eriktrautman
Joined 14 years ago
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511
Submissions
159
Member since
Feb 27
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@eriktrautman
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 6 days ago
Solar that can make it through the seasons is the coolest.
Comment · 4 months ago
At the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.
Comment · 2 years ago
Next, I’d love to move in to text SPAM, the perplexingly unsolved problem that we’ve been particularly reminded of every election season for the past 20 or so years
Comment · 2 years ago
The idea of a Lego AI sounds amazing... just thought of what might happen if you took a photo of your pieces then said "I like original Star Wars, make me a series of spaceships from that" and it outputted step by step instructions to create them. So cool.
Sure, something seems a bit lost in the creative flailing that is the growth path of young Lego-ists, but it would be really cool.
Comment · 3 years ago
They need more than that - they raised $22M but only for a portion of the company so presumably at a valuation of multiples of that. To get a 10x valuation it may have to become a unicorn.
Comment · 3 years ago
Same - chrome on ios
Comment · 3 years ago
Depends on the environment. In a startup, the top performers often say basically “what took you so long? Glad we can move faster now. And try to hire some more top performers for me to work with.”
Comment · 3 years ago
RIP content writers scratching out a living on a beach in Bali
Comment · 4 years ago
Firearm deaths just overtook auto deaths as the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761
Unclear the portion that is suicides but homicides are the fastest growing segment beyond unintentional poisonings
Comment · 4 years ago
I started triathlon training and the swimming helped bring my back and knee pain into line such that I could actually run again and I haven’t had a reinjury of the back disc (previously every 12-18 months like clockwork for 10 years) in 7 years. I don’t even swim much anymore, just light maintenance through running. Swimming is magic.
Comment · 5 years ago
Deploy this to production on NEAR and fund it every step directly with staking rewards that are piped in from a small endowment and it will run forever.
Hell, I’ll give you the tokens myself just to see it go!
Good excuse to play with Rust or AssemblyScript https://docs.near.org/
Comment · 5 years ago
This represents a reasonable-sounding surface view but is mostly off the mark. There are valid concerns but insufficient logic to justify a dangerous trap.
O/P TLDR:
1. Art is silly too but it's ok for Real Art because we've done it that way for a long time
2. It'll become a soulless money-grab
3. Buyers don't understand scarcity
4. It's killing the environment
re #1 (Art):
> You either own this thing or you don’t.
This logic just doesn't make sense and seems backwardly purist. Status conveyed by owning original editions of physical art doesn't just come from having it sitting on your wall where you can show it to 3 people a week, it's from making sure people know you own an original edition (art as flex, art as humble brag). In the digital world there is tons of status to claim using mediums beyond that narrow view and that's fine.
And the point:
> Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn’t mean you own Honus Wagner. Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.
Why should you limit your thinking on what art can be and why it's valuable to people based on an old model? The "other stuff" which can be layered in increases its value substantially to some segments of buyers and there's no reason the artist shouldn't benefit from this.
re #2 (Paying creators):
> CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for what they’ve created.
Why shouldn't creators get paid!? This is a very top-down, privileged argument. The biggest impediment for most creatives to creating their creations is usually worrying about monetization! Why shouldn't we try to get them paid as much as possible with as little work as possible so they can go back to making the things we love?
Chris Dixon had a good post [https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/] about how NFTs allow more fine-tuned segmentation among different fan groups, allowing artists to gain more from their work while simultaneously satisfying the market. Seth is a marketer who understands segmentation intimately, so I have to imagine this is an oversight.
The embedded fear here is that we'll corrupt the purity of art by finally allowing creators to have a business model, and to be fair it's one that will probably see some crazy bubble dynamics and abuses. But that's well worth it if the world becomes a more creative place by introducing better tools to monetize creation and community.
re #3 (buyers don't get scarcity):
> BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply.
And buyers of stock may be blind to the fully diluted EPS of the shares they're buying... what's the point? Again, there's a reasonable embedded fear that we'll get over our skiis and convince people or imply things that aren't true, resulting in consternation, but this isn't sufficient to call NFTs a "Dangerous Trap"
re #4 (Environment):
> They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade.
This is a fully Ethereum-centric view of the world but today Ethereum isn't the only chain. Ethereum is only used for NFT minting right now because it had years to build up tooling but it is unsuitable for creators because transaction fees run in the $50 range just to transfer tokens and >$100 to mint, so obviously creators are desperately looking for alternatives. And they're out there -- I work on the NEAR project (near.org) which is Proof of Stake, has purchased offsets to become fully carbon neutral, and is cheap enough to test in prod. Look where the ball is going, not where it is today!
Sorry for the rant. We need the biggest voices to present a more nuanced case for this technology.