10 ms·

Employee #1: Coinbase

142 points by craigcannon 10y ago

40acres 10y ago
> Okay. So the first one was on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams. It is complicated, but it’s a mechanism to induce lucidity in your dreams. You can control your dream by waking up in the middle of the night and taking an over-the-counter supplement called galantamine, which increases levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse. Fun fact is that I’ve been writing down my dreams for 11 years. Uh, what? Has anyone heard of this kind of procedure? I'm aware of other methods to induce lucid dreams but never ones that involve OTC medicine.
- rublev 10y ago
  Pharmacological Induction of Lucid Dreams [0] Abstract: >This article explores the effectiveness of using supplements to induce lucid dreams. The method of combining a cholinergic stimulating substance (galantamine & choline) with a deep sleep suppressing substance (sulbutiamine, caffeine, or desmopressin) is examined. Eleven nights of EEG data were recorded from a subject skilled in lucid dreaming techniques. On each experimental night, the subject slept for 3.5-4.5 hours before consuming either a deep sleep suppressing substance (DSS), a cholinergic stimulating substance (CS) or a combination of the two. >The subject experienced a lucid dream in five out of five trials that included a combination of cholinergic stimulation with deep sleep suppression. Furthermore, the five lucid dream events occurred in the span of 10 calendar days and were all characterized as Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams (WILDs) in which conscious awareness remained during the transition from the waking state to the dream state. A second observation relating the influence of dopamine uptake to the subject’s control over the dream environment is also discussed. [0] http://www.bluesilk.com.au/lucidmind/ld_resources/Pharmacological-Induction-of-Lucid-Dreams.pdf http://www.bluesilk.com.au/lucidmind/ld_resources/Pharmacolo...
- aab0 10y ago
  Not sure there's anything to explain. Waking up and then going back to sleep is going to help with inducing lucid dreams, supplement-assisted or not, that's the point of WILD.
  - enraged_camel 10y ago
    I've actually always been able to wake up in the middle of the night, then go back to bed and continue dreams where I left off.
- hammock 10y ago
  Isn't acetylcholine how caffeine works too- Any data on the effect of caffeine on dreaming?
  - cjhveal 10y ago
    Caffeine does indirectly promote release of acetylcholine (along with the monoamines, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine) via antagonism of adenosine receptors. I've heard anecdotal evidence on caffeine giving people nightmares and vivid dreams, especially when consumed immediately before sleep. After digging a little more, I also found that caffeine is also an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor (it disrupts the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine) which have medical use in promoting REM sleep and induce lucid dreaming.
- comboy 10y ago
  Yes, popular method is also to drink a lot of apple juice. It worked for me a few times but could just as well be a placebo effect. I've learned to lucid dream before that though.
largehotcoffee 10y ago
I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took 3 - 5 days to get a reply and it was always unhelpful. For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers. Do not use Coinbase.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  From a consumer side I've used coinbase because of its great website and simplicity compared to alternatives I saw when I signed up a year ago. It offered a polished interface that helped me feel more comfortable about purchasing Bitcoin and making exchanges. I understand that many of these qualities are somewhat superficial when it comes to security and reliable service. What competing companies out there do a better job in your experience?
  - mr337 10y ago
    I have heard of really bad horror stories on the merchant side. While on the consumer this its great, if the merchant side is horrid, you can bet it will hurt the adoption of bitcoin.
  - sidko 10y ago
    There are horror stories on the consumer side too. Multiple withdrawals when only one was instructed, delays in getting money after a buy/sell, locking people out of their accounts still with Bitcoin in them without providing a reason, canceled buy orders during a volatile market, and what not. r/bitcoin is littered with such user complaints. It is sad that the best way to get support on Coinbase issues is to go on reddit to complain. Many people have moved to Circle for a smoother consumer experience. p.s. no relation to either Coinbase or Circle except as a consumer.
    - beaner 10y ago
kough 10y ago
Had the pleasure to work with Olaf during an internship at Coinbase. Great guy, super fun – if you're reading this, good luck with your new startup!
zizzles 10y ago
