skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Who needs bitcoin? Honestly not many people right now."

Worldwide, lots of people.

There's folks in Venezuela and Zimbabwe who need Bitcoin because their national currencies are hyperinflating.

There's folks in El Salvador who need Bitcoin because it is their national currency.

There's folks fleeing Ukraine who need Bitcoin because their nation is at risk of being swallowed by a large empire.

There's folks in Russia who need Bitcoin because their nation is doing the swallowing and getting cut off from the world financial system as a result.

There's folks in China (and other countries) who need Bitcoin because their nation can't be trusted not to interfere with private property and it's good to have a little insurance policy on a thumb drive, piece of paper, or memorized.

I think that cryptocurrency is one of those areas where people in the developed world look at their own life experience and think "Who could ever need that?", not realizing that they represent a tiny fraction of humanity and that the experience of most of the rest of the world is dramatically different. I work on a product (Android) with about 3B users. I work on a tiny segment of it (tablets & TVs), with about 12% market share combined, and we're always struggling to get the larger org to invest in developing us. But when you run the numbers, you realize that the 12% of Android users with a tablet or TV is about 340M, more than the entire population of the United States. Similarly, the number of mobile phone users with accessibility needs (largely vision difficulties) is also larger than the population of the United States, yet it's awfully hard to get people to consider screen readers and assistive technologies when developing.

Americans in general are wildly unaware of what a tiny percentage of humanity they are (for reference: about 4%), and this comes up over and over again in HN threads.
No, I've been taught that to survive/be healthy we need to eat meat. So I didn't question it (for several decades).

The idea of animals happily living on the farm somewhere and their painless/swift death is a part of the lie. The reality ... is of course much, much worse.

I've become vegan because of other people (not enough space for everybody to eat same amount of meat as westerners do), because of the loss of biodiversity (such shame to erase so many "cumulative billions of years of dna code generation") and because of meat production's adverse effects on the environment.

Health and moral aspects came later, for me.

Now that I know (and verified it myself) that we the people in fact don't need animal products to be healthy, that quite the opposite is true, that we don't need to cause unnecessary suffering for our own livehood, I'm not interested in eating animal products anymore.

It may change if our civilization collapses. For now ... with the plants available ... no, thank you.
it was pretty marginally useful for the longest time, night and day with todays
Netflix was doing great, then other services came along. Local restaurants were doing well, then covid hit. Most things have a life cycle and black swan events happen. Can't be avoided; you can only have a contingency plan.
> Investing one's savings in buying a home comes with the expected option that one can live in it indefinitely if one wants to. Fulfilling this expectation does not depend on others becoming homeless, nor on their home becoming worse, nor on others being unable to buy a home in the future.

I don't think any of this is true. You buying a home deprives someone of said home and drives the expected price up. We have a homeless crisis in California because we are not building enough and everyone is treating housing like an investment ("It can only go up!", "This is an investment!").

Living in it indefinitely is also a pipe dream. You're paying taxes and fees that can increase or change at any moments notice if enough people agree. This requires the same consensus as fundamental algorithmic changes in cryptocurrencies. You can't bank of living somewhere "indefinitely" without agreeing that it's a gamble...nothing is guaranteed.

Regarding the "need" to invest in cryptocurrencies, I can kind of agree. Shelter is a need because it helps us survive more efficiently but one could argue investing/growing wealth should also make life easier to live if it works out.
>It's not idiocy that drives people to this, it's greed. It's the idea of obtaining wealth without work, of speculation, and the thrill of what is plainly gambling.

Is it greedy to have a 401k? People and companies have been pushing crypto as a reasonable investment for years. For example, it felt like crypto took the place of beer as the primary advertiser during this year's Super Bowl. It isn't all crypto assholes sitting at the top of Ponzi schemes who have been and will be hurt. Plenty of normal people only put their money in because they saw Matt Damon and Larry David talk about it on TV like any other traditional investment vehicle.
“You are not knowledgeable enough to invest in commodities” is probably good advice for most people. It is also honest and clearly demonstrates the way in which you’re being (perhaps rightly) judgemental.

“Commodities are not an investment vehicle” is incorrect, and the way you are presenting it in this argument is intentionally deceptive.

The first quote seems to be the advice you mean to give most people. The second one seems to be the advice you are actually giving, with the implication that you think it will be more effective when it’s presented deceptively?

I would highly recommend you change your approach here. Because all of these people will one day figure out you lied to them, which will taint the credibility of what should fundamentally be good advice.
Don't just go. Run out of there. They will get rid of you as soon as need to. Be fair about it but look out for your needs.
By the folks who put “safe” in safemoon.
Ask HN: Joining a publicly traded tech company given the stock market situation?
I currently work as a technical lead for a private tech company and I’ve been offered a job at a publicly traded tech company (non-FAANG). I primarily focus on the business systems side (things like back-end billing, etc) and not so much product development. The salary at the new gig is a bit higher and the team seems better and more supportive overall, but the current situation with the stock market is giving me some pause.

