alistproducer2

The article is a little tough on Protocol Labs. I'm pretty sure it's the same team behind IPFS so they have a pretty good track record of delivery. The idea of Filecoin has been floating around for years and the dev team is a serious one. Of all the ICO's, this is one I'm not too skeptical of.

I'm not sure I get your point?

I'm glad to see this. With many systems trying to move to proof-of-stake[0] algos to secure their chains, I've been lamenting the lack of game theory experts in a lot of these projects.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

In the case of Vitalik, he was smart enough to enlist people more knowledgeable than him when organizing the Ethereum project. For example, he enlisted a PhD, Dr. Gavin Wood, to author the real white paper[0] (also known as the yellow paper). while it's possible that at 19 Vitalik could've been studying real CS long enough to work out the truely difficult parts of implementing his vision, it's highly unlikely and, to his credit, he was smart enough to know that. People who think they are the smartest people in the room rarely are. The really smart ones are the ones who realize this and are humble enough to seek the expertise of others.

[0]:https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/Whitepapers/Ethereum-A-Secur...

I won't comment on who the project is. It's not my goal to bad mouth anyone. I just wanted to share my experience.

yes it is. put up a site, write a white paper (even one that doesn't make any sense), create an ERC20 token and you can raise lots of money.

This is my exact thought as well. The risk-reward of shorting makes the most sense when volatility is low. It is certainly the worst thing to do in an irrational bull market AKA bubble.

Most are ERC20[0] tokens with a promise to convert them to the projects native token when their blockchain is stood up.

[0]: https://theethereum.wiki/w/index.php/ERC20_Token_Standard

>23 year old guy to write most of the Ethereum app

The project is a from-scratch smart contract blockchain: including a new contract language

Seriously? I think you're looking for "Show HN"

I dispute that. Most major newspapers in the states have existed long before it was common for media outlets to be publicly traded companies. The term "fourth estate" dates back almost to the time of the French Revolution so while it's always been expected that newspapers need be profitable to exist, the interests of its readers and those that stand to profit from the paper have not always been so far apart as they are now.

I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy who was promising features that much larger projects with teams of the best people in the field were yet to solve. Not to mention the project was blatantly lying about it's PoW algorithm.

When I tried to point out that the project should use some of that money to organize the software engineering aspect the founder got pissed off with me accusing me of trying to run the project. They had a second round and raised even more money (in addition to the insane capgains on their first round).

I check the github from time to time and it appears they've got at least 2 other devs involved and may actually bring a blockchain to market but this doesn't hide that fact that the project needed nowhere near the amount of money they raised. Hell they could've used a couple hundred grand from the first round and literally just paid a team of people to build the blockchain for them. did I get off of a gravy train? Yes. But there are more things to life than money.

I'm going to join in on the chorus of people here who are voicing their displeasure with the way the modern media works. I'm a left winger but I feel much the same way about the media and the chattering class as the most noxious parts f the right wing. It's not so much that the media is biased in one direction or the other; it's that MSM has mostly abrogated it's responsibility to inform the public. the media, and the class of people that create its content, see themselves as influencers more than reporters.

As an example, take the performance (and I do mean that literally) of Jim Acosta when he made a speech disguised as a question to Stephen Miller about the poem on the Statue of Liberty. Who told Mr. Acosta that what the public wants from its journalists are speeches instead of substantive questions?

It's often said that politicians want to be movies stars. these days it seems that the journalists want to be politicians and it's become a problem that Americans all over the political spectrum are beginning to see.

I took his course up until the back propagation lesson and then lost interest. Credit to him as a teacher though because the basic of ML are still with me. I just didn't have any interest in going very deep with it.

I disagree. The tone seems very sympathetic to the home-seeker. I got a "hard-working, salt-of-the-earth carpenter white kid hustles to attain the American dream." While old, prickly, angry black people jealously hold onto their homes. And by the way, for balance, an Italian guys feels the same way. This article sucked.

The tone of this article is terrible. It's blaming old people for not wanting to sell their homes they've paid off. The whole point of mortgaging a home purchase is the hopes that one day, when you're old, you'll have it paid off and you can chill. I'm sad I gave this piece a click. It may encourage the author to keep doing journalism.

