MCRed

All to protect mafiosos who pretend to be organizing "unions" for the "workers" benefit (which is illogical if you think about it due to the Principle-Agent problem, and makes no sense economically- the bosses will cut deals best for the bosses, not for the union membership.)

Keeping talented people down is just a side effect.

Yet another tragedy of regulation. Yes, I know unions want to keep competition for their services low, in the theory that they can extract higher wages. But the reality is, the people who want to come to america to work for companies are almost always going to have something that the existing people in america don't- either a willingness to do jobs that american's don't like or think are beneath them or skills that americans don't have in enough quantity.

Limiting immigration is limiting economic growth. The time when the country grew the fastest and most dramatically was also a time when shiploads of people were just showing up.

Every time you see someone saying "we need regulation for capitalism to work" these are their victims. Democrats and Republicans both have a history of denying people human rights, and the right to employ whomever I want-- without regard to where they were born-- in my business is a right that they are denying. It also denies the employee the right to work for whomever would like to hire them.

Government doesn't know best. This is why socialism has never worked.

So, if you're lamenting the way these people have been treated, look to your own voting history.

Slightly off topic but the general hacker community seems to somehow missed it-- the creators of CouchDB formed a company and merged with the creators of Memcached, and the new company is called Couchbase. This is the best NoSQL database going. Memcached built in, CouchDB views, scalable (really actually scalable, not mongodb "scalable") etc.

I've long thought the hacker culture ignored databases and just picked something because it was popular (eg mysql) even though there were superior (objectively superior- we are engineers after all) solutions out there.

Erlang is one of those languages that is objectively superior -- I've yet to meet another language that does concurrency right-- yet many hackers just ignore it because it's not got java's syntax. Which is silly.

Don't make the same mistake with next generation databases.

Stealing less money is not "welfare". The need to twist words like this is Owrellian-- and revealing.

I think both of them are, because none of the problems are really good for explaining your thought process. In fact, it is a contradiction to try and think about a solution to a problem and to give a dissertation on how you're thinking about the problem. You can do one or the other, and in the latter case you have to have solved the problem previously.

What I do is ask people about a problem they have solved and get them to teach me about it. If I learn something then it's a good result.

Asking people to solve a trivial problem AND let you into the inner workings of their brain-- normally a non-verbal activity- isn't testing their abilities.

I have seen an astounding amount of "biz guy" entitlement in this industry.

It can't tell you how many times I've talked to potential co-founders who were a pair of frat boy types who had business school degrees. They pitch their idea as if it were a company, but all they have are some powerpoint and a few phone calls under their belt. They wanted to be CEO and "VP Sales" and would be happy to let me be CTO, they just want the to build the product and engineering team and for that-- because they liked me so much-- they'd let me have %5 of the company! (Vesting of course, one year cliff.)

They don't understand when I laugh at them... and I think its because there are too many suckers out there and they soon find one.

Business guys make more money, only because they convince developers to take less than they are worth. Your friend hired a developer who, by your account, was doing all the work, and then the business failed because your friend was too greedy.

Now he thinks he's going to learn to be a developer and then not need any developers. Good luck with that.

By the way "getting it funded" is not success. Making it profitable is success.

PS- the word "coders" is like the n word. Use it and we know you don't respect us.

As an old guy, let me share with you which of these I think was the biggest lesson for me:

-- We do not need to be lead by business people.

MY new rule for startups - the big engineer should be the CEO. You can have a CTO and other engineers. You can have a VP of bizdev or sales. But the big fish needs to be an engineer if you are a tech company. If you are making biotech the big fish needs to have biotech engineering. If you are manufacturing, then the big fish needs to be a manufacturing engineer.

The number one mistake I see startups make (especially when they are started by younger people) is taking some type-A business school graduate and making him the CEO.

This is the cause, ultimately, of most of the failures of startups I've experienced (and I've worked for, founded or worked with a couple dozen.)

Or, as a second order function, type-A business school graduates who have never started a company or worked a real job but do instead work for a VC firm, forcing bad decisions on your company.

Most of the fights between founders are because business guys are forcing bad decisions on the company.

The problem is, business school doesn't teach YOUR business. It teaches general business concepts. These are not difficult for engineers to master.

IT's impossible for these business guys to master engineering. (Yes, 30 years, still haven't seen that- the best ones just find an engineer they trust and get out of the way.)

As an angel investor, if your CEO isn't a geek, I'm not putting my money in. And if you look at the "successes" where this is the case, it's usually an arbitrage opportunity (Eg: somewhere just piling a bunch of money behind a halfway competent business model with half way competent employees is going to make money because the situation is the result of a structural inefficiency, usually caused by government: uber for example.)

