On mobile it’s just showing the number “751” on the middle of the page, the text “maker time” and a background picture of earth seen from space. Is this how it is supposed to look? If so, what does it do?
On desktop there's a "What is Maker Time" link that provides the following:
Your clock has it backwards.
Time is infinite, but our time on earth is not.
Clocks should count down, not up.
Time keeping should be based on meaningful celestial events like the year (one earth rotation around the sun) and the day (one rotation of the earth)
Each unit of time should be based on a viable period of work for makers.
Maker Time is reset on January 1st each year. The year is divided into 1095 blocks (1098 in leap year). Every 8 hours the count decreases by one.
You know you are in a regulation bubble when the caution and judgement of the most highly trained professionals in our society is reflexively concluded to be inadequate and inferior to that of bureaucrats even when said professionals are working on the DEAD, whom they have no chance of harming.
The regulation fetish has become a form of magical thinking. In the thinking of the regulation fetishist, the lack of explicit permission from authority is in and of itself dangerous, but the danger could be easily neutralized by a talismanic permit!
The fact that these professionals have already adhered to countless existing regulations and have been trained to safely deal with bodily fluids and infection risk is immaterial to the regulation fetishist. The government has not explicitly granted permission for this exact activity. In this mindset anything that is not enumerated as an allowed activity is dangerous and should be forbidden.
Be careful with these negative HN comments, they have cost me millions.
I first heard about bitcoin right here, when it hit $3 per coin for the first time. That was a huge event.
I had my own reservations about investing in bitcoin, but reading the comments here prejudiced my view.
VC's say it's not the losses that get to you, it's the companies you miss out on that scar you.
Not investing in Bitcoin at $3-5 was the single worst strategic decision of my life.
It was something that could have saved me years of toil, it was an easy ticket into the Big Game. A massive influx of economic energy, a fantastic counterstrike to entropy was right there, and it was easy. So easy to buy, granted it would have been not easy to hold through the dark times, the dips, the panic.
Oh, but if one did!
None of the hard work of starting a company, finding product-market fit, hiring a team, raising funds, fighting off the inevitable bandits that will come for their extortion money in the form of frivolous patent lawsuits...
None of that. Just easy, huge, beautiful, juicy investment capital right at my fingertips.
Oh the land that could have been bought! The development deals that would have flowed and the opportunities that could have been pursued. Instant entrance to Ruling Class, a ticket to the best club on earth.
'The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!"'
- If I Were A Rich Man, Fiddler on the Roof
And it's that emotion thats fueling crypto asset valuations right now, along with actual riches created by people who didn't give in to the negativity, the doubt, the fear.
The thing has value. People like this thing. They like it all over the world. There are infinite uses for something like money + code + global computer networks.
And a thing doesn't have to be perfect or solve every problem to have value.
The standard that commenters here hold crypto to is not the same standard they hold startup companies to.
With companies if they do something some people like enough to use, they say wow what a success, look they are a real company with profits!
I mean even if the only use for crypto currency is regulatory/legal arbitrage, that's insanely valuable and would have merited an investment.
HN comments might have saved you a ton, too. If you focus only on the missed opportunities and not the things you've done right, you're just making yourself unhappy for no good reason.
Was it flawed thinking, or was it correct thinking that doesn't give correct results 100% of the time because the world is complicated and nothing can give correct results 100% of the time?
What I got from reading Paul Graham's own writing on the genesis of YC, was that his key insight was that VC's should be funding more companies, and earlier, and giving founder's much more control.
The other key innovation was funding in batches, in classes. This created a close-knit ad hoc community with shared goals, and one in which teams whose ideas were not finding traction could join teams whose ideas were.
Paul Graham's own writing and advice is not really followed by YC though.
As an easy example, look at his recent post about naming your startup, versus the names of the companies allowed through in a recent round of seed funding.
Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century.
You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.
The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...
Indeed. I hadn't actually reviewed ebay for electronics things for a couple of years, because any of the products I used to see there were significantly more expensive than anything I could get from aliexpress. It looks like, at least in this instance, that has turned around. I could even see individual 18650 cells for $1.
What is really dangerous is the mainstream media (NY Times, Washington Post) running stories based solely on anonymous sources.
The public has no capacity to vet the credibility of anonymously sourced claims.
Almost all of the current media narrative on the Russian story comes from stories with nothing more than "American officials say".
Remember that "American officials said" that Iraq definitely had WMD. Public support for the invasion was built solely on anonymously sourced news. American officials were actually politically motivated ideologues manufacturing consent, with journalists at the New York Times like Judith Wilson playing the part of the useful idiot.
The same thing is happening right now. This [1] New York Times story is a perfect example.
There is no place for anonymous sources on issues of war and peace in a republic. Allowing this low a bar for journalistic evidence leaves us completely vulnerable to manipulation.
The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all.
And people misunderstand the mechanism here: journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources. They know the names, and they build relationships with these sources. The sources/treacherous illoyal leakers/whistleblowers are career politicians or officials, and their relationship with someone at the Journal or the Times is equally valuable for them.
Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate. See for example "leak zero" of Flynn talking to the ambassador. We'll see about the example you added on Nunes' sources, but it seems like that information also has multiple confirmations by now.
I'd also like to point out that you're moving the goalpost and not answering my question, and that I actually thought about a specific exclusion of the NYT's failure on WMDs because it's getting old.
I also seem to remember that it was a very-much-not-anonymous Colin Powell who made the WMD case to the UN which actually allowed the US to invade.
> The choice is not to get the same information but from known sources. In most cases, you won't get the information at all.
Since the "information" is claimed to be from anonymous sources, there is no way to determine whether the information is accurate or wholly fabricated. Given the media's extreme bias now, it is not a given that it is not the latter.
>Since the "information" is claimed to be from anonymous sources, there is no way to determine whether the information is accurate or wholly fabricated. Given the media's extreme bias now, it is not a given that it is not the latter.
It's not immediately possible, but of course, as more information comes to light, you can verify of falsify it. So please show an example, from the last year, from the New York Times, where they published something from an anonymous source that was later disproven[1].
Here, I'll start with something that was proven to be right: Flynn's phone call with the ambassador was reported (with anonymous sources, on Jan 12th, and confirmed by the president's spokesman the next day: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/14/us/politics/f...
[1] Because I've learnt to qualify everything: This may actually happen on occasion, but I'd expect the journalist in question to acknowledge it, give an account of their relationship with the source, and what steps they are taking to avoid a repetition.
A major problem with anonymous sources is not just the inability to verify the claims, even more troubling is the inability to assess the motives of the source and their context and agenda.
The phrase "American officials" connotes an objectivity, as if the information was revealed by God himself.
>> Looking at the current storyline on Russia, I know there are daily leaks from "unnamed sources". But I can't think of a case where these sources turned out to be wrong – maybe there are, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority have turned out to be accurate.
>> journalists quoting unnamed sources put their own reputation on the line as a stand-in for their sources.
> Isn't that exactly the point? Their credibility is gone.
What makes you say that?
I could see a good argument that they are not impartiality, but that seems a different thing.
To some degree one can look on a case-by-case basis.
For a specific example, I find Fox's George Russell reasonably credible, but he is clearly not impartial.
On the other hand, Fox's Judith Miller seems more impartial but has some pretty serious credibility issues.
Yes but in the universe of knowledge work, what is work and what is not-work?
Do we count work as "being in the office/lab"? Or do we count work as thinking about the problem?
If one were building a company like Tesla for example, I would count going to the gym and thinking of the problem domain while running on a treadmill as work. I would also count thinking of the problem while going for a walk as work.
If one has really set one's teeth into a nasty problem, things like going to a party, or social calls like seeing friends not engaged in the problem, isn't relaxing, it's frustrating.
I think we should redefine the parameters of this conversation into time that depletes the body and time that replenishes it.
Being in front of a computer for long periods is hard on the eyes, it can be hard physically especially if the ergonomics aren't perfect. Being at the office for long periods can be draining as well because unlike being at home there aren't places to go that are replenishing on demand.
If one has a good sit/stand desk and spends a lot of time coding while standing, 10 minutes lying on a bed is incredibly replenishing for example.
The other dimension here is that perhaps it is alienated work that is inherently depleting. Working for someone else, or on something one does not really want to be working on is draining.
Working on something you care about is invigorating and I can't see how spending less time in that state can possibly be more productive than more time in a productive, non-depleting state.
> If one has a good sit/stand desk and spends a lot of time coding while standing, 10 minutes lying on a bed is incredibly replenishing for example.
Pomodoros[0] are life changing. While writing a paper/fiction/code/anything, I force myself to take that break; even if I'm on a roll. Sometimes I leave myself a note "When you get back, solve this particular problem/write this particular part" or I'll scrawl some shorthand solution for the problem on my whiteboard. I'm way way more productive if I do anything else for 10 minutes, whether it's laundry, video games, lying down, reading fiction... doesn't matter. It's almost like my brain is working while I'm relaxing.
Agreed, a tremendous work with a dream like quality, a phantasmagoria contrasting vapid American consumer culture, against bloody reality in the lands the great powers toy with.
Also interesting observations on William Gibson's work and the genesis of the EFF.
Definitely worth watching in it's entirety.
It's central thesis, that the current state of affairs has become too complex to predict for elites, and that either a fake, simplified reality is both created and presented to the masses, and also willingly retreated into.
Plus great stuff about the cynicism created by the failure and capitulation of social movements.
One of it's assertions is that Gaddafi willingly accepted a false role as a global supervillian because he liked the attention and status, and was in fact not actually responsible for some of the terrorist acts attributed to him, was completely new to me.
History and reality is hard to know in an age of state sponsored manipulation campaigns, intelligence and counter-intelligence, spycraft and subterfuge.
One has to look at any attribution as highly suspect in this environment. Cui bono?
