EternalData

It's going to be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies react to a protracted financial crisis. Time to see if the money in crypto is a hedge or if it's a risk-on asset.

There's a boom and a bust cycle when it comes to new technologies -- doubtless blockchain will have to go through the buzzsaw just like the early commercial Internet did in the early 2000s.

This seems like an ill-advised thing to admit?

Southeast Asia is a really interesting case study for me when it comes to political ideals vs. optimizing for life situations. There's a growing creep of authoritarianism in different nations -- given what we know of the military regime in Thailand and their propensity to arrest people for expression, it would be somewhat ironic to preach for the "open Internet" while living there. The tradeoff, of course, is much lower costs, higher security as others have pointed out. But I do wonder about the greater costs involved -- those perhaps not weighed on foreign workers, of accepting that this is the way things happen to be there.

TIL that Noam Chomsky answers emails. It's always been my thing to reach out to personal heroes of mine. What's the best way to reach out to him?

Big fan of using Cython for things where you need significant performance optimization.

Google might try to become the conglomerate of all forward-facing things but it is somewhat funny to see how through it all, it's their advertising revenues that form the core of the business.

Interesting stuff! I need to free up a weekend for this :)

There needs to be a separation of the underlying technological fundamentals of ETH and its economic reality -- which is, like anything else, likely to go through bubble phases.

I'm going to go on a bit of a curve here, and say take a walk -- the motion helps me think better and I think there have been studies to that effect.

Always interesting to see new ways to access useful material.

Important reading. More people are going to have to make hard choices like this as the months unfold, I'd imagine.

This is something we're going to have struggle with as a society for quite a while -- the pervading reach of technology makes enforcement of privacy rights and constraints on government ever more important. I wonder if it can go all the way to childhood. I've tinkered with the idea of doing a children's book on privacy -- I think you learn about VPNs along with your alphabets haha.

In all seriousness, anything that helps people be educated about security in the digital age is a massive plus.

Good on them for admitting to all these flaws. I'm especially interested in the fact that government officials seem to be citing articles to push people to certain communication channels.

Ah, frequentist interpretation of results. I don't think it's going to be something people are fond at looking back on.

This is why employment-based purposefulness of life is so dangerous -- I think it is nothing short of a tragedy that the way society is set up validates an utter hopelessness if you are not employed, this despite the fact that there may be structural factors arrayed against you. I've seen it almost chew up my father and I want to resolve that it'll never happen to me, but I know so long as structurally employment remains the default badge of worthiness in a capitalist society -- that it will come to pass for me as well.

You would get absolutely slaughtered in a public market setting if this happened -- I love the idea of ICOs giving non-accredited investors the ability to invest in risky ventures, but you have to wonder about the diligence layer that comes with it, especially as organizations like Bancor do not have nearly the legal requirements for transparency.

Ha! I do think it goes back to the old romantic thought of chess as a symbol of impregnable notions of human intelligence ...

probably a bit too late for that thought nowadays

This seems more petty than anything. Though it's strange to see just how complex Amazon has become as a company.

Governments amplified by technology and unconstrained by law are the largest threat to human liberty I can think of.

I saw Garry speak in San Francisco -- I'm convinced he's an intellectual giant, but he was very candid in admitting that for all of his trained knowledge in chess, once you take that to an adjacent challenge (the game of Go), he struggles with the basics. I think the same logic should apply with his understanding of AI.

I do think there is a general phenomenon of "smart people outside of AI saying dumb things about AI" -- I'm guessing it's because of the massive implications artificial intelligence is going to have on every part of society.

The government has progressed from banning encryption to trying to subvert it :/

Yahoo thought the media they provided users was important, Google thought user data was important -- it's possible Mayer tried to bring some of Google to Yahoo. But I don't think it was enough to bring Yahoo anywhere close to competing.

For those people who are talking about salaries in Canada versus salaries in the United States -- I don't have a dog to pick in the fight, but I think cost of living is a really important consideration when you're looking to evaluate compensation differences.

Some people have put together prices and it came out that Toronto is about 31% cheaper to live in than SF. (https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/san-fra...). That adds up.

As others have noted, this is a bit of the "bomber problem".

If in WW2, you would've noted that all of the planes that came back had tons of bullets headed to the underside, you might be tempted to reinforce that particular part.

But you're actually looking at the planes who survived -- not the ones who crashed.

You can put that to the "reading HN today" and "not reading HN today" crowds.

Always good to break down how startup equity really works. It quickly becomes apparent that working at startups isn't a great cash game (though it is a decently good skills game).

Criminal justice in the United States borrows a lot more from the Scarlet Letter than rational policy.

Thanks for bringing this thread of thought to light! Sometimes I look through Stack Overflow not only for solutions to particular problems, but particularly elegant solutions in a proactive manner. I often just browse through profiles of people with tons of karma.

There's a future utopia somewhere where you can use programmable digital monies that are a proxy for some sort of deeper more intrinsic value than our current economic system, which in turn allows you to purchase and unlock programmable materials. or maybe a world of abundance where that intermediate layer of monetarily designated value simple ceases to be useful.

There's also a dystopia where programmable material overwhelms organic material -- without the deep thinking and optimization runs undergone through billions of years in time.

I liked the term "junk finance". There's a subset of financial products that are essentially the equivalent of going to McDonalds every day, and ordering a Big Mac to go.