natrius

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301.
by natrius 11y ago
I'm glad you made this comment because it's important to understand why this attitude is harmful. If people believe what you're saying, then they're less likely to attempt to steer their communities in helpful ways. Stro
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by natrius 11y ago
I bring it up in comments here any time it's relevant, but it hasn't had its own discussion. Adoption is the only obstacle, but tools and infrastructure are obstacles to adoption. There's lots of software to write before it&#
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by natrius 11y ago
You've reframed the problem to wealth influencing politics, which still isn't something that needs to be fixed by taking money away from people. Redistribution is a decent solution to resource problems, but this isn't that ki
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by natrius 11y ago
A company that hasn't prioritized product strategy isn't going to suddenly start prioritizing it once you get there. You are more likely to be ignored. Go somewhere that does product well, especially if you're early in your c
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by natrius 11y ago
The reason I mentioned race is because so many people around here want to ignore it. To ignore it is to ignore the reality that most Americans do not relate with minority groups. Bad news in a minority group is like bad news from the other
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by natrius 11y ago
How are those solutions feasible when the system is captured by the wealthy? I don't think any solution that involves politics can work. We have to solve it outside of politics by making it too difficult to use money to influence polit
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by natrius 11y ago
I like social democracy. (I was just establishing the burden of proof, not taking a position.) I'm skeptical that America has enough social cohesion for such a thing to be fully implemented here. Literacy and median wages are fine for
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by natrius 11y ago
> It is possible to address this problem without killing the golden goose. How? By rolling back some of the legislation that was put in place by undue political influence. Using the political system to reduce the influence of money in
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by natrius 11y ago
Communism happened. It killed lots of people, and made radical changes in the social order unappealing to most. Now ideas don't just have to sound plausible, but you also have to prove that they won't lead to the deaths of million
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by natrius 11y ago
Using wealth to exert political power is a problem, but we don't need to redistribute wealth to fix it. (We might want to redistribute wealth for other reasons, just not this one.) What we want is to be able to reject the influence of
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by natrius 11y ago
We can stop amassed wealth from threatening our democracy without limiting wealth itself. I don't care how much wealth people have, but I care how they use it to subvert our democracy. We've been trying to solve this problem with
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by natrius 11y ago
Retail traders don't have liquidity needs on a sub-second basis. They'd all be better off with exchanges that used batch auctions. HFT is a tax on our economy. http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-lewis-high-freq
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by natrius 11y ago
> Massive inequality in wealth breeds massive inequality in political power. No amount of mobility or opportunity can fix this one, only inequality reduction itself. There is a solution besides inequality reduction. The problem is that o
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by natrius 11y ago
I don't think we need to split economic power. I just think the people need to be able to reject economic power over them when they believe it is being misused. That's hard today because economic power is invisible. We can make it
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by natrius 11y ago
Money is power. It always has been, and it always will be. Sure, votes are powerful, but voters can be influenced by money, so it's prohibitively difficult to get elected without the approval of capital. As a result, capital can band t
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by natrius 11y ago
Persona seemed like the right identity product for its time, but technology has moved on in the years since. We now have blockchains: shared, publicly-writable databases that are perfect for hosting identities that users fully control. Figu
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by natrius 11y ago
Caching is hard because we serve the same code from so many different servers. IPFS fixes that by referring to files by a hash of their content. Commonly used binaries will be cached on your browser, and every app will refer to them the sam
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by natrius 11y ago
Labor has linear returns. Capital has compounding returns. They're different. We should tax consumption instead, but the current tax distinction isn't madness.
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by natrius 11y ago
A couple of years ago, I created a plain old GMail account and transferred all of my mail to it, mainly so I could get all of the Google Now features that Apps accounts didn't have yet. I still send as my own email address, but I never
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by natrius 11y ago
If you want a product focused career path, start getting "product" in your job titles. Every employer knows I'm a product engineer because "Product Engineer" is on my resume. Like others have said, the rest is mostl
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by natrius 11y ago
For folks who are interested, some other examples are the Kafka/Samza ecosystem and blockchains like Ethereum.
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by natrius 11y ago
I think Uber will fail, as will all other businesses that profit from bottling up the network effects of information. Uber is so valuable because they control the network with the most riders and drivers. Their app isn't special. Their
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by natrius 11y ago
Bitcoin solved decentralized trust, but at the same time, it solved distributed trust. What preexisting database product allowed multiple organizations to confidently write to a single shared database? Distributed ledgers are perfectly capa
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by natrius 11y ago
You're using an arbitrary, uncommon definition of blockchain. A blockchain is a Merkle tree of validated transactions with a consensus algorithm.
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by natrius 11y ago
This claim is repeated often in /r/Bitcoin without any facts to back it up. I work on blockchains every day, and I disagree. Blockchains provide a mechanism for parties to agree on a transaction history that no party can retroacti
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by natrius 11y ago
In a federated network, your identity is tied to your server. If you have a domain name, sometimes you can have portable identities that piggyback on DNS. This is a terrible solution for normal people. The cost of switching servers is high.
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by natrius 11y ago
I love my day job. I build decentralized software for a living. Always interested in talking to like-minded people, though. niran@niran.org
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by natrius 11y ago
What's the difference between a self-driving car and an Uber driver who picks you up on her way to work? Self-driving cars are just the icing on the cake. Matching travel intent to rides is most of the value, especially when you combin
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by natrius 11y ago
This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways
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by natrius 11y ago
That was a while after we deposed their democratically elected leader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

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