vec

That's roughly what I got out of the article as well, I'm just not sure it actually holds water.

Sure, Bitcoin is less expensive to mine where energy is cheaper, so if I happen to want some Bitcoin anyway I should try and purchase it from a miner somewhere with low cost electricity. That still doesn't tell me why I should consider buying it at any price. Let me see if I can demonstrate my objection:

Kangaroos aren't very common here in America. In order to acquire a one pound box of kangaroo feces domestically, I would need to find a rare animal collector to negotiate with and may expect to end up paying, say, $100. An Australian, on the other hand, might well be willing to send me a box for barely more than the shipping costs, leading to a total cost to me of only $20.

I suppose I could choose to describe the shipper as wrapping up the difference between their kangaroo availability and mine into a security, but that doesn't by itself make paying $20 for a literal box of crap a "good deal".

Obviously Bitcoin at least appears to have some intrinsic value, since it's currently being actively traded. And obviously energy prices serve to set an upper bound on that value. I just don't see how energy prices could serve to also set a lower bound and, therefore, can't be the source of that intrinsic value.

No, I pay almost exactly a dollar to mine the Bitcoin in China. If I could mine it for substantially less than a dollar, then I could use 1kWh of Bitcoin production to buy more than 1kWh in the Chinese energy market, independent of international energy prices, which (assuming Bitcoin markets are even remotely efficient) would drive BTC prices down until the local arbitrage opportunity disappeared.

I still don't see how the existence of Bitcoin allows anyone, anywhere to exploit the difference in energy prices to come out ahead of where they would otherwise have been.

I have $1. I use that $1 buy 0.0001BTC (not the actual exchange rate, but I don't think it matters). That 0.0001BTC took just under 25kWh to mine in China.

I go to my American electric company and purchase 0.0001BTC worth of electricity. They, being a forward-thinking utility company, are happy to accept my Bitcoin in exchange for 5kWh.

Am I missing something? Sure, $1 would let me get 25kWh in China, but I don't see how the existence of Bitcoin allows me to take advantage of Chinese energy subsidies to get more energy in the US than I could get for just the $1.

So - and maybe this is a stupid question - how do I go about converting my Bitcoin back to electricity?

Say 1 kWh costs $0.20 in the US and $0.04 in China. I am in the US, and I have a machine that requires exactly 1kW to run. How does Bitcoin mining in China allow me to run this machine for $0.04/hr? Or am I misunderstanding what "arbitrage" means?

I worry the average consumer's reaction to that is going to be as follows: "All the tech nerds were worried about this net neutrality thing, but since it got revoked my Comcast bill is cheaper than ever. In completely unrelated news, those bastards at Netflix have hiked their prices again!"

For issue (1), what's wrong with keeping a vestigial means tested welfare state around? If a UBI works as advertised, the number of people who need further assistance will shrink dramatically. Who cares how inefficient (say) food stamps are if, to a first approximation, nobody uses them?

Besides, the existing American welfare system is ostensibly focused on providing a minimum standard of living to children, on the theory that kids shouldn't be punished for their parents' dumb decisions. A lot of the more glaringly stupid and inefficient bits are places where the relevant politicians wanted it to be for everyone in need but had to find some way to claim it was only for families without actually making it only for families. Having a UBI backing the welfare system removes a lot of the impulse to game the system and gives a lot more heft to the argument that children really should mean children and the archetypal broke 30-something bachelor actually should be on their own.

Issue (2) is likely to be a fraught issue no matter where the line is, but luckily in an American context we've already spent decades hashing out the boundaries of a well defined Social Security system. Have an SSN, get a UBI; no SSN, no UBI. That's probably not the best answer, but it's probably good enough to keep relatively small immigration issues from derailing the whole project.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not actually the issue in question. The comments to the FCC board were made using (publicly available) real name and address pairs.

Someone submitted a comment using my legal name and current address. Whether that person should have been able to comment pseudonymously or not is beside the point. What they actually did is make a public statement in my name, which may or may not reflect my actual views, and which definitely impedes my ability to express those actual views if and when I desire to.

Yeah, you're totally right. Running an ER has huge fixed costs. Running an ER will inevitably have huge fixed costs because emergencies are, by definition, unexpected so they have to be ready for anything.

In most of the developed world those fixed costs are amortized over everyone, in the form of government subsidies of one sort or another. It's like the police or the fire department; everyone chips in some, via taxes, to keep the service running whether they currently need it or not.

