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zoshi

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There is another world, other than this one we choose to live in.

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The question was about educational choices.

Of course I taught my child to read and write. Beyond that, I am not forcing them to get up at 7am and memorize what other adults want them to all day every day. My child can learn about whatever interests him. I pay attention to what he is doing and provide advice, guidance, resources.

For example, if tomorrow I learn that my son has taken an interest in playing guitar, I will encourage him to take lessons, and provide what he needs to do that. I may expose him to music theory or other things I think align with his interests.

I will try and encourage him to cultivate skills and interests, but it is up to him what he wants to do.

Haskell (Warp HTTP server w/ WAI middleware, Selda with SQLite or Postgresql, blaze-html for templating).

I try and avoid JavaScript but if I use it I usually write vanilla JS and avoid package managers and build pipelines.

The incessant snide comments expressing nothing but dislike for Bitcoin really don’t belong on HN. Not liking Bitcoin is fine, but if you don’t have anything to add just don’t comment. Every thread about Bitcoin on HN does not a dozen comments that it’s a waste of time and energy.

A timezone can’t be encoded with a Unix time stamp, or a date without a time, or just a time. Unix timestamps ignore leap seconds and treat days as 86400 seconds, so it doesn’t correspond directly to UTC. And they aren’t readable by humans. There are many reasons Unix timestamps aren’t appropriate for encoding a date and time.

Cash flow is for businesses.

Ethereum doesn’t know what it is. The rules are always changing, running a full node is practically impossible, and issuance is always changing. It’s not even clear that the features claimed in this paper will be true one year from now.

Multiple consensus failures (most recently this last month) and constant design changes do not provide a secure foundation for sound money.

My guess is it’s because Unix timestamps aren’t calendar date and times. The same number could mean a different date and time depending on which timezone is used.

Given a Unix timestamp, there’s no way to know which date/time the author intended. The browser can only map a Unix timestamp into the user’s timezone, but it wouldn’t know which timezone the document/page refers to.

Transaction cost isn’t determined by hash rate. The difficulty adjusts to the hash rate such that a block is mined every X minutes. Because the block size is fixed, transaction fees are determined by the market for being included in a block, so the more transactions the higher the fees.

An alternative to Bitcoin’s fixed size is Monero’s adaptive block sizing. Monero blocks expand to fit more transactions, resulting in lower fees and higher throughput.

2009: "Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852>

2010: "if this is a serious virtual currency implementation by people who understand the security implications of such, I'm unable to find strong evidence of that fact. And, so, I worry about dealing with it." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144>

2010: "at the current exchange rate they'll be worth about $12.50 USD. That's very little value for a year's worth of computation, and they're still quite rare. As more are created the exchange rate is going to drop unless they become very widely accepted, but there probably won't be enough of them to support a large economy." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144>

Cash is opaque, yet governments have been funding themselves via taxation for thousands of years.

If government charged a flat rate for its services, tax evasion would become impossible. One would simply show a proof of payment. This would only be ~$10k/year in US according to its current tax receipts and population. Property tax is also impossible to evade.

Lightning and sidechains can handle thousands of TPS. Monero has adaptive block sizes, and is estimated to be able to perform 1500-2000TPS.

Privacy is a feature, not a bug. I don't want people knowing how much money I have.

Is the economy struggling?

Consumer spending has completely rebounded to previous levels: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/consumer-spending

Manufacturing output has also completely rebounded: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

Unemployment has fallen back to 6%, near prepandemic levels https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

And the technology sector never really slowed down. Many tech companies experienced high growth during 2020.

A major difference between Datalog and SQL is that Datalog uses set semantics, whereas SQL uses bag semantics. For those not aware, that means facts in datalog are unique. SQL’s equivalent to facts (records) are not unique, and relations can contain duplicates.

The government helped create both the 1929 crash and the Great Depression. The US suspended the gold standard to pay for the first World War. Commercial banks were flooded with money, and when inflation got out of hand the Fed tightened rates in 1928-29. Then after the crash, the government implemented all kinds of disastrous economic policies, including wage and price controls, and a massive trade war with Smoot-Hawley tariff act, destroying imports and exports. The Fed shrank the monetary base by 7% 1929-1930, one of the largest tightenings in 20th century. The Fed helped create the crash then applied disastrous monetary policy after the crash, none of which was a result of a gold standard.

One attempt to hack representative democracy is a party controlled by an app. It works like this:

An app is created which lets citizens vote on every issue in the legislature. A party is formed whose elected members vote according to the app results. Citizens elect members from this party. Once the party achieves an elected majority, the legislature becomes controlled by the app, and transformed into a digital direct democracy.

There’s a few projects that attempted this. The one that’s still active is Flux Party of Australia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(political_party)