thedaveoflife

Your question is answered in the article: YC is interested in making money and they seem to believe that having more diverse founders will help them do that.

The difference is that you are exchanging money for a service between two willing parties. Bitcoin miners don't take anyone else's money in exchange for verifying transactions.

How long do you think the Chinese government will allow this subversion to continue? It seems like something they would aggressively shut down.

A fair point, but also misleading. That's like saying a HFT trader is hoping to provide market liquidity... Really they're trying to make money. The market liquidity (or in this case blockchain verification) is an indirect benefit.

I agree completely... but one man's waste of time is another man's productive enterprise.

I am not so sure that "transaction security auditing" would be accurate though. That makes it sound like this company is doing something altruistic. The truth is that this facility was created for one simple reason: to earn Bitcoin.

Would you say that mining gold/diamonds is also a colossal waste of time and energy?

This is such a ridiculous scenario that I hope it's how it actually happened.

Ironic, the entitlement he feels about having an adapter on his AA flight before complaining about entitlement issues from his/GRRM's audience... or was that the point?

The lesson from this article: PR can be an effective legal deterrent. Publicize your victories.

The best thing about this article is that it hopefully signals that we will no longer have to here about this anymore. As much as I love using GitHub, I hate hearing about the internal politics of their executives and engineers.

Conventional economics states that in a natural monopoly the state should be the sole provider.

Obamacare: the perfect scapegoat for large companies trying to cut costs.

In the same vein, aren't most newspaper articles simply PR in some form or another? The key is to be a savvy enough user to spot it.

I think most people probably don't use facebook to see what their loudmouth acquaintances have to say. They use it look at photos of their friends and family.

>First, the unprecendented shutdown of a major American city may have increased safety some small bit, but it was not without a cost: keeping somewhere between 2 and 5 million people from work, shopping, and school destroyed a nearly unimaginable amount of value. If we call it just three million people, and we peg the cost at a mere $15 per person per hour, the destroyed value runs to a significant fraction of a billion dollars.

The assumption being that the people who didn't spend that $15 will not just go out and spend it today?

you would hope people would be able to use this with a certain amount of tact. Also, a simple button on the side of the glasses could be used for silent photos, or some other function perhaps.

I think this demonstrates how many people browse the /threads?id=pg page (myself included)

where there's smoke there's fire... unless someone has a smoke machine

I'm not trying to cast aspersions... just to state facts.

In a nutshell: take successful US start-up ideas and create a European version of the exact same thing.

>Kurzweil seems to always get technological capabilities right. Where he sometimes falls flat is in technological adoption - how actual consumers are willing to interact with technology, especially where bureaucracies are involved- see his predictions on the adoption of elearning in the classroom, or using speech recognition as an interface in an office environment.

This is a problem common to other AI pioneers, including Norvig.

real wages... meaning adjusted for inflation.

Also due perhaps to real wages in the US declining to the point where cost/benefit calculations of US based production facilities are finally starting to add up for some manufacturers.

For those learning R, this site: http://www.twotorials.com/ which I found on HN several months ago is fairly helpful as well.

But there is no incentive for colleges and universities to change anything about their practices. Demand for college education has never been higher and is increasing even still.

The question to ask is, if our higher education system is in such dire need of reform how come it is so popular? Why are people willing to going into a lifetime of debt just to participate in this system which, according to your linked research is so woefully inadequate?

the sad answer is because 38 studios had a famous CEO

how many people who watch television DVR and fast-forward through the ads?

In general, most people who are looking at facebook for any length of time are either playing a social game or looking at photos of themselves. It's confusing to me how this is a viable long term business model. Popularity can be a fickle thing...

Nobody doubts they have eyeballs and valuable data, and it seems like that should be profitable, but that doesn't mean it will be.

How do you feel about his claim that we are in an online advertising bubble?

I am sympathetic to that claim, because (anecdotally of course) very few people I know actually click on ads.