Consider that much of the opposition to Core comes from the perception that Blockstream, which employs many of the core developers, is usurping it to be a high-fee, low-transaction network so that they can incentivize (and profit from) the use of their lighting network.

That's why the opposition is called "classic" not "bitcoin democracy". Their position is they are getting back to what bitcoin should have been.

And bitcoin originally had larger than 2mb blocks. The 1mb block limit was a short term solution to a problem that existed back then... that was never lifted.

They won't be forced to switch but they will be highly incentivized to do so, as people in the minority coin sell them out to buy the majority coin.

Will be really interesting if any exchanges support this concept of two bitcoin chains coexisting. I bet they don't.

The white paper goes into the issue to some extent with the "longest chain wins" method, which is effectively, hash power based voting for bitcoin software. (the software with the most hash power wins.)

The voting is built into the bitcoin protocol-- the miners that find the next block are voting for the piece of software they are running. If there is a schism and some miners are running other software then two chains could -- COULD -- emerge-- but one will rapidly become the dominant one. ( for a period the two chains will effectively double everyone's bitcoins, but the losing chains coins will rapidly lose value as hashing power switches to the dominant chain.)

This could be chaotic so the debate is really how to avoid two co-existing chains in hard fork situation.

But bitcoin itself is, every 10 minutes, voting for what the "right" chain is, which is defined as the longest.

Right now today if you're mining on a block and find out that there is a longer chain, the node switches.

He didn't compare the publisher to nazis. He talked about one of the essential components that allowed the nazis to have power in germany.

The nazis existed. They were real.

I don't like the modern fad of holocaust revisionism that says "anyone who talks about the nazis is ipso facto unable to make an argument (because the nazis were not real and there is not possibility that there could be a valid comparison between the conditions that allowed them to exist and conditions in current society-- because the nazis weren't real.)"

The code uses elixirs built in doc system so you should be able to build docs after cloning the repo.

At a cursory glance it seems pretty reasonably well documented.

What do you mean by "austerity"? The US government has spent $8T under Obama in new debt (and that beats the previous record set immediately before by George W Bush- it's not a partisan thing, both parties over spend.)

As an american who has lived overseas, I totally agree with you about FBARs, it's beyond unreasonable.

But where is the austerity?

Calling Ron Paul a "tea party" candidate is accurate only if you recognize the Tea Party as a grassroots libertarian movement that, among other things, supported gay rights. Calling him a "libertarian" candidate would have been more appropriate.

While the TEA PARTY was a libertarian movement (That supported gay rights) the term was not trademarked and was quickly hijacked by propagandists on the left and the right to try and pretend like it was a neocon movement.

This shows the wisdom of Linus Torvalds and Satoshi Nakamoto trademarking Linux and Bitcoin respectively.

Alas, having read this blog, I feel it is pretty well spun to support a vary specific political bias and I'm not surprised they made this statement-- probably attempting to portray Ron Paul as a neocon deliberately.

I know they are YC alumni and thus I risk being banned for daring to criticize them. But at some point you gotta get out of your filter bubble and realize there's a real world out there.

Snowden exposed a vast amount of criminal activity within our government, and the governments response is "lets prosecute snowden!" ... no reforms, no groundswell for reform.

The spying isn't even a topic in the upcoming election.

Since 2001, we have only seen the government go the opposite way- gathering more power, from the creation of the TSA to NDAA they are clearly not beholden to the people. (I don't believe most people support this, if accurately educated about the scientific and legal basis of these- thousands of TSA agents have been arrested for crimes that victimize travelers, they fail tests to see if they will catch bombs, and no terrorists have been found...and this isn't just Bush's doing - NDAA and the porno scanners happened under Obama, and during the whole period we haven't been seeing congressmen of either party attempt to stop it (though Rand Paul did a filibuster at one point.))

The fundamental problem is that the US government- at all levels, and across parties- is not answerable to the people or for their crimes.

This is why I'm an anarchist- I believe no government can be kept accountable.

I saw an economic study from several years ago showing that the arrival of a Walmart actually stimulated the growth of "Small shops" around the Walmart. That it stimulated commerce in the area-- in part because walmart brings in people from quite a distance (especially in rural areas) and the stores showed up to capture that traffic.

Double plus good comment, comrade. Absolutely absurd that there could be propaganda or control, after all, if that were the case, we would have heard about it, right!

PS- Prove there is no evidence.

PPSS- A negative four vote count on an article pointing out that the media in the USA is mostly propaganda (on a site which bans people who disagree with the sites desired narrative) is... well, super ironic, and a form of a badge of pride.

I would love to see your source code get audited by a third party. I have a lot of faith in your cryptographers, but your methods are harder to grasp than bitcoin and thus harder for me to audit myself-- I admit, I don't have the crypto skills.

