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maxharris 23 hours ago [–] I wrote this incredibly unappreciated comment (it got upvoted once) back in April 2020, explaining why I put my life savings ($100k) into Tesla and tech stocks at the bottom of the crash in March 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810 I raised my position to 86% TSLA shortly thereafter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25555778 And in February this year (at the peak) I dumped my last shares of SQ to go all-in on TSLA. I was right, and the people I was arguing with were wrong. I do wish they'd contact me and pick up the conversation, though... maxharris 18 hours ago [–] But I knew I was right. I thought really hard about every single aspect, from the inevitability of the EV transition, to the fundamentals of the company, to the brilliant people that work at Tesla, to various macroeconomic trends, to virology, to value investors vs. innovators, to the 2019 yield curve inversion, to a snap prediction that the Fed would pump hard so as not to repeat what they thought of as mistakes from 2007-2008, etc. And even then it took me some time to go all-in on the company. I made a good amount short-term on a couple of casino stocks, and gains on Apple, Amazon, etc. But I dumped them all, one by one, to buy more Tesla.
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Oct 26, 2021 22:32
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I'm not sure exactly what this is, but there sure is a lot of it: panick21_ 23 minutes ago | next [–] I have been advocating for federated e-cash based on bitcoin for a long time. Interestingly I suggested this quite a lot to somebody who ended up working for Blockstream. The reason why I thought this was necessary requires some context. I thought it was kind of like Free Banking. And just as warning, in US history, Free Banking has a different unrelated meaning. So do not confuse the concept of Free Banking with the historical Free Banking, the 'Free' referees to different aspects. In US what is referred to is the 'freedom' to open banks at all. Before that, in the US, each bank required a voucher from the state legislature. What I am talking about is the freedom of issue, sometimes called 'Joint-stock banking'. Meaning a bank can issue bank notes (IOUs) without any restriction on how to back that IOU. This is relevant because historically quite often the state (and later federal) government would enforce a strict connection between outstanding notes and government debt. This is rather clear why governments would want that. This leads to a number of problems, historically most important that defaulting states would destroy its banking system at the same time. Other problems are that government with low or decreasing debt might not have enough debt to cover outstanding notes leading to a deflationary effect. Broadly how this works is, you have a Gold standard and then you have a set of 'banks' issue IOU on top of that. These come in form of private bank notes (typical a standard of note amount emerged as well). You can think of a outstanding bank notes, the same way as money the bank has in a checking account. The important difference being that the bank gets the interest, and not the holder of the note. And the profit derived from this is what makes the bank want to do this in the first place. The amount of IOU any individual bank can issue is limited by the consistence demand for clearance from other IOUs accumulated by banks. So I go to Walmart pay with an note. Walmart can check of course if the issuer is acceptable to them and then they hand that over to their bank to put in into their checking account. The bank then will bring those notes to the issuing bank, and demand reserves (ie gold) and transfer it to its own 'vaults'. Once you have more then 2 bank pretty quickly 'clearing houses' develop. These would be sort of membership clubs where after each day/week/month you would do a clearing of everybody against everybody and figure out who has to pay how much and who gets how much. These clearing houses were often separate private institution. The clever part about this is that this serves as a good indicator of who is abusing the system. So if you end up issuing to many notes, the reserve drain will be observed by other banks and they will kick you out of the clearing house as a default risk. The other interesting aspect of this sort of system is that it has an implicit regulation of currency demand and supply. In modern economics sometimes considered as 'velocity'. So each bank has a minim reserve and how much reserve they have depends on how many notes they need to cover the clearing house demands. If demand to hold currency is high, and therefore less demand on reserves, the bank can safely expand the amount of notes it issues. However in the opposite situation, if people drop their requirements to hold currency, the banks has to pull notes from circulation. Typically in historical system the notes would be backed by a wide range of liquid commercial stocks and government bonds. In a more standard economic way of saying this is that those banking system were adjusting the monetary base (M) in accordance of the monetary velocity (V) and this results in a relatively long run stable MV and therefore a stable PQ (Price level * real expenditures). What this means