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sprafa

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decrypt.co 4y ago

Ethereum Wallet MetaMask Reports 21M Users, Up 420% Since April

sprafa
3pts0
a16z.com 4y ago

What Is Blockchain: Computers That Can Make Commitments

sprafa
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onezero.medium.com 4y ago

Why Decentralization Matters

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threader.app 4y ago

Going from Web 2 to Web 3 – “Your take rate is my opportunity” Chris Dixon A16Z

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thedefiant.io 5y ago

OpenSea Becomes First NFT Unicorn

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www.theguardian.com 5y ago

Fifty people close to Mexico’s president among potential targets of NSO clients

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news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain?

sprafa
41pts130
www.ox.ac.uk 6y ago

Covid-19 won’t stop without tech we need digital contact tracing says Oxford

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news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Oxford Medical model says defeating covid19 requires digital contact tracing app

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news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Making the South Korean/Chinese covid19 containment QR code system as an app?

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news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: What are the best-designed news sites?

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1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Could information warfare make the web and democracy incompatible?

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medium.com 8y ago

Tim Cook Is the Bill Gates of Apple

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news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: How to build a personal database for creative work

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23pts19
app.simplenote.com 9y ago

Amazon Go and the future of work

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app.simplenote.com 9y ago

The Computer Is the Problem: Amazon Go and the Future of Work

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news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Secure alternatives to Dropbox?

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news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Best encrypted messaging app atm?

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52pts86
thecorrespondent.com 9y ago

The bizarre tale of President Nixon and his Basic Income bill

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rafaelkino.com 9y ago

Capitalism is failing

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news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Connect your app to the world's networks? Is this a hard problem?

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1pts2
rafaelkino.com 9y ago

Capitalism is failing – users are irrational we are using that against them

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rafaelkino.com 9y ago

On Management

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visualise.com 9y ago

On the Design of Valve’s ‘The Lab’

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61pts14
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Why is software priced the same around the World?

sprafa
1pts6

Many projects are in control of some actor, but decentralization is all about diffusion of responsibility.

Right now tens of thousands of people voted on ALGO's governance trough their wallets on their phones. When did you ever get that chance for FB? For Google? Instagram?

Never. The diffusion is real, even if it's imperfect.

This has demonstrated itself to be very unlikely to happen in large blockchains such as ETH because of cryptoeconomics - ie game theory 101 - if you do a 51% attack on a blockchain you're actually devaluing the entire chain.

It's like robbing a bank where if you take enough money you cause hyperinflation.

So it appears to become less common over time as the chain gains enormous amounts of value. Proof of Stake will also lead to this sort of attack being less likely, I'd think, since it's virtually impossible for a single individual to get 51% of a well-distributed token.

It's telling that the attack here listed happened in BSV, a sort of failed fork of BTC with relatively low adoption.

Aah your article is ok but you realise everything you want could be built - most likely by yourself - using a fork from any popular crypto token? Your dreams are in your reach.

That's the beauty of open-source blockchain. You want to fork? fork.

From experience DeepMind is the #1 goal for any AI/ML person anywhere in Europe. I know people don’t necessarily want to be googlers, but Deepmind ? Yes. If you’re brilliant in the field where else would you work? OpenAI is now completely different from where it started.

It’s also heavily based in London and I know they absorb basically all the top Europe folks who want to stay close to home. Not everyone wants to go to the US.

Demis is also a bit of a legend and I know DeepMind people teach/recruit at UCL his old university. I assume they do so everywhere in the UK but London is an easy talent pool to make and recruit talent for them. So they have a full integrated vertical stack for talent.

Renaissance Technologies, Jim Simons and Bob Mercer’s fund solved the market with ML techniques ages ago. Can’t remember off the tip off my head but they have consistent 60% annual returns which is unheard of. There’s a great book about it - The Man who Solved the Market

The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.

UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.

Virtually all aspects of western society is being eroded by the “management is a job-skill” type thinking. I expect that eventually we will stop doing this simply because it’s complete nonsense and clearly counter productive.

