HNNoLikey

Oh my god! What a coincidence this is. Yesterday at around 3am I woke up in the middle if the night and I had the worst pain in my lower back.

I have never had any problems with my back in my entire life so this came as a shocker. My job is as a web developer so I spend 90% of my time awake seated and working.

Here's what happened:

Once I woke up, I tried standing up and I could barely walk because of the pain. Talk about being god damn mortified. I immediately called my girlfriend to let her know she should probably check on me in the morning.

In a state of panic, I also called a doctor friend of mine at around 4:30am. I explained my situation to him and he told me to conduct a simple test and answer some questions so he could assess what it could be: he asked me to put my chin on my chest which I could and that was good. He also asked whether there was numbness or tingliness which I didn't have so he was more at ease. However, because he couldn't explain what it was he suggested I should go to the hospital. It wasn't safe to get out at that time so I decided to take some ibuprofen which luckily I had, and wait it out till the sun was up. I managed to get some sleep by 5:50am and by the time I woke up at 9am. The pain had somehow reduced and I could walk again.

My friend later on prescribed some myospaz and suggested it might have been a muscular issue. I'm feeling much better now. I still can't bend or lift heavy things but I can at least I can do some basic stuff like go to the bathroom without feeling excruciating pain when I change body posture e.g. moving from standing to sitting position and vice-versa.

I'm working from home now. Seated on my couch in the living room because, you know, code must be shipped and I absolutely love what I do. My back is rested on the couch so I'm pretty comfortable and the pain has been gradually decreasing.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. What didn't help:

Reading about back pains on the internet. If you want to absolutely heighten your anxiety when panicking about your health, read about it on the internet. I had begun to imagine the worst.

2. My girlfriend has been so great helping me out with cooking and cleaning since I've been pretty much useless at any laborious tasks. I should probably marry her NOW. She's been amazing.

3. Ergonomics

I've been trying to figure out what I might have done to trigger this and the only thing that comes to mind is that lately I had been changing my posture to a more upright position i.e. straight back instead of leaning back on the chair and letting my back ease up by resting it on the back of the chair. I'm insatiably trying to learn all I can about this topic. (any resources are welcome)

Avafind Pro when native search doesn't work. It will scan even the system files(and hidden folders) which are typically ignored by default unless you're deliberate about enabling their inclusion.

The Big 3 in china will now also have control over the world's 4th largest telecom provider whose market cap is $23B.

Is anyone just taking the time to simply ask, WTF is going on?

At the emotional frequency everyone is operating on, do you really think you'll win? No one will win because everyone will lose. Let me explain why.

I think it's time everyone admitted their biases and that their biases if not TAMED will only serve to antagonize their political opponents.

Before I go on, here are my biases...

I'm a black libertarian(with a strong affinity for classical liberalism) and a supporter of Trump's presidency so words like 'uncle tom' have been thrown at me. I wasn't always a libertarian. Initially a liberal, I didn't pay much attention to politics but when I begun to think about the role that politics has in my life (at zero option), I realized that I was naturally inclined towards conservatism i.e. fiscal responsibility & frugality, tighter immigration control, less government intervention, anti-eminent-domain, pro-personal freedom and liberty, anti-common-core, and then some. I'm huge fan of Peter Thiel and Hans-Hermann Hoppe - I read them a lot. I no longer feel the need to watch CNN because their ability to hide their skew towards liberalism is all but gone

You should note that there's no where that I mentioned violence as a chosen means to get my voice heard. I don't support it but I fear that's where the world is headed in order to resolve this political conflict that's in the ether right now.

What we have today is a left that is too far gone - who mostly don't realize it - and a right that's intentionally too far gone also.

Just as much as there is a far-right, you best believe that Trump is right and there is a far-left (it is telling that today on the web, you'll find two clones of Wikipedia all skewed towards either leftism or rightism because neither trust Wikipedia - see Conservapedia & RationalWiki).

As much as Trump has been touted by some as a symptom (I agree), I think that Obama's presidency was also a symptom. Putting his(Obama) race aside, we had an American president who once said that [sic] between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate...You should just decide what works.

This shows that the world had once again reached a point where systems like communism which were disproven - when America won the cold war, the soviet collapsed, the Berlin wall came down and Fukuyama wrote the words 'End of History' - could now be viewed in a relativistic manner. As though it didn't matter what the world had gone through historically. This was one of those fatal flaws because, if you forget history, you're undoubtedly bound to repeat it.