is that once reserve stop growing, you would expect Price level to drop or rise depending on Productivity. So if the economy is growing and things become cheaper the average price level would drop accordingly (just like price of consumer electronics drops). Attempting to enact such a policy is sometimes called 'Productivity Norm'. Another way of saying it, it would approximate a stable NGDP. This is not the type of demand deflation that caused the Great Depression. What this means is that workers would not have to fight for adjusted wages every year along with inflation. You get slightly higher wages every year automatically. Historically the most easy way to observe this is currency in circulation depending on harvest. During harvest there was a huge amount of currency outstanding, as everybody was paying workers, making deals and so on. When it turns winter, and there is far less economic activity going on, people much rather have more money at the bank so it can earn interest. Therefore what we should observe is the outstanding base of money being response to that requirement and we can actually see this in historical data from systems that were organized like that. There were also banks that had 100% reserves, meaning the amount of notes they issued was always the same as the amount of gold reserves in their vaults, of course at those banks you would not earn interest, but rather had to pay a fee for the services. This sort of 100% backed system is what seem to be proposed here. Historically these sorts of banks were very unpopular, to the point where they basically didn't exist at all unless for some special circumstances. My biggest issue with Bitcoin when people suggest it could be the backbone of a new economy, is that it does not have this feature. Bitcoin is like if you are trading on pure non-floating gold coins. If there is an increase in the amount of demand for Bitcoin, there is no corresponding increase in supply as to keep prices relatively the same. If you want to have a multi-level deep economy with labor, debt and so on, this is not tenable. Of course many Bitcoin people I proposed this to were very much against this. Of course the Bitcoin paper starts out with: > 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. I suggested that you could have different 'banks' cross signing each other and building a network of trust in the same way the clearing houses used to do. Banks and their costumers would only accept currency from trusted parties. You could run around with your wallet, potentially being filled with a notes from a whole bunch of different 'banks'. Seems to me this would make tracking very difficult. It would allow lighting fast payments and unlimited amount of transactions between parties. Our discussion often ended with the suggestion that he was not totally convinced but that it would be a great use-case for side-chains. This seems at least partly something like I suggest, just as a 100% reserve only system as I understand it. This might have some uses but for me, doesn't fix the underlying issue with Bitcoin when considering it as the reserve currency for a nation state. I would love to see a warrant where the IOU are unlimited and backed by some portfolio of other assets. This would allow bitcoin to truly serve as the backbone of a modern economy. Just like gold combined with IOU based banking became backbone of modern economy. P.S: It highly unlikely that my ramblings from all these years ago influence this project. I don't want to suggest that it did. I just found it interesting. P.P.S: The person I used to argue this with also suggest I join Etherium crowdfunding and I refused. So clearly I am the idiot here. reply
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Oct 28, 2021 04:23
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quote:During harvest there was a huge amount of currency outstanding, as everybody was paying workers, making deals and so on. When it turns winter, and there is far less economic activity going on, people much rather have more money at the bank so it can earn interest. this definitely seems like the work of the individual who will revolutionise money
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Oct 28, 2021 10:38
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The hackers are appreciating their moderators: Bayart 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] > ??? Is it common that people think he is Asian for some reason? What a strange paragraph to include... Call me a fool, but it's never occurred to me that he wasn't. I've always pictured him as a Chinese gentleman, a sort of Confucian scholar in 0s and 1s holding up the mortal world to ancient standards of virtue. I might come across as reading far too much xianxia, and that would be accurate. reply
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Oct 28, 2021 14:39
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mystes posted:maxharris 23 hours ago [–] this one made me really sad when i first read it
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Oct 28, 2021 15:10
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fritz posted:The hackers are appreciating their moderators: Yeah dang is also an Asian surname, we get it. It's okay to just admit your brain just read something wrong without bringing your weird hobbies and orientalism into it.
