mifeng

I bet Coinbase makes more money from their exchange (GDAX) which does $1 billion each day in volume. While limit orders are free, market orders cost 0.25% of transaction value.

Since contracts are immutable, you need modularity to be able to fix bugs like what happened with Parity. The problem is that Solidity libraries are also immutable, which means you can't fix them. The solution is easy: just use contract modules, not libraries.

I was wondering how Coda differed from Quip, et al, but this article makes me pretty excited about it. As someone who used to spend all day in Excel and VBA, there's definitely room for a new "light coding" platform.

I thought EDGAR was only used to disclose public securities filings. What's the big deal?

In my limited and non-lawyer understanding, that's not the SEC's modus operandi for investigations like this.

They want to leave themselves room to study the market and issue definitive guidance later. Also, these investigations cost time and money. So to discourage bad actors, they go after the most obvious offenders but it's not really in their best interest to present a positive counterpoint.

I predict that CoinList will create some type of exchange only for accredited investors and use an SPV to exceed 99 investor limit.

If you read the actual report (https://www.sec.gov/litigation/investreport/34-81207.pdf), you may notice that the SEC is careful to apply securities law DAO specifically.

In particular, they apply the security test: "did investors invest money with a reasonable expectation of profits derived from managerial efforts of others?" Since DAO was a wisdom-of-crowd VC fund, the answer is a clear YES.

On the other hand, they are careful to say that other token sales MAY be securities but will be treated based on their specific facts and circumstances.

My takeaway is that this doesn't change anything. The SEC is proceeding cautiously: applying securities law in clear-cut cases, "studying the effects" generally.

It's also not a bad thing to comply with securities regulation. FileCoin is doing quite well selling only to accredited investors on CoinList.

When you raise a round >$500k, talk to potential lead investors before anyone else. Defer all conversations with investors who do not lead. Ask investors before taking a meeting if they lead. If they don't or say that do and still pull that shit, immediately disengage.

I find it hard to write tests when I'm still formulating the logic of how a problem should be solved. For money-based logic in Solidity, I now like to model it in MS Excel first, write code afterwards, and then finally tests.

Unit tests do help, and they are relatively easy in Truffle, the most used JS framework for Solidity. I guess I need to move to more of a TDD style than I'm used to.

Thank you for succinctly summarizing all my frustrations with Solidity. I am developing a fairly complex smart contract (i.e. not a crowdsale) and it's fucking painful. Trivial computations that would take less than an hour to do in any other language take days to implement correctly.

Debugging is also a nightmare. There's no way to step through function calls or set break points, even though it's basically just Javascript. Multiple classes of bugs will generate the same "invalid opcode" error that is only visible at run-time with no indication of what line even triggered the error.

This is why I invested in the Tezos crowdsale. Smart contracts are a great idea but there's gotta be a better way.

I understand what you're saying, but are other paths besides being born with a silver spoon.

My family was on food stamps when I was a kid. After college, I worked for a long time in finance before joining the tech industry 7 years ago.

My savings during the first part of my career gave me the risk tolerance to do startups.

It's like asking why HTML hasn't been replaced. The business value needs to be greater than the switching costs for both publishers and consumers.

However, as someone who spent the last 5 years working for PDF companies, I predict that a new final form, fixed layout standard will take hold within the next 5 years. The format will be able to adjust itself to multiple form factors. Both Adobe and W3C are working on competing standards currently.

> because “engagement” is the metric, Facebook inevitably selects for the shocking and the outrageous.

Anecdotally, I've noticed this myself. Anything I post that's related to politics get lots of likes and comments, while it's crickets for everything else.

For many years, startups have exploited the opacity of potential outcomes to trick employees into thinking that their equity is worth more than it likely is.

A couple of years ago, I asked AngelList's CTO if I could utilize their data to build something like this; he never got back to me, so I moved on. Really glad to see this project live!

EDIT: Just realized this came from the fine folks at LTSE. Awesome stuff, Tiho!

Are those just prediction markets or is there something else to them? I remember there was a site called TradeSports everyone was excited about in the early 2000s. It's problem was that there was very little liquidity for any bet other than presidential elections and the Super Bowl.

I used the internet in '95. It was awesome: I played Trade Wars with my friends. I received and sent email with Juno. I chatted with random strangers on BBSes (a few were super weird, but whatevs).

Despite the limited options and the slowness of my 28k baud modem, the internet in '95 still fulfilled my needs for entertainment, communication and socialization. Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs.

>For building AI tools, it’s like the difference between a command line interface and a modern desktop OS.

What does that even mean?

CMU was also the first school to offer a masters in Financial Engineering in the mid-2000s.

Check out outlier.ai. Also I think there was a company in the most recent YC batch that tackled this problem.

While this site has some great info for non-technical folk who are serious about learning AI, I think the site will fly over the heads of most "line-of-business leaders" at whom it's aimed.

In my experience, those folks think of AI like...

My company is collecting tons of data in [insert data warehouses here]. How can I bolt on some "AI" and find out what's "interesting"?

International money transfer is indeed a big problem, and TransferWise has built a billion-dollar company over the past 6 years solving it, just not with blockchain.

Those are all important jobs that are being done today using non blockchain methods.

How does blockchain perform better at sub critical mass?

> Banks dragged down by capital obligations from Dodd-Frank regulation are looking everywhere for cost savings.

Name a single bank who is using blockchain in an essential component of their operations (not just a proof of concept). Go on, I'll wait.

Sure, blockchain is "interesting" and the people involved are "brilliant" but where is it delivering a 10x improvement over the status quo?

Blockchain is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.

Me too. On my Pixel, messages will randomly appear either in:

* Allo

* Hangouts

* Messenger (Android)

* Messenger (Facebook)

* WhatsApp

It's like SMS-Roulette.

Why would an object classifier matter?

If my plane is about to crash, do I really care whether it's a mountain or a building?

I read that Deseret News is doing something like this, but since they target a faith-based audience, they can transcend local borders.

Front page does look very local: http://www.deseretnews.com/

Have you tried selling a new, unproven product to an entrenched industry like construction? I have, and it's much harder than refactoring spaghetti code or learning Haskell.

>To bring them into the fold, the team started running superintendent “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” sessions at the office, where the two goals were to celebrate them as experts in the field, and to learn as much as possible about their lives, work and problems.... During these events, the superintendents got to know individuals at PlanGrid too, and walked away bigger evangelists than they were before.

I haven't seen this done before, and it's a great idea.

This works for more technical or earlier stage startups but it's much harder as you scale.

This post focuses on the problem, but it's also a huge opportunity to build a product that can integrate from a bunch of different SaaS and provide a BI layer. I'm sure lots of folks are trying to do this, but I haven't seen it done well yet. It probably needs to be an enterprise product w/PS, because of the infinite number of SaaS combinations.