Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
IPFS is really just a mix of a torrent tracker with a torrent client, but once IPFS VMs start paying for themselves, people will sign-up in masses. I guess that's what Filecoin is about.

Edit: The way I see filecoin working is anyone can post a reward for a file and once the file is provided, the reward is paid. In other words, it's bit like a brokerage that connects downloaders with uploaders. The difficultly is that this brokerage needs to be distributed and resilient.

Comment · 6 years ago
My interpretation of this message is that Google spends $20 billions/quarter and as the ad revenue has dried up, Google will have to spend its $100 billions of savings or consider other options. As far as employees are concerned, $6 billions goes to engineers, $4 to sales & marketing, $2 to administration.
Comment · 6 years ago
That's the good old choice between safety and freedom.
Comment · 6 years ago
...and it hurts America in the long term. It's a completely backwards idea to take away opportunities from the society members with highest potential. The inevitable outcome of this will be stagnation.
Comment · 6 years ago
Cymatics. It's sound interference drawing some peculiarly complex, but cool looking patterns. Edit: I've tried to find actual math behind those pictures and only found piles of pseudoscience. There's a CymaScope app that draws them, but they are super secretive about it. I suspect that it's just the interference pattern in a tibetian bowl or a cup of tea. It's almost suspicious that wikipedia has detailed scientific articles with hardcore math on dumb topics, but not only wikipedia, but the entire math community seems to carefully avoid this topic. Edit2: I think the math behind this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_mode. In this case, the picture can likely be derived by numerically solving the diff equation of a sound wave with a boundary condition on a circle. Edit3: This lead me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr... with Bessel equations and all the good stuff. Solving it (numerically) would supposedly create the cool picture of the 432 Hz note. Edit4: And I've returned to where I began: cymatics, cymaglyphs and that cymascope. It gives an impression of a lazy pseudoscience at first, because of the somewhat sloppy language they use, but after watching a John Stuart Reid's presentation (watch it, it's only 40 mins), I had to change my opinion. The indeed capture the interference patterns created by sound in a bowl of water and a picture of that rapidly moving pattern is called a "cymaglyphs". I'd say, visualizing sound and music is a solved problem and the solution is called cymaglyphs. Obviously, an app can't use a bowl of water to solve the diff equations, but it can do that numerically with a decent precision, and apply some smoothing techniques to deal with the rapid evolution of these cymaglyphs.
Comment · 6 years ago
Here's another observation from an armchair economist. Money flow upwards by forces of debt and contracts. If we short circuit the very top with the very bottom, money will start flowing inside this loop. If we don't form this loop, the powerful vacuum cleaner at the top will break this mechanism. In other words, the amount of money in the system doesn't matter much. What matters is that money form a steady flow pattern.
Comment · 6 years ago
With skillful division and distribution techniques, it's only $5,000 per person.
Comment · 6 years ago
This is the good old trick often done by startups: founders & investors create and generously give themselves a lot of shares, diluting the share of rank-and-file employees to zero.

Here's some deep analysis from a armchair economist. $6T goes to the US "board members": their share of the company (I mean, the planet's resources) grows, but the share of rank-and-file American employees (I mean citizens), probably shrinks. My guess: $5T will be hoarded by the US elites, $1T will trickle down to citizens, the world's GDP will shrink from $80T to $50T and the US's GDP will shrink from $20T to $15T. If these hand wavy assumptions are correct, the US citizens' share will grow by 5%, from 20/80=25% to 15/50=30%, while the elites will get an extra 5/50=10% share of everything. Everybody outside the 12 mile zone around the US land is going to lose.

Comment · 6 years ago
TBH, $10M per senator per year is only $1 billion/year - a rounding error for America. And when a senator has F-U money, there is little incentive for him to take dirty money (true sociopaths will take both, of course).
Comment · 6 years ago
I don't get it. The Big Pharma makes some serious money and it needs qualified chemists to make new drugs. The complexity of making these drugs is so high that there should only few chemists good enough for the job.
Comment · 6 years ago
That's some really complex mess. How much do these chemists get paid?
Comment · 6 years ago
Why do you think DNA includes everything?
Comment · 6 years ago
Let's put it straight: most diverse candidates are given 2 attempts; while most regular candidates are given 1 attempt.
Comment · 6 years ago
In that case you just slack off hard and do interviewing almost full time.

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