hedgew

Augur will probably be used for betting but really it's a prediction market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

Prediction markets are an interesting tool for determining the most likely answer or result for almost any question. Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions. Many companies already use them internally.

Sadly there's only one prediction market that's accessible from the US, and it's an academic project with a 10% fee on profits and a 5% fee on all withdrawals. It's also limited in what you can predict or bet about. Augur or some other decentralized solution is probably our best bet for developing prediction markets further.

I really think these markets are the key to overcoming our failure to make good political decisions. It is a wild idea, but I don't know of any other solutions that directly incentivize truth-seeking.

Vitalik Buterin actually wrote about these concepts in more length

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/08/21/introduction-futarchy/

The ISSpresso linked in the article was interesting. I like how clean and robust the controls look. Totally unlike most consumer products. I'd pay well to have more controls like that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSpresso

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/ISS-43_n...

Compare to a typical induction stove!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Kookplaa...

Each year the internet and its services are less and less for hackers and more and more for the general public. This is reflected in how everything is designed.

The average person has totally different needs and usage patterns than power users. If you want to avoid this phenomena, where the services you use slowly degrade and lose features, favor products that specifically target power users. Products for the general population, like Android, Youtube, and Windows, will over time degrade more and more towards some lowest common denominators.

Here's the key sentence which roughly translates into "Losses are not deductible" > "Sopimussuhteeseen liittyvät menetykset eivät ole tuloverolain mukaisessa verotuksessa vähennyskelpoisia."

Additionally, Example 3 is given to show how an actual loss of 500€ is not considered a loss in taxation and is not deductible.

The Finnish tax authorities use a First In First Out principle in crypto taxation. So if you buy 1 BTC for 10€, and later 1 BTC for 1000€, and later sell the 2 BTC for 20€, you have to pay taxes on the 10€ "profit". Even though you lost 990€ on the second BTC.

It is. Net profits are not taxed, but the profits of any profitable trade are. Trades resulting in loss are ignored.

The tax authorities interpreted cryptocurrencies not as a currency or as a financial asset, but as "trade agreements", which allowed them to take this stance. I'm not sure why they would skew the taxation so far against taxpayers' favor.

It only applies to cryptocurrencies.

That doesn't sound right. The authorities in Finland specifically tax gains made with cryptocurrencies. You only pay tax if you make profit on any individual trade. But you can not deduct trades that made a loss.

It's not exactly a wealth tax, but it's also hard to consider a capital gains tax because you can't deduct losses. Treating other investment products this way would probably have horrific results, because it heavily disincentivizes taking on any risk.

All they're doing is looking for bank transactions to crypto exchanges in citizens' accounts. What this article doesn't tell, is that the current cryptocurrency taxation in Finland is unreasonable. You pay 30-34% tax on any profit, but you can not deduct losses.

If you had bought 1 BTC at $1000, another at $14000, and sold both at $3000 you would owe $600 in taxes even though you lost $9000.

You can imagine how people feel about paying these taxes, when they are so obviously flawed and unjust. Some people may owe hundreds of thousands in taxes even if they made no actual profit.

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009).

In Europe, I pay $20 for unlimited mobile data at 100mbps.

I got curious and had to check the numbers, just to know what's real:

Australia: 7.7 million km²

United States: 9.8 million km²

Europe: 10.2 million km²

Russia: 17.1 million km²

Africa: 30.37 million km²

Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

This is obviously unethical. That it might not be illegal is our failing. They provide false solutions to a fear that they themselves create.

What's next? Giving every child a free phone on their 13th birthday? They already "gifted" the world's poorest with free internet. It's easiest to abuse those who have the least power to fight back.

"By accepting this gift, you agree to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy."

According to their numbers, 3% of their users have gotten married through the app. I wonder what that number is for Tinder?

Anki is sort of designed for this. You would have to manually add the highlights, though.

I quite liked the European competitor's original name, Joylent. To avoid legal issues they eventually changed the name and somehow ended up with "Jimmy Joy". That name was so intensely disliked that they renamed it again in about a month.

What a massive claim! Of course, after carefully reading the article several times just to make sure, it's just one attention-grabbing line said in one speech, by one person.

To prove this sort of claim, you'd need to challenge the millions of hours of research geneticists have done, all the open data they've published, all the medical advances they've fueled. Instead, without even considering that the claim might be wrong, without any scientific humility, without linking to any supporting research, Harvard confidently makes the most extreme claim; that zip codes have more predictive power than genes!

Disgraceful and absurd that Harvard would publish something like this. Disgraceful that I believed it even for a moment.

One significant problem is that teams have much more negotiating power than individuals. Which is why teams that stay together are consulting agencies.

To put it simply: The software development department of a company might bring the company $10 mil value. A consulting agency with great sales would bill them $9 mil to do the work. Individually hired developers might be paid a total of $1 mil.

If the company hires an entire team, eventually the team figures out that they bring $10 mil value and can easily negotiate their pay up to that because they coordinate together. Individual developers almost never coordinate like this.

The way I see it, this is the employer's problem. In a good company, what benefits the company, also benefits the employee. In this case the employee and the company have different incentives, and the company does not care enough to solve the problem of incentives.