I also subscribe to some Burkean views which espouse that, change in a society should be introduced gradually. Gradual change while all the while testing to see if there's truth in your claims. This is not what we're used to in the tech scene; we prefer disruption but disruption comes at a cost. You cannot have a Bernie without a Trump. You cannot have an Alt-Right without an Antifa.

We must all tone down our views. We must all tame our desires for instant political gratification. Revolutionary change comes at a painful cost. Let's all embrace gradual change. If we don't, right or left, the Daily Stormer will win whether you like it or not because there will be a race war as per their slogan. When this happens, it will all turn into rubble and only a few will be left to pick up the pieces.

The questions we should be asking is what can I cede (politically) in exchange for you ceding something of equal magnitude until some balance is restored. We aren't headed in the right direction otherwise.

It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.

Well-intentioned question: where do you draw the line? Where does it start or end? Businesses that have used this same logic to discriminate against LGBT patrons based on the owners' religious beliefs have had a very difficult time selling this same spiel.

Edit: Scrolling down, I can see this same question asked multiple times. My assessment is that, it's a very difficult thing to do and we must admit our biases even as we make our voices heard.

I actually think it would suffice to payout at random times with an insanely high number of bitcoin addresses (all autogenerated via a script) for high number of users (the more the better). It would be virtually impossible to know who got how much BTC out (may be in, but not out).

As for the hostile mixers, I'm afraid I can't offer any solution other than to rely on reputation. That said, it is rather telling that bitmixer.io is closing [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14843373]. It may not be safe to run a mixer; the feds may come after you.

I tried it. It's still not fixed. This is incredibly dangerous.

I think that for all 'non-essential' sites it might be prudent to use a throwaway password each time. I think it might be an all too common practice on many a site.

It might be the right time for the people at Uber to self-select based on their values.

Had similar questions yesterday and some hackers responded here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15016338

Bitcoin mixers would serve you well in this instance. Just buy BTC normally and clean via a mixer.

Are you serious? This is almost too goofy to merit a response.

Unfortunately, I suspect the poster is dead serious. This is why I don't recommend trying to appease socialists. It is never enough and they'll never be happy until we're all 'equal'.

The first time I came across this phenomenon was while listening to Thomas Piketty on YouTube and he went on and on about how the philanthropic approach Gates and people like him (the wealthy) were taking to solve the world's problems was flawed. I couldn't believe it! Piketty disapproved of Gates' donations and his philanthropy on the basis that one cannot donate to a charity that one still controls. To him that was ridiculous despite the fact that Gates' foundation has done a remarkable job thus far; more than Piketty - with all his socialist nonsense - will ever do in a million lifetimes.

The irony is that, the first time I heard of Piketty was via Gates' reading list on his website.

The mistake that some wealthy people are making is that they assume that they can appease socialists. You can't. They'll always want more or everything if you let them!

it's easy to live to 100 years old, just give up all the things that make you want to live until 100

Oh-so cool.

This makes me mull about the role that moderation plays in a person's overall happiness and success in life.

I've heard that bitcoin mixers can take care of completely/somewhat obfuscating coin ownership.

According to Wikipedia: User can send his bitcoins on this service, pay small commission, and then receive the same sum of utterly different bitcoins.

If they're paid out to one address it still wouldn't provide the desired level of anonymity, if however they are paid out to multiple addresses belonging to the same user, I would imagine the anonymity level would increase but not totally since one could still add up payments made to different addresses whose total should amount to a given range.

It feels like I've missed out on a ton of boats as well but someone pointed out to me a few days ago that three years from now it will feel like today's price was very cheap. If you think about it, cryptocurrency has a relatively minuscule market share compared to fiat. This can be tracked using the M1 rank, as per zero block app, bitcoin currently ranks at 41 with a market cap of 70B. The US dollar in US alone is about 3.5 trillion. One could try to hypothesize just how much of that will be translated into BTC or altcoins but it is obviously very difficult to predict the future in exact terms. It does however signal that cryptos are at a nascent stage.

That said, there are still relatively young coins I'm really looking at investing in this week including NEO and Golem. I'm still trying to get more information on Golem because I think the idea of shared computing power globally is one of the most understated computing revolutions in our age. If anyone has any digestible information on the brass project (Golem), please point it out to me; I still find it a tad arcane.

Other coins to watch/buy are welcome.

I think that it is incumbent upon an entrepreneur to apply they same magnitude of rigor (if not more) when conducting due diligence on investors as investors do when deciding whether to invest. This is, sadly, something that most entrepreneurs overlook due to eagerness to take up financing.

