larrysalibra

A blockchain doesn't handle the supply chain problem very well because supply chains + blockchains suffer from the oracle problem. Blockchains don't know anything about information outside of their chain and need a trusted 3rd party - an oracle - to tell them about it.

Imagine you want to track eggs through the supply chain from farm to table. Ultimately the trust of your system is rooted in the farmer and various other organizations that are updating the state of these eggs in the chain. If they make up fake data, the system isn't trustworthy.

Typically the solution for this is to only let trusted players into the system and have some sort of organization - perhaps the government - that vets users of the system and penalizes those that enter fake data. In this case, the trust of your blockchain-egg-supply-chain-tracking system is rooted in the organization accrediting and inspecting users of the system. If that's the case, you're better off trusting that organization to run a traditional database. You shouldn't use a blockchain.

It means that it can encrypt and decrypt data at the same speed as the interface/underlying storage. Encrypted storage doesn't slow down storage versus unencrypted usage.

Metal straws are very popular in upscale bars in financial cities such as New York, London and Hong Kong. It’s usually a sign you’re paying way too much for your drink!

The bridge, while very interesting as a large infrastructure project is laughably useless for many stakeholders.

Own a car in Hong Kong and want to drive across it to Macau? You need to get vehicle registration plates (some "electronic" or temporary) in 3 jurisdictions. You also need insurance for 3 jursidictions. Also, you can only drive to a parking lot outside of Macau and then transfer to public transit to enter the city. And you need to register for a parking space 12 hours before your trip. Watch this hilarious HK government video on the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO3bNlB9j9o

But you don't own a car! Like most Hong Kongers, you take public transit. Surely this bridge will make it faster than the 1 hour ferry ride that leaves from 2 ferry piers in the middle of the city every 15 minutes or so all day and night. Unfortunately this isn't the case. The buses across the bridge from Hong Kong leave from the airport and take 40 minutes. You'll have to take another bus from the airport to the city at the cost of another 45 to 60 minutes.

This is a political project to show that Hong Kong and Macau are being integrated into China.

As political projects go, this certainly isn't the worst of them. It's better than the other things governments do to bolster domestic support like wars or locking up people you don't like. At least we'll all get to have a fun day trying out the bridge and something for tourists to take pictures of as they land in Hong Kong and Macau.

Perhaps in the future policies will change and it will become easy to us the bridge as a normal bridge.

If you're interested in learning more, here's a great article with more background: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/10/23/explainer-hong-kongs-t...

Something that's missing from this article: Since USDC is an ERC20 token based on Ethereum, you'll still need to hold ETH so that you can pay for gas to move the USDC stablecoin token around.

A fiat-world analogy to this would be to imagine if spending Euros required you to hold US Dollars to pay the transaction fees.

Presumably they'll charge you a fee to buy, sell and trade it just like any other asset. If coinbase is involved in keeping the reserve, they can invest it various assets and keep the earnings - think money market fund, but you don't earn any interest - coinbase/circle keep the interest.

10+ years ago, I had the opportunity to pitch to Charles and his wife.

His advice to us was stop trying to raise money and “Just fucking do it.”

If you’ve never read the history of the company he founded, Computer Associates, it’s an interesting story of growth by M&A - at one time it was the largest software company in the world, ahead of Microsoft. http://www.company-histories.com/Computer-Associates-Interna...

RIP Charles.

Lots of people took that exact same strategy at what in hindsight now looks like ridiculously low prices like $1 or $10 or $100. Those people don’t have 50,000 or often any bitcoin left.

I agree with the directional sentiment of the article that a cashless society is bad for the poor and for other disenfranchised members of society.

I don't see the "many places will not accept cash" problem that the article suggests is widespread.

I'm in Shenzhen once or twice a month and haven't had any problem paying with cash - taxi drivers and vendors don't complain.

Vendors being unable to give change for 100 CNY bills was a frequent problem 10 years ago and is still periodically a problem. More often than not the solution is still the same as it was 10 years ago: insist that this is all you have. Half of the time the vendor really does have change and just didn't want to give it to you. The other half of the time the vendor really didn't have change and will ask a neighboring shop for change.

Europe for travel within the Schengen Zone has at least been moving back in the right direction of no papers required for travel. Meanwhile, in North America and the Caribbean it was perfectly normal to be able to travel around with no passport up until just a decade or so ago.

I remember being able to go to visit Canada from the USA with nothing more than someone asking if you if you are a US citizen.

That freedom to travel is yet another right that was thrown out the door because of 9/11 via the "Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative" [1] which would be more aptly named the "Western Hemisphere Restriction of Travel Initiative"

Sad.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Travel_Init...

