phyller

It's amazing to me how China is so effectively creating a 1984-type situation without much stir among the rest of the world. These chat programs are super important for everyday life in China. The same company that provides chatting also provides your ability to pay for everything, and a credit score that determines what you can buy, how much you pay, and more. So if you say something you shouldn't, this could very easily be something where your entire life is destroyed. If they choose, these ultimately government controlled companies can easily make it so you can't buy things anymore, you are not trusted anywhere, and even your friends all disconnect with you because your bad score could affect theirs.

Pretty scary.

It will be interesting to see how the Chinese government reacts to globally available, unfiltered internet via satellite, like the one SpaceX is making https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

I think in the US people are starting to classify marijuana with alcohol and tobacco. It's not illegal in a lot of states, where I live (in the US) it is legal for recreational use. My understanding was this discussion was about more illicit drug use.

I think it applies to aspirin too. You thin your blood, reduce some swelling. You feel better. But maybe you don't heal as quickly. Instead of being immobile and allowing resources to gather at the wound we get back to our work. But our work is leisurely these days and we probably don't need to heal quickly.

Perhaps if you are a runner and you take these seemingly benign medicines to reduce pain and swelling, you end up causing more permanent damage by continuing to run when you should not (I have experienced this).

I think a lot of medicines work by turning off or on processes that are important but inconvenient at the time. Painkillers are probably the best example. We shouldn't take them when we are healthy, it would be dangerous. Other medicines, such as antibiotics, work by killing pathogens directly and don't affect our bodies like the drugs in this discussion.

Your argument doesn't make sense to me. If the chemical is harder to synthesize, then the receptors could be more sensitive, or bind longer. Why would our bodies evolve to use a messenger molecule that was so prohibitively expensive to make that we couldn't make enough of it?

These drugs are just changing the balances of existing pathways in our brains. They aren't creating new pathways. Either they are causing a substance that your body naturally limits to exist in higher quantities or lower quantities, keeping a messenger molecule from being removed as fast as it would be normally, or removed faster than normal.

So I agree with the parent, it is likely we can choose the tradeoffs, maybe needing to avoid predators and scavenge for food is not our priority anymore and we can turn off some of that so we can think more deeply. But chemically I doubt we can improve ourselves without any drawbacks.

But yes, technology in general, physical things, can have a more pure benefit, and we are already reaping the rewards of those benefits. A new macbook pro is likely to make me more productive while not interfering with my sleep :)

You need to reply to the comment by Blahah who thinks literally every developer in Germany is high all the time.

I think people who do drugs just gravitate to other people that do drugs.

For me, the limiting factor on my productivity is not how god-like my mental state is, it's whether I can get the info I need from that guy on the other team or when the project manager will sign off on a needed change :)

I have never known anyone I have worked with to do drugs (in order to aid work). Doesn't mean they don't, but I hadn't even thought about it until I read this post. One of the first things I learned in my (albeit young) career is that my brilliant, complex, I-worked-all-night-to-make-this super code is total garbage that no one wants to work with. Yes, it's amazing, but if no one else can understand it or wants to, it's dead in the water.

Making code simpler is more important, being reliable and sustaining a constantly improving level of code quality is pure gold. This will allow my team to be more productive, we will get better quality products out faster and be able to build upon them. I think my natural mind is best suited for the complex demands required by collaborating with others, thinking deeply, and turning thoughts into clear, clean, testable and tested code.

Far from wanting to stimulate myself to work more, I'd love to be able to turn my mind off and relax more quickly, and get a good nights sleep to start again refreshed. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of coders had a little alcohol in the evenings, maybe marijuana. The coders I know drink a little (not too much) and one of them smokes weed. That's it.

I agree with other comments that I think people self-select into different groups. There are people that take drugs. They hang out with people that take drugs. Maybe some of them have gotten into coding. There are a lot of people who don't take drugs, and they usually work with similar people. I don't think this is a coding vs non-coding thing, but maybe what type of person you turned out to be in high school. I'd bet most coders aren't the drug-taking type.

That's funny, when I moved to Colorado was the first time I started hearing it. My wife can't hear it at all but it's so loud sometimes at night it drives me crazy. It's not in my head, it's definitely coming from a certain direction. Its very low, I can barely see it on an app I put on my phone, "Spectroid". I'm pretty sure I know what it is, the coal trains moving down the front range. The tracks are like 10 miles away but the sound is so big and low that when the weather is right it propagates for miles. If I can hear it while the train is on a 20 mile stretch of track then a new train will come before the previous fades. I'd wager that distant freight trains and a gentle breeze cause this noise for a lot of people.

I used to live right next to a busy highway, and that higher pitched white noise didn't bother me once. This unstoppable deep noise is incessantly annoying.

