I don't like prediction markets, but I think a lot of people in this thread are assuming that gambling vs. not is clear cut.
Insurance was illegal at different times in history because it was considered gambling. Ditto for commodity trading.
Even you look at the structure of a futures contact, the basics look really similar to a bet that can be traded with someone else.
The main differences are the regulatory environment, and the intention the actors in the market have.
Commodities, options, and futures are all legitimately used to hedge against future outcomes. The "gamble" (placing money on a future outcome) is a mechanism for the main goal: protection against instability.
When you look at stocks and - in particular - derivatives, it starts to look a lot closer to how gambling is structured. I'm pro stock market, but that doesn't mean I won't admit that the line between it and gambling is pretty hard to draw. It's a lot more grey than people give credit for
Election prediction is an interesting one. The first digital prediction market on the US was election only, and it has a $500 cap. It was run by a university and had a limited scope, but it still be a surprising amount.
It did a better job of predicting election outcomes than the polls. For markets without a cap, companies have used them to have against a politician that would pass policy that's can for their business.
This doesn't mean we should have them, but there is utility. It's just not worth the trade-offs
Prediction markets are a superior method for determining public sentiment, and understanding public sentiment is useful for many reasons. It can guide economic decisions, picking policy, etc.
Basically, prediction markets are for public sentiment what free markets are for supply and demand. They create an emergent system that balances/optimizes variables across a large domain.
Is their "greyness" between gambling and day trading? Sure.
Prediction markets are obviously, blatantly, gambling. There is no "greyness", we've skipped the slippery slope and gone straight to the bottom of the ravine.
The point is that it's a direct response to Forbes list of richest individuals. It's the same format, but arguing that measuring how much someone earned is a bad metric
While there's some truth to this, the early investments in Palantir and Facebook from In-Q-Tel were tiny. For Palantir, the contracts with a single government agency were far more capital than the investment.
The vacuum pressure is real. Using a system with the skip locked technique + polling caused massive DB perf issues as the queue depth grew. The query to see the current jobs in the queue ended up being the main performance bottleneck, which cause slower throughput, which caused a larger queue depth, which etc.
Scaling the workers sometimes exacerbates the problem because you run into connection limits or polling hammering the DB.
I love the idea of pg as a queue, but I'm a more skeptical of it after dealing with it in production
Is your comment referring to this project specifically?
Because the docs say:
PgQue avoids that whole class of problems. It uses snapshot-based batching and TRUNCATE-based table rotation instead of per-row deletion.
Would be great if you could specify if you had problems with the exact implementation linked by op or if you did write about a different thing, thanks!
> Bulk loads and deletes can be accomplished by adding or removing partitions, if the usage pattern is accounted for in the partitioning design. Dropping an individual partition using DROP TABLE, or doing ALTER TABLE DETACH PARTITION, is far faster than a bulk operation. These commands also entirely avoid the VACUUM overhead caused by a bulk DELETE.
It was a lot more annoying earlier then pg 13 though, maybe you're just reminiscing things from the 2010s?
> Scaling the workers sometimes exacerbates the problem because you run into connection limits or polling hammering the DB
Design question here (not familiar enough with this approach with Pg)
Would an alternative be to have a small pool of pollers that would "distribute" the records to a later pool of workers instead of having workers directly poll?
Because it's Afrika Bambaataa. He invented entirely new techniques for making music - which is already enough for him to be relevant here - that influences what many of us listen to daily.
I think a big piece missing from these conversations is compliance frameworks and customer trust. Of your selling to enterprise customers or governments, they want to go through your stack, networking, security, audit logs, and access controls with a fine toothed comb.
Everything you do that isn't "normal" is another conversation you need to have with an auditor plus each customer. Those eat up a bunch of time and deals take longer to close.
Right or wrong, these decisions make you less "serious" and therefore less credible in the eyes of many enterprise customers. You can get around that perception, but it takes work. Not hosting on one of the big 3 needs to be decided with that cost in mind
This is a weird one. It absolutely should not be haphazardly added as a rider. The 0.4 per container is also insane. But, this really was an unintended loophole of the 2018 farm bill. Most plants grow THCa, which turns into Delta-9 when heated. They were ignorant and straight up forgot to specify anything except Delta-9.
