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quartus

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PoST (Chia specifically) produces 20,000 times less e-waste than Bitcoin. Chia also has 20x the nodes as Bitcoin. A comparison of network security would probably be the best way to compare the scales of each.

In the long run, hard drives used for crypto lookups in PoST (farming) have very low load and can last for a decade. Whereas Bitcoin ASIC miners become obsolete much faster and can't be reused for general purpose computing afterwards.

"Tech culture has a nice tradition of not deriding new ideas, but we need to break it here and speak out"

No we don't need to break it here (even though it's a pastime of the author, who has already done it to two tech ideas in that Twitter thread).

Build something that improves upon the ideas and solves the problems in a better way instead.

This is an interesting thought that crypto (or at least proof of work crypto) is backed by a sunk cost of an otherwise useless task. But let me extend that paradigm: why is (or isn't) gold also not baked by a sunk cost? What was the point of all that expensive mining and digging if not for the sole purpose to extract that shiny metal from the earth's crust?

Coinbase S-1 5 years ago

Anyone else care to comment on the S-1 itself? Revenues doubling, and a rare example of a tech company that is actually profitable before IPO (to the tune of $320M net profit on $1.1B in revenue). Seems like a great business to me! Given current market conditions, I wouldn't be surprised to see a market cap on first day of trading of $50B or more

How did you cherry pick that list? The actual top countries per capita from your source are:

  Qatar 40.1
  Trinidad & Tobago 37.78
  Kuwait 34.24
  Netherlands Antilles 23.55
  Brunei Darussalam 22.96
  United Arab Emirates 22.31
  Aruba 21.59
  Luxembourg 21.34
  ...
But looking at the total, rather than per-capita, carbon emissions makes more sense if we want to actually cut total carbon emissions.

Here is the list of top CO2 emitting countries:

  China 10,877.2
  United States 5,107.4
  India 2,454.8
  Russia 1,764.9
  Japan 1,320.8
  Germany 796.5
  South Korea 673.3
  Iran 671.5
  ...
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... , which cites the source https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/fossil-co2-emissions...

This immediately reminded me of the scene from Silicon Valley where Gwart is working directly in front of an extremely powerful light, which Jared rushes to shut off because it's too bright

Cloudflare S-1 7 years ago

Throughout this year it is just loss-making companies floating everywhere on the markets here and have boarded the hype-train into the red.

Cloudflare is a loss-making company too, and their losses are growing. From the S-1: "we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively"

For a healthy dose of skepticism, check out the New York Times article "Vitamin D, the Sunshine Supplement, Has Shadowy Money Behind It". It points out, among other things, that a 2010 National Academy of Medicine (then known as the Institute of Medicine) report found that most Americans get enough vitamin D, and that "the evidence supports a role for vitamin D and calcium in bone health but not in other health conditions" http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2010/Dietary-Re... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/18/business/vitamin-d-michae...

On a related note about sunshine, Sam Altman recommends a full spectrum LED light in the morning as his most beneficial productivity booster. http://blog.samaltman.com/productivity

If you feel compelled to put a smiley face after a sentence to make it more agreeable, it's a sign that you were uncomfortable with the tone of the sentence. Adding a smiley just comes across as passive aggressive or condescending. Just rewrite the original sentence so that you're comfortable with the tone, and omit the smiley.

xwowsersx, please send an email to join@app.net and we'll get you set up with your login information. The backing process and the alpha.app.net access are not automated yet, we still need to grant your user access to the alpha.

There were certainly people calling app.net and our API spec vaporware on HN and other places.

The purpose of this post is to showcase the alpha-version of our web service and API to users and developers and to encourage them to check it out. We hope that our work so far will speak for itself and get people excited about join.app.net.

One thing to note is that our funding velocity is not linear, it has been picking up speed. If we can keep the momentum going and spread the word, we are confident that we will hit our goal.

Regarding ads being not too annoying, people are backing app.net because of the larger goal: creating a service where the user is the customer rather than the product. This allows app.net to focus all of its resources on pleasing the user, and ensures app.net will not try to shut down 3rd party developers who are competing for advertising dollars.

To this end, app.net does not need to become twitter-like scale to create a sustainable business.

We used Facebook's APIs and Open Graph in our app discovery service. It was built and released before Facebook's App Center was announced, and Facebook dev-relations employees had previously been supportive of our endeavor.

The service we were building (I work at app.net) was a social app discovery service. It integrated with Facebook to show you what apps your friends were using and downloading, and display stories about the apps you use.