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Oct 29, 2021 04:09
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jasode 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] | on: Reasons Truck Drivers Walk Out the Door [video] >Not being able to use toilets is, [...], but it probably adds to the feeling of being disrespected. Words like "dehumanizing" and "disrespected" are being used but we also have to remember that truckers are not the only ones that care about bathrooms. It's also the workers in the office who don't want to be dehumanized by cleaning up an inconsiderate trucker's piss and poop. As someone who used to clean dirty public toilets as part of my first job, this old video showing the owner of the company how to clean his office toilets has always stuck with me. He even cites the common problem of truckers leaving a mess for office workers to clean. Deep link: https://youtu.be/XlHWkdfZmb4?t=2m59s Sure, many truckers are considerate and clean up after themselves but the few bad apples ruin it for the other truckers. The office workers don't want to deal with disgusting bathrooms. Until we have robots in the future cleaning the toilets, there will be somebody getting dehumanized by cleaning up poop & piss. What are the office workers' options? - clean up after drivers (dehumanizing work) - deny bathrooms to drivers I feel bad for the good drivers but unfortunately, some disrespect the office workers because someone else's bathroom is not the driver's problem. What's the solution to avoid dehumanizing people? reply
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Oct 29, 2021 13:40
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I would love to show that guy some nasty-rear end pictures of toilets used solely by office workers.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:04
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legitster 1 hour ago | next [–] This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull). And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)! Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances. Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty. reply
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Oct 31, 2021 01:27
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"All of my hobbies involve buying things; therefore, anyone from history who was not constantly buying things had no form of leisure'
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Oct 31, 2021 07:27
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i'm sure that literature written expressly for the wealthy to read accurately reflects the totality of existence during those times. i definitely won't read what any historians have to say about the life of the common people, because that might prove me wrong and challenge my worldview.
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Oct 31, 2021 07:40
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poor people should do something that i view interesting, otherwise their time is obviously better used doing work for others, to stimulate their basic brain
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Oct 31, 2021 10:08
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roenxi 2 hours ago | prev | next [–] PhDs are an eccentric crew. Without any malice. This sounds miserable but it is untenable - totally untenable - for society to go out of its way to make life easy for someone who wants to devote a serious portion of their life to studying minority ethnic groups in American literature from a position in the UK. This sort of thing is really supposed to be a fun pursuit of the independently wealthy. It is very unlikely that there is a pay off from this degree in this field. Poor economic prospects are sort of baked in. reply
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Oct 31, 2021 15:47
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fritz posted:roenxi 2 hours ago | prev | next [–]
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Oct 31, 2021 15:53
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fritz posted:roenxi 2 hours ago | prev | next [–] What do I do you ask? I work for a startup and write software for a blockchain based AI to generate NFTs.
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Oct 31, 2021 17:52
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fritz posted:legitster 1 hour ago | next [–] lmfao whenever i read poo poo like this a tiny voice in the back of my mind says "we're doomed lol"
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Nov 1, 2021 08:49
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sneak 12 minutes ago | prev | next [–] I have a different view of the situation: while the emotional rewards from pets are nonzero, animals are, objectively, filthy. Keeping them indoors (and in one's bed/bedroom) means that even with the best cleaning regimen, your house is perpetually dirty. Imagine if someone who only bathed a couple times per month rolled around in your bed every day. Many people are fine with being dirty, so there isn't a moral argument against pets here, just a personal preference, but if you shower more than three times per week then your decision to have a cat or dog in your bed and on your sofa is inconsistent. reply
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Nov 1, 2021 13:27
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fritz posted:sneak 12 minutes ago | prev | next [–] This would have worked better as a Seinfeld routine.
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Nov 1, 2021 13:53
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It's not HN, but it is r/firefox which I think is close enough: (RE: Windows 7 EOL) [–]n0rt0npr0 1 point 1 day ago Migration to 8.1 is absolutely sensible if you are on win7 now. Linux will be completely viable btw December 2022 and June 2023 so upgrade installing 8.1 from 7 and using it & migrating to Linux after that. Sensible in that Linux is more reliable than Win7, Win8 & Win10 and thats what matters most. To all those still using Win10: Disable your Updates! My neighbors Win10 system crashed 3 days ago when the PC Health Check app installed! suck it microshits!
