I’ve discussed karma sharing on HN before, and it’s basically not really a bad idea per se but if it’s not broke don’t fix it. The second chance pool is there for things that fall through the cracks. And your post can still get some upvotes. But the real issue to my mind is that HN isn’t really about karma points, so if your post doesn’t do well it’s fine in the grand scheme of things, even in the context of HN. At least other people were able to see the link, even if they didn’t see your post. All roads lead to Rome, anyway.
So your karma number didn’t go up when you did the thing but it did when someone else did the thing. It seems unfair, but it’s almost an anti-feature in that it can disincentivize karma motivated posting behavior. Find something else to post and try again? It’s not worth getting too attached to post traction. The time of posting seems to have more to do with how well a post does than the particular link or who posted it first imo.
Ursula K. Le Guin was an anarchist and Taoist not a socialist[0]; she translated the Tao Te Ching, after all[1]. She was anti-authoritarian, whether libertarian (remembering this term was hijacked), socialist or otherwise. She was pro collaboration.
The Dispossessed is an anarchist utopian novel.
"I'd put it this way: Dispossessed is an Anarchist utopian novel. Its ideas come from the Pacifist Anarchist tradition: Kropotkin, etc. So did some of the ideas of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies."[2]
> While I understand that they have to make money somehow
I don't. I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. With that kind of money, Firefox should be absolutely dominating the browser space. They shouldn't be making Firefox worse with advertising in order to subsidize their flailing around trying to find traction in mobile or VR.
It actually reminds me of Wikipedia, especially with the donation links littered throughout the experience. They're both growing out of control, spending mountains of cash in order to justify spending previous mountains of cash on ventures that nobody asked for or wanted. The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird.
I think the author fail to distinct between how "entrepreneurism" and "venture backed business" differ.
A one man consultancy operation is as much entrepreneurism as serving billions of users world wide.
I think we have this misconception that success mean you need to have hockey stick growth on bunch of metrics, anD that you must make your investors 10x return on their investments.
Fundamentally the wrong approach. As an entrepreneur I don't strive to "make money", I strive to learn, adapt, and survive. Money and success depends solely on how well I can iterate those three things.
You give them stock straight out with a 'reverse vesting' buyback schedule and you cover the tax. If that starts becoming 'too expensive' because of taxation / valuation reasons for the company, then you've reached the size where you give 10 year options or RSUs.
US startup stock options push the tax externality to their employees. In somewhere like canada, your tax bill is due at liquidation, not at the purchase of options. It makes a lot more of this problem go away. For most early stage employees that do well in a tax scheme like canada's then paying $20k for stock in a large valuation company isn't nearly as painful as paying $20k + $100k in AMT tax.
I think that would probably be reasonable for most angel investment and stage A teams. It isn't a stretch for the company to pay an extra $10-30k for a stock transaction where %60 of it cycles back to them anyway for a total of $4k-12k of a tax bill.
Also another way to value the stock to give to early employees is to treat them as investors investing the $500k+ or whatever equivalent they are giving up for 4 years and giving them that as their stock where you foot the tax bill. Also giving them the same visibility and protections that those equivalent angel investors would get.
The percentage points you start giving up for that although starts becoming too large for most founder's tastes, and thus we get the current situation we have today. Many engineers tell themselves, why should I join an early stage startup when I can do so much better as a founder with a similar risk profile?
edit:
I realized you want a way to keep the golden handcuffs that are unique with the US tax law and current equity structure to incentivize poor-ish early employees to stick around without creating an incentive to fire them with back loaded options.
You could create a second stock option reward for the early employees with a company performance + time condition vesting condition and pay the tax bills by giving them the stock right away.
Pinterest's long term stock option expiry date is contingent on being with the company 2-3 years, otherwise it goes back to the same 90 expiry window I think.
You could try many structures, and the market will respond to it compared to their other offers. A good way to start is to explicitly state what you actually want, and then engineers could state what their price is for that ask in comparison with what they can get.