This is now a thread about lucid dreams and the galantamine/choline stack. Galantamine is marketed as an Alzheimer treatment, and although me and others are weary of pharmaceuticals (side effects? cancer? higher-morality rates in clinical trials?) drug induced lucid dreams sound very interesting to me. Has anyone on HN experimented with this?
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  Lucid dreaming is fun. You can use apps like Android sleep coupled with Android wear and hue smart lighting to help learn how to do it. No drugs necessary. It does take a bit of practice/getting used to. The apps monitor you heart rate and movement patterns to try and detect REM sleep and send a signal to you. At first these signals will wake you up but with practice you will recognize them in your dreams without waking up.
  - Osiris 10y ago
    Can you provide a link to any resources describing the technique and how to practice it?
    - gnarbarian 10y ago
      http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-features/lucid-dreaming/ http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-features/... http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream Keeping a dream journal is probably one of the best techniques.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- yerbatime 10y ago
  This is Olaf from the writeup. I have a master list of chemicals that induce ludid dreams here: http://www.imaginarymap.com/consciousdreaming.html http://www.imaginarymap.com/consciousdreaming.html Extremely small doses of Yohimbine (~300mcg) and Mucuna Pruriens are lesser known and quite effective for me. Yohimbine is a norepinephrine agonist and Mucuna Pruriens has L-dopa and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Keep in mind it's much more important to be extremely diligent about writing down your dreams, every night. Don't pay attention to how galantamine/yohimbine are marketed - do the research yourself.
dev1n 10y ago
Anyone know where can I find this thesis?
sit12 10y ago
$5 Million is hardly a hedge fund.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  We are all here because we dare to dream
smcl 10y ago
I thought we were over the "torture the interviewee" interview stuff, this blows my mind ------- Olaf : This is just to Fred. Fred and I probably talked for 45 minutes–a long time. Then Fred gave me a really brutal mathematics problem ... Okay. So there are 100 lockers in a row. They’re all closed, okay? A kid goes by. He opens every single locker. A second kid goes by. Now he closes every other locker, every second locker. Third kid comes by, every third locker. If it’s open, he closes it. If it closed, he opens it. Then the fourth kid goes by. Every fourth locker, he changes the state. And now 100 kids go by. What is the state of the lockers after 100 kids go by? ... Craig : What was the actual job? Olaf : Customer support
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Not only that, but the whole interview seemed to be from bizarre-o world. A mix of awesome and WTF. Five minutes after sending an email to jobs@ you get asked to "hop on Skype"? Wow, that's pretty great. With most companies you're lucky if you even get an automated "We got your Email" message after 5 minutes. Then it's "do two presentations by tomorrow". (I guess they assumed he had no plans for the evening). Then after what sounded like typical tech interview hazing, it only took 4 days for the company to decide? Wow!
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    It was bizarre to me, too. I thought most of what you mentioned was just testing his commitment. Solid commitment should mean something decent looking would come out of those efforts. The email and 4 days are probably just their instincts in action with some deliberation on latter after doing this kind of thing regularly for a long time. I'm curious how long it takes on average for most VC's to go from good interview to acceptance.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Hustles are all about commitment, and one of the ways you can tell you're being hustled is when your side has to establish its decisionmaking ASAP while their decision process then can take however long they feel like.
paulcole 10y ago
Minor nitpick and I enjoy reading these, but they could be edited a little tighter. Does every single one need to include: [Laughter] at some point?
- sathishvj 10y ago
  I think the [Laughter] part is important to get a sense of how the conversation was going, and whether that particular comment was said jovially. A lot is lost otherwise on plain text.
- zedadex 10y ago
  Sakurai: (Laughs)
kndyry 10y ago
I was one of the remote hires brought on through the first Bitcoin SAT on Reddit. I recall completing the test and thinking "well, that was fun, but there's no way I aced it," particularly because one of the questions, I was pretty sure, was a trick meant to see how you'd handle not coming up with an answer. To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered "when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit." A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and tickets) were pouring in. The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds. It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.
