the_local_host

Who exactly?

If they were rich before cryptocurrencies, they shouldn't care (unless they unwisely bet the farm on it); and if they're rich because of cryptocurrencies, no one else should care, because if cryptocurrencies crash, they wouldn't be rich anymore.

> Regulating cryptocurrencies now would be political suicide.

That seems like a stretch. Most people wouldn't care, and the institutions that own it haven't bet that heavily on it. It's a fear-of-missing-out trade for the most part.

Even after understanding that the service is about distinguishing fake from legitimate products, I still don't know what an "order note" is.

That warning is posted at the entrance to essentially every building in California.

If there were an adequate social safety net, specifically a universal basic income, then employees could be paid in equity if the employer wanted to conserve or did not possess cash.

> In what ways could capital be made less necessary?

By reducing the cost of anything and everything that startups spend money on.

(And for the largest item in many budgets, namely employee costs... in the presence of an adequate social safety net, cash-strapped startups could pay employees in equity rather than cash, and they could stick around for as long as they thought it might be worth something in the end).

Somewhat separately, what struck me from the article is that Zhu's controversial moves generally didn't involve bad business decisions, but rather failing to impress investors at a moment when the company needed the money. It would be better if that need for money were reduced, and we could all see how this type of experimental style turns out.

Receive ETH, and turn it into dollars.

Tutorials should focus on getting money, not sending it out, if they want to get people's interest.

I'm not suggesting that startups be given free capital; I'm suggesting that we find a way to make capital less necessary, i.e. lower the stakes.

At the extreme, if starting a company only requires pocket change, then nobody (society, investors, or anyone else) has much to lose in letting an unproven founder do their thing.

Name checks out.

I hope society figures out how to make startups in general less capital-dependent. If there weren't investors trying to protect themselves, we'd find out if running a company in Zhu's manner works or doesn't.

I'm not the parent poster, but I hear where their coming from.

I'm not visually impaired, just in need of bifocals; I zoom HN to 150% and it works fine.

But I am kinda surprised when I turn the zoom off. Even 25 years ago that text would have looked small to me.

Not everyone is comfortable with the risk that the truth might eventually come out.

What some intrepid manufacturer should do is create custom diamonds that are actually more expensive than natural diamonds, with some subtle structure that cannot be found in nature. That solves the problem of immoral sourcing, and better suits the purpose of displaying wealth.

Equivalent is not as good when what matters is what other people think.

Even if the person displaying a luxury artifact agrees that some other artifact is equivalent, if the people they're displaying it to don't also agree, then there is a difference that's relevant to the purpose of the artifact, which is to advertise your wealth.

Though the topic at hand is diamonds, which are strongly associated with wedding proposals, this principle applies equally to sports cars, guitars, etc.

What's "Trading View"?

> There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares

There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.

Yahoo Finance is so good that when I'm trying to find information about a company, I'll type the company's name into Google, do a bit of reading, then... go over to Yahoo Finance and manually type it in again to look at their stock performance.

It says something that someone as lazy as myself will actually hop out of Google's flow and perform a manual step to go Yahoo Finance.

If you ever get the chance, try putting together a strat with one of those cheap paulownia bodies and compare it to.. well, anything else that is exactly the same except for the body material. To me, the difference is glaring; the paulownia is so treble-heavy it's intolerable.

In fact I just installed Ubuntu on a laptop this evening, and it worked really well. (I did make sure others had met with success with this specific model of laptop before I tried it though.) Things have come a long way since "linux on the desktop" first emerged as a meme.

I suspect that would devolve into endless fights over cleanliness and storage of personal items.

Linux desktop/laptop is actually pretty usable nowadays - installing Ubuntu on a laptop is much less of an "adventure" than it used to be, with fewer incantations needed to get things working.

That difference is itself dependent on how the pick is grasped. Anything can happen.

> When going out, you could easily meet people working for those

It's not just that, you actually can't avoid them. If you write software and are walking someplace in a commercial part of San Francisco, basically every conversation you overhear is one you could immediately join in on.

Breaking up the clump is probably healthy for everyone involved.

I hope NFTs and crypto are a worse, and more popular, place for plutocrats to park their cash.

It's not easy. Apple does have a consistent "spirit", but it's such a strange combination of idealism and ruthlessness that it's hard to know which aspect(s) anyone is invoking when they mention it. I don't know why that question is getting so many downvotes.

> Free choice and the ability to make mistakes...

It sounds like the parent poster's relations have freely chosen to delegate their technology management to him or her, and in turn the poster is comfortable delegating that to Apple and their walled garden. If Apple is selling safety, security, and control, and people are buying it, what's the issue?

Potentially the issue is a lack of competition in the market when there are too few options; but it sounds like you're saying that no one should prefer a walled garden option at all.

A red flag indicating what?

I'm always surprised to hear, as a supposed benefit, how easy Bitcoin makes it to move money. I don't want it to be fast, easy or cheap to move my life savings. I want inertia.

EDIT: Turns out it was not intentional, see below, now fixed on the post.

(original): Given how well-written the rest of the article is, I have to believe that's deliberate.

For some reason this reminds me of the Feynman article on HN recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 ) - the enjoyment in pursuing something just because you think it would be fun.

The intent is not to fool anyone, but to provide a face-saving interpretation when socializing falls flat. You didn't stop in for a conversation that might or might not go well; you stopped in for a drink, and that worked.

Having some other activity involved (having a drink or otherwise) lowers the stakes when interacting with new people.