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applecoreon The Future of Money Depends on Busting Fairy Tales About Its Past

If you're interested in the history of this topic, check out Debt: The First 5000 Years[1] by David Graeber and The Philosophy of Money[2] by Georg Simmel, a sociologist whose main work was on money as a social phenomenon.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Money

applecoreon My Heroic and Lazy Stand Against IFTTT

Is there an open API standard for exposing a web service to IFTTT, Zapier, or other app connectors?

applecoreon Andy Grove has died

Grove's High Output Management is highly recommended. It's a masterpiece of management theory and practice.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp...

applecoreon Why Gold?

Not to sound harsh, but are there any historical sources or references for this essay?

It's likely another just-so story about gold and the emergence of money from the barter economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

applecoreon If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly

Charlie Munger's quote is also insightful: "If a thing is not worth doing at all, it's not worth doing well."

applecoreon I’m basically fine with investing in evil (2007)

> The first thing I want to point out, which I haven’t seen acknowledged enough, is how extremely, extremely minor the impact of a foundation’s investing decisions are on the companies it invests in.

The irony is that individual company selection has an overall negative impact on foundation funds' returns. Asset allocation (beta) is so much more important than security selection (alpha) that it explains more than 100% of funds' returns.

applecoreon The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street

Is this a submarine PR piece for Kensho? The company is mentioned over thirty times in the article.

applecoreon That’s a nice little $1-2M SaaS company you have here. Will it scale?

Autocomplete correction: You also have to acquire...

applecoreon That’s a nice little $1-2M SaaS company you have here. Will it scale?

Initial traction is about more than just a tidy number like $1M+ ARR. Your growth rate also needs to surpass a certain hurdle rate. At a minimum, this may be six percent a month (2x annual growth), but ideally it's more like ten to fifteen percent a month (3-5x annual growth). You also have to acquiring the majority of your customers through a zero-cost marketing channel or else it's too expensive to scale.

However, if you can get to $1M+ ARR fast enough and cheap enough, you probably have an interesting opportunity to scale.

applecoreon Economics in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged [pdf]

I can't wait to read the comments. Don't you know Ayn Rand is verboten here?

applecoreon Wherever oil goes, the stock market goes

> Also, the increasing interest rate is going to put downward pressure on the stock market, even if the economy does well. Right now that is what I consider to be the main cause of the drop.

Really? The 10-year Treasury yield (the best measure of long-term rates) has declined by 25% since the start of the year. No one is forecasting Fed interest rate hikes in 2016 anymore.

applecoreon Ask HN: What else do you read as regularly as Hacker News?

Books. I make sure to allocate at least twice as much time to reading literature as I do reading online.

applecoreon Real Estate Broker Arbitrage in Vancouver

The optionality of the assignment clause has value to the buyer which should be priced into the transaction.

applecoreon Ask HN: Who is using React Native?

Apps using React Native: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html

applecoreon Why a Marxist Social Policy Is Gaining Ground in Silicon Valley

What exactly is the Marxist argument for or against the idea of basic income? As far as I know, Marx doesn't comment on it anywhere in Capital.

applecoreon Dear Hedge Funds: Index Funds Didn’t Eat Your Returns

The most important driver of portfolio performance is asset allocation, which doesn't change just because you're allocating among a set of index funds.

applecoreon At 83, I Decided to Develop an App

The aphorism "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will" is actually a quote by Antonio Gramsci, a Marxist theoretician, citing Romain Rolland.

applecoreon You Need More Lumens

Sure thing! A meta-analysis of placebo-controlled trials found that when disorders are amenable to placebos, the placebo effect is robust and approaches the treatment effect[1]. For psychological disorders, particularly depression, it's been shown that placebos are nearly as effective as active medications[2].

[1]: http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.5...

[2]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jclp.20129/full

applecoreon You Need More Lumens

You seem convinced your brain "slows down" after the equinox due to (the lack of) bright light, but it's probably just the placebo effect. Has anyone ever convincingly measured the effect of bright light therapy on mood and intelligence?

applecoreon A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process

>The problem is that these teams do not understand the point of an MVP. [...] In fact, the MVP doesn’t have to be a product at all.

By definition, a minimum viable product is always a product: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-...

applecoreon A free shipping mystery

If you discover a product that sells for ten times more on Amazon than AliExpress, your first instinct should be to arbitrage the opportunity by ordering the product and selling it on Amazon (and letting Amazon handle the fulfillment: http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht...).

applecoreon Is Express.js dying?

It's simple. Everyone has switched to either Koa (designed by the team behind Express) or, more likely, a client-side framework like React.

applecoreon Before Growth

This is closely related to Aristotle's concept of potentiality[1] and the active intellect. More succinctly, a startup must build up the potential energy of its product prior to transforming it into the kinetic energy of growth.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiality_and_actuality

applecoreon Apple Eyeing Time Warner Acquisition

It'd be hilarious if every tech bubble was conveniently bookended with an acquisition of Time Warner.

applecoreon iOS 9.3 Preview

It's 2016 and Notes still has the questionable skeuomorphic design with a textured "paper-like" background and gratuitous text shadows.

applecoreon Running costs for running a web app

What's more remarkable is the number of services and integrations that are necessary to keep a SaaS product running. Even on a shoestring budget, that's a lot of complexity to manage.

applecoreon YC Updates and Additions

I'm coining a new term for this: Alphabetizing.

applecoreon Why I love Snapchat

> Instagram is the 9th circle of hell where everyone feels inadequate about their photos of bottle service, Michelin star dining and helicopter rides.

OT: That's... an interesting take.

applecoreon U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History, 1862-2013

Just a reminder: due to the exceptional circumstances following World War II, the top marginal individual tax rate was around 90%. (The effective rate was really about 70% for the highest incomes since so few paid actually the top rate.)

This was largely to prevent war profiteering, though it lasted until 1964 when the top marginal tax rate was lowered to 70%. It's not really relevant to our times unless you're forecasting another global war, in which case all bets are off.

applecoreon Income inequality is not the problem, it's a symptom

Here's the explanation for this phenomenon: the former is an example of man versus nature, whereas the latter is man versus man. We're rational animals, so we can try to use our intellect to overcome the insurmountable physical odds of living in an otherwise uncaring universe. However, when we're pitted against each other, we have no such luck.