People frequently lose a significant amount of money due to hacking, fraud, or extortion with no legal recourse. This is not where you want your grandparents parking their life’s savings.
I find the downvotes on my comment somewhat curious and amusing. But an example of what I am talking about is a reduction of buttons on TV remotes. Often manufacturers are reducing buttons and promoting the microphone/audio prompt button. This is probably cheaper for them, but more inconvenient for me.
I think people want to use it for their own benefit. Years of invasive advertisements has many people convinced that AI integrated into consumer products are more for corporate benefit, not the user's benefit.
I have a hypothesis that to move beyond being a consumer of technology to being a producer of technology, modern education in software development should be built on building fundamentals through first principles — especially with kids and young adults. It should be analogous to how we learn counting, arithmetic, and higher level maths.
One of the best features of obsolete, constrained architectures was their simplicity. Recovery for something wrong is quick and there is (generally) no permanent damage. All of this makes it much easier to understand what is happening at a lower level.
Once you have a basic understanding, then you are ready for the next level of abstraction.
I assume that openness and availability of IP is the biggest challenge to putting some kind of curriculum together. I would be highly interested in whether anyone has curated this into a cohesive educational approach, especially one that targets childhood development.
Interesting hypothesis. Mental acuity does seem higher while fasting. Is that a dopamine specific effect, or could there be a handful of hormones impacting mental state?
My implication is that if you think the company doesn't understand the business value of something you think is valuable, you should try to see it from their perspective or at least verify your assumptions. Most of the time they are right.
I think your assumption that everyone gets to select the tasks they want to work on is probably inaccurate for most organizations. Any reasonable manager will ensure that important but unglamorous work is getting done. They might assign this work fairly or not. It probably depends on the org.
I was speaking to how a developer should try to maximize their career potential and income.
You are assigning a personal value on several factors (simplicity, functional correctness, future maintainability) that may or not be shared by an organization.
My stance is, unless you have equity, it’s not your company. Deliver what your company wants. If they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s right for their business, find somewhere else or start a competitor.
I don’t think your point disagrees with my point. The better aligned your perception is with management on where/how value is getting delivered, the better you will judge how to invest your time. You might be right and they might be wrong. But if you know the business better than your bosses, then you might be working for the wrong people.
Many people also confuse how hard they work for how much business value they create. Staying late, working long hours is only beneficial if it creates value. Is that work something that anyone else could do? Does it reduce costs or increase revenue? Reducing costs has a limited upside. For a lot of work, the difference in productivity between two workers might be 10%, 50%, even 100% you can still be a commodity. From my experience, doing something that only you can do that results in enduring, increased revenue is the best way to make real money. Learning the business, becoming indispensable, and help to grow the business takes time and experience, but will be rewarded. And if it isn’t, move on!
In general, yes. Jewelry can be melted down and repurposed. It’s also visible in the physical world, which means more to many people today (maybe not to future generations). In that way, I think NFTs are more comparable to, say collectible mechanical watches, baseball cards, stamps, art. It might be worth dollar for dollar to some people, but the market for gold is much larger.
Gold was historically uncorrelated to other asset classes, so there was a portfolio theory reason to allocate in gold. In times of uncertainty and fear, people would flee to gold. Afaik, this effect has been muted in recent years. I don’t know if it has been fully explained, but it’s likely due to the highly available and interconnected investment products of today.
Bitcoin has been shown to have a high beta with credit and other investment assets. So from a portfolio theory perspective, it is functionally more like a leveraged ETF than a hedge.
This doesn’t mean that neither deserves a place in a modern portfolio. As they say, past returns are no guarantee of future results.
Besides practical use, gold also has aesthetic use: jewelry, as an external status symbol of wealth. That is not possible for crypto currencies in the same way. Of course as online presence and social structures mature, this might change. Maybe not in my generation’s lifetime, but who knows.
The author’s answer was clever, but also unconventional. The company was probably looking for someone that would write code in a shared codebase that other developers will need to contribute to and maintain. Thinking outside the box and not following suggestions might have raised a red flag that this person might be a loose cannon. In a small company, hiring someone smart but unwilling to follow directions can be detrimental. Kudos to the author, though, for being quick thinking and creative.
All the manufacturers today are trying to sell connected services, so devices are accumulating lots of features and heft. In addition, none of the manufacturers quantify the strength of vibration (what units would that be expressed in?). The lightest bands are the lowest end/value models and have the worst vibration mechanisms.
What I want is:
(1) see the current time
(2) get a buzz for a notification
(3) alarm clock
(4) ability to wear for multiple days without charging.
My preferred alarm clock is the vibration from my fitness band. I wanted something extremely light with a long battery.
Unfortunately, no modern fitness bands target this functionality. The vibration is weak, band is heavier, and the use large display. The best ones I used are probably 6-10 years old now.
Industrialized countries generally have high cost of living. It is much more common for both parents to work than 50 years ago. Also, for many, a career involves moving away from parents, grandparents, and siblings. This all leads to a vastly reduced safety net compared to what was common for most of human history. It is probably unlikely that government could ever fill that void. Eventually, high prices will cure high prices. But, the methods, timescale, and pleasantness in the intervening time is anybody’s guess.
I think he is suggesting that this move has favorable PR optics for the incoming administration. Making it appear like a conservative victory may give them some slack or earn them some favors.
Single use plastics are convenient, are 99% of the problem, and could be phased out feasibly. Perfect is the enemy is good. Not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but people arguing with absolutism on plastics is a dead end.
Many or nearly all policy votes happen along party these days. Has any party been able to overcome the Senate filibuster? There was a brief period in 2009 after the inauguration of Al Franken until Senator Kennedy’s death in August of that year. Not a lot of time to change policies, and every new act of Congress brings in both good, bad, and unintended side effects.
Very little in the intervening years has improved bipartisan cooperation.
I see this was submitted to HN a couple times over the last few years and has not received any comments. Can you describe the goals and status of this project? Does it fit into any larger ecosystem? Is it a research project or intended for eventual mainstream adoption?
Thank you for adding that link. What I find particularly remarkable is that the author of that comment is John Nagle himself (of Nagle’s Algorithm fame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagle%27s_algorithm).
It seems that the boiling point and flash point of rosin is quite high, somewhere close to 390 degrees Fahrenheit. So, transferring the heat directly into potato probably has some positive effect on cooking, but I would think cooking potatoes at that temperature in high temp cooking oil would produce a similar effect without toxicity. Giving up reusability seems like a good tradeoff.