Is this reasonable to consider as a factor for a job change? Is there anything I should be considering as part of this move as it relates to the current drop we are seeing among numerous tech companies?
Not a lot, 3-4 oz. covers all of your daily iodine needs and then some. I have it with my breakfast because having it later in the day can affect your sleep quality. I learned about this from listening to Stan Efferding talk about his "Vertical Diet."
I wanted to know what a Fipper was. I went to the website's hope page. It never told me what a flipper is. I walk away not knowing what a Flipper is. What a waste of my time. Their website home page is a failure.
The fact that there is wealth to extract implies that the ticket that allows you to control the extraction has value. The company has assets and the ticket gives you proportionate ownership of them and proportionate control of where they go.

>A house that burns down because of climate catastrophe is a real physical loss. A increase in the value of a house created by aggressive speculation is an imaginary gain that only exists because the people in the game believe in it.

And a house that is built creates real value by taking land, adding materials and labour, and creating something worth more than the sum of its parts.

I don't need to forgive all of the economic system's sins to explain why stocks have value.
For a bad enough crash, only governments can provide the necessary insurance.
DISCLAIMER: Never hold Tether, for obvious reasons

That said, Tether can't pop the way LUNA/UST did. UST was basically propped up by the value of LUNA such that when the UST peg is lost, more LUNA gets printed to buy back the difference. This causes the LUNA price to crash when the peg is lost, so people who know better try to sell before the rebalancing, crashing the price further, meaning more LUNA needs to get minted for every UST burned, causing rapid deflation. This is all done in a smart contract, and can't really be turned off.

Tether is run by humans. Turning USDT back into USD requires actual human interactions. The peg can be lost, and maybe permanently, but it's not going to suddenly go to zero over night.
It's not Scott's review, it's a guest series on the blog.
> the root reason

And no mention of petrodollars?
You should know, you practice it every day.
No worries ... DeFi is a confusing space.

DAI is not algorithmic at all, but it is controlled by smart contracts. For $1.00 of DAI to be minted, a user has to post somewhere between $1.25-$1.50 of collateral. The act of creating DAI is literally that of taking out a loan. Over time, your debt to the system accrues interest. If your collateral falls under a certain price threshold, the issuer of DAI (MakerDAO), will seize your collateral to close your position. You keep the DAI, and MakerDAO liquidating you keeps the system above water and DAI at the dollar peg.

Algostables are not collateralized at all. They're more akin to ancient gold coins. Think of Luna as a small piece of gold. When UST is created, the Luna is "melted" to form the UST. At any point, the UST can then be "melted down" to get the Luna back out of it. From a certain point of view, UST literally is Luna.
I wouldn't say it failed yet, but the writing is on the wall. GitHub Sync has been down for over a month and they think all API keys leaked and... it seems nobody cares. Communication is at a minimum, the UI is broken, we have no clue if our API keys were leaked, etc.

It's clear nobody at Heroku cares anymore.

(For the record, I loved Heroku and still do. This makes me so sad. I'd love to see Salesforce spin it off somehow, rather than slowly letting it suffocate.)
> In my own protocols, I always made sure that the sender has to put in more bytes until a >2^64-bit secret was echoed.

I have a hard time parsing this statement. What do you mean?
And there isn't realization that crypto isn't zero-sum market, but actually a negative-sum market. The not insignificant money spend on it running in first place must come from somewhere. Traditional markets are pretty cheap comparatively.
Even God Couldn’t Beat Dollar-Cost Averaging - https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co... Made the rounds here a couple days ago.

“Don’t time the market” is most certainly not stupid advice.
This is not a black swan event.
TfL to expand contactless payments outside London
The opposite is the case: whatever backs up Bitcoin's current valuation, it's all that allows the system access to those energy resources. Those energy resources in no sense support Bitcoin's valuation.
the S&P 500 will get you pretty close to that if you're in it for the long run
Did Heroku fail?

Heroku was the biggest in a long line of developer tools. The PaaS and now FaaS models are still alive and well. A lot of developers want them. I know people are hot on containers and k8s but devs, who need to focus on code and business logic, have poorer productivity when they have to shift into thinking about ops.

Heroku inspired a lot including direct competitors (like Cloud Foundry). A lot of money has been made and people jobs make easier.

On the flip side, I keep seeing businesses not wanting to invest in developer tools that make their lives easier. PaaS is one of them. Did Salesforce fail to invest in Heroku so it stagnated? How many other places is this happening? Did Heroku make enough money and that was it?

There are a lot of unknowns.

