peacetreefrog

A lot of people here are skeptical, saying basically "if people don't want to be addicted to technology they should just stop using it", but I think that's simplistic.

You could say the same thing about eating, "if you're not happy with your weight then just stop eating so much" The fact that's technically true doesn't mean there's no market for diet books or people should have to do it all on their own. Weight watchers, for example, has a 4B market cap.

Exactly, so what if a company/product's source of profit was helping people get off their phones?

This is a good point (about #'s of comparable products), but I disagree that anti-addiction products are inherently unsellable.

I think you could make the argument that weight loss products could fall into this category. There are a ton of diet books/advice, and Weight Watchers has a market cap of 4.4B.

As for actual products, I know there's the kitchen safe:

https://www.amazon.com/Kitchen-Safe-Locking-Container-Height...

Also 700k+ people have installed StayFocus (a website blocker) for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankej...

"Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or trying to anticipate corrections than has been lost in the corrections themselves." - Peter Lynch

I feel like there should be a link to a demo application more easily accessible. I'm interested in what type of things I could build with it, is the only way to check that out forking the tutorial repo and building it etc?

Well for one, it's not just the price -- I can't slap a million dollar price tag on my house and call it the value -- it's the price in a well functioning, liquid market. I.e. someone has to be willing to pay it.

Historically from time to time you do get these anomalies and bubbles where things get out of wack. The tulip bubble is a classic example, and BTC last year looked a lot like that too. I think the way to connect those prices back to value is that the price eventually (and not even that long from a historical perspective) got back in sync -- tulip bulbs eventually crashed and BTC has lost 50+% of it's value in the last year.

So I guess it's not to say price always == value for everything at every moment in time, but exceptions don't come around that often. Again, the Yudkowsky book explores when they do.

Related is this comment by Warren Buffett:

"I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.

"Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better."

For a lot of economists price == value, so it doesn't really make sense to say something like a house is overvalued. This is particularly true with liquid, well traded securities like US equities. That's not to say the current price (value) won't ever change but -- generally -- you can't make consistent, exploitable predictions about them. Prices for equities generally take a "random walk" from where they are at any given moment.

For an interesting discussion about when and when this isn't the case the book Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky is pretty good.

https://equilibriabook.com/

When did you learn rails? Would you recommend learning it today?

This is cool, seems like getting this article on HN should be helpful for you.

I like the total net revenue figure, $710 and low expenses.

I'm in a similar range for my side project, a few thousands of dollars (prob a similar net revenue figure to yours) but not nearly enough to take it full time and (by itself, from a pure financial perspective) not enough to justify the huge amounts of time I spend on it it.

A lot of people say getting the first X (3 or 10 or whatever) customers is the hardest, but for me it's definitely been expanding on that and taking it to the next level. One book that seems promising to me is Gabriel Weinberg's book, tractionbook.com, though I haven't had a ton of time to try and implement all the ideas yet.

This is my first app built with Elm - happy to discuss my experiences with Elm, which have been > 95% positive so far.

Originally built it in React-redux, which was nice and worked decent, however when I came back to update a few things this season a bunch of stuff was out of date and -- based on my brief googling -- there was some talk about whether redux would continue to even be necessary at all.

Anyway literally that same day I read: https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpop... on HN and decided to give Elm a shot and here we are.

what are your websites?

With respect, "this shit" and "drove ME crazy" don't sound all that empathetic. This is a disorder that people can't help, and are often very embarrassed by. I think the right way to handle it is to be supportive in trying to help get treatment, while making clear it has zero impact on how you view them as a person.

Not saying you're not doing that, but just a good reminder. I have someone close to me that suffers from this (and is embarrassed by it) and it's helped both of us to sort of view it as a biological quirk/defect (like wearing glasses) vs something really shameful.

Awesome!

Can I run pandas in it?

No worries, not suggesting you think it's slavery. I think that would be a pretty extreme position to take.

I do agree people aren't always rational, and there are certainly other costs in terms of wear and tear etc. But I think people are (1) relatively more rational when it comes to money, (2) get more rational with experience (i.e. as they observe having to take their cars in more after driving a while).

Uber has > 160k active drivers, I think it's very paternalistic to suggest they aren't rational enough to realize how screwed they're getting and think gov or some other third party needs to step in. I think it should also give us pause that many of the loudest voices saying these things (especially locally) are associated with the taxi industry.

These researchers say it's $8.55. Some people argue it should be more (like $13), but -- like I said in another comment -- a job is a bundle of things including pay but also: flexibility, liking who you work with, feeling like you accomplished something, etc. Uber provides very high flexibility (literally can almost work on demand), which economists have estimated gives drivers twice the surplus over similar paying, less flexible options.

And is your argument that driving for Uber is de facto slavery?

