roymurdock

Lightning is for continuous or repeated transactions between two parties because it doesn’t settle immediately/at end of day like the vast majority of one off transactions conducted in the world

Ultimately using lightning, “Bitcoin banks” would develop because that is the most efficient way to do it with large volumes of trades between disparate parties involving cash, credit, and gold

Instead of opening individual lines of credit with the 1000 people I paid or who paid me last month (lightning wallets) and adding/subtracting from those lines of credit instead of settling (nothing is written to the blockchain), it all goes through central authorities and arbitrator - my banks and credit card providers, who tally all the transactions

Lightning is not a scalable solution without centralized lightning banks which defeats the entire purpose of the blockchain in the first place - it’s just added complexity to arrive at virtual banks as a solution

Blockchain is in 99.9% of cases a solution looking for a problem

It is hard to grasp for non technical/economics minded folk so it is easy to exploit as a magic snake oil solution for hard problems

I’ve had very painful conversations with people who control very large budgets at companies that are convinced blockchain is the next big thing when they only have a rudimentary concept of what it is and can do, but think it will revolutionize the payments industry or how supply chains are structured

It’s a distributed database that is more expensive and time consuming to maintain than a centralized database but if structured correctly can remove the need for a set of players to trust a central authority or one another (you pay for this in speed of read/write and storage making it nearly useless in payments industry)

There are a lot of solutions looking for problems out there that are getting a lot of funding due to the glut of cash looking to seed the next big thing in tech, and the ease of finding and investing in small companies now

AI is perhaps the best meaningless umbrella term for raising money or generating corporate interest currently

AI safety is a very loosely defined term because of the vague nature of AI

Two welders, accountants, plumbers, farmers are going to have similar jobs, two AI safety engineers could be coding anything from video game algorithms to nuclear plant turbine shutdown code and failsafes

Anything hardware running any code could be broadly considered AI

Combining blockchain and AI safety is just mashing together two buzzwords and hoping something interesting comes out with no seed of true inspiration germinating a fruitful idea

They A/B tested the headline with and without “elite” and the headline including “elite” got more clicks. Then they ran that headline and got you to click on it/comment on it/engage with it.

Jeff mills spinning tomorrow at E1 in London. Need to go after reading this interview

Thanks for the list, great taste

yea there are other ways to increase labor bargaining power too i just listed the most common off the top of my head

there are 2 inputs to the classical production function (e.g. the 2 things businesses need to purchase/obtain in order to stay in business) - labor and capital

if labor is continuing to improve its value (through education, training business skills, learning new technology, etc.) then it continues to have bargaining power in wage/contract negotiations

if a company can produce the same or more output with more capital (generally cheaper/scales better) and less and/or cheaper (younger/less experienced) labor, then it generally will

this is why we're seeing so many "ageist" layoffs at the large tech and industrial companies in the west

old employees are very expensive (especially with pension programs) and they're often not necessary to keep the output constant, or can be replaced/outsourced, for the sake of pumping up equity/shareholder value because cost cutting is currently a lot easier in tech than the R&D/acquisitions needed for increased revenue gen

there are a few things that could happen to increase the bargaining power of labor and increase wages/time off work (benefits): 1. the supply of labor drops (a war/natural disaster) 2. the supply of capital drops (luddites/natural disaster) 3. the quality of education increases 4. labor unionizes 5. TFP (total factor productivity) increases

i don't know chinese labor market specifics but my general impression is that it's much more cut throat because there are just so many more people, the tech companies are playing catch-up in some sense to their western counterparts, the jobs are more blue-collar oriented (rather than white-collar services jobs which have more wiggle room), and because of cultural/government/societal factors that prioritize hard work and family/society dynamics over individual liberty and health

It seems like the main point of this redesign is modularity for security's sake. Curious to hear who is asking for this OS, where Google will use it, and what type of system any of the HN crowd would consider putting Fuchsia OS into. Can't shake the feeling that it's somewhat...uncalled for by the market?