Cannabis is a bioremediator and absorbs basically every environmental toxin from the ground (pesticides, heavy metals, etc.). Extraction (for CBD and THC oil) increases the concentration of any present toxins.
The only way you know of the problem is by thoroughly testing every batch. Pesticides that are safe at low levels can get concentrated and become really problematic at high levels.
States where marijuana is legal require all of this testing, so the products are much safer. Hemp-derived THC does not require these tests. (Same is true for CBD, but that's a while other conversation...)
It's night and day. It's also about access. The labs in legal states usually just test for more things. For a while, it was one or two labs plus a Cole extraction companies that were pushing the testing boundaries. Then, relation caught up and pushed the broader testing on to everyone. Then there were managed batch sizes (though these got too small in Oregon). Hemp does not have the same regulations, and unregulated states have way less infrastructure (including access to good labs).
Nobody wants to harm their customers, but it 100% happened in the early days. A lot of harm is/was not immediately obvious. Of was repeated exposure to harmful chemicals. Good intentions are great, but resources and incentives still matter. Nobodyv wants to get hacked, but building a new feature over hardening is what stops you from getting yelled at
So their team is anonymous. While I understand the desire for that, trust is built through transparency. It's really hard to convince someone who's job, career, it potentially even life is at risk to trust random strangers on the Internet.
It seems like they need people willing to stretch their name to create credibility.
The point is that how does the whistleblower know whether or not they are not whistleblowing to the very people or allies to those being reported on if who is behind it?
To pull an example out of thin air, would you risk whistleblowing to TruthWave on Amazon if you knew that the Washington Post was running TruthWave?
Or, would you whistleblow on Tesla, if you knew any out of a hundred companies was behind it, like Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, ...? About the only "big" entity I MIGHT trust would be Berkshire Hathaway..
I think this trust (in the Post) is now misplaced, and in the case of the Post and Amazon, you absolutely shouldn't. But perhaps it always should have been with any single newspaper.
This is why whistleblowers now often work with two different organisations with different ownership/politics, or in different branches of media, or with a journalist backed by the ICIJ (e.g. the Mossack Fonseca leak investigation was shared with the ICIJ).
But yes, any generic online whistleblowing broker with dozens of concurrent cases is going to be such an obvious target for state or organised crime interference. Anyone making a business of brokering whistleblowing for a cut of the reward is an obvious risk.
Then the service seems to provide zero value, there are already “untrusted” platforms. If i have to anonymize myself anyways, i can just post on Reddit/Twitter/Orange site directy.
Ah, that's a shame they went that way. What I tell people when they're first getting into GCP is that it's gonna be a passion to set up what you want. But, the offerings are great, and once it's working, it'll just work
There is a large amount of what _might_ be described as astroturfing on the part of vercel to push Next. More charitably, vercel/the next community publishes a very large number of good tutorials/boilerplates/etc that are built on top of next.js.
Oh interesting - I haven't been on their starting page in years. I'm surprised getting started with vite isn't higher up. That takes 5 minutes and doesn't require a full framework.
That said, starting with react router or expo is probably the right call depending on the project needs. Routing is not something you want to do yourself, and react native is pretty unfriendly without expo
Insurance was illegal at different times in history because it was considered gambling. Ditto for commodity trading.
Even you look at the structure of a futures contact, the basics look really similar to a bet that can be traded with someone else.
The main differences are the regulatory environment, and the intention the actors in the market have.
Commodities, options, and futures are all legitimately used to hedge against future outcomes. The "gamble" (placing money on a future outcome) is a mechanism for the main goal: protection against instability.
When you look at stocks and - in particular - derivatives, it starts to look a lot closer to how gambling is structured. I'm pro stock market, but that doesn't mean I won't admit that the line between it and gambling is pretty hard to draw. It's a lot more grey than people give credit for