Maker Time is an alternative time keeping system I designed after being inspired by this essay.
Readit Newswillholloway commented on Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009) paulgraham.com/makerssche... · Posted by u/ibobev
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.
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willholloway commented on What Everybody Gets Wrong About Jekyll and Hyde (2012) tor.com/blogs/2012/06/wha... · Posted by u/Tomte
I expected this to be about the static site generators :D
Me too.
willholloway commented on The DAO, the Hack, the Soft Fork and the Hard Fork cryptocompare.com/coins/g... · Posted by u/jacquesm
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.
Personal happiness doesn't factor in to it, missing very early bitcoin was a result of flawed thinking, which I intend to correct.
willholloway commented on The DAO, the Hack, the Soft Fork and the Hard Fork cryptocompare.com/coins/g... · Posted by u/jacquesm
From my reading, many comments are negative. I was interested in crypto currency, but after reading enough HN, it has made me very cautious. I especially enjoyed learning about the horrible design flaws of the Solidity language.
I think HN plays a vital role and these opinions by very intelligent people are very helpful to me.
Your comment also made me wonder about a sentiment analysis of HN comments. Something like:
"What does HN Think about It?" App
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.
willholloway commented on Y Combinator raising $1B for new fund axios.com/y-combinator-ra... · Posted by u/tamalsaha001
What in your view, distinguishes a typical VC from YC?
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.
I'm going to look myself, but do you have any links about the 18650 packs?
Edit:cheapest aliexpress ones i see are about usd$2.00 each. That's not bad though.
Check ebay, packs from hover boards that got recalled are available.
The cost can be $1 a cell, a pack might have 20. Each cell might be 10-12 watt hours. It takes 3 cells to produce 12 volts.
FYI: 129 MWh would be about 1300 42U-style racks for batteries alone.
Source: there's a guy in socal (Jehu Garcia) building a reclaimed peaker 1 MWh pack in about 10 racks from used batteries and equipment (50 kW 480VAC inverter) on the cheap in order to store energy off-peak (plus possibly charge using solar) and use it at peak supplemented by grid power. This is how manufacturing and other heavy industry / large electrical consumers can save money right now in US day-of-use billed grid systems.
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...
The real activity was on Facebook groups, viralizing anti-immigration and far-left news, controling the narritive on 4chan pol and /r/the_donald, and botted up - and downvote brigades.
It was so blatant it was visible to a non-expert on information warfare like me.
The people doing this probably got paid about as much as a paid advertisement.