What type of device would you use this in?

nobody who goes through the process believes it to be a true meritocracy

colleges make it very clear that there are certain factors that weigh heavily. one of the legal factors is race. one of the unspoken factors is having donor parents/alum. now we know that another factor is direct bribes to admissions staff, which one could have guessed was happening under the table already

everyone who applies wants to be in that club with, not the smartest or most “meritful”, but the most powerful families/children (sometimes the same, often not) - and why isn’t family money considered a merit?

many of these colleges are businesses/hedge funds and they are looking to increase their AUM and ROI. I agree that advertising this core business as a meritocracy seeking to educate the brightest is false advertising

seems pretty malicious

why not just ask them to pay you for your time, or else say sorry you need to hire a professional instead of giving them more grief

you're on to something, but are missing an important part of the equation

instagram influencing is now a business. it's advertising without the clear disclaimers or statements for who is paying for that advertising and why

a lot of this advertising requires traveling to cool/famous/chic/rugged locations and taking photos or videos there, so that followers feel they are also there, and get to see a cool place through the eyes of their "friends"

it's more than just social points gamification, it's a business, it's advertising with real money involved, and these natural settings are becoming the new ad studios that it's cool to shoot in (besides places like venice beach and rue cremieux)

and when businesses/money get involved, the natural respect for the environment/others using the space disintegrates in the face of profit and time maximization

of course i use a real bank for a long term savings and checkings account

i use transferwise for converting money quickly at the market rate plus a small markup rather than the higher fees and longer wait times to wire money across "real" bank accounts, the same thing you can do with revolut. i don't want or need either to replace lloyds, chase, barclays, BOA, etc.

i use transferwise which i trust more to be around in 10 years and not doing anything idiotic with my money and bank account details

any company with roots/ties in the cryptocurrency scene is waving a giant red flag to users, as confirmed by the latest money laundering mess revolut is going through

Necessity is the mother of invention and memory/resource scarcity is the mother of quality code

A lot of junk and spaghetti code gets written (or copied/pasted together) today because there are few hardware-based constraints in much of modern app and system dev

I work with a lot of embedded engineers and have the utmost respect for those that work on safety-critical, legacy systems

It’s an approximation that needs to be imputed, and can’t be measured directly. It doesn’t need units to be a useful measure against itself at different periods, to measure the rate of change of how environmental variables effect a nation or firms production function. I think it’s cool and useful that someone tried to quantify how much infrastructure affects productivity by abstracting away all the immeasurable variables into one term. It’s an extremely important concept that deserves more work because of how closely it is tied to advances in standard of living. It’s not perfect but it’s very interesting and could be ripe for a revamp given how much data we are now collecting from all sources

This isn’t true, the study of applied economics (new Keynsian) saved the US in 2008 when the Fed decided to shore up liquidity and helped bail out industry in concert with the government. Austrian policy would’ve let the entire system collapse and rebuild itself to avoid the construction of perverse risk incentives and the zombification we are seeing in the economy today. You can argue which would be better long term (I think Austrian) but short term we needed Keynesian measures to save jobs and lives from being consumed in a downward spiral of debt chain triggering and collection.

Productivity has a precise economic definition - ratio of output to inputs - and correlates highly to standard of living. We don’t fully understand how and why technology advances, but we measure increased technology through a variable called the solow residual. Economic policy can help lead to technology breakthroughs that increase productivity and the standard of living. It’s very shortsighted to dismiss economics out of hand as something we don’t understand. A lot of it is politically motivated but let’s face it politics is what happens when groups of people get together and try to collaborate. There’s a lot of important work to be done around productivity economics and I’m glad it’s getting more mainstream coverage

natural has a completely different definition for different groups of people. was it “natural” for european settlers in America to have slaves up until the 18th century? was it “natural” for native Americans to live communally and without the ideas of property rights and ownership brought over by the Europeans? natural is such a vague and loaded term that its nearly meaningless when applied to “us” as human beings

the real key is labor productivity. unless we invent new machines that make us more productive, and re jump start the demand for skilled human labor as we saw during the various industrialization periods of the last 120 years, then we will continue down a path where humans are less and less valued as their skills atrophy and they can be replaced by automated systems or more often cheaper labor doing a decent job at a much lower rate

The design construction operation and regulation of commercial aircraft is the peak of safe and effective infrastructure technology it’s truly spectacular

the main issue is transparency

fuckjerry was involved in marketing the failed festival, then also involved in creating an "objective" documentary on the whole fiasco

obviously they have large incentives to cover up the extent of their knowledge and involvement in the scam

we will probably never know how much the fuckjerry founder/team knew about the extent of the fraud

the author is simply saying the documentary they produced is not an objective telling of the truth and is probably influenced by fuckjerry trying to manage optics after a large account it was profiting from went south

a lot of people didnt know that (myself included) and its good to know who is paying for things and why - transparency