Look at the difference between Elon Musk’s two companies and their ability to execute vs their rivals. The amount of value that was created because of an engineer led is so vast - it’s hard to even quantify.

This is what happened with real estate in the west. It is for example, not worth owning property in some major cities as a retiree vs selling it for a fortune and moving to somewhere warmer in many major western cities.

Hence we see the explosion of corp/concentrated ownership of real estate and exploding rents (just up to the level you can afford to live with the rest of your income but not much else). Money printing means it’s a great time as a millionaire to buy lots of property, and as an average person to sell whatever excess non-residential property you have for huge amounts. Hence cities slowly become unaffordable/within the very limits of affordability for most citizens.

The Toyota process says - you cannot manage a production line effectively if you don’t understand it.

Agile has become a way for people with no development experience to “manage” developers and that will always be wrong. The West’s obsession with “managerial” experience being a thing you can learn start to manage “anything” from is the origin of much of our malcontent. Management is just something you add on top of knowing how things work. It’s not valuable as an isolated skill.

Software engineering seems partially creative partially technical - so on the creative parts, yes absolutely teams should self define their preferences. Scrum vs agile vs whatever else IMO should be a team/org preference. However like someone else said some engineering has to be liable for criminal prosecution in some cases. So you need some practices to be enforced.

Was told by someone in the UK trucking industry this is mindless panic as some people have moved from HGV fuel trucks to regular as the salaries on regular trucking caught up with fuel trucks (and fuel trucks are far more dangerous so people just jumped ship).

One particular agency that has a big market share in the industry seems to be the issue (he said). Seems like they lost tons of drivers and havent raised salaries to meet lowered interest from truckers who can now make the same money from not carrying what’s effectively a mobile bomb.

Who is this quote from?

Im not sure I agree with you. Yes Germany isn’t Denmark, the distance from US —- German government policy is vast. Even the difference between UK and Germany is vast. What do we call that difference ? Some people might call it socialism, others just more govt intervention. Still the societal dynamics are so different yet “capitalists” and free market folk want to take it all under their wing, while ascribing only genocidal dictatorships to socialist policy.

Depends on your definition.

Capitalists have successfully ejected murderous regimes from their timeline, by saying that capitalism isn’t really real unless it’s got a free democracy associated with it. Thus imperial Japan, Belgium’s atrocious behaviour in the Congo, the behaviour of the British Empire is completely left out of “capitalist history”.

If you did the same trick for socialism you could just count Denmark, Sweden and other successful mixed-but-really-socialist democracies and you could say that socialist guided economies are actually fantastic. Ie if I define socialism as only real socialism when there is a free market democracy but large well funded social programs that keep the society from excessive inequality, I suddenly have the recipe for some of the happiest countries on earth.

And some people, you know reasonable people who actually understand Marx’s critique of capitalism - not as a recipe but as a pretty accurate descriptor of the end result of the natural forces of capitalism - they might say that Denmark style socialism is actually what they would like.

But of course Denmark = Soviet Union in some peoples mind so that’s impossible.

Let’s forget of course that past Stalin’s death, the USSR’s criminal activity was relatively limited. They didn’t invade a country until Afghanistan and that was still without imperialist purpose - they just believed Afghanistan to be in their sphere of influence. In comparison with American military, the Soviet military essentially was used to put down revolts in part so the world the USSR believed has been left to their influence after Yalta. When Portugal was turning red in 1974, the Soviets refused to have anything to do with it.

Vis à vis the crimes of the Soviet Union or Red China past their murderous genocidal creators - Mao and Stalin - were relatively limited. In the same vein you could argue that the US was also founded on genocide, just of Native Americans.

AMD’s Lisa Su 5 years ago

Isn’t Keller basically a mercenary/ronin in a good way? He hunts down good projects then executes then leaves. So it’s hard to imagine a place where Su or other higher ups were not involved in bringing him in, considering he never stays in one place for too long.

There are also virtually equally exciting opportunities, I think. Deepmind has never moved from london, and google essentially just built their HQ around them in kings cross.

The NHS isn’t even close to the best health system in the world. There are multiple other bizarre conceptions in tour rant but I would have to take 15 min that I don’t have.