automatwon

Bitcoin is not ideal for remittance in practice.

Speed: If you use your own wallet, waiting for the blockchain to propagate might actually be slower than currency through a remittance company. I don't know what the clearing process is for Bitcoin wallets SaaS, but Bitcoin is equal to if not slower than normal remittance tech startups. After all, speed is one of the factors these remittance startups are tackling to disrupt Western Union.

Rate: I can't speak universally, but doing remittance in or out of Vietnam with Bitcoin was too high last year. ~5% if we go USD -> BTC -> VND. ~10% in the reverse. These rates are indicative of the local currency being worthless. I also remember transferring Bitcoin internally in the U.S. last year through SaaS would eat out half a percentage.

Foreign workers who remit to their loved ones are price sensitive. That leaves Bitcoin as remittance viable to people who aren't price sensitive, at the asset of more anonymity. IMO, dirty money is not price sensitive. 10% fee to launder money is cheap. If you're already going down this road though, Vietnam mom and pop shops offer practically free remittance. They are unlikely to be regulated. And again, local Vietnam currency is useless. It's not stable or a good store of value. The government sets artificial exchange rates. People in Vietnam desperately want to exchange their money for USD, and are willing to pay a premium, which is still better than the governments rate, and so the remittance shop is able to offer people sending USD to Vietnam a free service.

A Bitcoin provider will have to exchange to and from the local currency if it's to be used for remittance. In the case of Vietnam, the exchange must exchange Bitcoin for the more worthless local currency, and hence charge the higher exchange rate. The provider in Vietnam has an underlying market exchange, actually, where there is no liquidity because people with Bitcoin expect a huge premium to exchange it for local currency.

I think Vietnam's situation can be generalized to other remittance countries where the local currency is undesired, and the government has locked down people exchanging it for USD.

But why not live somewhere where you are compensated 3x as much, and travel to said city, and still have money left over? It's not as if Tokyo's cost of living is 1/3rd of San Francisco.

Personally, I live in San Francisco. This wouldn't be my first pick if I was "retired" / didn't work. But, being a salaryman in SV, even with the higher cost of living, provides me a higher standard of living, insofar that I can travel to other places in the world, eat / live well, and still have money leftover. The reverse wouldn't be possible if I lived in Japan with this purported 1/3rd compensation. For me, traveling as a tourist is sufficient, I don't need years long "immersion".

If you're someone of a less represented class, and you tend to refer your buddies from the same gender/race, you're going to get better bonuses than your overly represented peers. Does this constitute reverse discrimination?

I gravitated to YouTube in the beginning because it felt disestablishment, and less commercialized. Now, it is the establishment. I don't know much about Youtube's payment / incentivization structure, but from the outside, I see YouTubers valuing quantity / frequency over "quality" and things that are not necessarily profit maximizing.

For example, there is one channel that originally produced funny skits. Now, they just talk about "news" and current events. Each of their video nowadays gets less views, but they're able to release more videos because it requires less planning, filming, post-production. They claimed they were producing the news videos as a stopgap to free up time to work on their feature film. 2-3 years later, they've made no progress. Their fanbase complained in the comment section as this happened, and their videos suffered a higher amount of dislikes than likes, in the beginning. Now, their news videos have bounced back to a high high like-dislike ratio. I don't think it's because these news videos inherently got better. I think they've successfully "pivoted" to this content category, attracting the right audience while their original fanbase, myself included, stopped caring enough to go dislike the video.

I see this trend with the majority of channels I watch, too. Here are some examples of "fluff" content to gain views:

- stretching out a simple topic into an unnecessarily long video

- providing a "novel" / hipster / contrarian opinion on something already well covered for the sake of being different

- An unboxing channel that goes from unboxing things people want, to things that are just ludicrous

- Covering a topic subscribers wouldn't otherwise care about. Take my brother for example, whose Youtube channel has 10 million+ views. His channel was originally teaching people English, then he started making VLOGs about aspects of American society such as going to the DMV or buying a used car, and recently he made a video about Gingerbread houses. As someone who traverses Wikipedia, I still think the audience interested in learning English have many other things they find more entertaining than the history of Gingerbread.

