nexthash

And if somebody steals your coin, you can go through courts and banks to get it back. You can pay taxes with it. It is backed by a strong authority and is used as the reserve currency/economic driver of the world's countries. It is stable and does not suffer price volatility. Fortunes do not get lost if they are in cash at the bank. Crypto has none of these things.

There's been an uptick of crypto fanboys coming to this forum lately. I'm fine with that and the technology is interesting. However, if you try to pollute our space with ideologies and conspiracy theories about the fed, you will not be unchallenged. Just like USD, crypto has downsides. Do not sweep the downsides of crypto under the rug for some utopiaic ideology. Be reasonable.

Fortunately, ublock origin does most of the targeting for me, although it focuses on ads not content. I'm pretty sure those people work night and day to keep the filters accurate. As for my filters, I've set them over the last couple years and haven't needed to change them since. Changing them probably corresponds to UI overhauls of the site. If it is too difficult or costly for me to filter, I usually just block the site outright.

The level of engineering put into creating feeds and distracting you from your purpose on some websites is terrifying. As part of my attempts to lessen my digital addiction, I wrote filters in ublock origin to block off anything on youtube that was distracting (auto suggestions, feeds). I had to target at least 4 different places to get the site looking clean.

There's the home page, the video suggestions at the side of a video you are watching, the video suggestions that pop up when a video ends, and much more. All equally distracting algorithmically-curated rakes that you have to step over. Here are some of the filter strings I used:

   www.youtube.com###secondary
   www.youtube.com###chips-below > .ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope
   www.youtube.com###primary > .ytd-two-column-browse-results-renderer.style-scope
   www.youtube.com##.ytp-endscreen-content

Unreal, in my opinion, how firm of a hold these kinds of sites can get over your brain through dopamine addiction and distraction.

From experience I know that user research/validation is one of the most important steps in building a viable project, but also that it is really difficult to do because your methods have to be tailored to different groups of people. That's where I think this might need improvement - it simplifies idea selection to "throw your idea out there, and maybe somebody will pay to see it happen." Quite a few ideas on there but I haven't seen anybody pay.

In reality, you will have to go through literally hundreds of ideas and talk to many, many people to even get your idea to the start line. Then, you can start charging and see if people are willing to pay. To be honest, I feel like this bring-to-market test, whether that's a Kickstarter or a deployment of a SaaS product is the most efficient way to test your idea out.

There are no shortcuts in user research. This website might be better off pivoting to idea aggregator (possibly with gamification/in-game money) to better simulate the market test. People "pay" for a small MVP experiment and contribute in a sort of crowdsourced idea selection and startup formation process.

I would argue that VC investing is actually a renaissance in providing bountiful cheap funding for startups to get off the ground. It is only going to expand. And if you know anything about the process, there are ample lawyers and legal contracts to set out terms and equity. Investing is less about insiders and more about innovation than it has ever been. If you are waiting for its collapse, you are going to be sitting in your gaming chair for quite a long time.

It might also be so unpopular because we are smart enough and technically inclined enough to make our own conclusions on the technology without relying on ideology. And the more we look into it, the more dubious the siren song of crypto becomes.

I totally agree. There is absolutely no earthly reason for why a Bitcoin should be worth $40k+. Cryptocurrencies can be useful, but they aren't useful enough to replace the financial system or be valued more than any actual asset. The whole ecosystem is rotten to the core, with scams, inefficient and stupefyingly complex technology, and a foundation built on dreams. Don't be surprised when it all comes crashing down.

I doubt anybody in an important position would lend much thought to crypto. A glance at it and you can see that its just a Rube-Goldberg machine trying to replace the trust and authority of central banks with "decentralization". And for what? So you can get your wallet hacked and have nobody to go to for restitution?

So you can get a bug found in your smart contract and have no way of fixing it? So you can lose your net worth by gambling on DogeCoin?

Crypto is a big bucket of problems, and the fact that a small group of idealogues call big bankers names and call their little toys "assets" doesn't change that the entire ecosystem is garbage. It will never replace the financial system.

Oh, and would you mind explaining to us your experience with supply chain management?

I guess I have coder's block... the thought of a big project makes me more reluctant to start.

Yeah, if you have the fab, circuit board manufacturing plant, and assembly plant then it is. Keep in mind that you are economically isolated from the rest of the world, forcing you to do things like copy designs to save time and limited resources for building the machines.