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Nov 1, 2021 15:19
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Micro$haft Winblows, amirite!
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Nov 1, 2021 15:22
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lobsterminator posted:Micro$haft Winblows, amirite! it's not just that, it's the insane suggestion that linux will become a perfectly viable OS for all enterprise use-cases between the end of paid support for Windows 7 at the end of one year and the end of free support for 8.1 in the middle of the next, and that users should in fact upgrade to 8.1 to avoid Windows 10 (which will have additional years of support). edit: I also forgot to mention that that is a new reply to a 9 month old thread. edit 2: here's some actual HN: cblconfederate 9 minutes ago | root | parent [–] [a bunch of links "refuting" the previous post that banks would be fined for suspending all withdrawals even temporarily] Anyway , i ve been burnt by banks enough in the past to know that binance is better than banks. I can't be preached about it. reply Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Nov 1, 2021 |
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Nov 1, 2021 15:35
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jl6 7 hours ago | next [–] In school, we are drilled into thinking reading is an unqualified good thing. Reading programmes exist to boost the amount of reading children do. Parents chastise their kids for watching TV instead of reading a book. Against this background, we forget that reading is ultimately a form of consumption. It doesn’t inherently make the world a better place. It doesn’t, by itself, produce anything. It matters a lot what you read. Reading can be a gateway to learning and fulfilment, but it can also be an addictive time-sink that leads nowhere. It’s a particular trap for those with an intellectual or introverted bent. I fear that the good intentions of teachers trying to get kids to read more at all costs risks only doing half the job, and leaving a population without the media literacy to choose wisely which books to consume, or without the restraint to know when it’s time to stop reading and start acting. reply
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Nov 2, 2021 00:48
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it's true, i've been reading the posts in this thread for a while and i'm definitely worse off because of it
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Nov 2, 2021 04:36
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Mr.Radar posted:cblconfederate 9 minutes ago | root | parent [–] I wonder just how that poster has been “burnt by banks” I suspect it’s not the usual complaint of eg Wells-Fargo structuring deposits vs withdrawals to generate late fees I bet “cblconfederate” got kicked out of the mainstream banking system for using sketchy cryptocurrency sites that don’t do KYC and got flagged for possible money laundering
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Nov 2, 2021 05:10
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fritz posted:or without the restraint to know when it’s time to stop reading and start acting. so this poster is suggesting that there’s a time to put down the theory and switch to praxis, hmm
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Nov 2, 2021 05:11
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eschaton posted:I wonder just how that poster has been “burnt by banks” you mean correctly identified for money laundering
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Nov 2, 2021 05:15
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eschaton posted:I wonder just how that poster has been “burnt by banks” once you get into chex/telecheck it's basically impossible to get out (some credit unions will take you with a starter checking account program) but it's probably that.
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Nov 2, 2021 06:38
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mrmcd posted:Yeah dang is also an Asian surname, we get it. It's okay to just admit your brain just read something wrong without bringing your weird hobbies and orientalism into it. The French invented Chinoiserie, they just can't help themselves.