- mbrock 10y ago
  I'd love to hear something about your thoughts on anthropology and computers (and work). My girlfriend is finishing her master's in anthropology. I'm going to the Anthro/IT conference in Tartu (Estonia) in November. I'm curious about the intersection.
  - kndyry 10y ago
    Sure, though I have to confess to trending more toward IT than anth, and being limited in exposure to my sub-discipline (cultural anthropology). Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University. My team provided web application development and protected data management to social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public Instruction on certain projects. Without question, data management is the thing. Field data is almost entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia, but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air gapping). It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of best practice in the social sciences.
simonebrunozzi 10y ago
I am not a math genius, but I spent a few minutes thinking about the locker problem. It seems to me that: 1) Every locker essentially is open (let's say "1"), and it will switch to the other binary state ("0" from 1, or 1 from 0) a number of times. 2) The number of switches is based on number of factors that comprise that number, minus one. E.g. position 1 = zero switches. Position 2 = one switch. Position 3 = one switch. Position 4 = two switches. Position 5 = one switch. Position 6 = three switches. And so on. Am I correct? In case, the final result is something like: 100100001000000... Which is essentially 1 + a number of zeros equal to two, then four, then six, then eight, etc. Edit: I've now continued reading the article and, well, the solution is down there. In a way, it seems I was correct.
- gct 10y ago
  He said the perfect squares are the only ones with an odd number of factors, which doesn't make sense to me. 16 for example has 4, 25 has 5, 36 has 4 again, so I'm not sure what he was getting at.
  - swang 10y ago
    16: 1 2 4 8 16 (5) 25: 1 5 25 (3) 36: 1 2 3 4 6 9 12 18 36 (9)
    - sfbay 10y ago
      So is this the right answer?
      - birken 10y ago
        Yes. Not too hard to confirm with a tiny little program: lockers = ['Closed'] * 101 for i in range(1, 101): for locker in range(i, 101, i): lockers[locker] = 'Open' if lockers[locker] == 'Closed' else 'Closed' print ([locker for locker, value in enumerate(lockers) if value == 'Open']) >>> [1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]
  - deleted 10y ago
bisRepetita 10y ago
>I’m actually buying units of the protocol. I’m buying scarce blockchain tokens and creating a portfolio of those tokens. I’m basically buying ownership in all of these new 2.0 peer-to-peer protocols. Is this any different from buying actual bitcoins, ether, litecoins etc?
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  No, but the VC world has been ill equipped to attempt to profit in this sure to profit way in the blockchain space. A lot of capital backed projects in the blockchain space were attempting to "responsibly not buy the speculative asset because we don't want to lose money irresponsibly", and they all lost money irresponsibly because they couldn't find a way to make any money There are ways to improve the blockchain space, with capital, and it so far requires getting capital into the tokens itself.
  - doctorpangloss 10y ago
    > Now, instead of just normal network effects, there’s also monetary incentive network effects built into this protocol. That kind of sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme. Is that a more responsible way to make money?
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      It is direct investment into a new asset class There really is no rebuttal to the clever savant that makes this observation whether you are at a VC fundraising event, an Amway meeting, or talking to Charles Ponzi himself
RobertND 10y ago
OK, maybe I have to look over the current interview that I'm using, because it's something similar and everybody in the comments seems to dislike it.
nikanj 10y ago
Coinbase told me I need to verify my residence information. I cannot start that process with funds in my account (0.01e), I cannot move a sum that small away from Coinbase, or buy BTC for just 0.01e. I complained about this to customer service, and got a canned reply saying I need to empty my wallet to proceed. A lot of companies are guilty of the same sins, having weird catch-22 glitches on the platform and customer service that wants to close tickets, not help customers, but if Coinbase seriously wants to handle my money, they need to start doing better.
rer 10y ago
> I did customer support by myself until we had 250,000 users It's good to know what the limit to customer support can be. Don't say customer support doesn't scale.
rer 10y ago
Another gem > My belief is that the inexperienced, interested person will outperform the experienced, uninterested person over time.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

142 points by craigcannon 10y ago

> Okay. So the first one was on the pharmacological induction of lucid dreams. It is complicated, but it’s a mechanism to induce lucidity in your dreams. You can control your dream by waking up in the middle of the night and taking an over-the-counter supplement called galantamine, which increases levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the synapse. Fun fact is that I’ve been writing down my dreams for 11 years. Uh, what? Has anyone heard of this kind of procedure? I'm aware of other methods to induce lucid dreams but never ones that involve OTC medicine.

rublev 10y ago
Pharmacological Induction of Lucid Dreams [0] Abstract: >This article explores the effectiveness of using supplements to induce lucid dreams. The method of combining a cholinergic stimulating substance (galantamine & choline) with a deep sleep suppressing substance (sulbutiamine, caffeine, or desmopressin) is examined. Eleven nights of EEG data were recorded from a subject skilled in lucid dreaming techniques. On each experimental night, the subject slept for 3.5-4.5 hours before consuming either a deep sleep suppressing substance (DSS), a cholinergic stimulating substance (CS) or a combination of the two. >The subject experienced a lucid dream in five out of five trials that included a combination of cholinergic stimulation with deep sleep suppression. Furthermore, the five lucid dream events occurred in the span of 10 calendar days and were all characterized as Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams (WILDs) in which conscious awareness remained during the transition from the waking state to the dream state. A second observation relating the influence of dopamine uptake to the subject’s control over the dream environment is also discussed. [0] http://www.bluesilk.com.au/lucidmind/ld_resources/Pharmacological-Induction-of-Lucid-Dreams.pdf http://www.bluesilk.com.au/lucidmind/ld_resources/Pharmacolo...
aab0 10y ago
Not sure there's anything to explain. Waking up and then going back to sleep is going to help with inducing lucid dreams, supplement-assisted or not, that's the point of WILD.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  I've actually always been able to wake up in the middle of the night, then go back to bed and continue dreams where I left off.
hammock 10y ago
Isn't acetylcholine how caffeine works too- Any data on the effect of caffeine on dreaming?
- cjhveal 10y ago
  Caffeine does indirectly promote release of acetylcholine (along with the monoamines, dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine) via antagonism of adenosine receptors. I've heard anecdotal evidence on caffeine giving people nightmares and vivid dreams, especially when consumed immediately before sleep. After digging a little more, I also found that caffeine is also an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor (it disrupts the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine) which have medical use in promoting REM sleep and induce lucid dreaming.
comboy 10y ago
Yes, popular method is also to drink a lot of apple juice. It worked for me a few times but could just as well be a placebo effect. I've learned to lucid dream before that though.

largehotcoffee 10y ago

I cannot recommend Coinbase at all. I operate an adult comic book publisher and they shutdown our account without notice and blamed the bank they work with (despite the fact that we were not converting our BTC to USD). All support tickets took 3 - 5 days to get a reply and it was always unhelpful. For a company like ours the whole appeal of Bitcoin is the anonymity, so our readers don't have to worry about buying lewd comics and having it show up on their statements. Coinbase tarnishes what Bitcoin stands for and they do not protect artists/publishers. Do not use Coinbase.

gnarbarian 10y ago
From a consumer side I've used coinbase because of its great website and simplicity compared to alternatives I saw when I signed up a year ago. It offered a polished interface that helped me feel more comfortable about purchasing Bitcoin and making exchanges. I understand that many of these qualities are somewhat superficial when it comes to security and reliable service. What competing companies out there do a better job in your experience?
- mr337 10y ago
  I have heard of really bad horror stories on the merchant side. While on the consumer this its great, if the merchant side is horrid, you can bet it will hurt the adoption of bitcoin.
- sidko 10y ago
  There are horror stories on the consumer side too. Multiple withdrawals when only one was instructed, delays in getting money after a buy/sell, locking people out of their accounts still with Bitcoin in them without providing a reason, canceled buy orders during a volatile market, and what not. r/bitcoin is littered with such user complaints. It is sad that the best way to get support on Coinbase issues is to go on reddit to complain. Many people have moved to Circle for a smoother consumer experience. p.s. no relation to either Coinbase or Circle except as a consumer.
  - beaner 10y ago

kough 10y ago

Had the pleasure to work with Olaf during an internship at Coinbase. Great guy, super fun – if you're reading this, good luck with your new startup!

zizzles 10y ago

This is now a thread about lucid dreams and the galantamine/choline stack. Galantamine is marketed as an Alzheimer treatment, and although me and others are weary of pharmaceuticals (side effects? cancer? higher-morality rates in clinical trials?) drug induced lucid dreams sound very interesting to me. Has anyone on HN experimented with this?

gnarbarian 10y ago
Lucid dreaming is fun. You can use apps like Android sleep coupled with Android wear and hue smart lighting to help learn how to do it. No drugs necessary. It does take a bit of practice/getting used to. The apps monitor you heart rate and movement patterns to try and detect REM sleep and send a signal to you. At first these signals will wake you up but with practice you will recognize them in your dreams without waking up.
- Osiris 10y ago
  Can you provide a link to any resources describing the technique and how to practice it?
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-features/lucid-dreaming/ http://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/extended-features/... http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream Keeping a dream journal is probably one of the best techniques.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
yerbatime 10y ago
This is Olaf from the writeup. I have a master list of chemicals that induce ludid dreams here: http://www.imaginarymap.com/consciousdreaming.html http://www.imaginarymap.com/consciousdreaming.html Extremely small doses of Yohimbine (~300mcg) and Mucuna Pruriens are lesser known and quite effective for me. Yohimbine is a norepinephrine agonist and Mucuna Pruriens has L-dopa and can cross the blood-brain barrier. Keep in mind it's much more important to be extremely diligent about writing down your dreams, every night. Don't pay attention to how galantamine/yohimbine are marketed - do the research yourself.

dev1n 10y ago

Anyone know where can I find this thesis?

sit12 10y ago

$5 Million is hardly a hedge fund.

cloudjacker 10y ago
We are all here because we dare to dream

smcl 10y ago

I thought we were over the "torture the interviewee" interview stuff, this blows my mind ------- Olaf : This is just to Fred. Fred and I probably talked for 45 minutes–a long time. Then Fred gave me a really brutal mathematics problem ... Okay. So there are 100 lockers in a row. They’re all closed, okay? A kid goes by. He opens every single locker. A second kid goes by. Now he closes every other locker, every second locker. Third kid comes by, every third locker. If it’s open, he closes it. If it closed, he opens it. Then the fourth kid goes by. Every fourth locker, he changes the state. And now 100 kids go by. What is the state of the lockers after 100 kids go by? ... Craig : What was the actual job? Olaf : Customer support

ryandrake 10y ago
Not only that, but the whole interview seemed to be from bizarre-o world. A mix of awesome and WTF. Five minutes after sending an email to jobs@ you get asked to "hop on Skype"? Wow, that's pretty great. With most companies you're lucky if you even get an automated "We got your Email" message after 5 minutes. Then it's "do two presentations by tomorrow". (I guess they assumed he had no plans for the evening). Then after what sounded like typical tech interview hazing, it only took 4 days for the company to decide? Wow!
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  It was bizarre to me, too. I thought most of what you mentioned was just testing his commitment. Solid commitment should mean something decent looking would come out of those efforts. The email and 4 days are probably just their instincts in action with some deliberation on latter after doing this kind of thing regularly for a long time. I'm curious how long it takes on average for most VC's to go from good interview to acceptance.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Hustles are all about commitment, and one of the ways you can tell you're being hustled is when your side has to establish its decisionmaking ASAP while their decision process then can take however long they feel like.

paulcole 10y ago

Minor nitpick and I enjoy reading these, but they could be edited a little tighter. Does every single one need to include: [Laughter] at some point?

sathishvj 10y ago
I think the [Laughter] part is important to get a sense of how the conversation was going, and whether that particular comment was said jovially. A lot is lost otherwise on plain text.
zedadex 10y ago
Sakurai: (Laughs)

kndyry 10y ago

I was one of the remote hires brought on through the first Bitcoin SAT on Reddit. I recall completing the test and thinking "well, that was fun, but there's no way I aced it," particularly because one of the questions, I was pretty sure, was a trick meant to see how you'd handle not coming up with an answer. To my surprise, a few days later Olaf emailed me and asked whether I could meet him on Skype. The interview lasted for around an hour and we found a lot in common (Olaf studied sociology and I studied anthropology, we're both rock climbers, and, of course, massive crypto nerds), and toward the end he asked whether I was okay with working support. The quote's not mine, but I answered "when you're asked to join a rocket ship, you don't ask where you sit." A few days passed and Barry Kwok contacted me to make it official. I joined the team on November 1st, 2013. Those early days were wild, even from North Carolina where I lived. Bitcoin's price was soaring and the users (and tickets) were pouring in. The rate at which Olaf's team became acclimated, with so few existing resources, is a testament to his leadership and their outstanding caliber, and something I'll never forget. You really had the feeling that you were "a part of something big," surrounded by talented and inspiring minds. It was a wonderful experience in my life, but one that I don't talk about very often and haven't posted about until now. All the best to Olaf in his continued adventures: no matter the route, I'm sure he'll send it.

mbrock 10y ago
I'd love to hear something about your thoughts on anthropology and computers (and work). My girlfriend is finishing her master's in anthropology. I'm going to the Anthro/IT conference in Tartu (Estonia) in November. I'm curious about the intersection.
- kndyry 10y ago
  Sure, though I have to confess to trending more toward IT than anth, and being limited in exposure to my sub-discipline (cultural anthropology). Immediately after my time with Coinbase, I started working at Duke University. My team provided web application development and protected data management to social science researchers, and worked with the Department of Public Instruction on certain projects. Without question, data management is the thing. Field data is almost entirely electronic (collected through the web, SMS, or downloaded off of tablets (mobile engagement is also big)), or will eventually be made electronic. This benefits later analysis in something like R, Stata or Julia, but introduces a host of concerns relating to secure storage, access, egress and ingress. Large data sets are also sometimes shared between institutions and typically come with stringent use requirements (up to and including air gapping). It's very new territory for many in the social sciences, and they rely on IT to provide them with solutions and answer their questions. Interestingly, the medical field have already covered a great deal of this ground, so their work can often be used as a template for - or at least a vision of - the future of best practice in the social sciences.

simonebrunozzi 10y ago

I am not a math genius, but I spent a few minutes thinking about the locker problem. It seems to me that: 1) Every locker essentially is open (let's say "1"), and it will switch to the other binary state ("0" from 1, or 1 from 0) a number of times. 2) The number of switches is based on number of factors that comprise that number, minus one. E.g. position 1 = zero switches. Position 2 = one switch. Position 3 = one switch. Position 4 = two switches. Position 5 = one switch. Position 6 = three switches. And so on. Am I correct? In case, the final result is something like: 100100001000000... Which is essentially 1 + a number of zeros equal to two, then four, then six, then eight, etc. Edit: I've now continued reading the article and, well, the solution is down there. In a way, it seems I was correct.

gct 10y ago
He said the perfect squares are the only ones with an odd number of factors, which doesn't make sense to me. 16 for example has 4, 25 has 5, 36 has 4 again, so I'm not sure what he was getting at.
- swang 10y ago
  16: 1 2 4 8 16 (5) 25: 1 5 25 (3) 36: 1 2 3 4 6 9 12 18 36 (9)
  - sfbay 10y ago
    So is this the right answer?
    - birken 10y ago
      Yes. Not too hard to confirm with a tiny little program: lockers = ['Closed'] * 101 for i in range(1, 101): for locker in range(i, 101, i): lockers[locker] = 'Open' if lockers[locker] == 'Closed' else 'Closed' print ([locker for locker, value in enumerate(lockers) if value == 'Open']) >>> [1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]
- deleted 10y ago

bisRepetita 10y ago

>I’m actually buying units of the protocol. I’m buying scarce blockchain tokens and creating a portfolio of those tokens. I’m basically buying ownership in all of these new 2.0 peer-to-peer protocols. Is this any different from buying actual bitcoins, ether, litecoins etc?

cloudjacker 10y ago
No, but the VC world has been ill equipped to attempt to profit in this sure to profit way in the blockchain space. A lot of capital backed projects in the blockchain space were attempting to "responsibly not buy the speculative asset because we don't want to lose money irresponsibly", and they all lost money irresponsibly because they couldn't find a way to make any money There are ways to improve the blockchain space, with capital, and it so far requires getting capital into the tokens itself.
- doctorpangloss 10y ago
  > Now, instead of just normal network effects, there’s also monetary incentive network effects built into this protocol. That kind of sounds like a multi-level marketing scheme. Is that a more responsible way to make money?
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    It is direct investment into a new asset class There really is no rebuttal to the clever savant that makes this observation whether you are at a VC fundraising event, an Amway meeting, or talking to Charles Ponzi himself

RobertND 10y ago

OK, maybe I have to look over the current interview that I'm using, because it's something similar and everybody in the comments seems to dislike it.

nikanj 10y ago

Coinbase told me I need to verify my residence information. I cannot start that process with funds in my account (0.01e), I cannot move a sum that small away from Coinbase, or buy BTC for just 0.01e. I complained about this to customer service, and got a canned reply saying I need to empty my wallet to proceed. A lot of companies are guilty of the same sins, having weird catch-22 glitches on the platform and customer service that wants to close tickets, not help customers, but if Coinbase seriously wants to handle my money, they need to start doing better.

rer 10y ago

> I did customer support by myself until we had 250,000 users It's good to know what the limit to customer support can be. Don't say customer support doesn't scale.

rer 10y ago

Another gem > My belief is that the inexperienced, interested person will outperform the experienced, uninterested person over time.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]