I'm in the process of auditing new low-power Po* algos for a crypto system I'm researching. This paper needs a way better abstract. The math is incomprehensible without knowing what it's end goal is. The paper uses acronyms (ex "Good ID") before explaining what they are. Overall a poorly written paper. The work maybe revolutionary, but what good is that if it's so difficult to understand. People forget that the purpose of a paper is to communicate your idea to other people. If it doesn't do that effectively then no matter how awesome the work is, you've failed.

I read the article and no where does it make a case for why a blockchain makes any sense in the application. I read a comment by a person claiming to be associated with the project saying that "blockchain enabled" makes sense because the payment are p2p but that doesn't make sense either. Blockchains are good for pretty much one thing: a distributed ledger that parties can trust to be immutable. I can confidently say they're only inserting a blockchain here because it gets the idea more buzz.

Side note: I had no idea people paid so much to charge they're EVs. the article mentioned that a electric bill in Cali can be upwards of $1000/yr.

Edit for clarity: the $1000/yr figure is the marginal cost of charging the EV, not the entire bill

I've heard anecdotally that Google denied a dude for a misdemeanor. Can anyone else confirm or deny that?

The proclivity of politicians to marginalize expertise, in general, as meaningless and elitist is short-sighted (at best). The world is complicated and the complexity grows by the day. Curation of knowledge and having delegated trust on complex matters is essential to governing our civilization by consent.

If we reach a point where consensus is essentially impossible because a strong majority of people are no longer willing to delegate understanding of complex things they have no interest in then how is it still possible to govern via consent? At that point, we will have to revert to monarchy and/or authoritarianism to break the persistent stalemates of popular consensus. The right-wing of western democracies are playing with fire and they're either too stupid or too greedy to realize where this strategy will end up.

I'm old enough to remember the when e-voting was brought about by the Bush administration. At the time those of us on the far left were convinced that Bush was the American incarnation of Hitler (seems quaint now, doesn't it) and Diebold e-voting machines were going to precipitate the end of democracy.

If I'm attacking anything, it's her record as a leader. We can agree to disagree on that, but I see nothing personal in my comment.

Secondly, the heart of my comment is how some people are raised up to insane heights on mediocre achievements. Even if she was a great "gatekeeper" as you say, there's really nothing in that skill that sounds particularly impressive and certainly not worth the obscene amounts of money and praised heaped upon her up until her public fall from grace.

And while I'm at it I suppose I should chime in on Instant - always seemed like a waste of resources to me. What is so hard about hitting Enter? Personally it always annoyed me. Obviously many people will disagree with me but when I found out that one of the most annoying changes to google search had been pushed hard by Mayer I couldn't help but comment.

>Google Instant launched in 2010 under the leadership of Marissa Mayer. Mayer called this change a “fundamental shift in search”....

So Mayer does it again, lol. My favorite thing is how this lady was praised as some sort of genius for managing the Google search page - as if that page is some marvel of modern engineering and not just a webpage with and input and no background.

So I guess Warhol isn't art? You are making some very opinionated claims that don't have any basis in, well anything. Take a read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art

For some reason, I'm scared that I'll be owned if I feed this to a parser.

They very much are art. Even if you're writing the nth incarnation of some tired JS pattern framework, you're coding it the way you want. Your making an API that makes sense to you. In short, the way you chose to implement the tired Ideas is unique to you. It's self expression that others can see. How is that different than a painter reinterpreting some famous piece of work?

>realize that you are an artist

That statement resonates with me - immensely. I was a musician for almost a decade before going to school for CS. I feel in love with the creativity that knowing how to code enabled. Just like the author, I made my fair share of worthless side projects and just like him I felt pressure to monetize them to no success which ultimately took all the fun out of them.

I've never been able to get the fire back to make stuff just because I can. I really hate that I've lost that.

I'm not really accosting the sport itself - which I played as well and have always enjoyed. The NCAA and the NFL are the primary targets of my ire as at least the NFL has long known about this and has only begun to pay lip service to fixing what it can because of public scrutiny. So based on that, yes rich old white guys paying young poor (mostly black) guys to go brain themselves for America's entertainment does feel like en exploitative "caste regime" as you put it.

I would love to see the loan be able to (or better yet, enforced that it is) used as a funding source in a smart contract. Provide an API for funneling revenue in the client contract to the loan object thus ensuring repayment. Making the release of the funds contingent on an audit ensuring the repayment is handled autonomously. Sort of interesting though.

I don't feel like you read my comment before posting.....