Depends on what contracting work you are doing. The average web/mobile dev can't charge that much anywhere in the US. Company that I work for itself (an app dev company) does not charge more than $120/hour/dev to their SF clients.
"An always listening device that record all your private conversations, that may or may not have been compromised (or will be compromised) by the private and government entities for surveillance and profit purposes has been the best selling product in the USA (where people refuse to give-up rights to own guns because they don't trust the government)"
Ok, I’ll bite. How does Alexa/home/whatever differ from your laptop? your laptop has a 10x more dangerous attack surface with a full featured web browser and a load of internet-connected apps, and yes it has a microphone too.
Laptop will differ in how much control you have over security. Attack vectors are less likely to be replicable across all users. Smart phone/watch would work better in your point vs Alexa.
I think the main feature of Functional programming is not avoiding side effects but abstraction. You can compose different kinds of powerful abstractions and programmers are free to choose their "language" of abstractions, compared to "X Oriented" languages that forces programmer to think in certain terms and limits in ways you can create layers of abstractions.
So basically it will replace all heuristics/greedy optimization algorithms. I am wondering if ML can come up with better sorting algorithms, or I guess when you can use ML for end strategy of optimization you don't have to sort!
That's a good point. My mother is 80 (in a few months) and it's all about life expectancy. Her mother lived to 95. She is in good health. Should she assume the best or worst case? The choice she makes will greatly effect her lifestyle.
I feel like we need a permanent solution to this so that we don't have to panic and raise awareness every year. If we create a fund to protect Net Neutrality and "out-lobby" the ISPs in Washington would be great. If we just donate 10% of our internet bill every month we can definitely become a force they can't out-lobby without going bankrupt.
China has around 70% [1] of the Bitcoin mining power, and the top three miners hold around 50%, which is so massive, it makes everyone else seem negligible, like an experimental error.
China has the advantage of cheap power, so where you pay $0.14kW/h they pay a fraction of that amount. You can mine crypto, but don't expect it to become profitable unless you have access to cheap power and are ready to break through some of the hardware costs......
Or if you have free student trials for things like AWS/AZURE and can just spin up an instance and run till the trail dies.
Or if you have nationalized power like Venezuela does.
Cheap electricity + ASIC Miners means chinese companies outcompete just about everyone else. Mining becomes unprofitable. Some alt coins manage to sidestep this by ensuring an ASIC for them would be an ASIC for general computing, therefore a CPU.
I think he is referring to the mining operations themselves mainly being in China. Not that the majority of bitcoin is owned by chinese individuals. At least, not yet.
I wonder if the gravitation waves stretches the Space-time in such a way that it takes 2 seconds longer for the photons of GRB to travel "on top of it" and reach earth.
By davidhydes comment [1] it is because the gamma burst actually happens after the merger. It is caused by the ejected mass slowing down due to friction.
My layman's interpretation is that this is cherenkov radiation on an astronomical scale, though that suggests it is caused by charged particles, which neutrons aren't.
