slyfocks

6 ms·

1.
by slyfocks 4y ago
I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.
2.
by slyfocks 4y ago
I actually find it refreshing that Wikipedia doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in the theory section of technical subjects. For sufficiently popular subjects, they often have more accessible explanations on their “Simple Englis
3.
by slyfocks 4y ago
It is indeed a taxable event. People who exchange crypto for “stable”coins are generally doing so to stay out of the KYC banking realm so they can lie about their transactions to their country’s tax authorities.
4.
by slyfocks 6y ago
And then everyone stood up and clapped.
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by slyfocks 6y ago
One could argue that the airline CEOs acted rationally and strategically—they know the airline industry’s importance to the US economy gives them great odds of a bailout if a black swan event were to occur, so there was more value to shareh
6.
by slyfocks 7y ago
> I can assure you if tomorrow we woke up and the world was 2 degrees hotter and people were dying left right and centre from it, the same thing would have happened with climate change. That’s the point he’s making though, we’re overcomm
7.
by slyfocks 7y ago
It’s quite alarming that no country (as far as I’m aware) is taking a more rational approach towards coronavirus policy. Any attempt to make an argument of this sort in the current panic is being seen as insensitive and met with outrage (“y
8.
by slyfocks 8y ago
I read it that way as well—-words do have secondary and tertiary connotations, and any competent journalist knows how to use composition and careful word choice to more effectively convey a particular narrative.
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by slyfocks 8y ago
The Chicago metropolitan area is not only the third most populous in the U.S., it also has the third highest GDP by a fair margin. More generally, it tends to be regarded as a much more global city than SF or DC. New York is clearly #1 as f
10.
by slyfocks 8y ago
Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it carries a lot of truth. Internet-based tech companies like Google have matured to the point where many innovators have left and MBAs have invaded, favoring short-term profit over user experience.
11.
by slyfocks 8y ago
Lately, it has felt like Google has become more optimized for less intelligent/tech-savvy users (i.e. people who search using natural language e.g. “tell me the store policy for target please”). In these cases many of the words used ar
12.
by slyfocks 8y ago
They’ve hired specifically for this project, and based on the friends I know working on self-driving at Apple vs. Siri at Apple, the self-driving team has a much greater concentration of talent.
13.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Patents are far from the only factor affecting innovation, yet you seem to conclude that patents are good based on level of innovation in the US. A logically similar argument (“fallacy of the single cause”) would be: Hawaii has a relatively
14.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Unless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense against malicious users. While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on mani
15.
by slyfocks 9y ago
My grandma bought some Bitcoin last week and she doesn’t even use the internet. Friends who are not tech-savvy are talking about Bitcoin often. It most definitely is not still “pioneers and early adopters time”—that idea seems to be Bitcoin
16.
by slyfocks 9y ago
You cherry-picked one poor prediction from a single (shoddy) economist and somehow conclude that economists in aggregate are terrible at predictions. That statement doesn’t even logically support a conclusion that Sean is terrible at predic
17.
by slyfocks 9y ago
You’re making a false comparison between the period of mania in tulips and the entire lifespan of Bitcoin.
18.
by slyfocks 9y ago
The cult-like “hodl” culture in the Bitcoin community exacerbating the already limited supply of Bitcoins (if it were a stock, it would be a “low-float” stock, which results in increased vol) has served as the perfect breeding ground for a
19.
by slyfocks 9y ago
I’m fairly certain it’s a bubble but it’d be foolish to short. Altcoins are in a bubble as well—Potcoin being valued at $64mil is just one of many examples of coins with zero or close to zero utility valued at absurd levels merely due to th
20.
by slyfocks 9y ago
I can definitely relate to this. I was an early Ethereum adopter and mentioned it to friends fairly often when it was around $2. I’m usually pretty dispassionate around others, so my friends took my zeal for Ethereum seriously and bought a
21.
by slyfocks 9y ago
You do know that trend isn’t sustainable, right? Bitcoin evangelists in 2017 seem to love talking about the rate of increase in price as if increasing in value by 300% every couple of months is a built-in feature.
22.
by slyfocks 9y ago
In some cases, they actually contribute a novel feature (e.g. Monero adding features that enhance privacy). In most cases (all but a handful), they add nothing. It’s a money grab—so much so, that a somewhat self-aware crypto enthusiast crea
23.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots. As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases)
24.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Profits are indeed fat, though (corporate profit-to-GNP ratio is at an all-time high) [1]. Also, there’s no reason to believe corporations would raise wages simply because profit has increased. This holds true especially if labor hasn’t bee
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by slyfocks 9y ago
Apparently it has only trained on 30k songs thus far. This would explain the bias towards pop, as 30k is far too small of a training set to accurately capture the long tail of preferences.
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by slyfocks 9y ago
This assumes venture capitalists don’t exhibit a bias towards male founders. Depending on the extent of bias (if any), female engineers would lose a bit of bargaining power with Google. Also, empirically, women tend to be more risk-averse t
27.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Square Cash has instant withdrawal (and a much nicer design).
28.
by slyfocks 9y ago
Venmo is commonly used in social settings to reimburse small amounts (e.g. splitting the cost of food ordered for a party). Wire transfers are generally cost prohibitive, and even assuming no fees, it’d be strange (and more time consuming)
29.
by slyfocks 9y ago
This is an absurd comparison—major sports teams bid for extremely scarce talent, and they generally have the revenue to support large talent purchases (which have never been anywhere close to the price of Neymar). No file storage startup wi
30.
by slyfocks 9y ago
According to a recent estimate, ~4000 times more energy intensive. It’s an incredible waste of resources for most current use cases. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is...

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