rguzman

Is there a provision that actually raises some tax along with this tax break?

> Where are the articles about BTC adoption?

Here's 8 of them https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=accept...

> If Bitcoin’s strength comes from decentralization, why pour millions into a single company?

Just like git and GitHub. One of the useful features of git is that it is decentralized; GitHub lowers the barrier to entry to nearly 0. One of the useful features of bitcoin is that it is decentralized; coinbase lowers the barrier to entry to nearly 0.

What would make google et. al. want to move, though? Is it really feasible for government (local or federal) to give strong enough incentives? Those companies are immensely profitable, so I'd guess it's not easy to bribe them with tax breaks. Furthermore, they care to be able to attract talent AND having a critical mass of talent, moving them all at once would only help with the latter, while they have both in SV.

What people need to survive is too low a standard given how much wealth there is in the world.

If I understand correctly, the idea here is that IQ is measurable (even if the measurement is noisy) and real (has predictive power, doesn't change). This is accomplished by studies that look to test individuals at different points in life. Secondly, IQ is mostly genetic. This is evidenced mostly by twin studies. Thirdly, math tests are okay IQ tests.

Note that I'm not saying that things are one way or another, or that the reason there are so few women in tech is genetic. Just explaining how the ideas go together. It COULD be that way.

I understand the point of this post and the original one. Further, I agree wholeheartedly that innumeracy drives bad policy (housing in SF anyone?) and mathematical models aren't used enough. In a nutshell, I would love for mathematically-able people, like Chris, to be in charge of policy everywhere. All that said, this whole exercise seemed a bit futile and kind of pointless.

Given enough parameters and assumptions about it, any model can be made to produce one or another result. (I know, I know I should shut up and just code to make that point, but bear with me) In this sort of policy debate, the harder part is actually finding the assumptions that are consistent with reality[1] and sorting out the moral and ethics questions behind whatever policy.

In this case, it is far less interesting to find that a hypothetical implementation of basic income or basic job would cost the government N trillion dollars per decade than it is to answer associated the moral question: Given that the GDP of the US is M trillion dollars, and that the Ginni coefficient is g, and that these candidate implementations would cost N trillion dollars, should the government redistribute wealth in some capacity as to guarantee a basic income? a basic job? Tinkering with the models doesn't really help there. All it does is change N. That helps when trying to answer the question, of course, but not too much.

[1]: Another example where this is the hardest step: It is easy to "explain" why there are so many more male STEM professors by noting that the distribution of <your favorite math standardized exam> has a std deviation slightly higher for males than females and assuming that a professor needs to be > 4std dev above the mean to succeed. The trickier part is measuring the distributions accurately and testing whether professors really need to be > 4std dev above the mean to succeed. fwiw, I believe that it is likely that the distributions are good enough and one does need to be that smart to be a prof, but testing those assumptions is the difficult and interesting part, not doing some numerical integrals of a gaussian.

Chicago, IL.

The neighborhoods in the north side, say north of wrigleyville, are very interesting culturally. Housing and other costs of living are low and it is still an urban center with all the amenities you'd expect from one such.

I think you answered your own question. Making stuff is not constantly fun. It is more like hours upon hours of confusion and drudgery sprinkled with minutes of elation "wow that worked!" (Try making something in hardware to see this with maximal prominence).

The point is that if you are only looking to have fun once the going gets hard you'll just stop and shelve the project. On the other hand, if your goal is to make something ie if you are Making For the Sake of Making (tm) you'll be more likely to actually cross the thresholds of difficulty at which you learn significant lessons.

They probably do process each application quickly but they get ~10^3 of them. Even if they spent 10 minutes total on each, that'd still be ~6 days of continuous work. Factor that it is probably 1500 or 2000 and the fact that they can't possibly work 24/7 and you get about the time they take to respond.

do you think that 4 months is an adequate time scale to know all the effects of switching to this type of "diet"? humans have been eating whole foods for ~100k years.

if you can recoup your funds 10 days after launching in one such city, why are you worried about the investors?

launch in 1 city -> recoup -> launch in another city -> recoup -> ... do that enough times and you either have traction and/or you don't really need investors.

i suspect that your prediction of the recoup-ability is what's off.

i'm a huge fan of python, and yet, after just the most superficial introduction to haskell i couldn't agree with you more.

i don't think it is the static typing alone that saves time, though. it is the static typing plus type inference.

writing serves two purposes: telling the reader something and helping the writer think. i think joel is mostly talking about optimizing for the latter purpose, which is very useful to the writer.

that said, i can relate to the sentiment. most pieces that help authors think just add noise when they become published. it can be hard to tell, though, and since information is cheap nowadays you might as well publish everything and leave it as a problem for the reader to filter.

maybe i'm really missing the point, but once you attach a keyboard to an ipad you've are bound to have a sub-par user experience.

in terms of portability, i see no difference between ipad + kb and a macbook air. heck, i see very little difference between ipad + kb and ipad + macbook air, which is what i carry around. ipad for reading, macbook air for coding and writing.

iOS does not seem like an environment designed for people who spend most of their time writing and typing or otherwise creating. rather, it is an environment optimized for what most people do with their computers most of the time: consume information. that doesn't mean you can't create on the ipad. OSX, on the other hand, is such an environment. there is no reason to pick either or, you can have both at relatively low cost.

