tsycho

Gold's utility value is such a small fraction of its reserve value, that it's moot. And gold has had 1000s of years to find an alternative utility. Even if we did, it's unlikely that that utility would be worth more than gold's market price. I.e. high prices deter utility (this applies to BTC too).

Bitcoin (or potentially Ethereum) in particular are a much more efficient reserve than gold; being a reserve unit doesn't require any physical characteristics, but security, pseudo anonymity, and portability can be significant driving features in adoption.

[Opinion and speculation alert:] It's clear at this point that Bitcoin's original currency goals are mostly lost, but Ethereum has a good chance of actually meeting them with ETH2. Bitcoin has become a significant reserve unit though, and it's energy costs is the only major risk against it (hence a potential flight to ETH). Although people who invest billions (including indirect investors via ETFs) don't particularly seem to care. Other specific-utility cryptos might also succeed, though I expect most of them to be built on top of ETH.

"Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people's pattern-matching, in both directions."

--Ben Evans (https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)

How are you getting the $8bn number[1]?

In any case, that's moot. Because if you join now (after they are making this change), your equity is being valued at ~$60bnm so the upside is significantly lower.

[1] If that's from the valuation at last funding round, then that's being disingenuous since no one thought that they are worth 8b then, and I would be surprised if they were offering equity at the valuation.

This is my #1 peeve. I have friends who work at FB, and the mental acrobatics they do to justify this would have been quite amusing, if it wasn't such a daily annoyance.

HN links to articles in 99% of its posts. If HN had to pay a link tax, would it survive?

I hate FB too, and avoid their products, but Australia's new law is Mafia style extortion, and we need to separate our feelings about FB when judging this law.

Funny, I read the title and immediately thought it was a good thing.

Only after I read your comment did I consider the alternative :)

Generalization, much? (for such a huge diverse country)

What's Thiel getting out of it though? How does pardoning Levandowski help him?

Asking: Do European tech companies just offer lower salary, or do they also offer less equity?

In the US, most people I know made a significant chunk of their wealth from their equity growth, especially as equity grants grow much more than salary, as people get promoted.

I have been building something similar very slowly in my spare time. Do you want to collaborate? Contact info in my profile.

What if management is the judge, jury and executive? Who will bell the cat?

I hated it initially, but am fine with it now.

When YTM is better than GPM:

1/ Auto-created playlists, especially after you just search for a song and hit play. On GPM, it would play different covers on the same song (basically all the search results) by default, unless you started a radio, which is a cool concept but was hit and miss in practice. On YTM, it continues with similar songs, and I have liked their selection so far.

2/ The library seems to have increased; I guess they have access to more songs that were YT exclusive for some reason.

3/ While I normally never use video mode on YTM, but once in a while for a cool song, it's nice to be able to seamlessly switch to video and cast to my TV.

On the cons side, I don't like the playlist management and home screen UI (which is what I hated initially), but it's not bothering me much anymore now that I am getting used to it I guess.

Initially, I had planned to just cancel the subscription, but held on because using YouTube with ads was just plain intolerable. I get reminded of this everytime I open a Youtube link on my work account Chrome profile by mistake.

"But won't you think of the children."

-- Apple apologists

I don’t get it. The bullet points in your screenshot seemed factual to me. Which part of it felt like victim blaming to you?

83 points with zero comments

Looks like no one has actually read the book, but the topic looks interesting :)

If you have to rebuild and reinstall your app every 7 days, it doesn't meet a reasonable definition of "runs any code you like". You are being technically correct, but disingenuously so.

Having used both Zoom and Meet extensively now for the past 6 months, my experience is:

1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.

2/ Zoom's desktop app performs very well, but its web version is atrocious. Not just because of the dark patterns they use to force you to install the desktop app, but also its performance is terrible compared to its desktop version, as well as worse than almost everything else. Unfortunately, I don't trust them and refuse to use their desktop app on anything but my iPad.

3/ Meet used to be bad like Zoom on web 6 months ago, but has improved a lot and is slowly approaching Zoom desktop in performance. I have noticed that Meet on my work GSuite calls at work perform much better than on my personal account. This might be explained by #1 above I.e. my family has worse internet connections than my coworkers, but I am not sure if all improvements have been rolled out to personal accounts.

