As someone who’s changed careers, I value HN for the wide variety of intellectual topics and often insightful commentary. I think in recent years it’s actually moved further away from the ‘$N raised by $X from $Y to build A for B’ headlines that I used to hate. It still takes some digging to find stuff I like, but not long. The classic web1 design helps.
Every community on the internet has its problems. Every community has its own circlejerk customs. And n-gate.com is all that needs to be said about HN’s problems (hope he comes back).
I’d be curious to hear from people here about other communities or news aggregators of the same quality or better
ENS [0] seems to be a use case here [1][2] and even the concept can be used by merchants for users to donate / pay towards verified names e.g: (myshopname.eth) rather than 0x123..cdef. That still isn't an example?
I mean, I can even see that in reputable payment services like Stripe, BitPay and Coinbase Commerce in the future.
Thanks for sharing, we totally agree with the utility in collaboration and sharing.
ENS/wallets give users a lot of utility on Skiff - it makes logging in to privacy-first platforms easier (manage on secret key/seed phrase), sharing easier (ENS vs. an address), and decentralized storage can be nice if you don't want your data hosted on big tech.
First sentence of the Bitcoin whitepaper: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution."
Except that's a lie because you need a middleman to process the transaction (mining group). And in reality it ends up having another company like coinbase in the middle as well. So now you're in a worse position than before.
Maybe, maybe not. Certainly some people who are doing this will continue to do so despite regulation. In any case disproves the comment I was replying to.
This is literally addressed in the second paragraph:
In electromagnetism and most other fields of physics, imaginary numbers are merely a mathematical convenience. All the relevant phenomena can still be described using nothing but real numbers.
> I’ve only ever heard this line of reasoning used to justify something unethical.
That doesn't mean it's not true. Soros's actions ending the peg helped the british people, whose government was throwing away billions of pounds trying to sustain the unsustainable peg.
Perhaps the outcome was better for Britain in the end, but I object to glorifying Soros on the grounds that his intentions were clearly to take money out of the system, and breaking the pound with a coordinated attack just doesn’t seem very ethical.
I also think that when people characterize moves like this as ‘brilliant’ it does a disservice to the word. I think many folks, if they tuned their attention to opportunities like this, had the big name firms in their Rolodex, and had questionable ethics, could have made this move. Maybe I’m missing it, but this seems like a pretty straightforward way to take advantage of the system.
I really don't think intentions matter when contemplating moral questions, outcomes matter. Every economist was saying the peg would be broken, yet the bank of england was committed to throwing away money trying to save it. Every day they continued the british people were worse off. Soros was a hero in this story for being the person who convinced the bank of england to end their fools errand.
That's begging the question. Clearly someone thought that Britain would be better off in the ERM at that rate, and clearly some economists thought the rate could be maintained
I think you’re right in a way, but the problem is multifaceted.
If true, the idea that 1-1 tutoring pushes an average student two standard deviations above the mean where nothing else does today is compelling evidence that this is an element missing from today’s apparent lack of genius. Imagine what pairing inherent talent with a talented tutor might do for results — it might be enough to produce the high-sigma results that we seem to be lacking. It would also be massively unfair, so I recoil from the idea a little thinking that some modern robber baron gets to also buy their way into contributing to the world’s greatnesses through their children and wash their hands of how they acquired their wealth (it’s better than naming a building!)
I think you’re right that we probably have a lot more geniuses today than before, in an absolute sense of talent, and that obscures their greatness. But I also think the author may be onto what we may have to do if we also want the outsized geniuses of the past that seem to make the normal geniuses pale in comparison.
My experience with the classroom is that a class size of 15 is barely better than a textbook. Simply not enough individual attention is there to go around. And yet we’d consider that a ‘small classroom’ at any top university, and you’d have to likely go to a graduate level class for that.
I think people misunderstand the skills needed for progress nowadays (or maybe ever). We have clear avenues forward where we are basically just waiting for data to trickle in, then prune the falsified hypotheses, and repeat.
It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.
And even then we have the story of the quantization of blackbody radiation, when Planck was stuck and finally ended up using a formula that fot the data and called it a day.
As an addendum consider Paul Erdos. As far as I know everyone loved to work with him, he was basically running a big distributed institute in this regard. He did what organized workshops do nowadays, but in a slightly radical way, he basically changed "dorm rooms" every few weeks, and churned out papers like a machine on speed. Which in fact he was on all the time. And who can blame him? Stimulants are part of work culture anyway. Coffee, tea, anti-ADHD meds, etc. And with such drastically work focused "work-life balance" it's not surprising that he has results.
> It takes smart and dedicated individuals relatively a lot of funding and time (see mRNA vaccines or the blue LED story), but it's not exactly the same as coming up with Maxwell's equation out of thin air.
Who says there are no more breakthrough to conjure out of the thin air?
There certainly are, but the later part of my comment tries to address this by illustrating how nothing is really "out of thin air" (still, the creative jumps from data/knowledge/premises/broken-models to a new hypothesis/better-models are invaluable, and almost always there's a prerequisite of years/decades of hard work to familiarize oneself with the data/old-models on such a level that the insight required for the jump basically comes intuitively "duh just try this, or that, or this helps to fit the data better" - which of course is intuitive to no one else, who did not put in those years).
I do think so. I think wealth disparity has enabled intellectual folks to, very quickly, propel themselves into the upper class, by essentially being part of the money machine that keeps rich people rich (hedge funds, ads, etc.). I don’t have any data to support this but I believe this was literally impossible before some decades ago. Certainly was not available to Einstein.
More evidence: people literally write songs about wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. We live in a disgusting age.
If you're asking in good faith, it's market manipulation.
In your own words, can you explain the difference between, say, a Ponzi and a pyramid scheme? Pyramid and a matrix? Or do you use "pyramid scheme" to just mean "scheme?"
Okay, it may not be a pyramid scheme in the exact technical sense, but combined with the other items on the list, "get-rich-quick", etc., I think pump-and-dumping shitcoins counts, right?
‘A pyramid scheme is a fraudulent system of making money based on recruiting an ever-increasing number of "investors." The initial promoters recruit investors, who in turn recruit more investors, and so on. The scheme is called a "pyramid" because at each level, the number of investors increases. The small group of initial promotors at the top require a large base of later investors to support the scheme by providing profits to the earlier investors.’
Come on, many crypto projects don’t seem like this in any sense?
The general term should be "greater fools schemes". Ponzi and Pyramid are just subtypes of this. There is also MLM and PnD which have their own characteristics. All of these involve finding more and more people to invest so that early investors can exit.
The reason why every greater fools scheme fails is that there is no net revenue (or too small to sustain the scheme). No matter the scheme, you will always run out of greater fools, and so it must collapse eventually.
> All of these involve finding more and more people to invest so that early investors can exit.
> No matter the scheme, you will always run out of greater fools, and so it must collapse eventually.
That depends on how you define "collapse". After a pump and dump, a stock might crash to zero, or settle back to where it was, or even settle back to a higher number than it was originally at. It doesn't require a particularly large supply of fools, and it only requires them for a small amount of time. And it doesn't have to move the stock price by a huge percentage either.
My point is, it doesn't matter whether you or I consider it a "bad definition". To say that these things are not pyramid schemes "in any way" is unnecessarily pedantic and not useful considering the context (the implications of their terms of service).
