sumgame

I second this strongly.

Meditation helps me be less reactive to stimulus and also decreases the occurrence of random thoughts.

Think of the human body as an IO system. Your sensory organs constantly giving you inputs from all directions.

Your mind deciding what the output should be.

When you meditate - I feel like you add a latency to your responses which allows you indirectly to focus better.

Second thing that really helps is a non distracting environment (decreasing potential inputs) - have a space where there isn’t much distractions.

Phones with push notifications id say are one of the biggest sources of distractions - I have most notifications switched off and check different messenger/mail apps periodically as I finish blocks of work - this absolutely helps in terms of focus.

I don't think I could sleep to that voice though super interesting as as a concept.

Maybe using some sort of deepfake for voice would make this a 100x better.

That’s true for stocks too.

As people sell, value plummets

That doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme

So to talk about the killer app we’ve got to differentiate the technology from the first use case, which is digital gold for now

Ethereum goal was to allow people to build different types of dApps by opening up the number of op codes on the virtual machine - this allowed people not only to build bitcoin on ethereum but also other types of apps - like Uniswap (Exchange), Compound (Lending) and dydx (derivatives). These are just a few. There’s a whole other world of NFT’s that is also bubbling up now. Aragon is building a DAO creator and launcher where you can build and run organisations in a digital jurisdiction.

Now as the World Wide Web decentralised the power to distribute information via a protocol, Blockchain’s can allow that for anything that requires trust - such as finance

Though the biggest limiting factor is still scalability of Blockchain’s but the Ethereum team and a bunch of other teams are solving that by being at the breeding edge of mechanism design. Ethereum realised Blockchain’s aren’t scalable and are bad for the climate long long ago - and already have plans to move away from PoW (energy intensive) to PoS (not energy intensive)

P.S - I got into bitcoin early because believe it was a hedge to inflation - realised it isn’t really a value add to society and have been dabbling with ethereum projects since 2016

I get the hate HN has for bitcoin - but deflationary assets are a use case especially when central banks believe they can pump infinite money. Nobody knows where this will end but your best bet is a deflationary asset

I love tech and finance - I believe the next decade we’ll see finance being disrupted by these protocols as ethereum moves to PoS

I agree - both my immunity and energy levels are clearly much better when I do practice Wim Hoff vs when I don't. Though its been only a year and a half or so.

Namecheap is awesome. I switched from godaddy's predatory practices to namecheap, couldn't be happier.

To be honest most providers suck. Another common scam these guys run is skinning you for renewals, its just messed up that sometimes i have to pay double to triple the price of buying the domain for renewals.

There is a caveat that this article doesn't consider.

In India, if you are studying for elite colleges, in this case the IIT's, you write the entrance exam designed specifcally for that, which is IIT-JEE.

Most people go for separate training camps to study for JEE. The 12th grade exams are a cakewalk compared to these exams, and the stuff you study for the JEE is sometimes super advanced, like calculus in super advanced levels.

Most kids studying for JEE ( I was one of them), don't optimize for 12th grade exams because the JEE exam rank is all that matters to get into these "prestigious" institutions.

So a bad 12th grade score is by design more than anything.

Though there is definitely a lot of signaling, the research has ignored a very important behaviour.

What we are seeing is an unprecedent level of supply and demand shock. What this means is that there is going to be much lesser spending and businesses making much lesser money.

If this reflexive loop kicks in people have lesser disposable income and a lot of people will get unemployed ( we can see the early signs in the hospitality and airline industry already)

If this continues, then there will be foreclosures. Asset prices are going to go down. We will enter a recession. If Banks stay alive and liquidity is pumped into the system by the Fed, then we could see a reversal, if the shock persists for longer and finding the vaccine takes more time, we could head towards a depression.

Obviously there are tons of moving parts and there is no way to predict the future, but its likely that we will have a recession. There is a low probability that this will head to a depression because the Fed has been printing loads of money, but if this stops working, they have no more tools in their arsenal to revive the economy.

Fellow Indian here who's been tracking this since Feb.

Highlights of what I think are the biggest risk: The number of tests being performed in India are 20x less than most other countries, though it has ramped up in the past few weeks, there was a free flow of international travel till then.

My fear is that because the virus is asymptomatic, there are a lot of active carriers freely moving around. Most companies in India also find WFH an alien concept, even in tech, so it seems like most people still have to go to work.

