randomsearch

This isn't just about Tether, this is it.

Eh, but minting Luna increases the supply of Luna and thus devalues it, therefore a run means that the price of Luna increasingly drops as you mint more, meaning you have to mint more Luna, it heads to zero, you're dead. It's the opposite of stable, because a run actually accelerates itself. What am I missing here?

I don't understand.

How do you ensure you have enough Luna to maintain the exchange? If you hold enough Luna but then the price of Luna goes down, where do you get your extra Luna from? A run on your promise kills you.

Surely it is very difficult for a company to "guarantee" anything about the price of a commodity sold in a large open market. There are all sorts of reasons prices go up and down, it seems hubris to imagine you can tether anything.

Even national governments struggle to do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

Do you worry about the opportunity cost of that time?

Could you expand on the “for the outdoors” comment and explain why those people are self centred? Assuming this must be an American cultural thing

Many, many, many startups - this seems to be a very popular idea!

> Unpopular opinion: Social media is a great scapegoat,

On HN that's likely to be a popular opinion, given how many members here probably work in social media corporations.

I have lots of experience looking after relatives' kids in the UK and your points don't apply at all to them.

It's anecdata vs anecdata, but yours doesn't refute the article, and given your opinion may well suit HN biases well (we don't want to think of our work as causing mental illness) then I think the top voted comment needs a stronger counter argument than "my kids are like this".

It's not certain, but it looks pretty damn likely that social media has caused a dramatic increase in mental health problems amongst kids.

Maybe teachers could contribute something here with their experience? Parents see such a tiny sample size but teachers see 1000s of kids over a few years.

My succinct explanation for this: “social media extends the school social environment into the home.”

Whilst I believe social media is bad for everyone’s health (the unethical manipulation of users by the social media companies), the reason it is so so terrible for teenagers is it removes any possibility of escape for the horrendous “Lord of the flies” that is high school.

If I hadn’t been able to escape that environment each evening, I very much doubt I would still be here. And I wasn’t suffering anywhere near as much as many people I knew.

High school is a terrible idea, and social media extends and amplifies the horrible behaviours it engenders.

I wonder how much of that shift to services was a necessity due to the pandemic. It’s very difficult to ideate new software products when everyone is wfh, I imagine that’s doubly difficult with hardware. Perhaps Apple’s drive to get people back in the office is because they’re worried the product pipeline has stalled.

I like this idea. If I already have a home office, so I get paid this extra fund too? Or does my coworker only get it because he doesn’t have a home office?

Or wfh as a poorer individual with a cramped house shared by multiple occupants, low pay that doesn’t cover the increase in electricity usage etc.

Works both ways.

The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working.

Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.

Fair point for some people.

Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?

This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.

Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.

> Designers often don't work on open source projects not because they don't work for free, but because it's a miserable experience.

This did also occur to me, but I don't have any experience of it.

I do know that solo designers working in a team of commercial devs often find it a miserable experience.

> The positioning is not objectively wrong.

Yes, it is. There are lots of UX rules backed by research.

Fitts' Law in this case is just one reason why this is wrong.

The non-standard and objectively poor positioning of the buttons is fascinating. What was the logic behind this?

It seems to me that designers are much less likely to give their time for free to a software project than programmers. Is that why OSS suffers from problems like this? A junior UI designer would never make these kinds of decisions.

I can understand why designers wouldn’t work for free. What I don’t understand is why an average coder couldn’t do some basic googling and learn the fundamentals. You can get a long way by imitating commercial work and following standard conventions. So is it lack of skill, or some sort of mistaken belief that the conventions established by the experts are wrong?

I’m wondering here if the idea is to imitate a forward/back step from a wizard (albeit with the buttons in the “wrong” vertical position) Not a paradigm appropriate for repeated everyday interactions, mainly because wizards are not designed for efficiency.

It’s interesting to note that during college we live closely with lots of strangers in a big community, make lots of friends, and typically describe those days as some of the best of our lives in retrospect.

We then move away and live in increasingly isolated housing, typically long distances from our friends.

Modern life doesn’t make much sense in this way. We’re sociable chimps that need a group. I really love the idea of living in a street with friends nearby. Maybe I can make that happen.

I guess you did consider the possibility that by using Airbnb to find accommodation you were nonetheless perpetuating the system by which they have turned cities into "hipster slums"?

The three months doesn't make much difference. I might be a responsible tenant when I use airbnb, whether in lots of short stays or one big one, but that doesn't stop other guests being awful.

Your three months just incentivised the owners to keep it as a short-term let.

Full disclosure: I have used Airbnb in the past.

Maybe, maybe not.

I've been downvoted for my analysis but absolutely stand by it and want to double-down for the record, as I think HN is very wrong about this.

Worth noting that Facebook's stock is now less than 50% of its peak price, and we're in a bull market. How is that going to look when the recession hits?

Whilst I'm sure it will continue to rake in cash for a few years, my point is that the gradient is severely negative and it will accelerate. Tik Tok will overtake Instagram this year, despite the fact that its audience haven't even reach 25 yet. That's _already baked in_ to the demographics.

The only way I'm wrong is if Facebook make a big success with a new product in-house, which they have never done. I believe they don't have the ability to do it. Their hiring and their culture are the problem, and you just can't fix culture overnight (esp with the original founder at the helm).

Facebook are not Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. They don't have the same culture. The reason they're in the same bracket is their financial success, but it's not an appropriate comparison.

