HN user
You're probably talking about Peter's Pence collection contribution which is just pocket change (a few millions). Dioclesian revenue, lease income, Vatican's wealth fund generate billions. Lets not forget state support which the US doesn't have - for example if you register as a catholic in Germany 8-9% of your income tax goes to the church directly - to the tune of about 6 billion per year altogether.
Sure - and Plato once said: "Quotation marks are always a sign of absolute truth."
Comments so far are sort of singling out the "negatives" i.e. make it seem like 40yo just don't want to put in the time anymore (for one reason or another) but the article also mentions stuff like:
- At 40+ you're more judicious about where you put your energy
- In your 40s, you have some accumulated wisdom: you recognize patterns faster and are more willing to change course
Do I have the blind faith to grind it out 5+ years in a stagnating startup on an off chance it might take off someday - especially if I've done that before? Looking for a better way is not always a bad thing. On another hand - my 20yo self wouldn't have believed my 40yo self - some things you just have to live through.
I thought it was already encoded with SynthID? could that not be used to detect it?
congratulations on the launch! how does this compare to Gumroad?
This will very likely end by both parties pronouncing they are the victors here.
For Ukraine the victory might be that Russia will most likely be unable to take Kiev and need to "withdraw" closer to their own borders i.e. the victory is not submitting in the "heroic" sense. However with a staggering economic loss and loss of life (including the refugees that might never return).
For Russia their victory will be claiming they "secured" the 2 rebel republics/Crimea. Also at a staggering loss - some of it army but mostly incredible economic sanctions. It remains to be seen if Putins regime will be able to survive that in the long run.
In terms of the classical definition I guess you could call it a stalemate - don't see how either of them can win - everybody loses. Who loses less - arguably I'd say economic sanctions still do not hurt as much as the decades Ukraine will need to rebuild. And Russia still has a huge amount of natural resources that others need and are willing to pay for.
Exactly - especially given that BTC is -13% today.
My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today.
My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash?
I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to?
I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed.
Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems.
Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all.
The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc...
But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.
Not defending them in any way - but don't think security was the primary reason for Zoom taking off. It was stability - it just worked and at the same time competitors didn't.
Everybody used to have Skype and I would have gladly handed over my data to MS if only it would have been able to do stable video calls. It was often a disaster for just 2-way calls, let alone group.
Yes of course there are synonyms in all languages - but I specified "a lot more words". If you look at the link I included in my first reply under "vocabulary comparison" you'll see an example of what I mean. And thats just the biggest one - there are islands in Croatia where I (as a native speaker) might have better luck understanding Czech than the local variants.
Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.
Thats only partly true on a very broad macro level - for example someone mentioned Kajkavian, which is dialect of Croatian but sounds a lot more Slovenian :)
In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian
Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).
In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?
Yikes - just compared the latest map with the one in January - what a difference!
Not unlike what Slack is doing with data residency controls - only available for Plus and Enterprise plans.
At the risk of going full doomsday mode (and besides stockpiling on food and masks) - lets say pandemic happens and some useful meds/vitamins do go out of stock - is there any advice what those are i.e. what kind of meds/vitamins would be practical to buy right now to help fight/slow COVID-19/infection in the future?
Not really a fan of the design - too rough for this world and too fragile to survive Mad Max ;)
Plenty of Tesla design concepts online that were way better: https://www.behance.net/gallery/78909965/TESLA-Pickup
https://www.shiftnrg.org/ might be interesting here too - IPFS-based project targeting web hosting specifically (includes a custom DNS + working on serving dynamic content, CMS, etc).
BTW as a proof of concept their website is already hosted on their own IPFS cluster.
Just for the sake of accuracy - Croatia was never "under" the Ottoman Empire. That was Herzegovina - so technically today's Bosnia.
Also not sure what you mean by Slovenia being historically different - slavs, similar language, part of austro-hungarian empire, part of Yugoslavia, etc etc
Agreed. Smaller nations/states almost have to do that to remain competitive.
Especially the newer EU member states that have been experiencing an incredible amount of brain-drain i.e. people moving to bigger/"richer" countries. Bigger countries profit from that while smaller die out - unless they make themselves more attractive somehow. To some extent its happening within bigger countries as well with urbanisation - in Germany for example villages that are not close to bigger urban centres have the same problem.
Whether you call it a "tax haven" or subsidising - in practice its virtually the same thing. Of course you need some rules in place to prevent creative tax practices by multinationals (like linking taxation to physical presence) - but its a do or die sort of thing.
Have taken a quick look at it, still seems in very early stage. Keep up the good work! Is the platform releasing soon?