This is the first line in the Myth gameplay Wikipedia:

All three Myth games play very similarly. They are real-time tactics games, and as such, unlike the gameplay in real-time strategy games, the player does not engage in resource micromanagement or economic macromanagement, does not construct a base or buildings, and does not gradually build up their army by acquiring resources and researching new technologies.[9] Instead, each level begins with the player's army already assembled and ready for combat

sounds a lot like Eve online set in medieval times. Guild Wars had a similar system where you could choose a faction and battle other factions to win reputation etc but was nowhere as dynamic as you're describing. also kind of sounds like Dynasty Warriors which kicked ass but followed a more traditional set path of battles

all of these are great games and a blend of them would be awesome if you had a clear vision for how to combine them, but would also probably be a massive undertaking

side note, i wouldn't consider anything a true RTS unless it has some type of resource gathering and tech/unit building element to it

you're right, 4 races for WC3. switched into SC2 thinking for a moment

per my comment below > it's pretty amazing how well designed and entertaining the game is 15 years on with the 3 unique race systems, beautiful tilesets/models, fantastic music, etc.

add to that: great lore borrowed from mythology/made up, fantastic voice acting, champion units with extra abilities and item usage, complicated (but not overly) resource management, competitive online community, modding ability with a full map editor/scripting engine. plus a lot of interesting/funny people play the game all over the world which always spices things up. and continuous tweaks to improve the games balance

my game of choice was WC3, i still watch it played at high levels and it's pretty amazing how well designed and entertaining the game is 15 years on with the 3 unique race systems, beautiful tilesets/models, fantastic music, etc. props to blizzard for keeping SC2/WC3 balanced and trying to bring in a new generation of fans with the graphical refresh

but lets be real about the resources expended on these old games and developing their successors vs. the new generation of money sinks. it's a simple ROI calculation and unless you have an old school game fanatic running the show, i know where you're going to put your money to sustain/grow the studio

the games industry is shifting to the casino whale poaching mindset, and taking advantage of borderline gambling addiction through loot boxes/crates to get kids to (steal their parent's money sometimes) and buy shit in the places they hang out with other kids/socialize/spend a lot of time watching professional gamers play

makes me very sad as someone who grew up with amazing RTS and the first generations of online/LAN games where $50 would buy you hundreds of hours of entertainment sans microtransactions

there are still some amazing games coming out graphics and storywise, it just sucks to see names i once respected trading in their reputation for cash - blizzard, bioware (EA), and obsidian chief among them

microsoft did it pretty easily, albeit 4 years later than amazon, which is partially why they're playing catch up. microsoft didn't have any "industrial warehouse buying" expertise and was a lot more familiar with server tech than amazon was at the time they started aws in 2006, and probably had a good number of data centers already, they just weren't built for rental services.

although it's outside facebooks current core competency i think they wouldn't have too many issues getting into the cloud game if they wanted to. they could hire all the expertise they need and get 100 data centers up and running in 5 years.

but why would they? it's like google getting into the ISP market to compete with verizon et al. google runs its very profitable business on top of the commodity rails and keeps limited deployments of google fiber as a stick to threaten slow or uncooperative ISPs. facebook can run its profitable software based businesses on top of the infrastructure instead of joining the cutthroat race to the bottom of cloud computing that may or may not be semi nationalized/regulated as ISPs and utilities are today

The author has a good thought but the wrong solution (most likely there is no solution and the public internet of the late 90s early 2000s is gone forever)

bigger point is that communities and tribes have gotten larger at least in the US, breaking down once strong barriers of trust (people becoming more numbers than neighbors)

there is a lawsuit pending that focuses on snapchats potential misrepresentation of instagrams size and effect on the mkt

investors should've done their own due diligence on that, what i believe is more likely is that snapchat misrepresented its user numbers pre IPO as alleged by a fired employee in 2015

investors wouldn't have cared if the stock went up, but it went down so they need to find an actual tangible way that snapchat lied to them to recoup any money from a bad bet