I think we need more PaaS and FaaS. Make the jobs of developers simpler (hiding the ops complexity).
> Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes… and so do peoples fears. Many times they are misinformed and misplaced, but usually right to be concerned in the first place.

My dumb take: what could go wrong? Interrupting normal proteins to become prions, that’s what.
Haha!
"The other Esteban" here.
Thanks for the comment, we've been hard at work.
Hope to see you again soon!
For reference one protocol offered insurance for UST depegging for a 2% annual cost.
Browsing the runtime/view/ssr source code it appears to use esbuild (over the VM?) for rendering the svelte views while injecting the relevant code etc.
I had a manager who measured how much time everyone spent using slack and actually boasted that he was the person most active on slack as if that was some measure of productivity.

And I guarantee you that 90% of his posts on slack were cat gifs and the like. Most of the other 270% of his messages were automated notifications for build, deployment, and test failures that everybody ignored.
As the article mentions, the drop for BTC and ETH was nothing unusual. This was a problem specific to UST/LUNA. Plenty of people in crypto warned about them. Algorithmic stablecoins like this have been tried before on Ethereum and all of them have failed.
It is not easy for a smaller tech company (often happy with their relatively lean stack) to integrate into a big company and its stack if integration was ever a goal (not sure it was). The hassle factor in a big company is 2x to do something, and you often have 1/2 the drive / vision / motivation.

I do wonder though, do folks not have super clear plans for these acquisitions? They sometimes stagnate surprisingly. We used a smallish product (maybe 5K/year) they get acquired, they dropped a key feature and replaced it with a paid but not compatible / worse feature, then reached out with a sales person to talk about why we weren't using it and rolled our own replacement. I mean, huh? Of all the strategies this was going to be it?

Instagram a notable exception here.
First there were MLM, HYIPs and other bullshit and now we have NFTs, Stablecoins, various cryptocoins and cryptotokens.

I think this Ponzi crypto assets are something like the evolution of fraud in a sense that scams are no more secretive, obscure and somewhat straightforward investment programs but more wrapped up in a sophisticated talk about cryptography, blockchain and DeFi which should bring you confidence that you should invest in them because they are more technologically advanced.

Somebody should write a book about Fraud in Crypto Assets from the more academic point of view and tbh I would very much like to read it. For example explaining the history of crypto fraud and scams, investigating them deeper and dissecting them from economical and financial point of view with the addition of explaining the basics of cryptography, blockchains and DeFi.
No, it's not native; it looks like it uses Flutter, which implements its own UI behavior.

IMO, flutter feels even less native than web apps. At least the latter uses system font rendering, supports system-set color palettes (an option in Firefox prefs), supports system preferred keybinds for text editing, system scrollbars, etc.
The author hints more than once at unfulfilled OpenShift potential. I’m not familiar with anything that OpenShift set out to do but failed to realize. Genuinely curious.
And Magic Internet Money (MIM) is overcollateralized with interest bearing crypto assets, and is also natively multichain via Multichain protocol

(The naming is supposed to cause consternation from people that dont matter, but since we’re all in one place now, the system design can now be evaluated independently)

Its basically what DAI would have been if DAI launched in 2021 and had choices, compared to 2017
Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.
It's almost entirely because of inflation. Persistent inflation raises the discount rate (10y treasury yield), and devalues all other assets.

Why would you buy a 100x PE company (1% yield) when you can get 3% guaranteed today? Even growing at double digit rates, how many years just to match that return? Except many tech companies were 100x PS not even 100x PE. DDOG and NET are two examples.

If the 10y runs to even 3.5-4%, and stays there, we're likely to see a 40-50% haircut in markets.
How could I forget about Arrow of Light? Now that is the crowning achievement for any Cub Scout!

From my fuzzy memory, this was more of an award than a proper rank, but could only be earned by someone of the Webelos rank. Or something along those lines.

Many of us had this plastic diamond thing attached to a button on our class A shirt, and the diamond had 4 slots, one per rank with Webelos being the bottom of the diamond. Arrow of Light was a special patch you sewed directly onto your uniform.
Whether they’re working through their previous severance package or waiting tables, anyone who takes more interviews than average to be hired will be over-represented in the application pool, for the exact reason you describe [they need money] plus they are more likely to be involuntarily termed and put back into the pool.

It’s not that being employed makes them competent in my eyes, but rather that being competent makes them more likely to be employed.
Isn't the elephant in the room then; why did Salesforce buy Heroku?

I mean:

> From a strategy POV, for better or worse, Salesforce is not particularly focused on integrated acquired products

> I heard revenue and margins weren't sustainable prior to the acquisition

What was the point of the aquisition? To let it die?
DNSCrypt requires responses sent over UDP to never be larger than the question, or else the client must retry with larger padding in the question, or over TCP. That makes amplification impossible.
Well there are reputable institutions who will vouch for the surgeons experience. Literally anyone can put that they have 7 years experience as a software developer on their cv
Back in the day, there was an inherent understanding that a stock price is supposed to reflect "the fundamentals" - present value of the company + future earnings. And of course there was some amount of speculation around future earnings, but for the most part companies at least tried to be profitable.