Most of them have never built a company before and have no clue what it takes to really build a successful startup (sorry, just because you sit on a board doesn't mean you understand the hard work, tears, daily ups and downs, personal sacrifice it takes to build a business)....

Couldn't agree more with you. There is one VC who echoes these very sentiments. Vinod Khosla never hires someone in his firm (especially those that sit on startups' boards) if they have not been entrepreneurs. When he does hire non-entrepreneurs, they don't sit on boards and within 2-3 years they're expected to go out there and do/join a start up before they can be allowed back at KV.

His logic being that, one cannot truly empathize with what an entrepreneur is going through without having started a business of their own or being at a start up during its infancy.

Ai yai yai...You're actually a self-professed communist as per your bio. Never thought I'd see the day. I don't think our debate would ever come to an end.

they think it merely comes about by giving a lot of money away.

Then it would behoove you to tell me what redistribution is all about (or for that matter what communists today like to call re-redistribution).

Thiel is somewhat of an Austro-anarchist, if not fully one like I am. As a matter of fact, he was to speak at PFS 2016 [http://propertyandfreedom.org/2016/01/pfs-2016-annual-meetin...] but cancelled - likely due to PC pressure - but it would have been great to hear him speak.

Anyway, this school of thought espouses that capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible. Democracy is seen as a slightly longer but sure road towards communism (as Karl Marx himself said [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_Marxism]).

The logic here being that, if the criteria by which elected officials get into government is by promising the demos more and more government handouts, then the logical conclusion is that at some point, we'll have transitioned from democracy to communism.

The Austro-anarchists' solution is therefore to nip it in the bud and ensure that society doesn't employ democracy from the onset.

This wouldn't be so much new funding as it would be swapping equity holders. It would be a great investment if Uber keeps growing and one day exits. And Uber will grow - I don't think they've even scratched the surface since logistics is still wide open, among other things. It could very easily be another Amazon-esque juggernaut 10-15X current value.

I happen to agree with that but I don't think it could happen at this advanced stage. Would the SEC even allow it?

These were my exact sentiments earlier.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14986446

They have really dropped the ball with this one. I know I wouldn't work with benchmark if I had a choice in the matter. A company is too hard to build - let alone a unicorn - to let investors treat you the way Benchmark have treated Travis. There are better ways to deal with such issues. They embarrassed him and left him out to dry at a time when they should have been most supportive.

I am severely disappointed in Benchmark and I hope they go away for good!

Khosla is not a paragon of founder-friendliness despite his public attestations

There's no evidence he hasn't been anything but. I choose to trust him. If I had to choose between a VC leaving a company and the founder CEO leaving, I'd rather the VC left which is the mantra that Khosla advocates for. Before you say the VCs money is at stake, remember also the founders' and employees' sweat equity is also at stake - you can always make more money, but when time is gone, you can't recover it.

He claimed there was trespassing on his private property but I didn't follow the court case.

Two years ago, folks still said they'd close shop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079864

I submitted a resignation I didn't mean?

Consider his mental state during this time. He lost his mother for crying out loud and all these things were happening at the same time. Now the VCs want to pile on to that with a lawsuit. I lost my mom 3 years ago and I wasn't in a good place for months. I'm surprised he was able to even function whilst the weight of the world was on his shoulders.

I'm not saying that he should be CEO again just yet (he can take a break and recover) but to sue him at this time like he wasn't directly responsible for the billions they're now so eager to cash out on...?

Don't forget the toll entrepreneurship can have on someone's personal life: you know it from experience and you can also read on how Travis had to move back home in the early days because things didn't work out with initial projects. This is why I would always give first priority of investment to someone like Vinod Khosla who says, 'in 30yrs, I have never once voted against an entrepreneur in a board meeting'. He goes further to criticize most of these VCs as incredibly unsympathetic towards entrepreneurs because they don't know the pains of building a company. Benchmark are exactly the type of VCs Vinod Khosla warns entrepreneurs to avoid.

I would 100% have expected Sequoia to sue me

Don't know much about Sequoia but I have never seen an article where they've sued an investee.

This is no excuse to sue their investee. WORST VCs ever. This will serve as a cautionary tale to avoid working with benchmark.

HTTP downloads a file from a single computer at a time, instead of getting pieces from multiple computers simultaneously. With video delivery, a P2P approach could save 60% in bandwidth costs.

From the IPFS site. If true, then this is ground breaking tech. I honestly didn't know that HTTP was that wasteful.