- "I'm quitting YouTube"

Like an invite-only forum that extends invites to people who share an idea in the public thread? With increasingly more access as users continue to contribute ideas that receive positive feedback from their peers?

How about Amazon GO? Is that a toy / experience / novelty for affluent tech-savvy early adopters?

Sorry if I'm not political correct. I tried. My intent is not to troll or offend people who do shop at Whole Foods. I actually live in San Francisco, 10 feet away from a Whole Foods. I previously lived in Seattle, too. I feel that, compared to other fields such as Finance or law, tech tend to be more self-conscientious and guilty about income inequality.

Maybe I'm giving too much weight to single individual's effect on altering public opinion (stock price).

we implemented most of LD in a 24-hour quarterly hackathon we hold

What's the breakdown of 'most' vs the remaining? 80/20? Alternatively, if 'most' was implemented in 24 hours, how long would it take to implement the rest?

From these two statements, I get the impression that either

(1) LD is cheap to buy to begin

(2) 'most' should be taken with a dash of salt

I'm curious, is that priority computed based on Mark's circle of friends? Or, are these values hard-coded / special-cased for the CEO, and potentially other individuals aswell?

What did you intend by using the term 'theorem'?

"I haven’t aimed for a fancy style or padded the book out with long sentences or pompous, pretentious words, or any of the irrelevant flourishes and attractions so many writers use; I didn’t want it to please for anything but the range and seriousness of its subject matter."

For me, this article was the opposite.

You caught me.

I don't care if my friends use Uber, if a different Taxi company offers me the same service for cheaper.

I don't know if functional program is SIMPLE as much as it is CONCISE.

I didn't see the word monad, fold, or reduce anywhere in the article. Is a functional programming language used with side effects and all? There's no acknowledgment of scenarios where managing the state the functional way can be unnatural, and require an intellectual hop. Or, alternatively, that this game in particular lends itself more naturally to the functional paradigm.

Do you mean relative to the startup scene / community in general? The general population? Other tech / startup online community? Or did you mean within HN itself where more people lean towards the sustainable business model?

I feel the exact opposite if we're talking relative to other segments of society. Most people I talk to don't know about the VC funding model.

I used to work in Data Science. I definitely agree with this sentiment. Sometimes we did statistical calculations of 'confidence'. Personally, I rarely felt confident, due in part to my constant OCD / skepticism. Question for people who know statistics better than I do: what does accuracy mean when there isn't a known "true" / standard value? What's the precision of a measurement when things are an order of magnitude off?

The article mainly talks about attribution. Another possibility is for some non-trivial portion of data to be systematically missing altogether. Data which isn't a randomly distributed sample, but a particular characteristic.

but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons

I also agree with this. I guess it's okay for metrics to be wrong? As long as all the metrics are equally wrong in perfect proportion? This is why I also like to track the proportion between metrics, as well, as an internal consistency check. My mathematical intuition is that if the metric in question is a monotically increasing (growth) / decreasing metric over time, there will be a interval of time which this relative proportion is useful, after which the metrics, growing at different rates, will diverge to incoherence. Of course, models are not perfect representations of the world, and merely reductions to the key components. To give a concrete example of a model where things look good in some narrow domain, but breaks down. I wrote a physics wave propagation simulation. Instead of actually implementing the Wave Equation which is too much math for me, I used Hooke's law as an "approximation" if you can call it that. It's a good enough visual approximation, but there will is a critical value at which the system implodes or some fuzzier value at which things no longer look "unnatural" to say the least. Then again, Newtonian physics breaks down after a while too.

Also, when the model IS outputting the right answers, it could be for the wrong reasons. Companies will spend money on a particular thing, which they correlate and assume causes growth. For example, a particular marketing campaign. It could just be coincidence / fluke. Does Descartes' evil demon like trolling analysts?