In America, however, we amortize them over everyone who comes into the ER. That's good for the guy who never needs medical attention: he gets all the peace of mind of having state of the art care a phone call away for free. It's good for the lady who rolls in at 3am with a gunshot wound: she gets her very elaborate lifesaving care for only a few percent over the marginal costs. It really sucks, though, for the guy with a dislocated thumb: he's forced to either massively cross-subsidize both the other patients or to forgo necessary but relatively simple care because of the huge expense. That guy doesn't need to believe the system should be free to have a valid complaint that he, personally, is getting screwed over by it.

Yeah, but isn't that also the "problem" with subsidizing K-12 public school? One doesn't need a high school education to wait tables or stock shelves, and most apprenticeships and trade schools could probably be started several years earlier without issue.

We used to have this Enlightenment ideal of a Liberal Arts Education. It served as job training, sure, but it also tried to make its recipients better citizens and more adept thinkers and more capable adults and, broadly speaking, more effective human beings in a bunch of socially and culturally important ways. I'm optimistic that free college tuition would be a net gain for the economy, but I also strongly suspect that it's worth doing even if it costs us some economic growth.

Besides, if someone wants to take a 4 year vacation, they're already well within their rights to just not get a job and do whatever they like with their early 20s right now, presuming they can cover their living expenses somehow. Free college tuition doesn't actually allow anyone who wouldn't otherwise be able to to slack off, but it does give them something socially positive to do with their slacking.

Free southerners (to massively oversimplify, and with recognition that this excludes the very different concerns of enslaved southerners) were worried about the federal government getting both strong enough and regionally diverse enough to abolish slavery, which they felt would be both culturally and economically disastrous.

Northerners (to also massively oversimplify) didn't really care one way or the other about the moral question of slavery, at least not until fairly late in the war. They were worried about the Union dissolving into a dozen perpetually feuding nation states (like they saw in 19th century Europe) and taking American prosperity and power with it.

Both sides were probably correct. Had the war not occurred, abolition via the political process was eventually inevitable. Demographics weren't on the Confederate side. And had the Confederacy succeeded there's almost certainly no Pax Americana in the 20th century.

The American Civil War was fundamentally about slavery. It was also fundamentally about states rights vs federal power. Specifically, it was about the inherent instability of a specific, geographically coherent region having a slave economy inside a larger nation where slavery was generally illegal and where they would no longer unilaterally held any political veto points. But more fundamentally, why should it be surprising that the people who disagreed strongly enough to shoot at one another didn't cleanly line up about the exact single issue they were fighting about? History's not under any obligation to be simple and coherent.

And since this thread is already Godwined, If you went back and polled the average German circa 1940 on whether their flag was racist, I suspect the vast majority would emphatically insist it was about national pride and cultural unity and whatnot. Most arguments about why the Confederate flag is fine also accidentally serve as compelling arguments as to why Swatstikas are fine, and I've yet to hear a compelling distinction between the two cases.

I expect this is intended to be a rhetorical question, but there's a lot of hidden premises here.

First, it assumes that Bill Gates did in fact work hard. Please define exactly what you mean by "work" and "hard", since I'm not sure there's an obvious thing that he could have done more of, even if he were so inclined.

Second, it assumes there exists some direct relationship between Bill Gates's personal work ethic and Microsoft's outsized success. Maybe all Microsoft needed was a good idea at the right time and would have succeeded about equally well with any minimally competent execution. Maybe they would have done even better had Bill Gates founded the company and then retired at 30.

Finally, it assumes that Bill Gates work ethic had some direct relationship with his financial compensation level. It is quite possible that he would have been more than happy to still give his best possible effort in return for being, say, a mere hundred millionaire. Moreover, plenty of people do hard work for all sorts of other reasons, from duty to boredom to artistic vision. Why do we assume that Bill Gates's internal motivation is predominantly financial in the first place?

None of those premises appear obviously and indisputably true to me. Maybe they are, but it'd be nice to see the case actually made (and made about real humans in the real world, not about perfectly rational actors in an idealized market).

I'm the same way. My instinctive reading of a 5 star system maps it onto a bell curve. So if I received exactly the service I expected, with zero complaints, that's obviously a 3 out of 5. 5 stars means two standard deviations above my expectations. It feels to me like a company that gets nothing but 4 and 5 star reviews should be taking issue with their marketing department for setting expectations way too low.

But in an Uber, giving less than a perfect score can get someone fired. So it's 5 stars unless the driver literally spits on me, and then it might be 5 stars and a complaint. Anything lower than a 5 star rating feels unethical, like stiffing a waiter on a tip.

