digitailor

American crypto exchanges were actually reporting predating that announcement; they had to in order to not get shut down. Thoughtful people knew that certain regulation would have to be met from the beginning, but that memo wasn't universal and there's no one who goes door to door with the facts for hungry home speculators. There's likely to be a continual wave of retroactive enforcement for some time. That's why most sincere people in the space have been paying any required taxes generated by their activity starting for the year 2015 at the latest.

Incidentally, bitcoin hasn't been considered a security by the IRS yet, but the infrastructure bill that just passed has a whole sea change of new regulation for the space. I don't feel I've been informed well enough yet to comment much regarding macro implications. But there is something in there that could effect the latest buzzwords to go media viral: NFTs. Securities-related Know Your Counterparty and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that will be in effect starting in 2023 may apply to NFT sales, for any seller. That could have a real impact. You would need the EIN or social security number of your buyer.

We could call this tightening or a crackdown, but I think it also might be fair to call it reigning things in to prevailing standards. I don't really know. All this revolves around interesting questions about how the standards continue to be established for what constitutes a digital security vs digital property/currency.

As to the ICOs crackdown, it was nice to see regulators actually take real action on straightforward and often inept securities fraud. They were enabled by capability advances that weren't as feasible with bitcoin alone. They were old grifts cycled around again for a round of digital "innovation," so they were nipped in the bud pretty quickly. These kinds of fraud will probably spring up at every stage of the digital asset technology development cycle. The noise can be a bit maddening, and I can understand your general sentiment.

The China crackdown was this year. The US agencies mentioned all started examining bitcoin in 2012 at the very latest, and had a decent grip by the next year. Left off the list is the agency with the most impactful jurisdiction- the DHS- who essentially "signed off" on the "legality" of Bitcoin in 2013, specifically citing the ease of tracing bitcoin transactions. The IRS gave its guidance on bitcoin (and classed it as property for taxation purposes) in 2014. FinCen was not particularly concerned at this time, according to someone at FinCen at the time.

Cooperation between compliance specialists (like Promontory) and major investors and the federal government (for KYC and AML) hit full steam by end 2013, by necessity. The FBI seizes assets suspected of being used in the commission of federal crimes, and bitcoin is simply another asset for them to seize, which the Justice Department has done successfully for a decade now.

One could argue that bitcoin was able to go to the moon because of these decisions, actions, and verdicts.

Sources: people who worked in these agencies or organizations at the time and the publicly available information at the time that it was disseminated.

Bitcoin (BTC) is classed by the US Federal Gov't (IRS) as property, not currency.

That wasn't some kind of mistake or tax technicality on the IRS' part - a lot of analysis went into this in 2013, along with DHS and FinCEN. This is the definition for BTC in the US.

That means what happened today could be described as: The first and oldest decentralized, distributed, cryptographically-secured record of digital property ownership (Bitcoin as a network) is producing cryptographic keys (the property, BTC) at half the rate it was yesterday. There is now less of the digital property (BTC) being created by the network daily, and this is due to an artificial scarcity strategy built into the Bitcoin source.

Hope that helps

While living in LA and NYC, and single

Has both negatively and positively impacted my life

We don’t always go back, the assertion is biased and/or anecdotal and shouldn’t be publicly made

This is definitely a PR offensive mixed with journalist arousal and legislator outrage. Impossible to know all the actors

Read “10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” by Jaron Lanier, especially if you’re on HN but don’t know who that is

I'm still a night owl, wired for very late.

I'm positive they figured out how to have sex in the day as well when possible. But nomadic daytime marching would reduce opportunity, and in a hunting culture it would be harder to separate a woman because of daily gender-disparate activities. In a predominantly gatherer culture, perhaps it was easier.

Teenagers are most likely wired for later nights because they have reached initial fertility. They will sneak off in the night to fool around, especially if they haven't had a child yet. At the risk of sounding patronizing, this is how babies are made. Adolescence is the age when women would first become pregnant, and the ancient's concept of marriage was probably not the same as ours. (There is evidence of monogamistic tendencies in humans for a long time but that isn't synonymous with marriage.)

Teenagers are biologically wired to want lots of sex and they tend to do it at night. I would put a lot of money on the fact that that hasn't changed in millennia.

Obviously, this is a critical aspect of the process that allows for the continuation of the human race. Humans didn't have the consistent ability to wait to reproduce until 30 as is common now. And probably not the desire too; I can't see career-building interfering.

The initial party must have ended pretty quickly. Poor ancient teeenagers.

(Edit: considering this speculative is reasonable and factually correct. But speculating there's been behavior change is currently more speculative. What reason do we have to think teens had daytime sex in ancient times and our behavior has changed? What about for mature adults? Never heard of an existing tribal culture that mostly has sex during the day, and that's how we get much of our anthropological evidence.

Humans tend to have sex at night, and the most fertile, desirious and energetic would be wired to spend more time at the time people have sex doing it: that would be selected for because of our primary biological directive. Is there a more logical evolutionary reason?)