I see this oft repeated comment about Google acquiring YouTube, DoubleClick and Android. Yes they did. But the companies they acquired were tiny upstarts, which might have even died on their own. Google built them into what they are today, and deserve 90% of the credit for their current significance.

The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM users and would have organically reached 1B+ users on its own.

Google has TLMs (tech lead + manager). It doesn't force parallel tracks.

Wow! So much hate on this thread. And not a single reasonable proposal on what newspapers or Google can do to make things more equitable.

Product Manager (junior/mid-level)

Remote: Yes (and have experience working remotely even before Covid)

Willing to relocate: Yes, anywhere in US/Canada/India. Can start immediately in India, and need 2-3 months for US (H4 EAD under process).

Experience: 2 yrs as Product Manager, most recently at SoulCycle

Email: sheikh(dot)runa(at)gmail(dot)com

(posting on behalf of my friend)

The funny part is that Sundell and Hacking With Swift are actually among the more useful sites, offering bite sized information that you would expect Apple documentation to provide.

But Apple's documentation nowadays, is so bad (inconsistently so, some parts are fine) that these sites are filling the gap.

Further, for most other languages, Stack Overflow fits this need mostly fine. But Swift and SwiftUI have been changed so often that the accepted answer on Stack Overflow becomes outdated within a year.

If this is what GoDaddy is doing, let's get back at them.

Everyone can search for a variety of domains that we are not actually interested in, and waste their money if they frontrun us.

Try http://instantdomainsearch.com/

(No affiliation, just a happy user)

But that's standard, no?

The only organizations that publish equity research are investment banks (which rarely publish negative articles since they want to be part of potential future M&A activity), and hedge funds.

This type of research takes significant time and effort, and almost no one else does this except short selling hedge funds.

I am genuinely sad to write this:

Apple has become the most arrogant asshole company of all the tech giants. They have forgotten the role that we developers played in making them the largest company in the world. But in their moment of financial victory, they have lost their soul.

:(

I presume you are a bigger API design expert than Joshua Bloch. Please point us to your talk/insights.

Insightful article. And worldscraping is a delightful term, with lots of positive potential if there were an open platform.

Unfortunately I agree that big tech will definitely try to own AR-scraped data, and make it even more of a walled garden than smartphones, but I am pessimistic about government regulation preventing that, and keeping data open.

Governments around the world have so far only shown interest in"opening" the data into their own surveillance systems. And centralization of the platform by big tech makes it easier for them.

The only hope I have is from either of:

a) a new upstart that builds on an open platform from the very beginning, to compete with big tech (unlikely due to the significant hardware investment requirements)

b) the loser among FAMANG's AR attempts, who decides to open everything up as a last ditch attempt (plausible)

c) hackers jailbreaking AR glasses and creating an open platform

Yes, we know. Ask any iOS developer friend of yours and you'll know that Apple never backs down, until the incident gets publicity.

And the non-malicious explanation for that is simple. The majority of the million apps in the app store are small fry to them, and they can't scale support to that level in any empathetic rational manner.

My wishlist for legislation is:

1/ Apple has to allow side loading of apps (make it an advanced developer setting, with plenty of warnings and periodic reminders, that's fine).

2/ Apple cannot force usage of Apple pay and apple sign in.

3/ Apple cannot force developers to hide any options or even information about alternative mechanisms to pay for content, or sign up to a service.

Beyond a certain market share, that argument doesn't hold anymore. That's where anti-trust comes in.

Which market share definition, you ask? IMHO it is the definition that defines decision making for app developers, on whether they can skip the Apple platform or not.

So Apple's percentage of global smartphones doesn't matter, what matters is:

- Apple's 2/3 share of app store revenues.

- Apple's share of users in rich, developed markets such as US, Europe and Japan, which (source: ben-evans.com) varies between ~50-70%.

It is unaffordable for app developers to skip the Apple platform, since that's where the majority of paying users are. And as a result, they should fall under anti-trust laws that protect small players.