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bconnorwhiteon SEC Doesn’t See Cryptocurrencies Lasting Long

"...banks issued their own currencies, which they sometimes refused to redeem for their purported value in gold or silver."

Fortunately the government stepped in with its own currency to refuse to redeem for gold

bconnorwhiteon GitHub Copilot

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1404100794245214215

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

The economic stimulus has certainly been a success for asset prices, in dollars...

bconnorwhiteon Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged

know something we don't = difference in how you price risk of various outcomes. Not necessarily new information

bconnorwhiteon Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged

Uber without drivers is a very different business. You get clown numbers if you try to model the profits if Tesla can make 20M cars / year

bconnorwhiteon Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged

Tesla's rise this year is obviously extreme, but it also traded sideways from 2013-2018. Over a decade AMZN is up 25x, TSLA 150x

bconnorwhiteon Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged

The problem with Tesla is that the opportunity for FSD is insane. Either the market is mispricing the risk or the shorts are, but the asymmetric upside if Tesla succeeds makes it a risky short. Asymmetric downside.

bconnorwhiteon Tesla Short Sellers Lost $38B in 2020 as Stock Surged

The market is usually right, but the market doesn't have all the information either.

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

"Why would one person want to reduce the ability to apply economic policy in their country?"

What do you think happens to your currency when they print more of it?

One problem with gold though is that we know where plenty of gold is, its just too expensive to mine. Once the price of gold rises, more gold becomes profitable to mine, supply increases, and the price goes back down.

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

Price action would seem to agree with your typo

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

I can't tell if you're agreeing by saying "its only been 12 years," or if you're disappointed by a 10 million % appreciation in 12 years

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

I think the difference is that currencies fluctuate against each other, whereas if everything is priced in Bitcoin, its whatever you're pairing it against that's fluctuating. Goods (ex: loaf of bread for 200 satoshis for example) would stay stable

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin is a disaster

Most of the criticisms in this thread seem to be missing that Bitcoin is only layer 1. Bitcoin isn't Visa or cash - its gold. Rather than shipping gold across the Atlantic, large institutions will settle in a few minutes in Bitcoin. L2/L3/L4 solutions (built into Apple Pay, etc.) will allow for instant payments for coffee, allow for privacy similar to physical cash, etc.

Before this is possible, the price has to stabilize. Just takes time to go from $0.1 to $10M per coin. Once Bitcoin has eaten all the "store of value" value & only appreciates at the rate new wealth is created, L2/L3/L4 solutions will go mainstream.

bconnorwhiteon Bitcoin still makes no sense

This is super common on HN. Just look at threads on Tesla. Fortunately betting against someone with a closed mind is super profitable, because they'll always mis-price the risk/reward.

bconnorwhiteon Drivers react to Tesla’s full self-driving beta release

ML is intuition. Consider the difference between an expert system solution to chess and an ML solution to go. Go is all intuition.

bconnorwhiteon Tesla to wide-release Full Self-Driving 'by the end of this year'

Would be surprised if autopilot isn't already superior to humans at avoiding cyclists. This seems like mostly an attention problem, and humans are more susceptible to not noticing the cyclist in their blind spot going into a right turn.

bconnorwhiteon SpaceX raises $1.9B

We are far too stupid to not fall for scams. It's better that the government "protects" us. /s

Seriously though, this is messed up. Crypto is similar - CoinMarketCap has a program where you can earn tokens by watching a few videos, but look at the list of restricted countries: "Belarus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Mainland China, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, United States of America and its territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Zimbabwe."

Why the f are we on a list with Cuba, Iraq, Iran, China, North Korea, and Syria??? America is not free

bconnorwhiteon SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]

https://blog.ted.com/what-will-the-future-look-like-elon-mus...

@34:15

bconnorwhiteon SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]

The crazy part is that Elon has said this will look like a rowboat compared to their future rockets

bconnorwhiteon SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]

True, but I'm not sure difficulty is as relevant if the motivation is there. You can't terraform the South Pole. Mars reopens the frontier whereas the South Pole is a dead end

bconnorwhiteon SpaceX test flight of Starship SN-5 [video]

The other factor is that Musk has nothing better to spend his money on. With Tesla + SpaceX + Boring + Neuralink he'll likely be a trillionaire by the time Mars colonization is full swing. Even if the price was $2T instead of $200B, Musk might be able to fund most of this himself.

bconnorwhiteon The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions

True, but even after narrowing this, you usually end up with 3/4 of these companies in competition.

Messaging? FB vs Apple vs Google

Ads? FB vs Google vs Amazon

Video? FB vs Google (YouTube) vs Amazon (Twitch)

Especially re: Google linking to its own sites, are we now arguing Google has a monopoly over google.com? It gets a bit weird

bconnorwhiteon The Antitrust Hearing, the Role of Congress, CEO Questions

The best thing about "tech monopolies" is that there are so many of them

bconnorwhiteon Google’s top search result is Google

I don't think DDG is quite as simple as a wrapper on Bing, just open both in private windows. Same search => different results.

The reason to use DDG isn't that its results are superior to Google/Bing (although imo this is true in many cases), the reason to use DDG is that its so clean. Google and Bing just feel spammy/garish in comparison

bconnorwhiteon Finishing a side project

Motivation = what you think about in the shower http://paulgraham.com/top.html

The question seems to be how to keep your project top of mind. Once you're forced to stop working on your project, the context file this post mentions acts like a save point to return your project to top of mind.

I'm sure there are other similar hacks. Maybe review your context file before showering each day?

bconnorwhiteon Text-Only Websites

Does this count as a text-only website?

https://masciintosh.com/

bconnorwhiteon Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

Engagement rate is measurable. The average time it takes for users to complete the action they're looking for is also measurable. Companies test this stuff, Apple isn't spending millions of dollars to redesign MacOS because Tim Cook is bored. Same goes for the Instagram redesign of a few years ago, or this GitHub redesign, etc.

bconnorwhiteon Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

Let's take the simplest action - cloning a repo.

Old: https://web.archive.org/web/20200619163555/https://github.co...

New: https://github.com/torvalds/linux

It was always strange to have all the language info at the top

bconnorwhiteon Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?

Excel today is still cleaner than Excel 2010, and Google Sheets easier to use than both. Most spreadsheet users simply don't need the extra functionality Excel provides, and the few users that do need this use the product enough to have memorized the keyboard shortcuts.