102 karma · joined January 23, 2020
For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"
> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”
These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.
No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.
Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.
This is highly doubtful. Crows don't have language anything like humans. Dolphins are a more likely candidate. I want to believe it, but I can't.
Yes, these are some of the highest paying companies on the planet. Your statement is not a put-down of Jane Street.
But there is a clear winner here. Tabs won, almost all code files use spaces. Of course everyone uses the tab key on their keyboard, and the IDE makes spaces for you; no one is going to manually press space 4 times.
Food is not limited by labor, or specifically scarce any more than any other good. In fact it's not obvious to me it will always require labor at all.
Strictly speaking, all goods are scarce if you don't have an infinite number of them. But I think we are lazily saying "scarce" when we mean something like "unavoidably zero sum". The only thing you list which has that is land.
Strictly speaking, this is false.
I think it's clear from Paul Graham's essays that he always basically defined "hacking" as just programming. He then created Hacker News.
> Then it became "Hacker News" and about "Anything that good hackers would find interesting".
Well, yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
*What to Submit*
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
> But somehow I would expect more outlandish topics then all the discussions about corporate software jobs and tools we see.
Well, I don't know, if you're interested in that you can submit such things and upvote them. But I wouldn't necessarily expect founders to post more off the wall stuff.
> Is there a smaller communitiy somewhere, where less "normies" with normal jobs hang out and more founders and makers?
Yes, https://lobste.rs/
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
First, this does not negate the comparison. Bitcoin could also be like that, and therefore not a ponzi. Second, I know a long of gold investors who would disagree with this opinion. Third, the market cap of gold is over 4x bitcoin, indicating that gold has already reached saturation, whereas bitcoin has space to grow.
> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry,
This is a point that always gets brought up in discussions of gold. It is wrong and practically dishonest. Gold as jewelry does NOT drive the value of gold, by and large. And even if it DOES, the valuing of gold as jewelry material over any other similar-colored material is itself non-intrinsic/socially constructed. People like to own gold jewelry for the same reason people like to own bitcoin.
To be a bit flippant, isn't this obvious? Who thinks that mind-wandering is a bad thing? Teachers, I guess. How is it possible to be a philosopher without mind-wandering?
> In 2014, a new study showed that walking decreased rational and linear thinking and increased divergent thinking and imaginative mind-wandering
The only thing problematic here is the decrease in "rational" thinking. I think in context it means something closer to rigid, concentrated, and well-defined (ie - uninspired).
Then they are mislabeled as "minimum requirements." They must be relabeled as "preferred requirements."
The fact of a currency being "backed" by something went away in 1933. No currency is "backed".
> This makes me think cryptocurrencies are mainly about speculation more than rebelling against governments and central banks.
Yeah, they are about speculation. Whether investing in crypto rather than some other financial asset constitutes "rebelling" is subjective.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.
On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.
Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.