jval

People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)

Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more cool NLP technology out there!

The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.

Coinbase can settle most trades internally and push out any 'interbank trades' onto the chain. Some of the patterns others have noticed could be them settling internal accounts, not sure though.

1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone.

2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders.

3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not.

Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.

The ancients used to select one of their own (sometimes even their own children) and periodically sacrifice them to the gods.

The moderns instead periodically select one person and have the entire world turn on them through Twitter, having them perish in the flames of hundreds of angry tweets.

Hopefully their sacrifice will atone for all of our sins before the eyes of the gods.

I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there).

I think at the moment it's too easy to hit that flag button on the front page (as others have said, especially on mobile), so maybe it should be moved back too?

People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early adopters were idiots, a lot of the internet's early adopters were seedy criminals and pests too.

Bitcoin's community will evolve in the same way every online community does. It's found some early traction in the form of speculation which has encouraged people to buy and own Bitcoin. Now that a lot of people know what it is and own some, it's easier to test services built with BTC.

I agree with this, but I think it is still an extremely difficult problem to solve. Most of the political problems we have are low hanging fruit from a technical perspective, the thing that renders them almost impossible is the fact that they run contrary to vested interests.

Part of the reason that Uber and Airbnb have succeeded where other content-based startups have failed is the fact that they are dealing with city-based, rather than federal regulations. As copyright is regulated federally, the only way to fix it is by first fixing the broken system of electoral funding that encourages politicians in DC to follow the money that flows out of the RIAA and similar cashed up lobbying bodies.

Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get the advantage of their distribution at the cost of platform risk.

If you haven't already you should read his book, Avoiding the Fall, there are a number of prescriptions inside it on how to go about rebalancing the Chinese economy. It's really well written (as is his blog, especially this post). The central thesis of the book is that the Chinese economy has low consumption as a total proportion of their GDP due to a number of hidden subsidies that transfer wealth from households to businesses and governments in China.

He argues that by removing these subsidies China can rebalance their economy from an investment driven one to a more consumption driven one and achieve a 'rebalancing'. Some subsidies are governments fixing bank interest rates for lenders and depositors (in a way that takes money from depositors to subsidise borrowers) and artificially pegging the exchange rate, which penalises households (who typically in urban settings rely on imported goods) and subsidises businesses (many of whom export their goods).

My economics knowledge is generally self-taught and I don't have the book in front of me so you'll have to forgive any errors - but hope that helps!

What are the "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage?

All the software in this business is commodity.

The only real defensibility at work here are the network effects, which are totally asymmetrical due to the city-focussed nature of ride-sharing.

The legislation is generally not company-specific, which makes the problem much better for followers rather than leaders. Uber enters a new city and gets hit with the upfront cost of having to fight to have legislation changed. No such problem for the followers who can wait until the battle is over and then claim the same status under the new legislation.

Uber and Lyft could do the same thing Sidecar is doing, but then they wouldn't be Uber and Lyft. They would be Sidecar. You have to choose one thesis and go for it. Sidecar is going for the variable price model and Uber & Lyft are going for the fixed price model.

Nobody is going to run the table over the other guy, investors know that and are betting that the different model will attract a subset of customers perhaps not as large as Uber/Lyft but large enough to be a big business in a huge market, maybe even IPO. Seems pretty logical to me.

Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's difficult and comparisons with other countries are not helpful in addressing those difficulties.