agorabinary

Articulate and well spoken - I hope that through threads like these that especially tech newcomers discover that there are alternatives to the YC founder mentality of "growth at all costs". A more gradual approach that respects users is also better for founders. You may not retire at 35 with some big exit or raise, but why is that the goal anyway? Build something that respects your users and you can see yourself working on for 30 years, living comfortably and in moderation.

A minor tweak to The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman[1]:

The venture capitalist laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time was right, you would announce an IPO, and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions!”

“Millions – then what?”

[1] https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...

Definitely not slop. Curious mix of storytelling and tech news, a bit disjointed but I'll give it another chance.

Medical intervention.

You cannot expect the severely mentally ill to "voluntarily" seek medical help - this is the current prerequisite for medical intervention in SF. If a child runs into the street, you don't ask for consent before moving them out of the way of oncoming traffic. The severely ill in this city have less mental capacity than a child and yet we expect them to consent like any other adult. If you truly understand these illnesses you will recognize the futility of throwing money, housing, etc. at this problem.

Sure, if heroin required a doctor's note then addicts would hit the streets once they've exceeded their allotment. But I don't need a doctor's note to get weed from a dispensary. The author is attacking a misrepresentation of what drug legalization actually is

How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a totally reasonable compensation

Good for him.

Chill your hyperbolic outrage. We should be able to talk about sensitive topics like job loss intelligently and in context to the realities of building a startup. Working at a startup is inherently risky and the people who take on the risk are adults. They don't need you to defend them as if they're children

That has nothing to do with the dollar. If bitcoin were to match the market cap of gold irrespective of any money printing, it would be $500k a coin. Which is to say that people consider Bitcoin to have properties similar but superior to that of gold.

The Federal reserve injected banks with money, not the economy. One would naturally think that these banks would then lend money to the broader economy (because that's how banks make money), but a law passed around that time allowed banks to deposit their money in the Fed itself and extract an interest rate better than they would get from normal lending. The Fed, which normally ran a surplus (money which goes to the Treasury to pay down debt), began to run a deficit from these payouts. Potential inflation just became more debt. This is why over a trillion dollars in "printed money" failed to yield much inflation over the last 10 years, but let's all just keeping reading ZH articles about the looming "inflation bomb"..

ZH is unmitigated garbage. It began by pushing the standard tropes of goldbug interpretations of the economy with the banker bad, armchair (amateur) realist good and an unrealized schadenfreude of global economic pandemic. Now it's realized that its early readership is just a subset of the broader misinformed armchair conspiracy theorist and has expanded its message to them as well.

Just as easily as someone in software can bullshit their way through a presentation with a couple years cursory understanding of SWE topics, same goes with "researching" and writing a ZH econ article. ZH does not do meaningful economic analysis, look elsewhere.

Signal lags pretty hard on ubuntu 16.04, reason why I switched to Telegram despite the latter's inferior privacy

"In fact, Severo said that no-one could recall the last time a non-Polynesian had come to Tepoto – certainly not in their lifetimes."

I have a feeling this island is about to get quite a few visits from readers of the BBC...

I've always felt that Elon talks like his tongue is numb

Who cares? The vast majority of Stellar's currency XLM is owned by the founders just like Ripple, and their efforts to distribute this currency to the public are entirely disingenuous. For example, their 2017 airdrop purported to distribute up to 16% of the initial XLM to Bitcoin holders, while less than 10% of that amount was actually claimed (as to be expected when you make people jump through hoops to claim something of dubious value).

The crypto space has an near-infinite supply of new coins and new whitepapers to trap the naturally curious into a hopeless cycle.

I'm quickly running out of excuses for still using Chrome...

"Absolutely functional" is when a user can send+receive a payment as effortlessly as Venmo. You cannot do this with LN at any time in the near future - routing payments, automatic channel management, sending a push payment, etc. I don't mean to bash LN but its simply disingenuous when people suggest these features are anything but pre-alpha

The goal of BTCPay server is to use the Lightning Network for Bitcoin payments, which only generates single-use payment requests. Also important to point out that LN will not be functional for years, so...

Can you withdraw your USD to a flash drive?

None have materialized except.. for biometrics on all passengers.. the very subject of this article.. ? Downvoted.

Did they ever reverse the product redesign back to the original design? Haven't really used Snapchat at all but curious to know, thanks

I suspect GMU/Mercatus has a few early crypto adopters given the symmetry of their ideas with crypto political ideals. What does a GMU academic economist do with hodl money? Form a grant program with a heavily libertarian bent.

Any other reliable sources on this beyond GQ?

Lisk is a sidechain and EOS is centralized.

Proof of stake has never been shown to work and the largest projects attempting to move towards it, ie. Ethereum, are finding PoS's issues insurmountable. There is still no proof of concept for PoS (Casper), something that is becoming increasingly apparent to the ETH/BTC market these days...

tl;dr "You don't have to take my word for it: No less an authority than JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has identified crypto as a bubble just waiting to bust."

Is this satire?

Ever since LN was first proposed, skeptics have asserted problem after problem as an insurmountable obstacle. And time after time they have been proven wrong.

If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just use Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate forks as we speak..

I can send less than a satoshi to someone across the globe for virtually zero fees, anonymously and without any need to wait for block confirmations? And all of this works right now on mainnet?

Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable problems, Lightning dev is no different. Next up is solving efficient routing and intermittent nodes.

It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section - I would expect this to be the primary topic when talking Bitcoin commerce! It's not possible to have an intelligent discussion on Bitcoin commerce without discussing its most relevant tech.

From my experience, I see that most apolitical or politically averse techies (a lot of HN) are drawn heavily to Ethereum, which has been falling relative to Bitcoin ever since the January highs. Pretty sure there is a strong correlation between this and HN crypto frustration in general.

Elon nearly brought the newly merged X and Confinity to its knees during a critical period in its development by 1) insisting on the "X" brand when Paypal was more popular with users, and 2) insisting on Windows over Linux despite the protests of his tech team.

Soon after he was ousted and Thiel was made CEO. Interesting to see he's still pushing Windows.

Source: Paypal Wars by Eric Jackson

> prevention of theft

Taxation is theft.