I believe that the urban density in India is too high to stop something like this even from a lockdown. Also the lockdown would only help the middle class, there is a large section of urban poor that depend on daily wage that can't stop working. They depend on this money for food and shelter.

Overall, the avalanche is imminent, and I believe that the situation could be dire in the cities.

As tests ramp up the true impact will be seen but I fear that we'll always be behind the curve on this because of the difficulty of mobilizing testing at such scales.

The only way we can avoid large scale impact is if the virus finds it hard to survive in the heat, now that summer is in. Temperatures are rising but there is no consensus on whether that hinders the spread.

Fair, depth perception from 2D isn’t there yet through ML, but mixed with radar can it be effective enough.

The reason I assumed it works is that lidar on the article above seems more like a redundancy. Because their camera system have the short range covered and radar has the long range covered. Lidar seems to augment over it.

Though the order of disengagement is a great stat, that definitely shows how much better waymo is compared to Tesla

That’s a fair point. He does have a bias to sell that story.

I don't have a Tesla nor am I a fanboy. Just talking about the tech.

This is biased information as there are way more Tesla's out there compared to Waymo's.

Waymo has had accidents too https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-crash-self-driving-google-...

That's fair, I've just taken the marketing at face value.

Though I ended the answer at the end asking whether Lidar adds incremental or exponential value? Do you think it adds exponential value ?

I'm not an autonomous car engineer so don't understand the nuances but from whatever basic information I've read it doesn't seem like Lidar's add exponential value.

edit: Just to add, 5 million Waymo miles have been driven with a driver that controls the car and Waymo has had an accident too - https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-crash-self-driving-google-...

Also Waymo has way lesser cars on road than Tesla

It isn't necessary and the best example of this is Tesla's autopilot. It uses no Lidar component and Elon Musk's bet is that self-driving cars can just use just cameras, basic radar and ultrasonic sensors with enough compute resources and the right ML algorithms to perform better than a human.

He's been a long time anti lidar proponent because of the costs involved and the aesthetics. He's also betting that the amount of data Tesla receives from its customers, and the neural net they have can achieve autonomous driving with its current hardware stack.

“In my view, it’s a crutch that will drive companies to a local maximum that they will find very hard to get out of,” Musk said. He added, “Perhaps I am wrong, and I will look like a fool. But I am quite certain that I am not.

"Despite being a fancy and expensive technology, LiDAR provides surprisingly little advantage over a combination of cameras and radar. Radar, for example, is much better in the rain and other limited visibility scenarios, because it is based on radio waves rather than light waves. Radio can penetrate through some objects and bounce back from others, thereby “seeing” the environment along a different dimension."

an excerpt from a quora answer on why the Tesla stack could be better than Lidar: https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-Tesla-cars-use-Lidar-like-mos...

Here's a video of Tesla's autopilot perceives its environment : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKXztwtXaGo and here's a video of how Waymo perceives its environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopTOjnD3qY

The question is if the Lidar adds incremental value or exponential value, and I think it's just incremental by looking at those videos.

My concern is mainly how does the world change when the cost of borrowing is negative ?

It seems like the rat race into buying more and more assets at extreme premiums will continue as long as they believe that these assets will either grow or stay constant in valuation.

It's quite an interesting paradgim shift that I don't think many people are talking about.

Will we close the long term debt cycle via a depression ? Maybe. A sign of an incoming depression is the populist movement all across the globe, I don't see why we won't have a major revolution in the next few decades.

Or what happens if we head into world war 3 ?

I guess the best thing to do now is figure out sustainable cash flows like Howard mentions.

Thanks for the kind words. We will definitely add an about us page today.

We haven't worked on a) yet but its on the roadmap. We want to import it from gmail as of now but linkedIn is on the list too.

We have a very basic services page that gets set up. More than portfolio we focus on how you can help your potential client. So really trying to showcase a very specific problem that you're dream client can relate to.

Trying to find work through gig sites.

I've spoken to multiple freelancers to learn that the best way to actually find good clients that pay well is through word of mouth. There is inherent trust in the relationship when someone comes in as a referrals vs when they don't.

And that trust really changes the game in terms of how much more comfortable they are in terms of how they engage with you. They'll trust you with the project because they trust the referring source.