BTW whats the purpose of having your own token? What is it used for?
I don't understand people who cite current network speed/overload, transaction problem/cost and co as the reason why Bitcoin (or any crypto) will fail in the future.
Nothing is set in stone - its software, all of these things are fixable and are being worked on. Its still so very early in the game.
If you compare crypto to a traditional startup project - I'd say user engagement and growth is more valuable than a perfect product from the start.
as far as I know www.shiftnrg.org is building something along those lines... decentralised hosting on IPFS + custom DNS...
No. I was doing a lot of research into ICOs over the summer, but its incredibly time consuming and there are so many now. I spend too much time behind the screen as it - need to live in the "real" world every once in a while - I'm trying to quit :) Will try putting my money on autopilot/fund for a while.
Note that this is a database of fake phishing websites that impersonate legit projects (and try to steal your money) - its not a database of scamy ICOs. As mentioned - there are certainly those too - but I don't remember any with bigger/reputable projects lately.
You could say the same thing about "traditional" startups though - investors often invest just based on the combination of the idea, founders/team and maybe an early prototype. If the startup fails - nothing "bad" will happen to you either. Shares in a startup thats not publicly tradable don't really offer you that much security.
Unless you've committed fraud - but - I've been following the ICO market closely for the past 6 months and I can't remember any of the larger ICOs that were outright scams. Many people and smaller projects/websites will of course try to scam you online - but you should always do your own research and due diligence still applies.
I'm not sure I'd agree that "very few ICOs do right by their investors". It depends what you mean - there have been many successful projects out there that made people money. But if you mean "flipping" i.e. buying into a ICO just to try and sell it quickly for profit - that seems more difficult these days. But it might also be due to the current BTC rally.
ICOs are of course still in wild west territory as far as regulations go - there is a reason why Tezos calls it a donation. They don't want the regulatory hurdle. In fact almost all ICOs these days force you to accept that tokens are not shares in the company and don't "officially" entitle you to anything.
ICOs are more akin to angel/VC rounds than IPOs - you often invest in a idea thats still not fully developed and might need 1-2 years to come out on the market. The huge difference to traditional investing is that shares/tokens are immediately tradable and small(ish) crypto investors have 0 patience to wait those 1-2 years so they often sell early and crash the price to go looking for another get-rich scheme.
Thats a curse of the ICOs - but also a benefit. As an investor you get to assign value to something immediately and have the freedom to terminate your investment (something very difficult with traditional angel/VC rounds) and sell the tokens. Its also a fascinating marketing strategy - some of your crypto "investors" are early adopters, promoters and users of your tech - even more so because they're vested in it.
I'm not defending the ICOs (especially the over the top ones) - but lately there are so many articles that don't really try to understand the concept. And so many people automatically equating temporary loss of value with scams. Internet and cryptos are moving at the speed of thought - but the rules are still the same - startups need time.
In all fairness - Bancor is still a very young project. Also a fairly promising one - many projects already using it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bancor/comments/75b7us/list_of_all_...
Again - not really trying to discuss Flash, was just drawing parallels.
Even though my Mac never had significant problems with Flash. I mean - fix what? I don't have Flash installed any more but my fans still spin-up with multiple tabs and overactive pages trying to open a bunch of animated or video tabs.
And there we go again. Where/when did I ever say that Flash on mobile was great?
Just discussing monopolies and drawing parallels.
To be fair Adobe was always pushing Flash as a cross-platform, cross-browser system - mobile browsers kind of changed the game and required a different approach since they were so tightly coupled to the OS and controlled by its vendor (BTW there was also a time where Microsoft was accused of monopoly for bundling its browser with the OS - doesn't seem to apply to iOS though).
If it was supposed work cross-platform on 2 mobile platforms - and one platform says no, well then 1 platform is not cross-platform any more is it? Adobe then gave up and stopped developing it - but yeah, Apple effectively did kill it. Especially since it was still a very early try. I mean up until 1-2 years ago even normal css/webanimation was laggy on mobile browsers.
Officially Apple's reasoning for barring Flash was that web should be pushed forward. Now, almost 8 years later when web is "almost there" - its still hindering real web-app experiences in the iOS browser. Its pretty clear what this was always about.
-- (Please lets not do the fanboy "Flash is garbage" here - even if you do feel that it was heating up your CPU with ads - it would have taken a lot less than 8 years to fix that then to reinvent everything and find out that money still makes the world go round.) --
have always wondered on the benefits of forming a company in Estonia - I'm not an expert - but wouldn't you still need to pay personal taxes in your country of residence (where you spend 6+ months in a year) in addition on what you pay in Estonia?