"Regular" employees don't have universal health care. It's just that employers get a tax deduction for employer provided group insurance. Most economists believe this is hugely inefficient and a big policy mistake. If we're lobbying hard for pie in the sky goals, it'd be better to get rid of that (or let employers deduct contributions to individual plans instead) instead of applying the same crappy policy to gig economy jobs too.

It has to be mutually beneficial, otherwise drivers would be doing something else. We don't have slavery in this country anymore.

One of the biggest benefits is working whenever you want. A paper by the NBER found drivers get twice the consumer (or producer in this case I guess) surplus they would from less flexible arraignments:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23296

I really think one of the biggest blindspots of the (generally well-intentioned, smart) crowd at HN is lack of appreciation of economics and markets, and the belief that tinkering with these markets for the better is as simple as turning a dial on a knob (or passing a law, or getting a good ruling in a court case).

Good article with related thoughts on this: http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2005/Robertsmarkets....

Deciding to drive for Uber is a mutually beneficial transaction between consenting adults (or an adult and a company). If the driver wasn't benefiting, they'd do something else.

Well-intentioned (by some people, prob most people on HN) and not so well-intentioned (anti-competitive lobbying by taxis) efforts to make the relationship less "exploitative" are likely doing more harm than good.

What happens when the gov mandates all these extra benefits? "Drivers WILL earn more money!" The answer is some combination of: Uber becomes costlier, people take fewer rides (or growth is slower than it should be), and some people who are perfectly willing and able to drive right now are unable to do so. Or (if demand is more inelastic) a bunch of new drivers decide the new benefits make it worth entering the market, and not everyone who wants to drive can/people sit around idle, etc.

Either way, you're hurting consumers and many existing drivers.

I appreciate the spirit of this comment too. I do think though that where many well-intentioned people go wrong is that they think wages are just like a dial that "we" (or gov or whomever) can easily turn. I think this essay gets at a lot of these ideas very well:

http://russroberts.info/article/the-reality-of-markets/

No one said anything about dehumanization. It's your prerogative to disagree to what extent that line of thinking is based in reality. It shouldn't be your prerogative to see comments like that deleted because you disagree with them.

This article is talking about the labor-shareholder profit split. It's absolutely relevant to point out the opportunities normal people have for becoming shareholders. stockpile.com let's you buy fractional shares (no longer need 2k to buy a share of amazon) for a 99 cent commission. You can get commission free ETF's from Schwab with a couple hundred $ account minimum.

Arguing that most workers are so strapped for cash that they literally cannot set aside a few bucks to invest -- and not only that -- that arguments even hinting at such a thing should not even be said out loud, is mind boggling.

Really disagree with these comments (not as much this one as the other one in this thread) being flagged and removed. IIRC the line was basically, "many people have much more to invest then they claim, but they spend it on netflix, brunch, concerts etc instead"

Sure, obv won't apply to everyone and not everyone will agree, but seems like a reasonable sentiment that should at least be allowed to exist on the thread. Deleting it makes it seem like you're going for thought monoculture here.

Taking out a bunch of student loans in order to join the gig economy isn't nec the most sensible path to take.

One way: find a way to turn your sentiment (whatever it is, honestly a little unclear to me) into a testable, observable prediction, and bet on it.

Economist Bryan Caplan has done a lot of this over the years, and -- although he has a lot of non-mainstream views -- I think this habit means he's taken seriously even by people who don't agree with him.

http://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat.html

Did the people with the anti-virals take them immediately and upon getting infected? Or did they just have to take them at some point post-infection? Couldn't really tell from the article/not sure how the biology works.

vimwiki

For anyone reading this: Matterhorn is really good. It's a novel that takes place during the Vietnam war written by a former vet. I feel like it was good insight into what war is like. Also some good lessons to take away on nature of centralized command structures and their drawbacks.

"One thing that always bothers me is how we have this myth of personal responsibility that supposes an individual is equipped to defend their own interests against a multinational corporation on their own."

1. Our wiring isn't perfect, but who is better equipped to defend a person's interests than the individual themself? Serious question.

2. I don't think the "power" and coerciveness of multinational corporations is anywhere near that of government, which people bashing corporations usually want to make larger and more powerful. As Diedre McCloskey says, what happens if you are morally opposed to some new fighter jet or corporate subsidy, and unilaterally decide to pay fewer taxes because of it? The answer is you go jail. What happens if you choose Samsung or an Iphone? Nothing.

3. It's not like there is just one monolithic corporation. There are many, and they have various interests, capabilities and incentives. Usually they're competing with each other. Further, in time, many corporations correctly view these irrationalities as market opportunities and actively work on helping consumers combat them. E.g. see Acorns, Wealthfront, or hundreds of apps that help people use their phones less.

Even if we're all watching each other, we still all have our own incentives and not so obvious irrationalities.