Yes. And after each crash, people have to re-learn that.
> What actually maintains the value of the US dollar is the long dick of the US government through the Fed obviously but also foreign and domestic policy. It's the ability to project military power anywhere on the planet.

What actually maintains the value of the US dollar is that it's actually used to exchange goods and services. If you have $100, you have a reasonable idea of what it can get you: 20 Big Macs, 2 pairs of jeans, or 1 hour of work from a Bay Area SWE. The value of the dollar isn't just backed by the government. It's backed by everyone who offers goods or services with exchange for a predetermined quantity of dollars. This gives actual currencies momentum that cryptocurrencies simply don't have.
Tyler Cowen on Talent
Cool (or hot, as the case may be). Can I ask how you stumbled upon this solution? It's not one I would immediately reach for, especially the 5 - 10 minutes bit.
> I hope that people who have been wiped out understand that they can jump in again someday and hopefully pick the next winner.

The National Problem Gambling Helpline (1-800-522-4700)
Truly a tour de force of culinary engineering on par with the best that the CIA* has to offer.

*Culinary Institute of America
They should. Sometimes people ask me if I know anyone they could hire for a role. I ask them what the salary is. If they don't have a straight answer, I don't help them advertise. Seems fair.
Powerline networking is a terrible idea. Trying to feed RF over unshielded and electrically noisy wires is doomed to failure, as the signals can leak both in and out. P/L will cause interference to other services and also suffer from interference.

The big problem is that it might work just fine one day, then fail catastrophically if anything in the environment changes.
This is a more nuanced version of what I was trying to say. But if the cuisine in a country doesn’t hit for me, it’s a big con.

I’m in Mexico right now having a lot of fun
> If Heroku and Engine Yard were too early, we would have seen more widespread adoption of next-generation PaaS (e.g., fly.io, Render).

Biased take from the founder of one of the next-generation companies mentioned: given how new Render and Fly are as companies and products, it's much more important to look at the growth in their adoption. Render's signups were already growing at a rapid pace, but more than doubled overnight after the Heroku incident; give us a couple more years before judging adoption!
I guess I’m just old but when I started in 90s many people where in IT because it was cool tech, not really motivated by the money. Did that all wash away in dot.com or more recently?
What, are you going to squeeze your bitcoins and get energy out of them? Get real.
It is not the only thing, but rather the first thing that people often write. There is nothing particularly wrong with that, as forth is the kind of language where intimate knowledge of its internals is quite useful, perhaps even necessary, while simultaneously being easy to obtain (e.g. by writing your own forth). And of course, the number of people who complete one project is necessarily greater than or equal to the number of people who do more than one project.

The last thing that causes the phenomenon you describe to happen is likely the culture around forth, likely as a result of the relative ease and utility of making domain-specific abstractions compared to general abstractions in forth. The community seems to not appreciate libraries and reusable code to the same extent as other ecosystems, preferring instead to share ideas, which each developer can then adapt to fit their particular project in a very minimalist manner instead of adopting some convoluted general solution.
This is Matt Levine and his Money Stuff newsletter, one of the most respected and best analysis in finance journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Levine_(columnist)
Nice, did it pay out?

I think these unceremonious undramatic payouts should be news
No, I think you were clear, and I wasn't. :) I understood that it was more "he won't be on the hook to buy Twitter if the government prevented it but there's still a kill fee," but bungled describing it.

(I know "kill fee" isn't the right term, but that's what we'd call the equivalent in publishing!)
Do you have a source for the earnings figures? I can’t find anything — Heroku generating hundreds of millions a year feels like something that would be surfaced in the Salesforce financials.
Here’s a starting point:

addEventListener("click", function (event) {
const link = event.target.closest("a");
if (
!event.button &&
!event.altKey &&
!event.ctrlKey &&
!event.metaKey &&
!event.shiftKey &&
link &&
link.href.startsWith(location.origin + "/") &&
link.target !== "_blank"
) {
event.preventDefault();
navigate(link.href);
}
}

There are some points of nuance here where you may want to vary (e.g. the determination of eligible hrefs, and handling of href targets), but this is the bones of it. You can also choose to add more functionality to it. Fastmail’s webmail, for example, uses this basic design, but also handles mailto: links specially (taking you to compose a new email), whitelists path patterns (since the domain is used for more than just the webmail app), and one or two other things.
It's only the primes above 50 that are immediately eliminated by the fact that Peter does not know the answer right away.

The primes below that can be present in products that have multiple possible answers: eg. we can't eliminate 47 right off the bat because Peter could have been told a product like 3290.