brendanw

Americans testing the laws of physics with wingsuits are continuing to be criminally prosecuted by a national park service that turns a blind eye to the malfeasance of its own staff

I run a small site/app where wingsuit pilots upload gps tracks for analysis. 180mph is fast but can be achieved/sustained without a jet.

In practice that is difficult to do on most BASE jumps as you need to sustain a steep angle for 10-15 seconds to hit that speed. Density altitude will greatly affect performance as well.

What's cool is being able to sustain 180mph while not losing altitude, which it sounds like BMW+Salzmann have accomplished. From the article:

"While Salzmann’s first flight was a resounding success, it appears he’s not resting on his laurels. According to BMW, the daredevil wants to fly between the skyscrapers of South Korea next."

I've dreamed of being able to zigzag through downtown skyscrapers for more than 10-15 seconds. The Jetman project is astounding. From a friend who is working on a copycat, the costs are close to 100k to replicate. Eager to see experimentation+progress on any projects with the promise of making hybrid human+wing flight more accessible (cheaper).

It's also been the summer where DeFi 10x'd, so no surprise BTC has gone up a bit now that folks can earn interest on their BTC by providing wrapped BTC liquidity on Ethereum.

I use USD-C and DAI to give out grants to a team of international volunteers. Could not get payments to a guy in Turkey through venmo, paypal, square cash, or transferwise. Now we just send everything via stablecoins.

Negative thought spiral. Life is rough for the OP right now; negative thoughts are begetting negative thoughts. I think most folks have been there, with variance in magnitude.

Gilbert Strang got me through the more difficult of the two linear algebra gatekeeper classes in University. I didn't go to class once after the first week. I sent him a thank you email and he wrote a nice reply.

I've wonder if this + optimizing for sticky labor while meeting legal requirements. A person who has contributed to impressive open source ticks both checkboxes but will not pass FANG interview.

In my last cycle of interviewing in SF, I ran into two folks I had interviewed in the past. Both very strong interviewers in that I could sense they were putting their full energy into collaborating with me. I remember thinking I really hope I was as gracious of an interviewer. I don't think I have ever been an asshole, but I felt guilty because I have gone into interviews at 70%. SF is small too.

For those curious, the two companies were Coinbase and Envoy. Interviewers at both companies were across the board superb.

There does not have to be a trade-off between trees and new construction; see the new transbay terminal in San Francisco as an example, or the Changi airport in Singapore.

The poop in SF is from growing rates of homelessness, not from density. SF ranks low on density compared to NYC and Hong Kong, yet only SF has a poop problem.

NIMBYism crops up in every place where there is growth, and it seems to create a system that rewards luck of being born in the right time and place over contributions to society.

For folks looking for a good primer on the terminology and history of cooperative vs preemptive multi tasking, I took a pause on reading this thread to look for an article

https://dev.to/nestedsoftware/is-cooperative-concurrency-her...

This article does a good overview

As someone who loves kotlin on android, I have been searching for companies experimenting with kotlin jvm or kotlin node backends and have been surprised to see that companies are not making the jump. Swift is remarkably similar to kotlin. With a kotlin backend you have the benefits of the JVM or node ecosystem and a beloved language that a bunch of your frontend devs will understand.

I think most companies I've worked at opportunistically looked for standout candidates by always having job postings even when there were no openings. This creates a feedback loop.

It would be great if companies would allow you to bypass the code challenge if you grant them read git access to a relevant project that you have ownership of.

There was solid episode of Odd Lots on cryptocurrency usage in Venezuela.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-29/here-s-ho...

I vaguely recall reading a few articles about how firehouses are less necessary as we have less fires today, but we struggle to reduce their numbers as they are heavily unionized. This is the narrative I at least have floating in my mind.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/19/palo-alto-cuts-11-fir...

Yup, I am seeing double as well.

https://www.shahit.biz/eng/ Here is a database of over 5000 video testimonials by people who have had family members disappeared into Chinese "re-education camps". You can spit the database file out as a .xls and text search it. I found four accounts of forced abortions for women held in the camps.

Not to mention the shady business practices of many gyms. Search "Planet Fitness requiring direct withdrawals" on reddit.

How about the Presidio for riding? I am not a cyclist. I incurred a foot injury recently, and have been thinking of ways I can exercise without impacting my feet too much. I've thought riding a bicycle around the Presidio could be pretty nice.