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Nov 2, 2021 22:57
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> tomc1985 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] This sort of crap is why I left software. Niceness over competence. I didn't enter this (at the time) largely solitary profession to have all the best, juiciest parts of the job get taken over by these people-oriented idiots. There needs to be a revolution that returns programming back into the hands of solitary nerds working on sheer competence. More people need to care about the quality of the final output than whether or not the guy who wrote it is "a nice fellow". I feel like this is 'participation trophy' culture coming back to haunt us. Stop being so afraid of getting yelled at, anger is a part of life! > romanhn 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] As an introvert who had to push himself to become one of those "people-oriented idiots", the reality you have to recognize is that software is ultimately about people. It is not written in a vacuum to make computers happy, there's generally a human (or a bunch of them) at the other end who will be deriving value from it. Working competently to solve the wrong problem is not how successful software is written. And the chances of solving the right problem without talking to people are, frankly, slim. There will not be a revolution that eschews the people aspects, the industry has evolved (yes, the opposite of devolved) beyond that. Walking around calling people idiots and being generally angry is not going to win you any trophies either. > tomc1985 5 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Externally, with customers, sure. I agree that we are ultimately doing this for people. But internally, I do not think that having requirements filter through ever-growing and increasingly specialized teams is a net positive. Early in my career I worked directly with stakeholders and shareholders, and I was empowered to build and deploy things that solved their issues, often from scratch. And I did exactly that, and it felt great! When I quit, I worked mainly with my product manager, who in turn interfaced with god knows how many people, and only receive tasks after they were parceled out and dispatched to me via JIRA, where I could only see a small part of the picture and I was held to arbitrary metrics on performance. Things were much better when we programmers were a weird and mysterious rainmakers that the higher-ups didn't understand. This newer, more gentrified profession is ... a lot less enjoyable to work in. and > endisneigh 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I can't tell if this post is sarcastic or not, haha. What are you doing now? > tomc1985 5 hours ago | root | parent [–] Not sarcastic. I am now software-adjacent, working solo. Got sick of the people aspect and the fact that my employer takes 99% of the value I create and then forces me to practically beg for a 5% raise each year gently caress that industry. I became a programmer because I love computers, not people
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Nov 2, 2021 22:59
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Maximo Roboto posted:> tomc1985 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [–] these people write the worst loving software
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Nov 2, 2021 23:04
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one more- > vlunkr 5 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next [–] I'm pretty sure this will hold true in my field where teamwork is required. If you're not nice, people won't want to talk to you, if you're not part of the communication chain, your value as a team member drops. No part of this has anything to do with software. > tomc1985 5 hours ago | root | parent [–] The thing is software doesn't have to be a team activity. It goes against the current grain where everyone seems to want to build large teams of sort-of-competent nice guys, but you can have one or two really smart guys, and pay/treat them super well, and you can get an entire product out of them
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Nov 2, 2021 23:09
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The one thing that is true though is that the closer your work is to being black magic, by definition the least legible it is, and so the less power management has to Taylorize your work and de-skill it, which in turn transfers all the power in the relationship to capital owners. Outsourcing had historically very lovely results and all of it is instead done over platforms like AWS where the off-the-shelf nature of it hides the outsourcing nature of the relationship ("pay another company to run your <X>") that still exists, but with way weirder power dynamics. I'm not 100% sure how I feel about OSS under that lens, where things can still be black magic, but engineers are expected to be far more interchangeable, like we've set up our own assembly lines that corproations can just get for free.
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Nov 3, 2021 00:14
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MononcQc posted:The one thing that is true though is that the closer your work is to being black magic, by definition the least legible it is, and so the less power management has to Taylorize your work and de-skill it, which in turn transfers all the power in the relationship to capital owners. they keep trying, and trying, and trying, but it turns out that if you want something that actually works you need smart creative people who work well in teams.
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Nov 3, 2021 01:11
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yeah you just need fewer of them as more stuff is commoditized.
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Nov 3, 2021 01:21
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i'm okay with that when it means you don't need to roll your own bespoke framework just to stand up yet another crud app
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Nov 3, 2021 01:24
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Maximo Roboto posted:Things were much better when we programmers were a weird and mysterious rainmakers that the higher-ups didn't understand. This newer, more gentrified profession is ... a lot less enjoyable to work in.
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Nov 3, 2021 01:38
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carry on then posted:these people write the worst loving software
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Nov 3, 2021 01:49
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> nverno 2 hours ago | root | parent | next [–] Yes, it takes work, it's like learning how to dance, draw, or paint. My emacs config is literally 64183 lines of elisp + 2356 snippets (just checked), so I'm not really considering a major editor switch at this point. I've used VS code as well, it's fine for what it does and certainly much more beginner friendly. reply
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Nov 4, 2021 15:24
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Emacs grognards are literally the worst.
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Nov 5, 2021 01:02
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i use emacs but thats only after years of tweaking it to fix all the stupid defaults emacs is like the definition of what happens to software that has enough of an audience to end up being steered entirely by never breaking people's muscle memory
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Nov 5, 2021 02:40
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