bittcto

“Hate speech” is actually a great example. I’m a fan of the fact trans people are getting better treatment in today’s society, but if some obnoxious jerk says “there are only two genders” or “Chelsea Manning is a dude”, that may make him an asshole but it’s not a crime, it’s not aggresssion or violence.

Yet “hate speech” is literally a phrase created to justify oppression against people for having opinions you don’t like.

I may choose not to associate with a jerk like in my example, but the perpetrators of “hate speech” concept want to deny him basic human rights, and often do violence against him.

Ironically for the “crime” of being different.

Basic human rights s are rights for everyone.

Genuine liberals used to advocate for the right of the KKK to march. The ACLU even filed a lawsuit Withings the past ten years defending their right to make white robes fools of themselves.

When “liberals” stopped defending human rights, you lost the plot and the whole point of being liberal.

HN has a long history of censoring particular groups of people based on identity. That’s why it’s become such a monoculture (a monoculture of people generally convinced than HN is diverse, however.)

Down voting things you disagree with despite being well articulated (in fact because they are well articulated) is a form of censorship here.

But of course it goes much further when shadowbanning is deployed to enforce the narrow and rigid views of the moderation team.

Yes, I know pointing this out means it will now happen to me.

Nothing a censor hates more than thwarting the narrative they are trying to enforce.

But that’s why you think it doesn’t happen here. This is the most harshly and hypocritically cultivated walled garden on the Net. (Moderators violate their own rules regularly with impunity.)

Alas, I cannot abide not pointing out these abuses.

Tyranny, in all its shapes and sizes, comes wrapped in claims that it is for the common good.

In fact a good way to think critically about things you hear is to ask “how is the politician profiting from this law?” And noting what new powers the law gives government.

If government “needs” more power with the justification of “helping people”, it may be the case that helping people is just the excuse.

Government power is easy to monetize: threaten industry with worse regulations but forget the idea when you get campaign contributions, etc.

“By definition” people are just making up “Blockchain” as a desperate technology, usually people who don’t understand how bitcoin works and don’t realize they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Redefining the nature of the technology to get away from the difficult reality of it isn’t effective in the end.

The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

The entire point of Bitcoin is the distributed trustless consensus mechanism. Read the Nakamoto white paper, it’s all about double spending.

A chain of hashed data dates back to Merkle himself, that’s what a Merkle tree is.

The entire point of bitcoin is distributed independent truth and that’s the entire point of a Blockchain.

A Merkle root including previous Merkle roots may have been innovative when Surety started, but while its required in bitcoin its not a key feature of what defines a Blockchain.

Because the term was coined by Nakamoto to describe the technology behind bitcoin. Decentralization, proof of work and other characteristics of bitcoin are intrinsic to making the system work. Otherwise you have an inefficient database that has no reason to exist.

This is one of the problems with the generic use of “blockchain”. People think you just need Merkle roots including previous blocks, like you do, but that’s useless and pointless without the rest.

Because the term was coined by Nakamoto to describe the technology behind bitcoin. Decentralization, proof of work and other characteristics of bitcoin are intrinsic to making the system work. Otherwise you have an inefficient database that has no reason to exist.

The fix was a hacknand as for “on time”, no we were already three Sadat’s into the heavyvsakes week, literally hours before thanksgiving when Bezos decided to cancel everyone’s thanksgiving because of his own incompetence.

I call it incompetence because prioritizing a new feature over a bug fix is almost always wrong. And Bezos surrounds himself with yes men so if he under estimated the bugs impact because a yesman was saving face that’s still on Bezos.

I think selling drugs on campus to employees is a pretty bad result. He also drove off %80 of the talented team before I left. The DMV person was a dumpster fire and all the incompetence they showed us what you would expect— so cliche it would be boring to give examples.

Amazon is way over valued relative to its actual business... that shows that effective PR is good for the stock price (and amazon as a company is pretty much a pathological liar when it comes to PR. Like claiming AWS was what Amazon.com ran in at launch.)

No, waiting two months and working in less critical stuff was not the right choice on Bezos fault.

Bezos is a bozo.

Which makes me think that their competition must really suck... or like the fact they were able to use political pull to to tie Apples hands on ebooks it may all be government powered rent seeking.

I wonder how much of a deal they are getting from USPS and how much government IT has been outsourced to AWS.

But ask anyone- Amazon is well known to be incompetently managed.

Yes, and early in my career I was a technical sales person for a product I built... paired with a pure sales person.

I don’t mean to say there was no value to his skills— but I am saying that it was not hard for me to understand enough about sales to hire a good sales person.