The alternative is spending a significant amount of time showing your skillsets to clients that don't know about you. Which means you may have to warm them over a few projects before they actually fully trust you. While starting off job sites maybe the only way to build a portfolio but we believe that everybody inherently has a professional network of good relationships they can tap onto, like old colleagues or friends from college that work in a similar industry.

[1] Here's a post I wrote about the ways different ways experienced freelancers find clients and most of them said that their best work came through word of mouth https://freelancefish.com/things-we-learnt-about-finding-cli...

[2] If you want to bootstrap your referral network, a friend and I are working on a tool that helps freelancers find work through word of mouth by reminding you to stay in touch with people and helping them in meaningful ways. It also encourages you to clearly articulate what you do and how the same people can help you in return. We just launched the beta a couple of weeks back and are slowly adding people onto the platform https://clienttree.io

‘ No one on either side of the conflict , then or now, has a satisfactory theory of why Carrie Lam won’t form an independent inquiry into police violence, the demand that is the emotional core of the protests.’

Does China have anything to loose with an independent inquiry into police violence ?

The Hong Kong situation is still quite baffling. I initially thought that the emotional motivation was independence. But it seems like that’s not the crux of the issue

So let’s say you’ve paid 20% of it as advance, plus you’ve spent a year figuring out Uber and Ola are fleecing you. In that year you’ve put down another 10% into instalments.

What then ? You’ll give up 30% of the money just because you don’t like Uber and Ola anymore. If the bank takes the car back, the driver loses all the money he’s toiled to make.

If you speak to a lot of them, they’ll tell you that once they clear the car debt and sell the car, they’d most probably head back home to their villages and just go back to farming.

They work a few hours a day and make 100-200$ a month. Vs making almost the same by toiling 12 hours a day in a car and in some of the worst traffic conditions.

Interestingly a lot of them I’ve spoken have said that they just want to give it all up and move back to their village and farm.

The more time they spend in cities , the more they realise how much freedom and happiness they have

They’ve realised that even if they don’t make as much money in a farm, it keeps them happy and it gives them food.

If you do the math in India, the drivers were basically not earning any money last year. They spend about 30% of their income of debt. Another 30-40% on fuel and maintenance cost. Then 20% charged by Ola and Uber. There’s other miscellaneous fees that creep up plus insurance every year which atleast takes another 10%. So they take home around 10%. That 10% has to pay for food, rent, children’s education, etc.

The argument can be that they’re technically taking home 40% if you take their debt payments that’s paying for an asset.

But a car is a depreciating asset, so after 5 years they’ll technically have lost 50% of that money.

The 10% decrease in fees would go a long way for these drivers. I’ve spoken to a lot of them and it’s really sad what’s happened.

You may ask why did they join in the first place ? They were attracted to these services by glamorous stories of cab drivers making 1500-2000$ a month on these apps. But all fo that income was funded by inorganic incentives that never fit into the unit economics. It was basically VC funding that was channelled into a few drivers income, which then brought in a lot more.

I feel strongly about this as I’ve spoken to multiple drivers who make very little money and work about 12-14 hours a day. You can see a lot of them just sleep in the car in the night to make sure they can make ends meet.

On the other side, they’ve stopped heavily discounting the rides at the consumers end, which means demand has decreased because they had artificially inflated demand by providing a service at discounted prices.

So that means drivers don’t get as many rides either.

It’s basically a double whammy for the driver.

Aggregators charging 20% of the ride costs is just unempathetic and stupid if they actually did the math.

But obviously they’ll have to recoup all the VC money they’ve invested. It baffled me for a long that the unit economic never made sense for the longest time.

They took no fees, they gave discounts and they attracted drivers by inspiring them of glamourous stories where cab drivers were making more than most employees in India.

Most cab drivers who saw this as a gold rush, took on a lot of debt to buy a car and drive people around. With time they’ve realised it’s all a sham but there’s nothing they can do about it. They’ve already committed to the debt, and if they stopped paying it, they’ll loose the car, which is all they have as assets.

Funninly I just went for the Wim Hoff fundamentals course yesterday and it fits the description very accurately.

You can learn it online by watching the video or downloading the app and shouldn't take more than an hour. But preferable do the cold exposure part of it with somone around.

The breathing technique by itself is still great though