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jbpetersen

365 karma · joined April 15, 2015

I curate ideas.

jeff@jackinthe.net

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jbpetersen··on A few words on Doug Engelbart (2013)
Tlon's Urbit is probably the best all-fronts attack on the problem I've seen.

Honorable mentions for tackling part of the problem go to IPFS and Scuttlebutt.

There's a lot of people who understand the larger vision around the decentralization crowd if you can find them in the haystack of hypesters.

jbpetersen··on Ask HN: Amazon software engineers, how is the work culture now?
You could always move to where things are booming and see your salary double overnight.
jbpetersen··on How to Get Paid for Open Source
Spamming at least one private telegram channel for upvotes without contributing anything.
jbpetersen··on Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
You might try looking here: https://intelligence.org/all-publications/
jbpetersen··on Freedom of Speech Isn't About Speech
There does need to be some sort of sane standard for determining whether something counts as a threat/incitement if they're not going to be permitted.

Say I'm very popular on twitter, and say I don't like somebody for whatever reason. If there's a reasonable expectation that this will result in them being mobbed by my less personable followers, does that count as incitement?

Or at what point does aggressive banter in good faith become an actual threat in [favorite multiplayer video game]?

jbpetersen··on How Tesla Will Change the World (2015)
On the other hand, targeted subsidies can push economies of scale to tipping points of self-sustainability.

If there's lots of low hanging fruit then a broad tax/subsidy makes sense, but if you need high levels of investment into specific things to make a difference, then use the tool for the job.

Which end of the spectrum incentivizing green behavior/tech mainly lies towards is left as an exercise for the reader.

jbpetersen··on Intro to Graph APIs
Having played around with building exactly that, the conclusion I came to is that REST is nice for not having the additional setup step of establishing a websocket connection as well as having the considerably better support for simultaneous http requests over rebuilding that part of the networking stack once again and layering it on top of everything else.

For real-time subscriptions though, websockets (pardon my grammar) are wonderful. Hence why all the above will probably be ignored as they become a trend and people at large learn the sensible limits of what to use them for.

jbpetersen··on Bancor Is Flawed
Good luck making those ERC20 compliant.
jbpetersen··on Show HN: Pay with life – converts prices to time it takes you to earn the money
Tried this on coinmarketcap.com and it broke horribly.

You've got some bugs to work out but this is a very fun and useful idea.

jbpetersen··on First draft of the new Artificial Intelligence and Games textbook available now
Now you've got me curious how much people have experimented with making AIs play "incremental" games where there's literally nothing but build order planning.
jbpetersen··on We Need More Alternatives to Facebook
Unapproved third-party APIs.
jbpetersen··on Ask HN: How do you organize and store your notes?
A journal made up of both digital logs and a physical notepad, a graph of associations between things, and a wiki for deeper details on specific topics.
jbpetersen··on Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?
If you dig into the origins of a buzzword, it's highly likely there's a very valuable concept hiding underneath the accumulated cruft.

Had I known this sooner it would've sped me along considerably towards finding a lot of cool things that give me more motivation to program.

jbpetersen··on Ask HN: Stories of startup persistence
What were each of them in a nutshell?
jbpetersen··on How Much Does a Politician Cost?
So what's preventing market saturation from everyone lobbying until the ROI drops to something sane?
jbpetersen··on Coinbase adds support for Litecoin
Network effects of people who held one that skyrocketed then diversifying into others and news around any given one skyrocketing drawing people to the space in general.

Not to mention that every single one is an experiment that feeds back into the collective knowledge of what makes a good cryptocurrency, even as any individual one can only choose a single set of all the known tradeoffs.

jbpetersen··on Google accuses Uber of creating a fake company in order to steal its tech
I believe Animats was referring specifically to disruption of industry incumbents and failed to clarify that.
jbpetersen··on The LHC has restarted for its 2017 run
Now I'm curious how much someone's chance of having seen/played anything Steins;Gate goes up when preconditioned on visiting Hacker News at least once a week.
jbpetersen··on Ask HN: How to best utilize a 6 months sabbatical to improve technical skills
I'm trying to get an online community together over the next few months for some of the same stuff. More generally for learning through collaborative experimentation. My email's in my profile if you're interested.

You might try setting up a simple blog and chatroom combo specifically for what you're learning and trying to get a few others to join in on some parts for the mutual support. Half your list is stuff I'd love to join in on if the timing worked out and I doubt I'm the only one if you do decide to get small groups together for at least some parts of your adventures.

Worth mentioning is also the typical advice of teaching others being one of the most effective learning methods.

jbpetersen··on Show HN: Kobble – Notes app that saves directly to GitHub
Seen https://blankslate.io/?
jbpetersen··on Ask HN: How do you move files between computers?
I'm really just curious what everyone's using for any given situation.

I don't move much around myself, but I anticipate that changing and it's nice to have a broader picture of what's out there.

jbpetersen··on BitTorrent Inventor Bram Cohen Will Start His Own Cryptocurrency
"Of course, the Internet doesn’t remember that he worked on cryptocurrency almost 20 years ago (with Zooko of ZCash) before he started BitTorrent."

Citation needed.

jbpetersen··on ArkOS discontinued
And then there's Urbit, the unusual suspect.
jbpetersen··on Why Information Security Is Hard – An Economic Perspective (2001) [pdf]
Abstract:

According to one common view, information security comes down to technical measures. Given better access control policy models, formal proofs of cryptographic protocols, approved firewalls, better ways of detecting intrusions and malicious code, and better tools for system evaluation and assurance, the problems can be solved. In this note, I put forward a contrary view: information insecurity is at least as much due to perverse incentives. Many of the problems can be explained more clearly and convincingly using the language of microeconomics: network externalities, asymmetric information, moral hazard, adverse selection, liability dumping and the tragedy of the commons.

jbpetersen··on What makes a genius?
Thank you for this. I wish there were more people (or bots) like you who made thoughtful highlights.
jbpetersen··on Golem – A Decentralized Supercomputer
Unfortunately having a flashy website seems to beat out good UX when it comes to attracting the 8 digit sums regularly being thrown at ICOs.
jbpetersen··on What Happens When You Send a Zero-Day to a Bank?
Better yet: Short their stock, then write a scary blog post about the problem.
jbpetersen··on Designating the hamlet of Sumte as a sanctuary for hundreds of displaced people
To clarify I mean cases where someone who didn't vote in one election may change their mind in the next if the right candidate shows up.

If you're slicing a higher-dimensional space and can only slice so far from a point you start slicing from, then the problem gets even more interesting.

jbpetersen··on Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
Already there if you count inferring things people would prefer to keep private by looking at probabilities given their visible activity.
jbpetersen··on Designating the hamlet of Sumte as a sanctuary for hundreds of displaced people
What is it about the US political system that forces things back towards a evenly split equilibrium?

I don't agree with the typical "vendors on a beach" (move towards the center until you each grab the half that's closer to you) metaphor since it seems to discount the possibility of being so far away from people that they're alienated to the point of non-participation. I could see it being cyclic though between that and periods of recapturing alienated demographics.

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