I wish I knew, I would go there too.

There is a strong bias, and the amazing thing is that its very difficult for the people who have this bias to realize it. As far as they can tell it is fact, and this is in large part because they live in a filter bubble where they only see things that confirm their bias.

For example: Articles bashing Steve Jobs get upvoted a lot more than ones praising him. Exactly the opposite for bill Gates.

Now if you look at Slashdot a decade before Hacker news the results for bill gates would have been the opposite of what you see here.

Effectively, Bill Gates' millions in spending to improve his PR have changed people's perceptions (they will argue that its because he's such a generous benefactor, because that's politically correct, alas, they won't look too close at the activities of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation lest they notice he isn't.)

Google Good, Apple Bad, Leftism Good, Socialism Good, Basic Income! Global Warming is FACT, and anything you post that goes against this narrative risks getting you slow banned or hellbanned.

Hell, I was once banned from here for relating how I met Grace Hopper as a kid (in a comment on an article about Grace Hopper.)

I have no clue why that was hell ban worthy, after all she was the original "GRrrl in tech!!11!"

Welcome to hacker news where there are no hackers.

http://poloniex.com is a US based alt coin trading system.

Zcash gets %10 of the mined coins for the first 4 years and %1 goes to a foundation. This is their business model. It seems reasonable to me... using the currency you're creating to fund the development of the currency.

If Zcash ends up worthless, then they won't have captured any value.

Since it's not a pre-mine it's not subject to the pump-and-dump dynamics of a pre-mine... it will take 4 years and the coins will have to be valuable over those four years for them to net anything.

It's a reasonable approach to aligning the companies interests with those of the users.

I'd love to hear a better one though, if you know of one.

I'm a guy with 40 years of experience, and I'm working with a 20 year old. I learned a technique awhile back and a strategy that is-- whoever has to implement it gets to make a lot of decisions. So I give advice and suggestions and he does his thing and more than once he comes back and says "You were right". Never gloat, this is how you guide people-- because you can't micromanage programmers, you can give them suggestions or even directions or ideas, but you can't control them.

This is the sense I got from Steve Jobs as well- he was passionate and he would say things definitively, but he understood collaboration. He was persuadable.

I am persuadable, my biggest lament though is that so few people try. So many people just demand that things be done a certain way- and often with the worst excuse "that's how other companies do it" (or "that's standard practice" or even "best practices" -- which is just saying "I belong to a cargo cult.")

That attitude is death to a startup.

When all you consume, day in and day out, is propaganda, it becomes reality for you.

I spent 6 years living abroad and got to see the perception of the USA (south america counts as "americans" too) -- in the media in foreign countries, including some discussions of politics with people in europe and south america.

I can answer your puzzle very simply: The media in the USA is controlled by the FCC to a high degree, and all we get to consume inside this country is propaganda of one sort or another. From Fox news to CNN to MSNBC to your local affiliate, you get a very slanted, very consistent take on the news.

John Stewart used to run clips of various reporters reporting on the same story and using the exact same words. This was supposed to be funny- but the thing is, this is because the government manufactures the news for us. Investigative journalism is basically a dead art. And the places that do it still (like Rolling Stones coverage of the housing bubble) are basically putting forth political propaganda pieces as if they were investigative journalism.

> A gun doesn't keep you or your family safe

Defensive gun use is far more common in the USA than murders by firearms:

http://guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html

> when we look at the data, all of these provide no tangible benefit, and often great harm.

No tangible benefit? Even 100,000 people saved by guns annually (the low end number) is "tangible benefit".

According to the CDC, there are 11k homicides by firearms: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

If you look at other countries, when guns are banned there is a shift from guns to other methods of killing ,but not a significant decline in homicides.

This is what you see when looking at the data.

> work to mask the consistent refusal by the courts in the Eastern District to end meritless cases before trial.

More trials should mean more money for lawyers in the area, judges, ancillary people like stenographers and clerks.

So, imagine what negative interest rates will do. Seriously, I can't imagine it, I sense it will be bad, but I'm not sure how it will play out.

On the other hand, if the fed will pay me to borrow money, I'd love to borrow as much as I can and loan it out on Prosper or Kiva etc.

Alas, the banks get these primo rates, not average joes... who are still paying %15 on credit cards. (money the bank borrows at near zero) Risk compensation and profit do not account for probably even half of that spread.

I've been paying very close attention to the responses of my body to different foods, etc. Drinking water has not produced better weight loss than drinking coke zero. Maybe by "soda" you meant soda with sugar...but for me, the coke zero is well worth the mood improvement, and I've observed no negative effects.