michaelscott

...for those that own it, certainly. What about everyone else?

This is a separate (but important) issue. The development and effect that tech like this will have on the place of the artist or designer in the future is going to be a similarly seismic shift for the industry, just as the camera and printing press were in their time. This is going to happen more-or-less regardless of what the outcome of the copyright issue is.

Art has been seen as an outcome of context, rather than simply a combination of aesthetics and composition, for a long time already. The movements of Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and, maybe most famously, Cubism have all already questioned the purpose of art in the recent-ish past.

That purpose of art is what will need to be determined now. In the early Middle Ages of Europe or the Islamic Golden Age, for example, art served a religious purpose. In more modern times, art has served to question or criticise the status quo in the context from which it's born. I don't think this purpose necessarily needs to be abandoned, but it will definitely need to be re-assessed in light of this new tool we've developed.

You're right, I think this was probably a major factor in why he was voted in (I wasn't alive at the time so this would just be a guess from my side). I think the big problem with Carter is that he was what you could call a "peace-time president" in a period where America was basically still very much at war. What America needed was something closer to a Churchill, and they essentially got it in the form of Reagan later.

I think Carter would've been assessed very differently if he'd been president in the 90s or early 2000s.

I'm not really making a comment about his morality, only his skill. If you have an issue with his methods and what they mean morally, I'd suggest you not look too deeply at any of the people who've sat in the Oval Office. Every president since at least Truman, in a more ideal world, would be tried for war crimes for a start. In the real world things are a little more grey though.

I think this a great summary. Carter is someone who, when looking back, seems very ahead of his time in his views. It's just that presidents are not assessed in a vacuum, and unfortunately he was not perceived as the president America needed at that point in its history.

Reagan played the political game far better than both Carter and Nixon (Watergate notwithstanding). He was a master at couching effective foreign policy tactics, which often relied on detente (eg negotiating with Iran), within the augur of American values and exceptionalism that spoke to the people of the time ("we don't negotiate with hostage takers").

The former was critical to actually get things done, but a president has to realise that the latter is just as critical because you need that public support to get the former through the door.

I'm not sure how citizens using crypto to buy bread and milk helps prop up bad governments? To be clear, in the kinds of governments I'm talking about here the people at the top are entirely and completely insulated from the day-to-day struggles of their population.

Most will have offshore accounts hidden in various shady or neutral jurisdictions that will ensure they live out the rest of their days without issue (see Zimbabwe, Nazi Germany, or recently Sri Lanka). They could even wipe out large swathes of their population completely and it would still do nothing to destabilise the government (again, see Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge, the list goes on)

Apologies for saying it this way but this is a very naive take. How long did it take for the Vietnam to resolve in the 50s - 70s? How long did the Berlin Wall take to come down, or the Soviet Union to collapse? What about apartheid in South Africa? How long before Ukraine's population can live normally again?

"Change the government" is a process that even in the best cases takes decades to resolve. Children are born and grow to adulthood in these chaotic situations, and that's normally with outside pressure applied. No the tech won't resolve the core problem, but it will allow people to get bread and milk from within a hostile system until that core problem is resolved.

Very much this. It makes the process of salary negotiation completely tied to perception rather than reality, which isn't necessarily bad for the employee. It just means that the justifications for a higher salary need to change from "your salary offer is too low because it shouldn't depend on where I live" to "your salary offer should be higher because I can improve your business in x, y and z"

I would say it's more congruent with evolution, which is to say it aligns with the idea that mutations or other advantages can put an organism far ahead of its competitors and improves the species through genetic preservation (or historical preservation, in the case of societies).

I don't buy that it's out-and-out better than a collectivist system at a society level (even though I consider myself very much an individualist). As usual with these sorts of polarising perspectives, the ideal is probably somewhere in the middle and a purely individualist society will never be able to persist long term.

Western cultures, as originating from the Greeks, prioritise the individual in society and usually attempt to improve through the conflict and collaboration of such individuals. Eastern cultures, as originating from Confucianism, prioritise the group and attempt to improve through harmony of social structure and contribution to the greater good.

I wouldn't say one is better than the other, but they're very alien in comparison to each other and this makes preference extremely subjective. Both approaches have significant drawbacks in addition to all their successes, so it's natural that an Easterner would entertain this satirical idea (seeing the positives) while it'd be abhorrent to a Westerner (seeing only the negatives)

Prior generations were more likely to remain in a specific geographical area (eg. central or western Europe) and so taking the time to learn these specific languages made sense. Learning other European languages as a European is also not that far of a leap (unless we're talking Hungarian or Finnish).