In the meantime, Troy sent over a Letter of Intent and explained that it needed to be signed and returned by Monday. I was very frustrated by this. You don’t send a legal document to someone over the weekend when their is no time for a lawyer to review it and demand it back by that same Monday. Whether it was the intention or not, this was a high pressure sales technique and just one more red flag.

Which is well put- "whether it was the intention or not." So, why wasn't Talkroute simply rejected for taking too long? If Techstars was concerned about an undersized cohort, they could simply sign another startup with no ill will - Talkroute just missed the deadline. No harm no foul.

A Saturday -> Monday LOI signing isn't typically considered a reasonable expectation.

There was good discussion of this on a prior HN thread when @sama posted that blog piece. If I can dig it up I'll add it here.

Is Sam Altman involved with TechStars? If not, why is his name being evoked? It's great that you agree with him, but OP is saying that at least in his case, this point of view was not honored.

One issue that is relevant to us given our fixed class sizes is getting a definitive answer from a offer though as quickly as we can so that we know if should move down the list and give an offer to the next team instead. Having 10 offers out and finding out that only 8 want to accept would mean we have are giving out 2 offers potentially much later than the others. Purely as a practical timing matter we hope to give out a set of offers and have everyone accept or dismiss them pretty quickly so we know who the class will be.

I understand, but this is simply the universal rationale behind pressure tactics. Your desire for quick resolution is understandable, but the specific claim made in the post needs to be addressed.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/paul-farrells-commentary-ch...

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/08/03/in-honor-of-planet-of...

...the training was almost finished; the performances of the top 4 rats had turned out to be comparable to those of the world' s best fund managers. Their ability to recognize sound patterns generated from the market's ticker tape was incredible. And the rat traders also hold another advantage: unlike their human counterparts, they are not likely to be distracted from news or economy fundamentals, their own personal or their bank's financial status.

Imagine this: A designer walks into corporate headquarters of Macy's with his sample garments that he wishes to sell there. He is given the opportunity to talk to a Macy's buyer (the person who selects garments to sell).

The shirt the man shows says "So sO seKsy" on the right sleeve, there is what looks like a mustard stain on the collar (he defends that it is "the beautiful sun", and the construction is terrible- a button falls off while the buyer is looking at it.

  Buyer: "I'm sorry sir, this shirt is grotesque in my view. Best of luck to you."
  Designer: "Screw you! I'm going to sell it to Target! I'll never shop here again!!"

Note: Not an Apple fanboy, see previous comments, but i do use some of their products

Do you know how happy I was to figure out how to get the Apple bootloader off of the machine? Joyous! I was proud ;)

Basically I was trying to say, it really helps to have someone with some manufacturing experience in-house if your startup involves it, even if you're not the actual manufacturer.

Of the hundreds of retail startups I have seen that are going to contract manufacturers, none have had a manufacturing expert or even one with any experience. In fact, it's severely undervalued with respect to importance. If they do have someone from manufacturing, they probably aren't being paid relative to their market scarcity.

The best manufacturers also design what they make, their own product, and do not make for others.

Apple has manufacturing experts and manufactures themselves, hence they control what they make. <startup-person class="random inexperienced" /> does not, so they cannot have their quality level, by definition. Hence, they pay more because they didn't capture the margin, and because they have to get in line to pay a contractor who knows how. But they cannot bring a serious order unless they are funded by deep pockets.

Here in America, we have lost most of our manufacturers, leaving three generations missing manufacturing experts. This is a no-brainer, obvious to all. However, the connection is rarely made that we have lost our manufacturing capability because /it is difficult/. It's so difficult it had to go to a highly efficient country with cut-throat competition, abundant labor supply, and abundant poverty. The perfect conditions for plunging down manufacturing costs.

Manufacturing is quite different from "making." We are having a resurgence of interest in making in this country, which is exceptional. Arduino is amazing! It manufactures for the people, not for other companies, reducing cost and providing access. Making doesn't scale without manufacturing expertise. I hope manufacturing is part of the renaissance as it grows.

  1. Install Linux Mint via USB thumbdrive (Ubuntu has UEFI support)
     Use to format and partition destinination drive appropriately
  2. install grml-rescueboot
  3. cp crunchbang .iso to /boot/grml-rescueboot
  4. In the grub CLI (that 40x80 first stage GRUB prompt), set the $root variable
  5. > linux ($root)/install/vmlinux
     > initrd ($root)/install/initrd.*
  6. Insert Crunchbang install DVD, locate CDROM drive in the GRUB CLI
     (enjoy finding things in the 40x80 context)
  7. Install, reboot, sudo update-grub, reboot
  8. Celebrate, and then weep bitterly because it took ten hours to figure out

Does anyone know if this process might work for 'BSD? Haven't installed one since the mid-2000s.

Intel wants us to pay for something that industry won't buy with the Edison. Contrast to Arduino and rPi, which are providing affordable access to something only available otherwise to industry:

AVR: High volume microcontroller- let's make it accessible and useful outside of heavy industry == Arduino.

ARM: Exploding in popularity due to mobile devices- let's make it accessible outside of device manufacturers == rPi.

Atom: No one is using these in industry- let's palm it off on hobbyists and see if they can drive demand == Edison.

