll be so spontaneous that it almost becomes a lifestyle.

But it's hard to level up your life when you're too spontaneous.

Avoid.
LIFE
Tashny Sukumaran
Tashny Sukumaran
@tashny
Surendra Ananth @surendraananth, you violated my conditional consent. I assented to unprotected intimate relations with you on the STRICT condition that you tell me if you have relations with anyone else. You failed to do so, and I became ill as a direct consequence.

You refused to reveal your own STI results to me, but claimed to others they were negative and alleged I had multiple other partners, slut-shaming me. You gaslit me saying you had told me about your other partners.

You called up @justice_sisters and @SistersinIslam to tell them I was crazy, jilted. You rebuffed attempts to organise a community mediation so we could address matters. You said I was crazy for speaking to your boss and father in an attempt to keep other women safe.

You have a PATTERN OF BEHAVIOUR of misogyny, harassment and sheer disrespect for women. This was sent to a friend of mine who has never expressed interest in you and has a partner.


You think women are playthings, notches on the bedpost. You, @surendraananth, are no human rights advocate.
LAW