Tangential to the article, but on-topic to the title:
I saw the Dutch documentary #followme [0] the other day, about the incredible fakeness of Instagram, where for a couple of dollars you can buy 1,000's of Likes / Followers. And everyone - up to the kids in high school - is doing just that, to buy popularity (the metrics have actually become the determining factor for real-life popularity for many people).
Apparently one of the big shots in this shady industry is a Dutch guy (multi-millionaire now), who manages tens of popularity-boosting websites directly or indirectly (and not only for Instagram). He caters to celebrities as well, who sometimes buy millions of followers. For these high-profile actions they arrange special events, according to the docu, like publishing 'fakish' news articles to established news sites (Forbes was mentioned) to coincide with the artificial boost in popularity.
This can be considered fraud too, as 'popular' users benefit from influencer marketing deals (free clothing, travel, tickets, money, etc.) and there is a continuous cat and mouse game between illegit popularity boosters and marketeers. Professional investigative companies jumping on this train to filter out the bad apples, etc.
I work in public sector digitisation. We’ve spent a lot of money on blockchain proof of concepts, sales meetings and general hype. My colleagues in banking have spent even more.
All those resources have been a complete waste so far, and they’ve entirely been spent on blockchain because of hype. That is extremely bad, because all those resources could have been thrown at something useful.
For whatever reason blockchain has been extremely resilient to reality. It’s almost been a decade, and we’ve yet to see anything purposeful come our way. It’s still on Gartners list for 2019 though, so I guess we’ll spent another year burning money.
It's a computer museum, but they work. They're turned on, and you can use them! You can program them; you can even get an account to access ancient computers over the internet (via telnet).
For example, look at the cool as hell control panel and general design of this thing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Sigma_9 -- light bulbs add something to computers that LEDs don't. :)
If nothing else, it makes us nerds happy. Thanks, Paul.
>Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fnance, etc. As a result, these superstars reap enormous rewards, whereas the rest of the workforce lags behind. We describe superstars as arising from digital innovations, whicih replace a fraction of the tasks in production with
information technology that requires a fxed cost but can be reproduced at zero marginal cost. This generates a form of increasing returns to scale. To the extent that the digital innovations are excludable, it also provides the innovator with market power. Our paper studies the implications of superstar technologies for factor shares, for inequality
and for the effciency properties of the superstar economy.
In the late 90s, there were a few "no man's land" raves in places where jurisdiction was ambiguous between Israel and the (then brand new) Palestinian Authority's west bank territories. Neither the israeli army, police or palestinian police wanted to mess with a huge, internationally negotiated agreement for the sake of a party.
Around 1999-2000 the "Oslo Process" which created those jurisdictional grey areas collapsed into it's current state, things got violent and the raves ended.
Funny how "what's normal" depends on where you're from. Middle Eastern no-mans-land seemed like a cool place for a party, to 16 yo me. Frozen lake in winter seems way to dangerous to even consider. What sort of a lune would go to a frozen lake party?!!
Here is my shot at defining various terms in this context:
- Centralized: Centralized networks have one central point which controls the network. That doesn't have to be a single server sometimes it is just that there is just one company controlling the network (e.g. WhatsApp).
- Decentralized: Is the opposite of 'centralized' meaning there is more than one central point. So all following types are 'decentralized'.
- Distributed: In general terms, it means that the network is (more or less evenly) distributed upon all participants. All participants have the same role and responsibility. There are various kinds of distributed networks. Git for example stores a full copy of all information in every node. Distributed Hash Tables use a different approach where every node is responsible for one explicit part of the information to store.
- Peer-to-peer (p2p): Is one form of a distributed network, which works (in general) without servers. So all the participants connect directly to each another (Tox).
- Federated: Is sometimes called a 'distributed network of centralized networks'. Two popular examples are e-mail and XMPP. All participant use their own centralized server, but that server cooperates with other servers to transfer messages across the network. Sometimes their implementations make a distinction between client-to-server and server-to-server protocols.
In general, the more centralized a network is, the easier it is to control. This can be good when it comes to spam, but also bad when it comes to censorship.