They would of course be a better sales person than me.

The problem is people think your CEO should be a sales person and that’s s mistake.

Sales is a process that’s easy to replicate.

Creating a novel software application isn’t.

Ate hnicwl CEO can hire a great chief sales guy. A non-technical CEO can’t hire a CTO and often ends up undermining the product.

I would have no problem being hands off with the sales department.

I have yet to meet a Non technical CEO who doesn’t think he knows how to design products.

I’ve seen many software companies where for months on end each week more than a weeks worth of new work is added to the product, without changing the deadline, because “management” keeps deciding therecare new features that are critical and they can be just slipped right in.

If you tell them they are going to increase the time it takes or lower quality, you’re “not cooperative” or “not a team player”....or they tell you they will take the quality hit... but when there are any problems in the delivered product it’s the teams fault, of course.

I believe they hire those “lunatics” because it’s believed that engineers can’t understand business.

As an engineer that has started businesses this is BS.

It’s really easy to learn business skills, sales and marketing are not difficult, finance is laughably easy.

But so long as the companies are being formed to sell equity to VCs you will see them led by frat boys who the VC frat boys recognize... and they will abuse engineers.

My solution- stop working for anyone who isn’t technically competent or at least recognizes engineering needs enough to get out of the way and support being efficient.

The cause is that “leadership” is generally people who don’t understand technology, and the solution is to stop hiring such incompetence.

No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars.

But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engineering.

I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at:

At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was borderline computer illiterate.

After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management, right?

Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management skills were still getting paid more!)

At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.)

Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar” in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!

Ballpoint was invented in 1888, around 40 years earlier:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen

5 years ago he claimed bitcoin was evil. He hadn’t adapted. He can’t adapt. He’s just a fraud.

He’s not held in high regard by economicists or even economics. He has been proven wrong repeatedly. He’s held in high regard by socialists because he white washes the death and destruction their socialism causes. That’s his purpose. That and virtue signaling.

Your instincts are right. Go to Mises.org for real economics.

HN leftists can’t abide any facts that put Krugman in a bad light. I pointed out he advocated a housing bubble I’m getting downvoted too.

HN is a farm for socialist sheep and explicitly anti-intellectual.

Krugman, in a real way, is why Bitcoin exists.

He literally advocated a housing bubble. (Broken Window fallacy)

The housing bubble collapsed causing bailouts of banks.

Bitcoin is a direct response to this nationalization of private losses. Not to mention the century of financial corruption that preceded it.

Satoshi was not coy.

The genesis block contains the text: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.

Of course Krugman is a “skeptic”.

Bitcoin repudiates his entire career, ideology and work, and is having a significant positive impact in the world.

Unlike Krugman.

Every year bitcoin continues it gets stronger, it rewards supporters and forces the corrupt banking system Krugman endorses into the light a bit more.

Krugman and other nocoiners hate bitcoin?

Bitcoin don’t care.

This is what you have to understand about bitcoin:

Bitcoin doesn’t have to care.

It’s the first real tool of individual financial sovereignty.

TLDR: 30 years experience, I learned: don’t go work for a SV style startup. Be a founder, even if you have no experience. Don’t take VC money for more than %10 of your equity in total. Better off, right out of school, founding a company and failing than working for a startup, especially if they take VC.

It’s lopsided against the founders too. They might walk away with big checks but the risk is too high.

This is the problem with the SV model. VCs take way too much off the table, founders and employees are not adequately compensated.

This is partly YCs fault because they basically groom startups and usher them into the maw of VCs while glorifying the exploitative VC model. But that model makes YC partners rich st startups expense.

Founders and employees in the SV model sell themselves way short. This is also why so many startups are BS non-innovative companies— they are chasing funding rather than the future.

Better model: - slicing pie with no bonus for money contributions- this rewards people fairly. - crowd funding, consultancy funding, boot strapping, angel money with no liquidation preferences, and no VC termsheet BS.

Having founded and worked for startups for 30 years, I won’t ever take a meeting with a VC again. I have not met any good ones (and people who say theirs is great are generally just kissing ass to keep money flowing.)

Worse- the number one cause of failures of startups in my experience is bad strategic decisions forced on them by VCs. The number two cause is conflict among the founders, and the number one cause of that conflict is VCs trying to force a bad decision in the company (and one of the founders realizing it.)

The problem is that product and dev are different people. Product managers don’t understand their product as well as the devs do. devs should manage the product definition and work with feature requesters at a very high level, where the details are the choices of the devs (or senior devs acting as product managers.)