From the previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2514041 looks like the Britney Spears tutorial in semiconductor physics is at http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.html

+1 I really wish we could choose our carrier, and reward those that do a good job. I used to have a way better experience with UPS then Fedex, the difference was huge because I would have to go to the Fedex warehouse to pick up my package (long story, Fedex was pretty bad in my area). But I have no control over who delivers it.

The Amazon delivery guys are way worse. I never know when something is coming, even if it says out for delivery I might not get it for days. Every time I need something for a trip that I buy 3 business days early, with 2 day prime shipping, I don't get it before I have to leave.

I gave up trying to complain, you could review the seller, but not the delivery service. Hopefully they have changed that. I used to only shop on Amazon for pretty much everything. Now I decide if I should get it from a local store instead. When I need something that is time sensitive, I definitely get it from a brick and mortar store.

The worst is that while UPS will leave the packages on my doorstep (and knock on the door), the off-brand Amazon delivery guys tend to leave the package in front of my garage door because it is closer. One of these days I'm going to drive over something expensive by accident.

I wonder what would have happened if they took all that development money, didn't worry at all about stealth, and just tried to make it as unsinkable as possible.

Anecdotal evidence, I played rugby in college. We'd send at least one person to the hospital every game. But few head injuries. A friend of mine who played football played rugby the spring of his senior year, and promptly broke his neck by leading with his head when tackling as he was used to. Fortunately he didn't sever anything, no permanent damage.

Personally I think a lot of our injuries were because we had a lot of former football players who were used to a different sport. It takes time to adjust. My "career" (fun hobby) ended from a ridiculous move from an overzealous opponent that destroyed my shoulder. If we were wearing football gear everything would have been fine. I wonder if rugby players in the US get injured more frequently than in other countries because of our legacy of American football.

I had never heard of them before, the idea is really interesting to me. I went to their website to see if there were any cooks in my area to see if it was worth trying out. It looks like I have to sign up before I can even see any of that :( I am skittish about giving out my contact information, I don't want to deal with throwaway accounts either. I wonder how much growth they missed because of that.

A very close friend of mine recently received a master's degree in Philosophy at Columbia. She definitely did not fit the mold of many students who were there, being a conservative and an active duty pilot in the military who was preparing to teach at an academy. She found many people and professors to be open minded and mostly fair. However she experienced a few professors of the type described here, where the authority of the professor was used in ad hominem attacks on disfavored groups. Voicing any dissent was greeted with scorn and disgust.

One of the interesting things, at least about the graduate program, is that you can take many credits as "R credits", meaning you don't get graded. You have to show up and submit research papers, but they don't get graded. The idea, I think, is to focus on the learning and not focus on getting an A. I think this can also give the students the ability to disagree with vindictive professors without getting their academic career derailed. I think this really works to provide more intellectual freedom to students at Columbia, and my friend had a good experience there.

Taking out a mortgage and buying stocks on margin are different things. The author is recommending using margin. Taking out a mortgage and having money available to invest requires that you first own an unmortgaged house, or have significant extra equity in a house. And if you have that in your 20s, well, you are already really far ahead.

This sounds like a horrible idea.

Oh. Sorry, I interpreted it that you were a full-time freelance developer.

How about a full time job? With that much experience you should be able to get one that pays well. If there are no full time positions for your skill set in the area, there are companies that hire remote workers. Search for the "Who's Hiring?" post that comes out every month or get in touch with a recruiter.

It could be emptied out after 400 coins, not 900. If there is already money in there it would take a little more, not much. Unless my math is wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16226641

Reproduced here with more columns, assuming initial price of .02 ETH per coin:

  +----------+----------+-----------+------------+-------------+
  | numCoins | coinCost | coinValue | sell price | Profit/Loss |
  +----------+----------+-----------+------------+-------------+
  |      100 |        2 |      0.01 |          1 |          -1 |
  |      200 |        6 |      0.02 |          4 |          -2 |
  |      300 |       14 |      0.04 |         12 |          -2 |
  |      400 |       30 |      0.08 |         32 |           2 |
  |      500 |       62 |      0.16 |         80 |          18 |
  |      600 |      126 |      0.32 |        192 |          66 |
  |      700 |      254 |      0.64 |        448 |         194 |
  |      800 |      510 |      1.28 |       1024 |         514 |
  |      900 |     1022 |      2.56 |       2304 |        1282 |
  |     1000 |     2046 |      5.12 |       5120 |        3074 |
  +----------+----------+-----------+------------+-------------+

Also the guy said he has 200 coins to use whenever he wants

Clearly this person has minimal experience in fraud, this is a horribly set up ponzi scheme. The investors can make a profit purely with their own actions, and remove any ETH that is currently in there. I thought about doing it, but don't feel like getting into cryptocurrencies and putting up $30K to get a positive return.