I'm also a self-proclaimed minimalist: materialistic, and beyond. I'm curious what's people's experience with "hoarding" metrics? Given how hard it is to have accurate metrics, I feel reporting should be reduced to a small set of metrics one can be confident about, rather than a large set of metrics, none of which one can feel confident about. If I ever work on my own startup, that's how I'd run things, or so I hope. Maybe businesses gets pressured, to feel productive, to build confidence with employees, or by their investors to crank out metrics? I'd love to hear your stories there.

The article talks about having no idea what we're talking about. Sometimes we have no idea what we mean, ie: Semantics. A metric which we describe qualitatively in English can drastically differ in value based on how we formulate a query / computation. Maybe basic English sentences are not Turing complete, even. This notion doesn't really make sense though, because the issue of Semantics is also about communicating the idea between two people, and each person's mapping of a English sentence to a computation is a somewhat abstract idea. Anyways, either the semantics of the query doesn't reflect our qualitative definition of the metric, or querying the dataset is not a "closed-path", meaning one or more of the paths consists of wrong or inaccurate data. In which case, the solution is to be explicit about how a particular is computed, rather than WHAT we're desperately thinking we're getting at. Actually, it was when I first wrote two different queries to calculate the same metric, and having the numbers differ on an order of magnitude that I realized what we call confidence borders on quantified faith.

The book 'Wealth of Nation' by Adam Smith covers the allocation of human capital. Adam Smith argues the ultimate resource being allocated here, really, is time, and how individual's spend their time. When we measure output in dollars, what we're examining is the money value of time.

It's hard to get someone to agree that Finance can be a positive-sum game, if they refuse to accept that society is better off through the efficient allocation of human capital / time. Someone faulted me for being "greedy" and "selfish" to be a programmer in Silicon Valley. That by donating money to the Syrian crisis, I was merely "paying off the debt that you created". They insist I quit my job and go protest the United States government to allow Syrian refugees in. They suggest I quit my job, move to a 3rd world country, and help poor children. I sleep well at night because I read Wealth of Nations. I believe there is no place in the world that is comparable to Silicon Valley. Here, my skills / knowledge as a programmer is fully utilized. As such, I maximize my money, and, should I choose, donate money to causes I care about, to employ people who are more efficient at humanitarian efforts, but not necessarily programming.

Finance allocates money, which, we hope, leads to production of goods / services / jobs. The most efficient allocation of money is the one that produces the most. From first principles, I don't see anything inherently wrong with Finance. By putting money to work over time, rather than lay stagnant, Finance can be viewed as the time value of money. As a society, we'd want Finance and Financiers who help economies grow by efficient allocation of money.

This dichotomy of money-value-of-time versus time-value-of-money is not an original thought of mine. I was first exposed to this idea from a Finance PhD candidate's thought about their program. I couldn't find the article on Google. It'd be great if someone can link to it.

You can say, well, the pie is fixed and it's just a matter of who gets a bigger of slice of the pie. Consumers or VCs. Is is it equally good to "society" if consumers get a smaller slice of the pie when the private company charges monopoly prices and their owners benefit?

Also, I think you reduce the resume down to one page. The foreign language section is taking up too much vertical space.

What kind of 'background'? Economic? Social? Education? They're inter-related, yes, but for actionable initiatives to take place, the lack of diversity along these dimensions have to be isolated, acknowledged, and prioritized. Otherwise, it's just recasting the problem and expecting companies to spit out answers. If Engineering schools became more diverse, I have no doubt there will be more diversity of engineers in the workforce, too. Without establishing diversity in these earlier funnels, such that people's background are more diverse, companies will continue to have to "overcompensate" for diversity, as to avoid criticism.

In the case of these particular companies having a lack of diversity, I don't think it's inherently a 'culture' that has been formed, but more so about the network. Network and compound effects makes it harder for these companies to course-correct. A person's set of friend is not a random sample. Potentially, people are more likely to form friendships with people from their own race / culture. This is not to say they are discriminating or racist. An H1B worker who went to school in Asia will likely have a greater percentage of Asian friends, and by transitivity refer more Asian people. Again, if the earlier stages in the funnel, such as education, more diverse, maybe people will have a more diverse set of friends, in the aggregate, and refer a more diverse set of friends to their employer, in the aggregate.