Didi significantly reduced subsidies after Uber left the market - in Shenzhen at least this means prices aren't any better than taxis. It's usually faster to get a taxi in most places and times of the day than waiting the 3-5 minutes for your Didi to arrive. Back when it was a lot cheaper to Didi, people would wait a couple minutes to save 50%, but if the price is the same, they take what's faster.

On top of this there's additional competition from the huge numbers of people using bike sharing like Mobike or Ofo - which not only taking a bike much cheaper, but it's often faster because you avoid traffic jams.

Amazing how much the market has changed in such a short time.

Not sure this is just a Japan phenomenon - seems like more of a "American tech workers are realizing there's a lot of interesting places to live outside of the USA and it's easier than ever"-phenomenon.

I made the move to China and then Hong Kong about 11 years ago and don't regret it either.

Anecdotally seeing increasing numbers of "high tech" people moving to Hong Kong / China too. 10 years ago it was mostly people looking to source cheap goods.

Fast forward 10 years and in Hong Kong, we finally have our first tech startup unicorn, Bitmex [1]

It will be good for everyone to spread the talent and innovation around.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-22/crypto-tr... which was started by American and British co-founders who moved to Hong Kong.

Heathcard insurance premiums are using community rates - priced on the overall risk / claim rate of the population of people covered under a certain policy.

My guess is that expats and visitors from other countries are a healthy and lower risk group (because they’re also wealthier) than the general population.

It's great that Google is doing the right thing in this case, but it is still incredibly dangerous for society that one company has so much power over what people can find on the internet.

Google used to say "Don't be evil," but no company or individual should be in the position where they can sit there and think "Should I be evil or not?"

Thanks!

Anyone have details about how Messages in iCloud works? Is it end-to-end encrypted?

Hong Kong doesn’t tax capital gains so if you’re American you pay normal capital gains and if you’re not you pay nothing.

Not surprising: Google despite being blocked in China a lot of presumably expensive paid transit from the big 3 mainland china telcos in and out of the mainland to Hong Kong.

Cloudflare serves sites visited from China that aren't using their China-requires-an-ICP-license service from their west coast USA location where the big 3 Chinese telcos will peer for free.

It doesn't stop at 6 gb, they stop charging you for data at 6 gb. It's "free" after that.

If you can figure out how to bootstrap it, Discourse will provide your community with more long-term value as it becomes a valuable, organized store of community information new members or potential new members can browse to learn about the community.

Slack is great for realtime interaction and a short term dopamine hit, but is also a black hole for information. This is especially true when you're using it for a community and not paying to have access to your old messages.

Larry from Blockstack here.

We're really focused on improving the on-boarding process for users who are new to the Blockstack ecosystem so it only takes on a few seconds for users to get started with a Blockstack app instead of immediately asking users to download and install the Blockstack Browser.

There's a bit of a discussion about how this will work on mobile here: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/blockstack-mobile-plans/3621/...

We want to really reduce the friction of on-boarding new users to amazing apps like Graphite.

Very happy Fastmail customer here. Find the web interface more responsive than gmail and the IMAP implementation seems to be play better with apple's mail clients.

It doesn’t invalidate the article at all. Quite the opposite.

It’s the best part because it shows us how ridiculously out of control the issue of third party tracking & data collection is. You can’t even read what’s being done to address it without being subject to it.

Best part about this article is that the Guardian has Facebook tracking code that collects user data on it. https://imgur.com/a/UrSyt

I was in a similar position as this entrepreneur. I had the company I created sponsored my own employment visa in Hong Kong. I often took less salary than my employment contract that was provided with the visa application specified because that's what happens sometimes with bootstrapped businesses.

Luckily for me, the Hong Kong government isn't the Swedish government, and didn't give me a hard time when renewing my visa.

It will be Sweden's loss if they deport this entrepreneur.

No idea. Ha!

Ha! That's a great idea!

The really crazy thing is how I found out about it. A friend in Austin's friend who I don't know was apparently at that restaurant in Shenzhen, ~10 miles north of where I live in Hong Kong, traveling on business, saw the menu, recognized my name from somewhere, told the friend in Austin who then passed on the message and pic to me. Small world.

China's a big country - makes me wonder what other menus I'm on!

At least Google Translate is a bit better than Baidu Translate which at some point decided that my name is the English translation of 扒饭 (grilled rice).

2 years ago, I appeared on the menu of a restaurant on Huawei's campus in Shenzhen because someone apparently used Baidu Translate to translate the menu to English: https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320

And 2 years later, I'm still grilled rice: http://translate.baidu.com/#zh/en/扒饭

Human language is hard!