Yes! Query string parameters are great for this kind of stuff.
I guess the choice on the URL format depends on how you're going to route that on the server side, so there are multiple ways of doing it.
Depending on the nature of the resource, you might have to be careful with URI canonicalization.
Consider for example the "diff between account balances" endpoint:
GET /account_balance_diff?accid=1&accid=2
Should the diff be presented as from 1 to 2, or from 2 to 1? Query string parameters don't have a particular order to them, and when canonicalizing, some user agent might decide to reorder these parameters.
If you do:
GET /account_balance_diff/1/2
Then, there are two distinct URIs (one for diff 1->2 and other 2->1) and no ambiguity on meaning.
You could also use some kind of index on the parameters to preserve order:
GET /account_balance_diff?acc[1]=123&acc[2]=456
Your other example using a comma should also be fine:
GET /account_balance_diff?accs=1,2
Let's go back to the "discussions" example. What should happen if I GET /discussions without any author id? Our inner guts tell us that there should be something there (after all, I'm filtering _something_), but REST implies absolutely nothing about this relation. To REST and HTTP, you could have a /discussions URL that is completely unrelated to /discussions?filter.
Having a concise, clear URL forming pattern is great. It's not REST though, it's a separate thing, incredibly relevant to us humans, but irrelevant to the architectural style.
A similar confusion happens with error codes. I've seen a lot of people answer 406 Not Acceptable as a status for lock errors and invalid requests. It sounds nice, but it's not designed for that. 406 means the server can't deliver that media type (you asked for PNG but I only have JPG, for example). That 406 is part of the content negotiation mechanism of HTTP, not a lego block to reuse as application logic. The URI is the same, it's role is to be a primary key for the web, not to express hierarchy.
(btw sorry for the long post, I ended up venting a lot and got into several tangents completely unrelated to your comment)
This is not bad in itself. It's just the first step in the market evolution. Given a free market (barriers aside) an equilibrium will be found sooner or later, but this step needs to happen first.
Talking about a free market with perfectly informed, rational actors is like talking about perfect, frictionless spheres in a vacuum in physics. It's fine for theorizing, but useless once you're building things in the real world.
If every employee knew what all other employees earn, what their training is, what their workload is and what degree of productivity they have, as well as the return on investment generated by their own labor force.
And, what this would mean in comparison with other employers (i.e. comparative salaries, etc), we could think about whether we can speak of an (ideal) free market. To do so, the possibilities to change the company as well as the actual profession would have to be transparent and open.
In addition, most theories on the free market also assume rational actors. Which has been sufficiently refuted as a model of reality.
But even this would not be the problem if the basic assumptions above were fulfilled. But in most cases they are not. I do not know what the colleague next to me earns. I don't know how much ROI my employer gets with my work performance and I certainly don't have the chance to get analogous data to other companies in the market. In addition, as an employee I am also very much tied to the local area due to family situations and therefore cannot act like capital on the free market worldwide.
All in all, in this "game" of the employee is always the weaker market participant - which is why, for example, there are facilities and institutions in consumer markets that protect the consumer, because there is an imbalance in information.
For this reason there is (at least in Germany) state intervention in the employee market just as there are trade unions or works councils. There are analogous instruments in many markets worldwide - to create a counterweight to the imbalance of information and power.
Uh huh, and all of my "Buy in at $3,900; buy in at $5,800" comments were downvoted too.
It's remarkable how influential groupthink is. Everyone is panic selling, so of course the logical action is to buy. It's never a good time to buy when everyone's been buying! This is the only correct time to do a long-term bet.
This is all quite mistaken for day trading, but that's not this strategy.
Everyone is panic selling, so of course the logical action is to buy.
A great many companies watch their stock crash... and then become worthless and cease trading. Buying those crashes was not a good move.
This is the only correct time to do a long-term bet.
A great many companies that didn't experience a crash in their stock nonetheless were great long-term bets, and some investors made their fortunes this way.
Actually a "death spiral" is basically built-in to bitcoin.
If the value stays at this level for a while and the hashpower increases so that miners rely on this level of income, a drop of say 30% could mean that almost all miners are running in the red (except those with free electricity). The resulting long block times could cause the price to crash more, discouraging even more miners, until a block is just never produced again. The difficulty adjustment requires 2016 blocks to be mined.
It will inevitably be forked to try and save it, but that might not take off...
BTC will die eventually--albeit slowly. $26 transaction fees are insane and unsustainable imho. My money is on proof of stake like Ardor.
I'd like to see something with GBI built in, and maybe less deflationary. Not completely, as it's nice when saving money makes it worth more, but the only reason to have btc now is to hodl and make more ... till it's worth shit... and you can't sell it at all.
I mean really you can't even really use it for utility any more... Say I wanted to buy hosting with bitcoin... I pay $15 a month for hosting, so that's 15 in btc, PLUS $26 to send the btc? well fuck that.. nvm.. guess I'll just hodl like everyone else...
1. BTC is useful as a store of wealth. A rich saudi would be very happy to dump their fortune into BTC and then wait several years. It would be much safer than storing it in banks where they are held hostage in hotels until they agree to pay N% of their fortune to be released. (Apparently this actually happens.)
2. BTC is a speculator's currency. The whole point is to speculate, and not much more than that. But that's literally the point, and the fact that it's absurd doesn't change how real it is.
3. Fluctuations will be with BTC forever due to #2. This has always been true and will continue to be true. Periods of inactivity will become longer, but then eventually speculators will notice it's a lucrative deal again.
4. Speculators have a crucial ability: they can manipulate the market. It's common for people to dump N million into the market to cause a small rally, at which point everyone else starts buying. This happened to Ripple. No one cared about Ripple until however many months ago that was, when it suddenly surged overnight due to this.
5. BTC has immense inertia because it was the first, and continues to be the most valuable. As long as the core team doesn't screw with it at all – including trying to "extend" it with bigger block sizes or any other convenience features – then BTC should stay a fine store of wealth. Satoshi planned for the long term.
6, The above points do not hold for other currencies. Others have some of these points, but not all of them. Hence BTC remains a solid bet.
7. All of this can be mistaken, but after seeing this behavior many, many times, at this point it's fine to gamble that you won't be wrong this time.
8. Don't put in more money than you're willing to lose.
I wouldn't say 0 utility but for sure not anywhere near it is now.
Tulips still have "utility" today but a single one does not buy you a house anymore ;)
I think a "single" bitcoin doesn't mean anything, especially compared to a physical good (it makes some sense when you are making a performance comparison to other CCs but not too much).
You can buy a house with enough bitcoins as long as you have buyers. You can say the same thing for tulips as well.