Offtopic. DLT is basically a marketing fraud. Both "permissioned" and "permissionless" DLT are packed into one term. Problem is - they are vastly different. Permissioned DLT is not interesting at all from technical and social point of view. We knew how to do them for a long long time. Openness, permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin. "Permissioned blockchains" are just repackaged tech with lot of marketing sauce.
Reading this through the lens of a current era where hierarchies are being subsumed by networks, and then reasserting themselves, this was written in a similar context, can't help but recommend "The Square and the Tower," a recent book that talks about the historical tension between networks and hierarchies.
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I'm an atheist and don't believe in spirits, but when I came across a viewpoint similar to this a few years ago it really changed how I empathize with people.
I really don't agree with how widely we apply the disease model when thinking of human behaviors. Some people are mentally ill, but the world we live in is more certainly ill. The expected arc of a life in the Western world is that you spend your healthy years working on other people's goals so you can spend the last few years of your life doing what you want with what resources you've amassed and what health you have remaining. We wage wars and torture, reward greed, deny each other healthcare, homes, food, our leaders are cartoon villains. If we manage to find love, it is discriminated against unless it fits into a narrow set of parameters. If we are unlucky, we are born, starve for a few years, and then die of preventable, curable disease.
Happy participation in this society is not rational. As Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society." I have been lucky in the opportunities that I have had available to me, but it's not hard for me to conceive of situations where the rational choice is to drink oneself to death. Life is unkind to many people.
The ideal solution is to fix all of the world's ills, but obviously that isn't realistic, at least not in our lifetimes. We can make progress, but help will arrive too late for many. I can empathize with those who choose to say that the individual is sick, rather than the world, because the individual is easier to change.
But it's simply not true in some cases. Instead of telling someone, "Something is wrong with you, let's fix it," we should often be telling them, "You're right, there's a lot wrong with your life and the world, and much of that can't be changed; let's see if we can find a way to find you some contentment despite that."
To be very clear: some people are mentally ill. Individuals can be ill AND the world's can be ill. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Are you counting shared memory multiple times? Try hitting shift-esc in Chrome and checking the memory usage there. My heaviest tab (Gmail) is only around 250M.
Edit: I mean most computers don't even have 30 GB of RAM, but if you do there's an easy way to check. Open a bunch of tabs and note your system's total RAM usage. Then close Chrome and see how much gets freed up. If it's 30GB then you have a problem :)
Interesting how the pyramids have been around for 4500 years and we still don't know all about their structure...
Fun fact: there's a Neolithic site in Ireland, Newgrange, that's actually older than the pyramids. Fascinating and worth a visit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
Most NDAs have two parts: non-disclosure and non-use. That means that parties won't disclose the confidential info that is shared, and they won't use that information except for the express purpose of the agreement (usually assessing a partnership or customer relationship).
One Silicon Valley company that is well-known for not having a non-use clause is Intel. This means that they can use any confidential information in their own business, in any way they desire.
It's not problematic to sign an agreement like this with another startup because they are unlikely to have the time/money to start competing with you on your home turf. But big companies can squash you like a bug if they so desire.
Other reasons to carefully review an NDA:
Make sure it's bilateral, not unilateral
Check to see how long it's in effect for — usually the parties are permitted to disclose / use the info after 2-5 years
Make sure the above clause has an exception for trade secrets that are still secret (which they should not be allowed to disclose even after the expiration)
My dad was in the Army Special Forces during Vietnam. He says "they" didn't like the term Green Berets and I don't remember why, it might have something to do with the song (which he also claims was not well liked) or the movie.
I think he has a conflicted view of his time, he did not stay in the service afterwards and to this day I think he both regrets his participation in the war and is proud of it at the same time.
I think war, and by extension the military allows people (mostly young men historically) to push themselves and put themselves in danger, forming some of the most memorable moments of their lives. The problem is this often goes with creating some of the most traumatic moments of their lives, and they are forever stuck with the juxtaposition of those memories.