What I can't figure out is how this is of any use to Uber. They have created a "metric" where a large chunk of their customers regard answering honestly as a social faux pas, at best, so what do they think they're measuring?

I think this is key. All the conversations we're hearing are about data breaches. In my opinion, that's merely a predictable and unavoidable symptom of data hoarding.

We need to move toward a recognition that collecting PII is inherently dangerous. Holding on to PII forever is inherently dangerous. And that's before the not insubstantial privacy risks these databases incur. I worry that any policy that solely concentrates on breaches is just going to lead companies to gamble that they won't be in the relatively small minority of companies that actually get hacked.

What can we do to incentivize a CTO not to have a customer database, or failing that to keep her company's database as minimalist as possible, even if she is 100% certain that database will never be stolen?

> But in this case, you have to decide who to take the word of.

That is true. And by refusing to give the allegations credence you have implicitly decided whose word to take.

> There is no way to logically analyze the claims and come up at the correct answer.

Sure there is. You can evaluate the plausibility of each claim. You can verify that the claims are internally consistent. You can ask what motivations each party would have to lie, or what motivations each party would have to tell the truth here and now. None of those will get you to ironclad, unquestionable certainty, but it sounds like you're at ironclad, unquestionable certainty now and I'm not sure logical analysis had much to do with you forming that opinion.

It's fine, really, if you've looked at the evidence and found it unconvincing. It's fine, too, if you've decided it is convincing but that your partisan interests are strong enough that you're willing to overlook them. But it sounds like you're just refusing to engage with them because they're confusing. That's not wisdom. It's anti-intellectual tribalism at it's most raw, and I for one expect better of the commenters at HN.

Yes, at least one dyed-in-the-wool Democratic operative is now attached to this scandal. And yes, at this late date the only realistic alternative is that the seat goes to a member of the other party. I would hate to be a Republican partisan in Alabama right now, and if I were I'm genuinely not sure how I would choose to vote. That's different, though, than refusing to consider the allegations because they're politically inconvenient. It's possible Roy Moore is a creep. It's also possible half a dozen unrelated people are lying. There's no reason to think those must be equally possible, and there's certainly no reason not to think that one can't make an educated guess as to which is true.

To shift political gears somewhat, our legislature is currently engaged in a debate about tax reform. One party claims the currently proposed plan will cut taxes on the middle class. The other party claims that the plan will raise taxes on the middle class. That's a question of fact, and both positions can't simultaneously be correct. The thought process you engaged in above can be applied equally well to that situation regardless of which party one favors, but it's guaranteed to make at least one party's fans wrong.

When we, as a polity, begin to completely disregard information because it comes from a partisan source or has strong partisan implications then I worry that we lose the idea of a shared reality. We can't convince those who disagree with us, nor allow ourselves to be convinced, if we refuse on general principle to listen to and engage with people who disagree with us.

*Accusers, very much plural at this point.

But more to your point, Roy Moore has not been arrested. He has not been, and probably will not be, charged with any criminal or civil infraction. He has, however, accepted his party's nomination for a seat in the United States Senate and is currently actively campaigning for same.

It is worth remembering that allegations are not, in and of themselves, proof of wrongdoing. It's also worth remembering that a political campaign is not a trial, that the press does not have the same investigatory powers as the judicial system, and that the "punishment" being threatened is not being able to be a United States Senator after all. It's actually okay for "the court of public opinion" to have a different burden of proof and standard of evidence than an actual court.

"[I]t is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" is a wise and good maxim. "It is better 100 guilty Persons be elevated to high office than one innocent Person should resign from a campaign they had no guarantee of winning in the first place" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

I did choose a pathological case, partly because there's no way to write the `md` helper function in a way that react will just treat as always safe, other than wrapping it a component. But then components requires a single root element and unless I want it to always be a div I also have to pass in a tag name and this is rapidly ceasing to feel simple.

But it's not just contrived examples. Here's a list:

    <ul>
      {(this.state.items || []).map(item => (
        <li>{item}</li>
      ))}
    </ul>

vs

    <ul>
      <li v-for="item in items">{item}</li>
    </ul>

And here's a simple if/else

    let loginOrLogout
    if (this.isLoggedIn()) {
      loginOrLogout = <LogoutButton />
    } else {
      loginOrLogout = <LoginForm />
    }

    // snip

    <div>{loginOrLogout}</div>

vs

    <div>
      <logout-button v-if="isLoggedIn" />
      <login-form v-else />
    </div>

React is conceptually simple, but that often forces me to write complex code. Vue lets me keep the code I write (i.e. the only code I actually care about) simple.