I think the important thing highlighted in this article is that a startup needs to do whatever it can to survive - which means its okay to quickly do things that won't be sustainable later. A startup needs to hit the ground running, whether that means building a quick MVP or taking to the road for users. If it doesn't build a stable position to start off from or focuses too much on planning/scaling then it won't ever be able to move from square 1. When the startup gains traction and critical mass, then it can start thinking about scaling and long-term performance.

London e nodonL worked for me.

I especially liked the squeaky toy sound it made when the input met the password scheme. Maybe that would be a good addition to slip into the product's account page before it ships!

No, no, no! That's the whole reason behind why it sucks... you can't trust it! You have to verify every record on that chain by yourself, and if you make a mistake in a transaction or other operation there is no court or process that can give you restitution. Its also very inefficient (massively slow) compared to a distributed database, while functionally doing the same thing. There are barely any use cases where you don't want central authority and you want distributed storage... centralized databases are always going to be more efficient and convenient. If you want to use a inefficient, crappy excuse for a database be my guest.

Willingness to be conscripted? Different styles of dress? Different approaches to life? Sure it would be a culture shock and strange, but the culture as a whole would not be alien. If we had a day just to shadow/hang around in the company of these people (you can still travel to areas where people practice indigenous lifestyles, for example) we would find them to be not much different than us.

Despite their strange practices, this is what is normal to them, and they aren't any less human whether in the form of perfection or fallibility. They worry about the future, love their families, have wants and ambitions, get angry sometimes, and have their biases. We would find them to be comically relatable to your life, just in a different form.

None of this is true... politics mainly happened at the local level because the imperial Roman empire was destroyed, but that only changed development and innovation. Have you ever read Beowulf? It is one of the most highly developed pieces of Old English poetry, at 3000 lines, and was written in this time period. Silver mining increased, and many technological innovations like iron plows emerged. Beautiful cathedrals were constructed in the Romanesque style, and learning continued in monastical schools all over Europe.

There was international trade and military activity ranging from Scandinavian societies raiding into Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as the Crusades starting up near the end of this period. The Christian church of the Roman empire, otherwise known as the Roman Catholic Church, was alive and well, becoming one of the most powerful institutions for the next several hundred centuries. "Dark Ages" is an antiquated term - think transition, not Camelot (although the legend did originate in this period). It is often called the "Early Middle Ages" these days.

I mean if we look at the time period... everybody did this to everyone. European states had bloody dynastic and religious wars. The intrigues of city-states on the Italian peninsula created one of the most treacherous political environments of all time, inspiring Machiavelli to write his renowned book on power. In the half-century prior, England invaded France and ravaged for a hundred years, and Europeans regularly attacked Islamic empires in the Middle East.

It was bloody all around, because there wasn't a whole lot of stability. But this didn't stop these different cultures from exchanging knowledge and goods as well, as Islamic empires, Italian merchants, and other players all had high levels of development and innovations that were quickly copied. I'm sure the sacking of Constantinople did lead to an influx of knowledge into Western Europe, but it was all these different factors that led to the appearance of the Renaissance.

You are quite right. A lot of people underestimate the international connections a specific local place had at some time in history, this is the case with Europe as well. After the Roman Empire fell, its knowledge, writings, and customs were somewhat preserved in Western Europe, but their real preservation and translation occurred in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. Then in the 15th century the lifestyle, innovations, and preserved writings from these places and others as far as China gained traction in Europe again. This helped kick-start the Renaissance.

I personally am not surprised this happened - the definition between concrete species is terribly fuzzy depending on how far back in time you go. There's different ways the evolutionary tree can fork, from geographic to functional to reproductive isolation. Usually the environment selects for random mutations that differentiate two similar groups of organisms.

What takes longer is for prezygotic (functional) and postzygotic (cellular biological) reproductive barriers to form to prevent direct genetic mixing. Their absence would allow human and Neanderthal populations to mix DNA pools and merge even with some biological differences, especially if the human population arrives in overwhelming numbers.

There are a lot of misguided beliefs about the Medieval period arising from a popular Gothic/Romantic revival in the 19th century. The period became known by another name - "the Dark Ages" - and was seen as dark, mysterious, and primitive. That completely got wrong what the Medieval period really was - the transition from Roman imperial rule to early-modern European states, and a small industrial revolution in technology including agriculture and navigation.