I'm sorry to hear you stopped using iDT. We've heard this same feedback a few times now and we're still trying to figure out how to make it easier for people in your position to get the team interested. Do you have any insight as to why people weren't interested?

I'm one of two co-founders of iDoneThis, the other guy is smalter, not Zach. We tried out doing a promotion with awesomeness reminders for a while. The story of that promotion is the parent to that comment you linked to.

this is easier said than done, but the key to avoiding analysis paralysis is to worry about building the right abstractions and only that. if the software is abstracted well -- ie it correctly represents the underlying problem at an adequate resolution -- then it becomes easy to say YAGNI in the short run with the confidence that refactoring or adding functionality will be straight forward later.

how settings.py gets so large is not only a valid problem in of itself, but also symptom of another problem: it is hard (or at least not obvious) to have configuration that can be changed from the admin.

i've considered implementing something that works similarly to the sites contrib app for this, but it always seems that for it to be useful it needs to hook into django internals more than apps "are supposed to".

i second the request to elaborate on your setup. a blog post is probably most adequate.

doing ineffective things is not the same as not taking yourself seriously.

in general, what sort of physical activity is good for you, how to get started, how to progress, and so on are all pretty well understood. not only that, it is all pretty straight forward.

whether at working out or anything else (e.g. learning to program or learning the banjo) you should worry about doing it effectively. get the brush strokes of that right -- it is much easier to stick to something you see yourself improving on.

taking yourself seriously are things like thinking that if you miss a workout day your regime is ruined, obsessively counting your calories, etc. avoid that.

so you don't have to be in the same place.

> Is the coffee you produce somehow more valuable to society than a new facebook feature?

This is a slippery slope. Value is abstract. Some people may value the coffee more than facebook having 99.99% uptime. Furthermore, some people may value the diversity that having the barista neighboor. Etcetera.

To me rent control seems to be a symptom of much deeper urban planning issues.

> talk is cheap and ideas are cheap, but people are really expensive [...] because the idea will change over time anyway.

I largely agree with this sentiment in general. However, all ideas are not created equal. Most successful companies seem to make 2nd order corrections and refinements to their ideas, but not change them all that much. Case in point, facebook hasn't changed that much in terms of vision and what it provides for its users since it started. Same for google, apple, airbnb, heroku, dropbox, reddit, mint, basecamp, ...

[i don't mean to say that those are the same type of success, just illustrating that what i said applies to a lot of very different types of successes]

The crime rate is probably different. But that is not really meaningful to your every day life since your life doesn't happen in the whole city. ie the crime rate is an aggregate.

I reckon the "effective" crime rate for the places of SF where someone with a developer's salary may choose to live are comparable to those of the similar places in Vienna. I bet the same goes for most other "quality of life" proxies.

fair enough. on the other hand, i arrived at this by thinking about the role that pictures play in the lives of my friends & family, and my experience. not by analogy with instagram.

this is very impressive. i'm a little skeptical, however, whether this type of video sharing will get mainstream adoption (like, say, instagram).

people like 3 things re:pictures: 1) take them, 2) show them off, and 3) look at them. this has been true since way before the internet. the advent of the video camera on phones makes 1) happen, but i'm not sure about 2 or 3. for example, i'm seldom inclined to watch any socialcam video that shows up on my FB feed, but i click on pictures a lot more often than i don't.

current research suggests that the feeling of making constant progress and being appreciated at work are the most important motivator for people. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

i'm on the minority, but i find that the craigslist UI is pretty good. all the "flows" work pretty well and are well explained. i hope that doesn't change and that all they do is make the site easier to read.

arguing against what you believe applies to a lot more than just programming. it is a pretty good way of arriving at what you really believe. guess you believe X0, try to argue against it arrive at X1 as a result of the arguments, argue against X1, ...

Over the last year we've seen people use idonethis to help achieve personal goals and build habits. With our product for teams we've also seen how groups help each other stay motivated. We're bringing those two together now.

To capture the new year's spirit we thought we'd help everyone and anyone by creating groups of people with similar goals. The frequent reminders and updates help everyone stay motivated.

Happy new year!