There are many, easy ways the employer could solve this problem so that both parties benefit. The employee does not have the same ability to pursue mutually beneficial solutions, and is acting like a normal profit-seeking business would.

I am confused too.

You can compare the market caps in a sense. A company with 1000 shares worth $10 each has the same market cap as a cryptocurrency with 1000 tokens worth $10 each. The $10 price is the highest price people are willing to buy the share/token at. In economic terms, they're quite equivalent?

That's where the similarities end. A token does not mean ownership. It doesn't mean a share of profits. Tokens do not necessarily have any rules about how many there will be.

More practically, a single person owning 100% of a cryptocurrency would likely reduce the value to zero. Owning 100% of a company, you can at least sell its assets.

I'm so, so skeptical of the current cryptocurrency valuations.

$200 mil for a browser with no users.

$1.5 billion for a coin that was twice renamed to hide that it was premined.

$500 million for a Reddit with less than 1/10000 of Reddit's users.

$30 million for PotCoin.

$350 million for DogeCoin.

The list goes on and on. If BAT was a normal company, would someone buy them for $200 million? Would someone pay $500 million for Steemit? These valuations sound insane, but that is what people are paying.

What will happen once Bitcoin is replaced by a clearly superior technology?

It is quite likely that cryptocurrencies and related tech will revolutionize many aspects of our lives. But that is also exactly why Bitcoin will decline. Its current value comes from speculation rather than utility. When actual business is done on the blockchain, the value created by that will surpass value from speculation so much that no consideration will be given to bitcoin and its technological baggage. Business will simply use a newer crypto because it is more economical. We'll use something that's faster, easier, cheaper, and less energy consuming.

When superior competitors exist, Bitcoin will simply have no inherent value. It will be like a government invalidating a currency, except it won't happen as fast.

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuvmV5O-qTA

1. An AI might not need long exponential growth to make humans obsolete. Maybe the computing power of one data center is enough to outperform and dominate humans? Imagine if you had infinite patience, and experienced time 1000x slower than everyone else. That number might be in the millions. Or more.

2. I agree that it's a very strange and unpredictable scenario.

3. How optimal do you think humans are in the real world? In chess you have a very limited number of possible actions at each point, but in reality your possible moves are almost limitless.

The amount of low-quality, negative comments here is surprising. I read the whole article carefully and it seems quite reasonable.

I was never a big fan of Wunderlist, it was too much eye-candy and too few features for me. But it was the best todo app the whole family could use. Support for all platforms, simple list sharing, and the ability to set custom backgrounds and colors..

Not sure what will replace it. Almost certainly not Microsoft To-Do, though. Seems too opinionated for a todo system and lacks critical features.

>“Based on everything we know about early math education and its long-term effects, I’ll make the prediction that children who thrive with abacus will have higher math scores later in life, perhaps even on the SAT”

Also not so suprisingly, children who thrive in early math education will tend to have higher math scores later in life.

That's about all we seem to know about early math education anyways.

You can sort of explain how life is in beautiful symbiosis with the planet it resides on, but mostly this sort of perspectives cause harm. It's not science and encourages magical thinking.

- "Gaia" makes it easy to think we are bound to Earth, and that nature protects Earth. There is no magical force that ties us to Earth, or a magical force that keeps it liveable, it's just a lucky coincidence and a complex set of systems. Maybe we stop global warming, and then a supervolcano erupts.

- "Balance of ecosystems" creates the illusion that even the tiniest change in nature will hurt it. We spend more time worrying about tigers going extinct than an asteroid wiping out all life.

- "Biodiversity" makes us think that more variety is always better. No universal law rules that a single super-crop couldn't keep us happy and fed in an environment without biodiversity. If we bring two of each species to a space station, it won't be because of economic reasons. Wild animals and plants do their best to destroy biodiversity constantly anyways.

- "Nature knows" causes us to think that naturally occurring solutions are better. For example the genetically engineered Golden Rice, which could save millions of lives yearly, is a victim of this belief.

Similar flaws in thinking even cause most of the medical profession to only see medicine as a way to treat disease instead of improving wellbeing. Ask doctors and they'll tell you: all medicine has side-effects! If you gave doctors a pill that eliminates the need for sleep without side effects, they would only give it to people who are dying from insomnia.

Outside of fields with direct penalties for invalid science (think aviation, nuclear reactors, sinking boats, collapsing bridges), we're just relying on the integrity and honor of researchers. On an individual level it's much more effective to cut corners and publish trendy research than it is to make valid science.

The situation is only made worse by the fact that universities reward this; because they too are rewarded more for high-profile research than they are for scientific validity.

My guess is that most studies in softer sciences are simply erroneous. Many social sciences have already been shown to be unreliable by the replication crisis.

My personal experience comes from reviewing hundreds of published studies that evaluated the applied effectiveness of machine learning models. Half had significant statistical errors.

This obviously wasn't a hard decision for them. In the article she's doing her best to demonize Thiel and Trump without even trying to empathize.

It also reads like she's trying to associate this project with big names like YC and Thiel.. but if I'm reading correctly all "Project Include" has done is "actively invite YC to contribute". The cynic in me says that this is a simple political power play and a marketing trick in one. Nothing to do with actually helping people and society, which would involve understanding and sympathy for all sides; even your political enemies.