The popular view of all-powerful, romantic nobility and dumb peasants also comes from this mischaracterization. In reality, the period's instability after the Roman empire fell really made kings and nobles more akin to local warlords playing at Roman customs, and there were exceptions to the rule like prosperous city-republics. Peasant life was also sophisticated, rational, and complex, completely attuned to local weather and crop cycles. A good blog series goes into detail about this here:

https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

The important thing to realize is that no matter how difficult it was, how long ago it occurred, and how foreign the customs were for a certain period, people are still people. They have emotions, worries, good days, and struggles. If you take things in perspective and empathize with the people that preceded you on this world, history will lose a lot of its mystery.

A little bit of value. But as a decentralized utopian panacea? Nope. If I was given the choice between a Bitcoin and a bar of gold, I'd definitely take the bar of gold.

With the resources they had (almost nothing) in the stilted, moribund economy of the Soviet Bloc, cloning the Apple II is quite an incredible technical achievement.

Interesting idea. What he's saying is that instead of rendering your single page webapp entirely on the client-side like React or have the user wait for the whole thing to be generated and sent over with server-side rendering, you can carve up the page into sections (islands) based on whether they contain more or less interactive/dynamic content.

Based on these sections, less interactive stuff like text can be rendered on the server and sent over while more dynamic stuff is in skeletal form until client side rendering occurs. This allows the user to see the most important stuff under the correct link first while waiting for any dynamic components to be loaded client-side. Definitely works for some types of SPAs, maybe product sites or social media, but for more complex webapps like scientific tools or presentation software this might not be the best fit.

Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26082303

So you pay $40k+ for bitcoin just so you can frame some numbers and letters and say you paid $40k+ for those numbers and letters?

Gold's value comes from the fact that it doesn't dull or dim over time, and has many uses in the electronics and jewelry industries. If you have the resources to get gold and own it, that is a clear sign of status and value.

Can't say the same with crypto for any counts. All of crypto's value comes from speculation. Over the last 10 years, I've seen the same tired drum beat, that 'crypto is valuable because of decentralization, supply regulation, and censorship resistance' but these are so vapid and completely different from reality and what people actually need. There is no convenience, no government backing, and no trust. So the only people using these fake tokens are disreputables and hedge funds/speculators looking to exploit and get fun returns.

Sorry, but in case you don't have much intuition, let me fill you in. People value gold and artwork because it is beautiful and you can have it for yourself. Gold also has several utilitarian uses. Now compare these things to a digital token. Can I frame and admire a digital token? Can I use it for anything? Do I even understand what it is or how it works most of the time? No.

So it therefore has no value for me. Millions of people like me have the same basic intuition. Others, like you, are driven by ideology and see digital tokens as something nice and valuable that can be "kept", for ideological reasons. This value has no basis in anything physical like looks or usefulness, and has no battle-tested authority telling you it is responsible for making it useful.

Decentralization doesn't count, because as I've already said many times there is no trust or recourse in a decentralized system with random people. So you haven't given me a reason for why a "Bitcoin" should be worth $40k+. That's why I say its sad that authorities in other countries are so unreliable that people have to buy into this disreputable game to stay afloat.

In Venezuela the rich were never destroyed, I'd argue that Chavez and his supporters rose into a new class of elites. They control the oil company, drug smuggling, etc. I'd argue that wealth as a zero sum game is a part of the premise - there is the whole pie (economy) and then there are slices (who reaps the benefits).

By growing the size of the pie you grow the economy, but then the task becomes dividing the pie reasonably to ensure stability and reduce societal problems. In Venezuela, the economy is shafted for numerous reasons - huge concentration of the whole pie into a small elite does no good for the rest of the country, and was worsened by sanctions punishing these actions.

It's actually interesting to look at the history of the income tax in the United States. The highest marginal income tax rate was at a crazy amount (> 70% !!!!!) during wartime in the 1910s and 1940s, corresponding with the strong-regulation Progressive era, and then New Deal policies. These were times of rapidly falling income inequality and rising standards of living, eventually leading to 1950s prosperity. Always good remembering the context in which we live in, and it can help us figure out what we can do to face our problems today.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...

I wouldn't say that the Fed is corrupt or incompetent by intention, rather it is part of a set of policies giving lenience to the financial system written by a generation that doesn't understand the need for strong regulation. Such generations come and go, usually in 50-year cycles as the older policymakers with memories of financial crises like the Great Depression die off.

This lack of regulation is part of the inequality issue. Other factors include a potentially flooded labor market driving down wages, allowing people in control of economic resources to reap more work for the same price. However, some skilled people in labor also use this as an opportunity to move up the ladder. It's complex, ever-changing system with multiple variables and outputs. Read more here:

https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap...