Hacker News: sprafa

Ethereum Wallet MetaMask Reports 21M Users, Up 420% Since April

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:31:51 +0000

Article URL: https://decrypt.co/86263/ethereum-wallet-metamask-reports-21-million-users

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29258462

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by sprafa in "Why Decentralization Matters"

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:24:06 +0000

Many projects are in control of some actor, but decentralization is all about diffusion of responsibility.

Right now tens of thousands of people voted on ALGO's governance trough their wallets on their phones. When did you ever get that chance for FB? For Google? Instagram?

Never. The diffusion is real, even if it's imperfect.

New comment by sprafa in "What Is Blockchain: Computers That Can Make Commitments"

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 16:45:19 +0000

This has demonstrated itself to be very unlikely to happen in large blockchains such as ETH because of cryptoeconomics - ie game theory 101 - if you do a 51% attack on a blockchain you're actually devaluing the entire chain.

It's like robbing a bank where if you take enough money you cause hyperinflation.

So it appears to become less common over time as the chain gains enormous amounts of value. Proof of Stake will also lead to this sort of attack being less likely, I'd think, since it's virtually impossible for a single individual to get 51% of a well-distributed token.

It's telling that the attack here listed happened in BSV, a sort of failed fork of BTC with relatively low adoption.

What Is Blockchain: Computers That Can Make Commitments

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 16:15:18 +0000

Article URL: https://a16z.com/2020/01/27/computers-that-make-commitments/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29254959

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

New comment by sprafa in "Why Decentralization Matters"

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 16:14:41 +0000

Aah your article is ok but you realise everything you want could be built - most likely by yourself - using a fork from any popular crypto token? Your dreams are in your reach.

That's the beauty of open-source blockchain. You want to fork? fork.

Why Decentralization Matters

sprafa — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:52:51 +0000

Article URL: https://onezero.medium.com/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f79f7638e

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29253779

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

New comment by sprafa in "DeepMind AI predicts incoming rainfall with high accuracy"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:10:46 +0000

From experience DeepMind is the #1 goal for any AI/ML person anywhere in Europe. I know people don’t necessarily want to be googlers, but Deepmind ? Yes. If you’re brilliant in the field where else would you work? OpenAI is now completely different from where it started.

It’s also heavily based in London and I know they absorb basically all the top Europe folks who want to stay close to home. Not everyone wants to go to the US.

Demis is also a bit of a legend and I know DeepMind people teach/recruit at UCL his old university. I assume they do so everywhere in the UK but London is an easy talent pool to make and recruit talent for them. So they have a full integrated vertical stack for talent.

New comment by sprafa in "DeepMind AI predicts incoming rainfall with high accuracy"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:07:55 +0000

Afaik it’s run completely independently from London, by the original founder. Distance from the mothership + founder in charge + separate goals = independence and results

New comment by sprafa in "DeepMind AI predicts incoming rainfall with high accuracy"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:06:48 +0000

Jim Simons and Bob Mercer used Ml to solve the market a decade plus ago. Good book on the topic is The Man Who Solved the Market

New comment by sprafa in "DeepMind AI predicts incoming rainfall with high accuracy"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:05:49 +0000

Renaissance Technologies, Jim Simons and Bob Mercer’s fund solved the market with ML techniques ages ago. Can’t remember off the tip off my head but they have consistent 60% annual returns which is unheard of. There’s a great book about it - The Man who Solved the Market

New comment by sprafa in "How does the economy work? A new Fed paper suggests nobody really knows"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:15:52 +0000

World of Warcraft ?

New comment by sprafa in "How does the economy work? A new Fed paper suggests nobody really knows"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:15:01 +0000

Not even approximations - they use a bunch of assumptions, many of which don’t hold up over time, so they then proceed to invent new ones as to say “well these assumptions are obviously better” even though they will inevitably be falsified because they share the same conceptual origin error.

New comment by sprafa in "How does the economy work? A new Fed paper suggests nobody really knows"

sprafa — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:11:59 +0000

Interesting ideas - any place one could learn more on how to think like this? Ie books or ? Basically How did you manage to get it to this simple statement, which seems intuitively correct when so much macro economics I’ve tried to read seem like obvious nonsense

New comment by sprafa in "The Martians of Budapest"

sprafa — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 23:31:30 +0000

The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.

UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.

New comment by sprafa in "Senior developers are leading the great resignation movement"

sprafa — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 23:36:25 +0000

Virtually all aspects of western society is being eroded by the “management is a job-skill” type thinking. I expect that eventually we will stop doing this simply because it’s complete nonsense and clearly counter productive.

Look at the difference between Elon Musk’s two companies and their ability to execute vs their rivals. The amount of value that was created because of an engineer led is so vast - it’s hard to even quantify.

New comment by sprafa in "Blue Origin has a toxic culture, former and current employees say"

sprafa — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:32:05 +0000

Wow that’s the biggest piece of evidence that the letter is accurate. 18% is abysmal

New comment by sprafa in "Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?"

sprafa — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:29:14 +0000

It’s a difficult question and I’m not qualified to answer it as an amateur tbh.

New comment by sprafa in "Redditors are right about the unfairness of the market"

sprafa — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:24:26 +0000

This is what happened with real estate in the west. It is for example, not worth owning property in some major cities as a retiree vs selling it for a fortune and moving to somewhere warmer in many major western cities.

Hence we see the explosion of corp/concentrated ownership of real estate and exploding rents (just up to the level you can afford to live with the rest of your income but not much else). Money printing means it’s a great time as a millionaire to buy lots of property, and as an average person to sell whatever excess non-residential property you have for huge amounts. Hence cities slowly become unaffordable/within the very limits of affordability for most citizens.

New comment by sprafa in "Senior developers are leading the great resignation movement"

sprafa — Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:19:38 +0000

The Toyota process says - you cannot manage a production line effectively if you don’t understand it.

Agile has become a way for people with no development experience to “manage” developers and that will always be wrong. The West’s obsession with “managerial” experience being a thing you can learn start to manage “anything” from is the origin of much of our malcontent. Management is just something you add on top of knowing how things work. It’s not valuable as an isolated skill.

New comment by sprafa in "Are software engineering “best practices” just developer preferences?"

sprafa — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 14:28:46 +0000

Software engineering seems partially creative partially technical - so on the creative parts, yes absolutely teams should self define their preferences. Scrum vs agile vs whatever else IMO should be a team/org preference. However like someone else said some engineering has to be liable for criminal prosecution in some cases. So you need some practices to be enforced.