I've personally felt a longing for the former but not the latter and I wish there were more opportunities to gain those kinds of experiences and the camaraderie without having to do things you are morally opposed to. I've found myself looking into disaster relief work and things like that at times as an alternative but that might not be a realistic option at this point in my life.
Does smartphone deprivation return cognitive capacity to baseline or cause people to exceed it? Phone deprivation may induce a higher state of attention than before a person had a phone if they associate phone deprivation with focus situations such as exams or crises.
Having a phone around may train the brain to relax and offload tasks, leaving it more fresh to focus when required.
Though many new "blockchain" systems do achieve BFT (perhaps most notably Tendermint, which seems to be passing aphyr's Jepsen tests with flying colors), it's important to keep in mind Bitcoin falls short of achieving it:
"Regarding BA, we observe that Nakamoto’s suggestion falls short of solving it, and present a simple alternative which works assuming that the adversary’s hashing power is
bounded by 1/3."
One important difference between how a truly BFT system behaves versus Bitcoin is how Bitcoin handles network partitions, or rather, how it doesn't handle them.
Specifically, when Bitcoin goes split-brain, i.e. in the event of a network partition, Bitcoin will "reorg" into two new chains, both of which will happily accept writes from both sides. When the partition is healed, one chain will win, and the writes to the other chain will be clobbered. Ideally these transactions will wind up in the mempool again and be accepted into the new chain, but that isn't a guarantee, more of a band-aid, and doesn't change the fact the system ostensibly acknowledged a write it then lost.
There are ways to turn Bitcoin into a truly BFT system. The main one I like is decoupling proof-of-work from transaction processing, turning it into a leader election system for a more traditional BFT algorithm, such as ByzCoin:
With ByzCoin, if you can't reach quorum, you can't make progress, so in the event of a network partition the system will simply stop accepting writes if it can't reach quorum, as opposed to accepting writes which will go on to be clobbered by a future reorg.
Is it still relevant if it has not been updated for several years?
Perhaps Ometa's younger's brother (Ohm) should have been referenced instead: https://github.com/harc/ohm
Unfortunately while it seems to have some very nice features, particularly the separation of grammar and semantics.
Its performance is underwhelming.
See a benchmark I've created of JSON parsers implemented using many
parsing libraries.
Spot on, apps have optimized our lives... to local maxima. Apps can't guide us to peak happiness because the best is disconnected from the rest.
Even when it comes to something as "simple" as music, I've never found a "favorite" band through something like Spotify. Good music, sure, but the "bar raisers" alway comes from randomness - radio, odd bar show, personal recommendation, cabbie's CD player, etc.
"You know what makes the rockets fly? Funding." - The Right Stuff.
What really made PARC work is that they were funded to develop the future of computing by building machines which were not cost-effective. It was too early in the mid-1970s to develop a commercially viable personal workstation. But it was possible to do it if you didn't have to make it cost-effective.
That's what I was told when I got a tour of PARC in 1975. They had the Alto sort of working, (the custom CRT making wasn't going well; the phosphor coating wasn't uniform yet) the first Ethernet up, a disk server, and I think the first Dover laser printer. All that gear cost maybe 10x what the market would pay for it. But that was OK with Xerox HQ. By the time the hardware cost came down, they'd know what to build.
Previous attempts at GUI development had been successful, but tied up entire mainframe computers. Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963)[1] and Engelbart's famous demo (1968)[2] showed what was possible with a million dollars of hardware per user. The cost had to come down by three orders of magnitude, which took a while.
Another big advantage which no one mentions is that Xerox PARC was also an R&D center for Xerox copiers. That's why they were able to make the first decent xerographic laser printer, which was a mod to a Xerox 2400 copier. They had access to facilities and engineers able to make good electronic and electromechanical equipment, and thoroughly familiar with xerographic machines.
I assume you mean can't
Replicating Google/NVDA/etc today is useless.
Building a future Google/NVDA is extremely hard and draws little inspiration from the current Google/NVDA.
"Every moment in business happens only once" (P. Thiel, From Zero to One)