> Some of these directives ship with core, but some are third-party, so you have to remember which is which, and which your team has added.

Not to nitpick, but I think this might be the nut of our different reaction here. Some of our directive are core, and some are third-party. 99% of the time I don't have to know or care which is which. I just use them and they work and I don't have to think about how or why.

Perhaps this would be clearer with an example. Our API serves numerous types of copy as markdown strings. In our React code, embedding a markdown string (assumed to be in `this.state.copy`) into a div looked like this:

    <div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{__html: md(this.state.copy)}} />

In Vue, it looks like this:

    <div v-md="copy" />

The first one is easier to statically analyze, but the second one is far easier for humans to read and to write. Vue allows me to abstract away all the details of how `copy` gets turned into HTML so that my templates can clearly express what I want them to do. The signal to noise ratio remains high, and if it starts to feel verbose or boilerplatey I have a large box of tools with which to fix it.

Because "simple" and "easy" are not synonyms.

For example, Backbone is much simpler than React. React keeps a full virtual copy of the DOM in runtime and uses complex diffing algorithms to decide when and how to actually update the DOM in a manner which is entirely opaque to the developer. Backbone just does the DOM updates you tell it to, when and how you tell it to. And since Backbone is so much simpler, it logically follows that building an application in Backbone much be much easier than building the same application in React, right? Right?

In Vue, a component generally consists of a raw JS object, an (almost) HTML template, and a block of raw CSS. The framework does some opaque but straighforward work to bind these three together into a single conceptual entity. This is indeed more complex, but the added complexity follows the grain of my preexisting intuitions. The end result, in practice, is components which have a clean internal structure and much less boilerplate. Slightly more complex, but easier.

No, Vue's templates do not allow arbitrary JS. The syntax is very Angular-like, in the sense that everything is pseudo-html using custom tags and attributes. But the builtins are extremely well thought out and in practice I rarely find myself having to re-implement much of anything that's not application specific, and most of those things I'm grateful to implement once and be done with it instead of having to reimplement in JS for every component that needs it.

There is more of a learning curve, in the sense that it only took me 1-2 hours to feel like I fully understood JSX and maybe a day and a half to feel like I fully understood Vue templates. I, personally, don't find that argument very compelling. ~10 dev hours is a rounding error over the lifetime of a project, and anyway I spent at least that much time researching and/or reinventing JSX conventions and idioms that are obvious or trivial in any real templating DSL. I only had to climb the conceptual hill once for each framework, and the view from the top is much nicer in Vue.

As an aside, Vue actually supports JSX out of the box. Any component can optionally include a `render` function that's almost exactly like React's `render`, and it falls back to using Vue templates only if no `render` is specified. Anecdotally, though, there is only a single component in our entire application where the team decided it was cleaner in JSX than with a template.

I'm not the author, but that quote lines up almost exactly with our experience.

First, Vue shares most of the things that actually make React exciting. Component oriented, one-way databinding, virtual DOM, a first party Flux-inspired state management plugin. We didn't feel that we lost anything moving from React to Vue, and most of our existing components were trivial to port.

What we gained, on the other hand, is a whole lot of developer comfort. Vue's template syntax can be read and manipulated by people who aren't primarily Javascript developers. Directives and filters eliminate quite a bit of boilerplate. Opt-in two way binding eliminates noisy setter functions without any loss of clarity. Getters enable the use of computed values as though they were raw data. There's no single killer feature, but taken together Vue just feels much more pleasant to use than React.

React has the correct fundamental abstraction, but the actual API mistakes "small" for "simple". JSX, in particular, is trivial to explain and understand in theory, but in practice is often quite verbose and complex to use, as everyone who has asked themselves "how do I actually write an if/else block" has discovered to their dismay. Vue plux Vuex keeps the same conceptual simplicity and cleanliness as React, but it pairs it with a much larger, much more opinionated API that doesn't force us to reinvent every wheel we need.

A UBI scheme can't just create value from thin air; it has to come from either taxes or from devaluing the currency by printing more, which is basically a tax by another name.* Given that fact, there must be at least some class of relatively wealthy people who come out worse off, even after their UBI checks. The bigger the check, the larger that class of people. Since those people aren't idiots, they'll apply political counterpressure against raising the rate.

Because there's still the same total amount of money in the system, (inflation adjusted) prices can't go up too much. According to the Econ 101 model, goods with a fixed supply will probably get more expensive since there are more potential customers wanting the same amount of stuff, but goods with an extremely flexible supply will get cheaper, again, because there are more potential customers to spread the fixed costs over.