A few years ago a Chinese man on the BART tried asking me for directions. His english was poor. With the aid of google translate we were able to do some basic communication. Over the course of 10 minutes I learned he was trying to visit the Wikipedia headquarters. I mentioned I was surprised he could access Wikipedia in the mainland. He told me that many know how to access Wikipedia.

Let's be clear. Authoritarianism is not culture; it is an evil political ideology that the people of China are subjected to.

Lyft is consistently 30% or more more expensive for my apt-to-work route in SF. A few of my friends observe similar. Perhaps you have to look at things on a route-by-route basis.

I am excited about the technology. I had taken a light look at the space 4-5 years ago and did not form a strong impression. I didn't take a look at the technology again until last September.

One of the topics I enjoyed deep diving on the most was the lightning network. The two pain points I observed for lightning were: (1) It takes a non-trivial amount of energy to understand hashed time lock contracts well enough to be able to prove the concept to yourself. Not having as easy mastery of a topic off the bat leads to feeling less secure about one's ability to reason about security. (2) The specter of rising on-chain fees for commitment transactions to open payment channels.

With regard to Nano, I was happy to see a different approach to the same problem that was more intuitive. I run a small business and am waiting for the desktop and mobile wallets to come out of beta before I offer the ability to pay with Nano.

I'd be happy if something came along that was better than Nano. I have it on my todo list to look into Byteball Bytes. I am optimistic about larger scale benefits that society will enjoy from the cryptocurrency space if certain projects are successful (eg improved ease of financial auditing, information-sharing platforms with strongly reduced odds of astroturfing, disappearance of credit card fees, increased financial transparency, reduced exchange fees when traveling, banking for the unbanked, etc). Since I am optimistic about the societal benefits from the space as a whole, I want to see more developers interested in getting involved.

Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks https://www.statista.com/statistics/268225/countries-with-th...

You do not see it because you likely fall outside of the demographic of cryptocurrency first users: businesses and citizens in countries facing hyperinflation, black markets, gambling, porn users seeking anonymity, legal pot businesses in the west cut-off from traditional banking in the west, legal porn businesses cut-off from traditional banking in the west.

Bear in mind there is a lag in adoption of the best technology. Just 4-5 months ago bitcoin was still the dominant currency on darknet markets, now it is monero.

Anyone who has read both whitepapers at a minimum, or audited either code base, knows they are far different technologies.

If we had a token either strictly or loosely tied to real-world identity, then I too would criticize the initial distribution. I would call for an airdrop that provides an equal allocation of a new currency to every identity token. I don't believe there currently exists a good way to do a universal airdrop. The counter argument to doing a universal airdrop is that all economic systems move towards inequality of outcome, so in due time, the initial distribution is meaningless.

ICO's that promise guaranteed returns are scams. Nano is an open source project that aims to give people an alternative to government currency. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks The most interest as measured by google search activity in the world for raiblocks/nano is in Venezuela; you'll find a similar pattern of top search results coming from countries where citizens are looking for alternative currencies -- Kosovo, Cyprus, Greece, etc -- with other useful cryptocurrencies.

disclaimer: I interviewed with the team back in January and turned down a contractor role but was impressed with their mission and roadmap.

It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper

I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).

Links?

Right, but when you lose the case, you lose that money again, or vice versa as the business.

To many Americans and world citizens with less disposable income, you might seem kind of nutty to not worry about losing 3% on your under $15 purchases. Credit score and insurance industries are ubiquitous. For most folks if they move to another country you will often be penalized by that country's insurance or credit score agencies for not having recent history. There is certainly room for improvement.

You are not guaranteed to win a credit card dispute. Depending on the card, it takes a great deal of your time to file the dispute and continue to submit supporting evidence down the line. You are paying 1-3% on all of your transactions for this privilege; do you really want to pay that 1-3% every time you buy coffee? On the other side of the token is the merchant. How often do they lose out from a fraudulent credit card dispute? There are many businesses that refuse Amex for this reason among others.

The blockchain and smart contracts provide interesting ways to tackle these problems with clever and transparent protocols. It is not difficult to imagine a credit score system (https://hellobloom.io/) that is based off a transaction history tied to an identity token (https://www.uport.me/). In that case, merchants and customers can choose who they want to engage with based off reputation and history.

That is one way of doing a transaction with a merchant. Another way would be to use a hashed time lock contract that allows you to get a refund on demand. In that event, the merchant has to trust you.

As both a consumer and a business owner, I am excited to see a highly diverse market of options for how we do transactions, as opposed to a market dominated by 3-4 players.