Modern generations are constantly on the move in a globalised world. It's not uncommon for that European to end up working in Asia nowadays, where their knowledge of other European languages is useless.

The second statement gives me the impression they're analysing and debugging... encrypted data? I can't really make sense of it

The lack of any affordance whatsoever on buttons, switches and appliances in Switzerland drives me absolutely insane

Personal experience attempting to open an account with them while living in a developing country. Granted, this was about 5 years ago so the situation may have changed since then.

Uptake in Zimbabwe, Nigeria and a number of other African countries has been climbing

Although I agree that the expression that OP made maybe wasn't the best, they do have a point.

> Your first approach should be a Wise multi-currency account.

Excellent example; Wise is not available for account setup in the vast majority of developing countries, so if that's your solution it's already a failure. But why? For the most part it seems to come down to banking and currency regulations, which is exactly what cryptocurrency (at least Bitcoin) was designed to circumvent. I'm not even talking about countries that are essentially kleptocracies and have moulded their regulations to fit that structure, or remittances that have become such a large industry they practically power the GDP of a number of extremely poor countries.

> Any decentralized/floating-rate coins are utter garbage for folks without access to meaningful banking systems in so-called third-world countries due to the volatility, embedded systemic leverage, high fees and potential long transaction times.

I'm not sure this argument still holds with all the defi options today, but if this is an improvement on the status quo I guarantee people in third world countries will use it in spite of its deficiencies. A central bank that throttles access to alternative currency options will practically shut down the use of existing banking infrastructure, whether it's good or not.

> The fact that Apple is entering the arena is quite a disruption as other brands will be forced to either compete on price or really raise the bar on innovation to justify their current levels.

This is the part I don't really understand, unless this app was completely developed out-of-house. How large an arena is this really? Are there really that many potential customers who are both divers and haven't bought an Apple watch? Is there some angle from the business side I'm missing here?

I'm not sure how you got less cautious from my comment. In fact I was saying the opposite, that they viewed gambling as a pastime or entertainment, not as a legitimate way to make money. It's when a person considers it a means of getting out of a financial tight spot that they start to make ridiculous and dangerous bets.

Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as.

In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope

A bizarre choice if they were middle management; the running of a kingdom in the Prince is only really directly applicable to highest levels of C-suite management.

> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets.

The irony in this statement, given the reasons why this toilet costs so much, is absolutely unreal. I had to check the date on this article to make sure it wasn't an old April's Fools skit or something, but it seems red tape and NIMBYism have escalated to such a degree in SF that (a) securing budget for a single toilet that will take 3 years to build is considered a political victory worthy of patting themselves on the back in the press, and (b) a toilet to "ease" rampant homelessness is considered a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes.

Wild.

It definitely makes a lot of assumptions that I don't think hold true in practice. As you say, many world leaders would even want to have one another killed (as individuals with both motive and a lot of power to make it happen) and yet it doesn't happen very often. The practicalities of actually _using_ the digital cash, should you win, in a way that wouldn't point the finger at you are also not so simple.

It's an interesting thought experiment though. Would probably make for a cool novel!

I worked on a little side project for classification on tabular data, but a really challenging use case where the data was prone to a lot of noise and some randomness in the dependent variable. Tree models couldn't get a high enough accuracy, and when the dataset was under roughly 6k entries deep learning performed even worse (as expected).

What was really interesting was when the dataset had more than 6k or so; the deep learning model was suddenly much more accurate and by a wide gap! At roughly the 10k mark, the DL model was outperforming the tree model easily.

I find these sorts of things fascinating ito the economics. If there is a large section of the population that creates companies but is underserved in funding by VCs (which I think is the case), then you've essentially got a market inefficiency. This means that the VCs that do fund these startups will actually end up becoming more profitable, because they're "stealing" edge from VCs that won't.

> In 2019, the Colorado State House of Representatives used quadratic voting as a way to determine which appropriations bills to prioritize funding first.

I think this is the best use case for this voting structure: given a set of options to choose from at the same time, you're able to rank these democratically in a way that embodies all the benefits described in the article

This is such a good point, my mind has recently been opened to how much happens in the Spanish, French and Russian speaking parts of the world that I had no idea about because it just isn't in English. Does anyone know of resources that are HN-like or could be used to fill in the gaps on interesting developments in non-English countries/regions?

It's about the underlying structure of the legal system, not one particular law or political leaning you don't agree with. The checks and balances system in the US is definitely far more resilient than any of the commonwealth countries, Roe v Wade notwithstanding.

This is incredible! Does anyone know of other sites like this for films from other countries? I've been looking to broaden my cinematic horizons a bit, as well as hunting for material to practice language comprehension.