dsukhin

This causes some interesting knock on effects on society:

1. more pollen (as mentioned in the article), leading to more more allergies, leading to more allergy med sales

2. no free fruit growing in the streets for kids/others to eat healthy snacks (visitors to some “old world” towns admire this about them). The fruit “littering the landscape” being the stated reason for not planting female trees, means non biodegradable trash from chip bags and other disposable wrappers litter our cities instead

This is an amazing educational experience for students but it is also such a great way to crowd source hyper realistic 3D world replicas - it reminds me of the Minecraft replica of MIT that cropped up at the start of COVID. I really hope they open source and preserve all the work of these students on a combined server anyone can browse.

It would be even more amazing if we ended up in a world where we basically open source public infrastructure projects so that anyone could contribute ideas and/or solicit public comment on new concepts before we invest billions of dollars of public money.

It also immediately comes to mind that Microsoft develops MS flight simulator - could proposed airport innovations be paired with it to test how pilots feel about changes to layouts or e.g. how new runways may affect air traffic and other patterns?

Very cool.

There is a discussion on that thread about the bounty being rather small compared to the damage it could have caused the crypto market and/or Coinbase’s stock/reputation. It’s low relative value is even being cited as a risk to future bugs not being responsibly disclosed.

It is however important to consider the technical complexity, effort, and exploitability when valuing an exploit. This was a very, VERY simple bug to find and with KYC very obvious and unlikely truly monetizable without consequences if exploited (unlike say getting access to the private key of a hot wallet). The biggest damage would have been reputational (though a rational person should consider the fact this kind of missing condition check bug made it to production a major issue already). The market would have recovered from whatever flash crash ensued and the attacker wouldn’t be likely to keep their winnings.

Kudos to tree_of_alpha for being the first to look at the API, spotting this, and reporting responsibly - $250k for what appears to be under an hour of work that was driven by curiosity is not a bad deal at all. I know Brian Armstrong frequents HN so it will indeed be interesting to get his take on this as well if he was involved in it.

You are doing exactly the right thing by reaching out and asking for advice in communities you are a part of that may be able to offer you a job or a connection to one. One piece of advice however would be to include a link to a resume or personal website showing off your independent projects and skills. It’s these projects that will show what technologies you are proficient in and prove to others that you know what you are doing even at a younger age.

I also started coding very early and used my time choose a project and dive very deep into the full stack. Web technology is the easiest thing to “show off” to others since it’s ubiquitous and easy to distribute. Even if you consider yourself a “back end” type of person, learn some web dev to be able to show and tell.

This is a time in your life that you can work on a piece of software that’s just for fun and to learn and do something cool. If you are lucky and commercial, that project might become a job of its own that provides you a passive income. Otherwise, it’s a part of your portfolio to help you secure another opportunity. I routinely look to give part time/internship opportunities to folks in your position precisely because others may overlook your talents and passion to develop them and because I was one of them :)

Yes, they get enough donations to cover their costs, just like Uber has enough VC cash and loans to continue its operations. It's non profit tax status is not strictly relevant to the fact that you typically need at least as much as money as it takes to run your entity rather than less. In my opinion, this doesn't change the spirit of the point that Wikipedia doesn't make money from its free, high-traffic service but rather from favorable financing for its goodwill and assets similar to a not profitable startup.

I've considered this question a number of ways. The fact that capital holders are gatekeepers to innovation is unequivocally worse for federated innovation, but it has created an interesting class of companies which may never need to turn a profit yet still have a positive (and growing) net present value.

Take Wikipedia for example. They lose money running a high traffic service (edit: see below reply for clarification), but it's plain to see they hold a huge asset in terms of goodwill, usage, knowledge base, and their contribution to research and knowledge growth. Despite its operating losses, its capital value (which may be in the form of social capital) is huge and will likely remain well financed into the foreseeable future.

The fact that the service is free is not relevant: a startup offering an invaluable service that is based on years of user research, development and testing has developed an asset which helps other companies and companies pay what they think it is worth (or at the beginning a subsidized rate to take a risk to try it). Operating losses at most start ups are from continued R&D; but if they were to just declare the product as "done" and have a sufficient moat/network, they could rent seek on the asset for years - yet in many cases that's not what is best for anyone (company, clients or shareholders) - we continue to want them to innovate for the good of the product and there will be stakeholders that would rather finance this research in perpetuity to grow the underlying asset and thus the value of the product and company.

Inductively, that's a company with negative NOL but positive NPV. In the physical world this might be the same as an apartment complex that's expanding (forever). They may currently collect $1M in rent, but they are spending $2M on new construction. The new construction may bring in $5M over its 30 year lifespan but it will never be enough to outpace the immediate outlay of continued construction cost. As long as the time value of money is correctly attributed, this isn't a new idea - just one that's been pulled to an extreme.