HN user

FlailFast

470 karma

Renersatz Man, Satirist, Crypto(graphy|currency|\w+)

Posts19
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eng.lyft.com 8y ago

Stopping Fraudsters by Changing Products @Lyft

FlailFast
5pts0
z.cash.foundation 8y ago

The Zcash Foundation Now Officially a 501(c)3

FlailFast
5pts0
ponzico.win 9y ago

PonzICO: Let's Just Cut to the Chase

FlailFast
4pts0
medium.com 9y ago

You’ve Reached Your Monthly Tweet Limit

FlailFast
2pts0
blog.blockcypher.com 9y ago

Finding Bitfinex's Bits

FlailFast
1pts0
blog.blockcypher.com 10y ago

What Bitcoin Core 0.12 Means for Bitcoin Developers

FlailFast
2pts0
medium.com 11y ago

Bitcoin Attacked, Fees Up 25x, Peaks of 200TPS: A Post-Mortem

FlailFast
21pts5
medium.com 11y ago

Embed Data in the Block Chain with a Single CURL

FlailFast
8pts0
medium.com 11y ago

From Zero to Hero: Bitcoin Transactions in 8 Seconds

FlailFast
6pts0
bitbanter.com 11y ago

Lenovo Under Sustained Man in Middle Management Attack

FlailFast
5pts0
bitbanter.com 11y ago

The Case for Minimalist Socialism Through Cryptocurrency

FlailFast
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bitbanter.com 11y ago

I Googled This Way of Attacking Problems

FlailFast
2pts0
survivorshipbias.org 11y ago

SurvivorshipBias.Org

FlailFast
4pts1
bitbanter.com 11y ago

In Too Deep with Google Depth Maps and Golang

FlailFast
8pts0
bitbanter.com 11y ago

The Art and Art of Interviewing Product Managers as an Engineer

FlailFast
3pts0
www.bitbanter.com 12y ago

“Don't Worry About iOS Security,” claims Apple on Your Favorite SSL’d Website

FlailFast
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www.bitbanter.com 12y ago

Show HN: Built Project in Golang.js; How the Hell Else Will It Get to the Top?

FlailFast
3pts0
www.bitbanter.com 13y ago

Show HN: Bitbanter, an anonymous bitcoin-reddit-McSweeneys mashup.

FlailFast
9pts1
www.flailfast.com 14y ago

Flailing Fast: A Startup Story

FlailFast
123pts20

It's important to consider the pros and cons about the Founder's Reward with Zcash, and I appreciate you trying to start a discussion, but I just wanted to clarify that your numbers are slightly off.

20% for the next 4 years goes to the "founders" (which is not just the developers, but investors as well). But much like Bitcoin the total monetary base is fixed at 21,000,000 ZEC. And also like Bitcoin, the total mining reward is halved (roughly) every 4 years, and consequently decreases exponentially until it reaches that total reward.

Effectively, this means that the Zcash Founders Reward doles out 10% of the currency to the investors/early development team over the lifetime of the currency, and in many ways mirrors a startup vesting cycle of 4 years (minus the one year cliff). Their blog goes into more detail about the reward here: https://z.cash/blog/continued-funding-and-transparency.html

Personally, I think this reward distribution is a significant improvement to the "premine/ICO" antics you see in many other cryptocurrencies/tokens, even if I think it's a little high. I applaud the team for trying something new/seemingly more fair.

(Also, not affiliated with the team, just a cryptocurrency nut: http://keybase.io/cin)

As someone who works at a Bitcoin/Ethereum company, and has passionately followed Bitcoin since 2011, every time I hear "blockchain" as a proper noun a piece of me dies inside. It's like saying "This Is Your Company on Website."

True that, which is sad, because charisma can legitimately lower the difficulty of understanding complex ideas; think of your best teachers/favorite professors. I wish TED was filled with more Richard Feynman (charisma * ideas) and less Tony Robbins (charisma % ideas).