Hard to find the point of the Edison. Too anemic and dull next to true next-gen SoC solutions like the Zynq [http://zedboard.org/], and too overpowered for most microcontroller applications. Weird price point. No GPU or vidout. There's many SoMs and SoCs to try before this one.

Intel has had to give away Atoms to get them used in any volume, this HN comment on a contemporaneous article has links on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8294864

If Intel wants to hit the hobbyist embedded market running, they could sell Edisons for $10. By giving them away to heavy industry, yet selling them to hobbyists, they aren't garnering interest, they're patronizing.

My hero for the day.

This is a critical aspect of crossovers- since they contain the same signal, any phase differences between the intersecting components are easy to pick up by the ear and very difficult to measure since it won't show up as a significant frequency or amplitude differential. In the highly acoustically sensitive area where the crossover occurs, the phase distortion between the two signals is hard to pin down but it's definitely there, it's easy to hear by A/Bing.

I mix on a multiple-monitor setup and the one that is most critical to me sounds like absolute garbage. However, it has a wonderfully "flat" response and allows you to get an idea of what proven aesthetically-unpleasing issues are present. It has no crossover. The goal is not to have perceived rumble, tinniness, or mud on any of the incredibly wide range of listening systems out there. I think this is what beat means by "musical"- flat speakers are actually not pleasant to the ears, but the most empirically useful.

The most famous secret of many respected mix engineers is the Auratone. Michael Jackson's "Bad" was mostly mixed on this little thing. It sounds like absolute garbage aesthetically but reveals more issues in a mix than anything else. It's like when you first saw things under a "blacklight" as a kid and got to see all the particulate matter covering everything, that you can't see with the naked eye.

Here's more about the Auratone. I hope my comment has helped to bridge this critical area of "musicality" vs. empiricism. http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2012/02/06/auratone-avant...

Postscript- the listening environment is the most important aspect! Always! You can have the best mastering grade monitors on earth in an improperly treated room, and it's all for naught!

Believe it or not, two iPad apps have become really important design tools for me- iDraw, a vector graphics app, and ProCreate, a painting app. They cover most straightforward duties. I was very surprised at their power, and not having to whip out the graphics tablet is nice. Working anywhere from an iPad mini retina is pretty liberating. Obviously the laptop is still needed for on-the-move coding, but again, that's Linux, despite the (good) Mac hardware.

After 22 years on Macintosh, I've completely transitioned to Crunchbang on a MacBook Pro and a Windows 7/Crunchbang dual-boot workstation. I really like the translucency and general look of Win7. I had started to feel like OS X was visually dated, but more importantly, harming my workflow.

For development and design, I am working nearly twice as fast in the OS using Crunchbang, and I've made it look and behave just the way I want it to. OS X is completely non-configurable! Since the only thing I need a consumer OS for at this point is for digital audio, I moved to Win7 as I wasn't about to lay out the $$ for the new, unfathomable, Mac Pro. What is that thing anyway? I worked with a guy in a metal shop to customize a case for my new workstation, tricked it out with an internal pro audio interface with exposed preamps and 1/4" jacks, and made it a 3U rack-mount. That versus a garbage can?

That being said, my 2007 Mac Pro is still ticking and I've been able to upgrade it considerably, though changing the processor was a PITA. It's still on 10.6.8- what I consider the high-water mark of OS X- but I would need Mavericks now, and that needs a 64-bit bootloader. (Couldn't use the hack for this since I have a flashed PC GPU in it and that precludes the hack.) Like I said, I can't fathom buying a new Mac Pro.

The way I see it, Apple is just for consumer devices now, and I love 'em. My iPad is critical to my workflow. OS X? Considered harmful. And visually dated!

A lot of recent Stanford and Berkeley grads I've met sound more like real estate agents than technologically oriented people.

Maybe a Victoria Secret model is actually very technically switched on, regularly reads HN in between outfit changes, trolls reddit when parties get boring, loves to Buffer her selfies, manages tickets to club appearances with Eventbrite and has her accountant send her weekly reports directly in Xero.

Either way, it’s not true. And not likely. But I’m proud to report I’m engaged to a stunner, and I met her when I was a poor student :-)

I know this is just gentle snark, but yes, one of my closest friends is a very successful model that does pretty much everything you listed, often on sites I haven't heard of yet. (She only reads HN with me but she chooses the links and always has insight). So maybe kill the snark a little? It makes you look less cool and maybe distances some people who could be truly awesome, unique friends. There are some extremely savvy models out there. She travels constantly and is basically my chief advisor on international communication trends. Now try to imagine what she overhears when some [redacted] dude wants to fly her to Bali on his private jet... Yeah. You think they ask her for an NDA?

Anyway congrats on your engagement! Money is NOT what it takes, right? Carry that message to the youngins ;)

I'm just speculating, though; perhaps you would be crowned King of All There Is and paid the fealty you are so surely due, as you have responsibly planned whilst the impoverished clearly have not. All hail Nirnira, may the bones of the weak be used to grow his giant throne!

[apologies for feeding the troll, he's just so cute but ideologically dangerous]