Definitely in that bubble.

Main product has tanked. So few people use it extensively now.

Instagram has been absolutely destroyed by tik tok. As that audience grows up, the impact of that colossal defeat will hurt more and more.

Buying another success will be near impossible, and they’ve not created anything significant since the original app. No reason to expect them to successfully build something as difficult as a VR platform.

They’ve had years to fix the above. They haven’t. Whilst that doesn’t matter for their current earnings, the future looks very bleak, especially when the next recession hits and advertising spend plummets.

I do wonder at what point Zuck will step away. I guess sidewards to avoid spooking investors but he’s smart, he knows it’s over.

Far bigger problem is that DAU and MAU are a vague metric and don’t reflect the amount of time on the site, click through rates, advertiser interest etc.

For a crude yardstick during a growth phase, sure. For measuring the long term health of a mature business, nope.

“ It was there for anyone with enough capital to dominate.”

Musk didn’t have much capital at the time. They almost ran out of money.

Your argument might apply to Bezos, but not to Musk.

Lots of replies saying Linux has changed. My experience is that it’s exactly the same: potluck. For some people, things just work, for most people they mostly work, and for a good chunk of people it’s a lot of effort to get a usable machine.

I switched to Mac around 2009 and have regularly gone back to Linux. It’s just not appropriate for a workhorse machine that you don’t want to have technical problems with, sadly.

I have a friend who loves Linux, has used it and nothing else since the 90s, and he said he would still never recommend it for anyone but a tinkering hacker.

Linux machines are great for dev, but terrible for any kind of management, and the UX generally sucks. I love Linux but it is not the right tool for the job unless your job is pure dev or you enjoy tinkering. Mac remains the best compromise, but it is a major compromise.

Is it possible that Facebook’s apps could also be using bots to boost their DAUs etc?

Noam Chomsky would say - have you being paying attention? In a “capitalist society” the real power lies with the rich. The clue is in the name.

The political leaders are controlled by the rich, because they rely on their money, so your idea that the people can vote for a better politician is incorrect - nearly all the time, the winning candidates are essentially chosen by the rich.

That’s Chomsky anyway, I’m reading him at the moment, but it’s hard to argue against.

At the risk of replying to flamebait: if musk was only interested in money, so you really think he would have started SpaceX? I can’t think of an easier company to bankrupt yourself with. That assertion is objectively wrong.

I can understand people not liking Musk, but I don’t understand why that leads to “he only cares about money” or “his business success is sheer opportunism” when those are wrong.

Such assertions seem to be emotional rather than rational. “I don’t like Elon therefore he is 100% bad in every way and nothing he has ever done is skill”. Surely the more likely situation is - he’s sometimes good, sometimes bad, and his business success is a combination of hard work, skill, luck, and timing.

Even if you’ve made Elon your personal enemy, surely you can accept that eg SpaceX is an amazing achievement.

Is there rigorous evidence that supports the idea of unconscious bias and the effectiveness of training in reducing it? I’ve seen it advertised in academia and wondered if it’s evidence-based.

By far the most important advice here is exercise.

Years ago I had a friend who suffered from severe anxiety, to the point where she later took a job working for an anxiety charity to help others.

I had some anxiety and followed all her advice for coping with it, got some counselling (really helped), read all the leaflets. Took up swimming. Meditated every day.

Recently, after some reading, I tried a different exercise routine for a few weeks, where I worked out every day before work.

Compared to all the other stuff I’d done, hitting the gym every day was _dramatically_ more effective for coping with stress and anxiety. I can’t really emphasise this enough. Like, not 2x or 3x as effective, but just off the charts. It felt physically impossible to get severely stressed if I hit the gym every morning.

That’s a good point. Relatedly, Jaron Lanier says something quite insightful on the topic that gets to the root (pun) of the problem.

If you think all information should be free, like all software, then the creators of information are not being financially rewarded for creating it. That’s how you end up with cloud data centres making huge profits whilst most OSS projects struggle for cash. It’s also where the business models of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok arise.

Lanier makes a rather odd statement about how web links should be two way to solve this problem. I get his drift, but a better idea is that the web should be built on a more rigorous foundation (see Joe Armstrong’s talk - “the mess we’ve made” - for how it could work). But the general idea is correct - in an information economy either everyone is fairly rewarded for the valuable information they provide, or else you end up with giant companies capturing all the value instead, which leads to gross inequality.

Tbf to Stallman, he is more focused on constraining the worst commercial uses of software, but his fundamental idea that (as per this post) “knitting patterns should be free”, originally something that sounded like an exciting and inspiring idea, has turned out to be absolutely disastrous. He was maybe philosophically correct but in practice, the idea does not serve the best interests of most people.

Information shouldn’t be free (!!! I said that on HN) but rather information should be provided at a cost that is based on both (a) the cost of its provision and (b) the economic value that recipients of that information derive from it. So, for example, OSS authors writing code that underpinned Google’s empire or someone’s SaaS, should get a (small) slice of that pie.

I think once you recognise this, you end up in a really exciting place: like, how could this work in practice? What new concepts do we need to apply to information to do it? Some of the ideas of crypto should come in here: we need to be able to identify information uniquely, for example, so we can track its value. We need to know how many SaaS products are using Bootstrap or whatever. A new type of economy based on fair reward for information is possible. And for once, we do actually need a technical solution to a social problem.