* There's also a sort-of-UBI variant where the funds come from monetizing some big nationalized resource and distributing the proceeds (e.g. the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend). In that case the above doesn't apply, but neither does your fear. Since in that case the pool of money is dictated by the market value of the resource the voters can't directly impact how much they'll receive.

As an empirical observation, in the US we currently have one group of politicians advocating for a larger safety net and a different group strongly advocating for lower taxes.

Sometimes the bigger safety net people win, taxes go up, and payouts go up. Sometimes the lower taxes people win, taxes go down, and payouts shrink. Eventually these forces hit a stable equilibrium (or a semi-stable "pendulum") and the tax and benefit rates don't seem to explode or contract endlessly.

I don't see any reason to expect that a basic income would be any different.

Oh, come off it.

Not every team gets to be made of 100% 10x supergenius ninja rock gods. And no one gets to be at their absolute best for every line of code they're ever going to write. Everyone, no matter how gifted, does a better job on average if the boring, obvious thing also tends to be the correct thing. Having some structure makes doing real work with real humans better, not worse.

SOLID isn't an iron law, it's a heuristic. And a damn good one. "Open-minded smart people" can and will find reasons to bend and break the rule sometimes, and the more experienced one becomes the more readily they'll be able to see when the rules doesn't apply. That doesn't mean they're bad rules.

Maybe I'm not open minded or smart enough, but I've seen plenty of codebases that adhered to some set of coherent architectural guidelines and codebases that didn't, and I know which subset I prefer to work on.

In the US at least, in theory the proposal for a long time was just to not keep track of people in the first place. The federal government collected taxes on things like property and tariffs that were hard to avoid, they performed a census once a decade to get a rough idea of how many people there were, and anything beyond that was none of their business.

Then we got income taxes and federally guaranteed pensions (Social Security) and medical assistance (Medicare/Medicaid) and a few other, smaller safety net programs. Furthermore, while there's plenty of fighting around the margins, the overwhelming majority of Americans are broadly in favor of keeping at least some of the Great Society programs, and that means we have to have a national registry of some sort.

It turns out that when the population is broadly distrustful of the idea of a national registry but broadly in support of a tax regime and social programs that require a national registry to function the stable equilibrium is a really really shitty national registry that everyone hates but nobody feels they can improve without getting shouted out of office. American politics is dumb.

Yeah, but why did Threadless possibly need to "maintain growth"?

They had a sustainable small business model. They could have consciously leveled off when they hit their natural equilibrium and remained a profitable niche vendor in perpetuity. Instead, it appears they threw out their existing succesful business model and a good chunk of their reputation trying to scale beyond their natural limits.

What's wrong with being small if you're good at it?

With enough practice, I could see this being much easier to read. There's no jumping from the end of one line and searching for the next, plus each line is visually distinct from the ones immediately above and below.

I wonder how much text I would have to read like this before it felt natural?

My wife is an audiologist, so I admit to being a bit biased, but it seems like most of the comments are missing one of the main drivers of hearing aid cost.

Traditionally, audiology offices undercharge dramatically for their initial consultation and testing, then provide full service for the lifetime of the device. And not just normal electronics service. Often patients will come back every week or two for months to get the fit just right or to get some coaching relearning how to hear conversations or just having the nice lady in the white coat show them how to replace a battery for the fifth time. A lot of clinics will even throw in "free" batteries for life. The cost of all that service ends up getting rolled into the initial purchase price for the hearing aids.

This is dumb. Most audiologists that I know think it's dumb, but it is the status quo. There's a move in the industry toward "unbundled" billing (i.e. charging an hourly rate for services and selling the aids at a much more standard retail markup) that I hope catches on, but it's a hard sell to charge for services that the clinic down the road is providing for "free", even if the total cost of ownership is the same.

Hearing aids aren't actually covered by insurance nearly as often as one would expect. The majority of patients pay out of pocket already.

First I try really hard to not need it. e.g. I'm "vec" on HN. They don't know my real name, my physical address, or my Twitter handle. Any features that did need that data are simply not going to be implemented, and the site is designed accordingly.

Next, I don't store what I cam fetch or derive. Say I'm using GitHub as an oauth provider. I don't need to store an email, an avatar, or a password hash. I can use GitHub's data. All I have to store is an opaque oauth ID.

Finally, if I do really need it and I can't get it from anywhere else then I'll happily store it. I just won't do it first, and I often won't do it until I've had a talk with the designers about what's possible with the data we already have.