The way you can rip this off is buy a bunch of coins at once, push up the value, and then sell them all. You have to buy a maximum of 400 PonziCoins before you can start making a profit, but then the more you buy, then cash out, the more profit you make.

This is if the current price is .02 ETH per PC, which I've heard it's not anymore.

  +----------+------+----------------+
  | numCoins | cost | return if sold |
  +----------+------+----------------+
  |      100 |    2 |             -1 |
  |      200 |    6 |             -2 |
  |      300 |   14 |             -2 |
  |      400 |   30 |              2 |
  |      500 |   62 |             18 |
  |      600 |  126 |             66 |
  |      700 |  254 |            194 |
  |      800 |  510 |            514 |
  |      900 | 1022 |           1282 |
  |     1000 | 2046 |           3074 |
  +----------+------+----------------+

Worst case scenario is the price has just gone up, and you need to buy 100 PC to make the price double. But immediately you can sell for half your cost, instead of 1/4 because you made the price double. Do this again, but now you have twice the number of coins to sell, you are already breaking even on your first batch. Next round you make money on your first batch, break even with the second, lose with the third. But the fourth round you are making so much from the first and second rounds, breaking even with the third, and only losing half of your fourth, that you come out ahead.

You can't make money forever, you will just take all ETH that has been put in before, which will be a small amount. Then nothing is left and it will be bankrupt until someone else puts money in. But it's a guaranteed way to get your own money back, if you can afford to go at least 4 rounds, if it works exactly as the site says, and if no one cashes out coins before you do. The risk is that someone waits and cashes out after you put your money in and before you have cashed out, you have to do your transactions all at once to be successful.

I don't know how this works behind the scenes, I don't advocate for any of this, and I won't be trying it myself. I also am a little disappointed to realize I may have provided the best argument yet to make this thing go. So don't put your money in there, you are probably going to lose it.

That one stat made me question the entire survey. There's no way so many people use VIM over Atom, Sublime, etc. Right? Someone reassure me here.

Speaking of civil forfeiture made me wonder whatever happened to all the bitcoin owned by that guy that ran Silk Road. Government sold it, but with some bad timing http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-road/

Thank God many of us live in countries where you are innocent until proven guilty, and not the other way around.

Almost all of the magical things described are exactly why I will never own one of these. Google makes money off of knowing everything about you. Orwell's "1984" is a bit ridiculous, but with respect to technology, we are almost there. At least Apple still makes money off of selling things, I think there is at least a better chance of privacy with them.

I wish I could upvote this twice. I know its just anecdotal data, but the rare occasions I have had personal knowledge of news articles they have been grossly inaccurate, every time.

Where is the quote from? Edit: from another comment: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

The article mentions alternate uses of a sock, citing its suggested use as a "water filter" as being particularly creative. In high school I had a project to make a water filter which I forgot about. The day it was due I managed to assemble a plausible filter by taking my sock, getting it wet, and draping it between the dirty water glass and the clean water glass, with the dirty water glass higher so the water would be sucked up and through the sock into the clean water glass.

Maybe there is a high correlation between creativity and irresponsibility or desperation :)

As this is Hacker News and full of curious people, I can tell you that it doesn't work very well. The dirty water just ends up on the other side, minus large pieces of detritus.

Since all you need is one instance, let me share. I am a runner. I run a lot to stay in shape. I am not particularly slow, and ran track in school. I ran once with a friend of mine who had a natural runners build, but wasn't a runner and hadn't run in years. He smoked me, trotting along effortlessly while leaving me behind absolutely breathless.

It depends on what you are doing but sometimes people are just wired for something better than others. But everyone can almost always get much better with training.

Personal income taxes were lowered by a pretty decent amount

Looks like it is back up

No one is saying the market is wrong or the data is wrong. Just that the implications the author makes based on the data are unjustified.

This story gives the impression that you can somehow magically make a profit by buying a house, waiting a few months, and selling it. This is completely ignoring the concept that most of the data is going to be from house flippers who don't just buy and sell houses, but renovate houses. If you are a professional who buys fixer-uppers that no one else wants the hassle of dealing with, then put a lot of money and work and skill into them, yes you have a good chance of selling it for more than you spent on it.

If you just buy and sell, and don't do anything to the house, you're very likely to lose money (when factoring in transaction costs) unless you really know what is happening in the market. People see what you bought the house for a few months ago, why would they pay more than you did? Also, as many others have mentioned, there is a lot of selection bias. People are less likely to sell if they have to sell for a loss, if they have to hold onto a property they wanted to sell because they would lose money if they sold, they don't show up in this data.