If you have deadlines, you already know management is incompetent.

Deadlines presume a known fixed scope. But I’ve yet to meet a CEO or sales team or whomever gets to decide what features go in who will fix the scope if a project.

They are always willing to add features, but can never take them out.

Hypothesis: There are more machines in consumer hands which support Metal than DirectX.

This may sound crazy, but remember there are billions of iOS devices out there in the world, and I don't think X boxes plus windows game machines count in the billions.

Its true Apple hasn't won the hard core gamer market, but they are no longer the niche player that had to cater to windows users.

"Bitcoin has very few of the properties that one would consider desirable for a currency."

The desirable properties of currency are: - difficult to counterfeit - fungibility - robustness from degradation (eg: salt works except if you get it wet) - consistent store of value - Easily transportable.

Bitcoin has all of the above, and has better qualities in each regard than both gold and the US dollar.

As for your complaints: 1. Transaction fees are not a problem. You can move a million dollars for $0.20. You can move 1 penny for a millionth of a penny with bitcoin. The "transaction fees" FUD is just a campaign combined with a spam attack and that spam attack has been defeated. Further it becomes irrelevant with lightning.

2. Bitcoin is literally inflationary. It won't stop inflating until 2140. You think its "deflationary" because its price keeps going up, but that's simply a consequence of the technology adoption lifecycle.

The idea that deflation is bad is absurd. Monetary inflation is a form of taxation, or more precisely counterfeiting. It is literally theft. The reason old people have trouble getting by is that the government has stolen their lifetime of savings via inflation. The idea that government propaganda has convinced people that this is somehow good is really quite disgusting.

3) There is no reason to hard fork bitcoin. The only ones that have happened were early days and an accidental one (which nobody noticed because everyone upgraded.) You don't need to hard fork bitcoin.

Unwinding "mundane fraud" is not a feature of gold or the US Dollar so the idea that this is a requirement of a currency is absurd.

Also, you were complaining that it is centralized, but your evidence is that it's so decentralized that you can't reverse transactions?! You said you were having trouble articulating it, so maybe you switched points in the middle.

Anyway, censorship resistance is a good thing-- any method that lets you "unwind mundane fraud" would let a government censor who has what bitcoin.

I love that you called a claim I didn't make ludicrous. I thin that strawman is murdered.

You're making the zero sum economic fallacy. More demand for solar panels finances more panels growing, increasing economies of scale reducing panel costs, and also, quite literally growing the total capacity of panels available in the world.

This is an example of bitcoin mining seeking the most renewable, inexpensive energy sources... including geothermal in iceland and hydroelectric in Washington State and China.

As solar or wind get closer to viability, it may soon come that bitcoin starts paying for massive solar investment (due to the "greedy" interests of miners buying up lots of solar capacity) and that further lowers costs of solar... and maybe wind, though I'm less confident on wind.

This is a very common rehash of the "blockchain not bitcoin" perspective, and this indicates a lack of understanding of the purpose of bitcoin. Bitcoin/satoshi aren't being coy, though. The Genesis block contains the headline "Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks." Bitcoin was created as a democratized money that is outside of central control.

The author thinks that centralized control is not a problem because "there is no lack of trusted enough intermediaries in the financial/accounting sector".

This is something that bitcoiners strongly disagree with, with almost daily news of financial censorship going on, and irresponsible financial institutions continuing to be funded by quantitative easing[1] to engage in carry trade and other gambling (which is somehow considered less risky than a revolutionary new form of hard digital money).

The thing that I think a lot of people miss is that bitcoin is not a technology, it is a combination of technological innovations with economic innovations.

Its the incentives in bitcoin that are critical to the system... this is why "private blockchains" are silly. You might as well use Oracle with version tracking on changes.

Public blockchains, namely bitcoin, have the potential of being genuinely trustworthy in themselves, not based on hoping you don't have counterparty risk.

In 2009, it was the counterpary risks that really amplified the disaster-- all of those CDOs were written assuming there was no possibility of default.

The rest of the financial sector operates at the risk of financial censorship, but financial censorship is not unusual-- everything from banning people from doing business with each other to the elimination of ownership rights for corporate bonds in the GM case. It's not that uncommon.

With bitcoin there is no possibility of default, and very high resistance to financial censorship.

[1] Not to mention that arbitrary issuance of currency basically removes individuals ability to trust that currency in the first place.

Yes, and I believe the actual mining breakeven is closer to $1,250 based on a tweet from Adam Back today.