I love this advice, and it took me a while to figure out that for me the intersection is Developer Advocacy. Math, software, public speaking, writing, comedy, business = Dev Advocate at a bitcoin company. I'm not great at any of them individually, but good enough at all of them to make a great Developer Advocate. Took a while to convince someone to take a risk on me (I had a technical Biz Dev/PM background prior to my current job) but finally got a company to interview me the right way...they had me present to 20 bitcoin devs about their API as part of the process, and I happily can say I knocked it out of the park. Barring any sudden discovery of me as a stand-up comedian/writer (unlikely at this point) I'm very very happy to make a long, fruitful career of this role.

Anyway, TL;DR: there are always ways to combine software with other skills. The hard part is finding the role that incorporates all of them (whether you invent it as a founder or join someone else).

Survive and Thrive 11 years ago

Yeah...it's akin to saying "I believe that [extreme outliers happen], then [they define the general rule]." Their outcome is wonderful, and I'm happy for them, but it's so many sigmas from the norm they may as well be Toyota consultants from the 90s.

Anyone else remember using ResEdit on original Escape Velocity plugins? Probably my first introduction to hexadecimal as a kid, heh. Loved the game (and meta game of discovering how to tweak things myself) and excited to try this out.

Black Swan is still his best in my mind, but the Bed of Procrustes can be a nice entree; aphorisms were the original tweets, and can be consumed as such. Then I'd jump into Fooled By Randomness, and finally Antifragile (which is the weakest of them...truthfully I think the entire book could have been a chapter in Black Swan, but I'm glad he wrote it all down anyway).

G is for Google 11 years ago

Seems like Alphabet (Google/Page/Brin) and Facebook (Zuckerberg) are in a race to become the Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet.

Agreed, and another thing they're doubling down on: disentangling themselves from Google. Eventually they'll stop using Google Maps, and I'd guess Google Ventures will sell their stake in Uber at their next stratospheric private financing raise, if they haven't already.

It's vaguely reminiscent of Google/Apple's friendly status up until 2007, when it quickly deteriorated to "frenemy" then "direct competitor in nearly every market."

I knew the government subsidized public transit, but I had no idea it was to that degree. Wow. I wonder if buses will prove more competitive if/when they're self-driving. Do you happen to know how much of that bus ride cost is for drivers? For vehicle maintenance? Would love to see a breakdown.

+1 to Zelazny's take on magic. Didn't realize Changeling was meant to be a trilogy (although that makes a ton more sense in retrospect, too bad it never had a threequel).

I also find his Chronicles of Amber to be an interesting take on Universe building, although the magic system is less formulated (but damn is the whole Pattern/Chaos thing cool).

All of which to say: if you haven't read Zelazny you should, he's a wonderful writer.

Go in Go 11 years ago

Ah awesome! Thanks for sharing. Definitely going to add this on my to-do list; would love to add some already-made AI to it. :D

Is there any group lobbying for an open source proviso from results derived from a certain threshold of government research funding? That feels like a no-brainer to me, and one which could have enormously positive economic impact.

While I wouldn't go so far as agree that it's a strong argument for communism (though I do support guaranteed, unconditional basic income myself), I do think it's a strong argument for broad public education initiatives...imagine if there was a required class called "How To Tell When a Politician/Company is Bullshitting You." Seriously, no sarcasm, I think that's an extraordinarily useful skill that is often glossed over, and if someone made a curriculum for understanding psychological biases, that could prove insanely useful at mitigating the effectiveness of these ploys.

Nice! I'm trying the ChromeOS browser + terminal experiment myself. Just bought a 2015 Chromebook Pixel LS and outside the local storage issue it's a glorious machine.

In terms of terminal use, I thought a chroot would be a little heavy handed and I didn't want to get rid of Google's verified boot, so I bootstrapped Linuxbrew and gcc using this guide: https://github.com/Homebrew/linuxbrew/wiki/Chromebook-Instal...

Given that I use vim + bash + go + ruby / python + js + tmux...well, everything seems to work. And it's easily the fastest web browser I've ever used. I tried installing Gentoo Prefix but couldn't get it up and running...think that would be better than Linuxbrew, but for now this seems to suffice. If I run into any roadblocks I'll probably wind up doing the whole crouton/chroot thing, but for now I'm a happy camper.