I want more than anything to use Firefox, but the fact remains that they have internal issues that prevent them from creating a quality product. Slow startup times, constant hangs, memory leaks, crashes, and general sluggishness prevent even people who care from using Firefox.
Firefox will never match Chrome head-to-head, and is a dying browser. Then only way Chrome doesn't win is if a new competitor appears.
I switched back to Firefox around version 57, and the only 'performance issue' was initially having to re-learn stuff that was muscle memory in Chrome. Once I got up to speed the user experience is indistinguishable from Chrome - even on the crappy old netbook I sometimes have to use.
The thing that might kill firefox is the aforementioned shitty web devs with their bogus UA checks, Firefox having a history of bad performance/stability, and most people already using Chrome with no reason to consider switching.
Indeed they have, but if you reread my comment you may notice that taxes were only one component of the comment.
I'm noticing a distinct increase in ideologically motivated comments and a corresponding decrease in honest discourse. But then, why should HN be immune from it, it is fed by the same institutions as mainstream society.
AFAIK the timeline of profitability is somewhat like this:
- really profitable after introducing private repos
- burning quite some money for growth after they took VC money
- really profitable again after they changed their pricing to per-seat pricing
Most companies leave startup status long before they are profitable. It has much more to do with the stability and maturity of the business model and whether it can be scaled.
That's definitely not proof of real economic utility. How many bets happen in Las Vegas every day? But economically, they're negative-sum events exploiting cognitive weaknesses.
Entertainment can also have negative value. That's what the parent meant: your entertainment is provided by someone exploiting your gambling-addicted (and gambling may cause an actual addiction afaik, no less so than opioid addiction although based on different biochemistry) dopamine circuitry in order to extract actual (social) value.
They mainly provide addiction. Go to a casino sometime and look around. Do those people look like they're entertained? The slot machine zombies barely look human anymore.
You're also wrong about taxes. Consider my local taqueria. They buy raw materials and create value by making ready-to-eat food just when people are hungry. They receive cash in exchange, a portion of which they pay in taxes to fund the infrastructure their business depends upon.
That is positive sum for all participants. It has to be. If taxes tipped it into the negative sum category, they'd eventually close down.
I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0. (assuming for simplification, any rate of positive taxation on income).
This makes no sense at all, and is not how business works.
Most economic activity is positive sum. When I'm hungry and on the go, a taco is more valuable to me than raw taco materials, so I pay more for it. Value has been created. The taqueria owner takes money in, pays their expenses, and is left with a profit. Taxes are paid out of that profit, and you could just as well model it as another kind of expense, a societal infrastructure fee.
I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0.
An awful lot of casino gambling involves series of small stakes bets on low payout options which don't even meaningfully increase upside portfolio variance over time after the house edge has been taken out. Might still be rational from a utilitarian perspective if one really, really enjoys card games of course, but not from a portfolio allocation perspective.
Apart from weird edge cases where an actor needs to double their money overnight to return to solvency in order to have a chance of benefiting from an income stream in future, there aren't many cases where it makes sense from a portfolio allocation basis given the existence of non-negative expectation bets in other markets with a wide range of possible variances. The insurance and investment management industries are built on the principle that economic rationality works in exactly the opposite way to gambling: that inherent value exists in reducing risk.
300 million transactions in 9 years is ridiculously low compared to any "fiat" currency. Googling around I find a post that gives a lower bound for number of debit card transactions in the USA alone as 47 billions for 2012 alone[1]. That's not counting the rest of the world and the other exchange media like cash or bank transfers. 300 million transactions is nothing. I mean thing about it, it's one single transaction for every person in the USA over the course of 9 years. Alternatively it's less one transaction per year for the entire population of Canada.
Amazon alone probably handles more transactions over the course of a couple of weeks.
Gambling has way more transactions. LIBOR options have more transactions. Any actively traded stock has more transactions. None of those things are currency.
That's not buying anything with Bitcoin. You are converting your Bitcoin to USD and then purchasing using the traditional, centrally controlled financial system.
And that's not even considering the transactions fees it costs to get the Bitcoin to your account.
Then there are the transaction fees for using the card, which coinbase says is free "for now".
No. Someone is traveling to Europe, going to a restaurant and paying for the Euro nominated beer with his US based VISA and starting to claim that hey, cool, I paid for the beer with USD. You see, I lost a portion of my USD balance and gained a beer.
If you insist that the guy paid his beer with USD, it is going to be very difficult to discuss about anything as the meanings of the concepts are so twisted.
It is quite obvious that using a credit card that then accepts BTCfrom you does not mean that you use BTC to pay for anything but your credit card bill.
It's more like saying you can't buy anything with gold.
Credit and debit cards are just a way of shifting dollars around. Bitcoin is more a commodity than a currency. Yes, you can convert gold or oil to dollars and buy things, but you can't walk into a store and give them some gold flake or a quart of Texas crude in exchange for a candy bar.
> Credit and debit cards are just a way of shifting dollars around
A credit card is shifting a line of credit, an intangible promise to pay, a form of trust, that happens to be denominated in dollars.
We can pretend it's just a balance of dollars, even though it technically isn't, because it makes conversations easier, and in practical fact that's how it appears to work. But that's just a shorthand.
We can use the same shorthand to say someone bought something with bitcoin.
There's no reason to demand perfect technical precision with bitcoin and no similar pedantic precision with lines of credit.
> you can't walk into a store and give them some gold flake or a quart of Texas crude in exchange for a candy bar
I think this is the best test. Here the guy has done that. He walked in with bitcoin and walked out with tacos. When you say that's not really what happened, it feels like a no true scotsman response.
It did not. He gave them dollars, not a quart of crude. That he might have a side deal with somebody else to trade beanie babies for dollars does not make beanie babies a currency.
Bitcoin is not a currency. Plenty of other things are true currencies, so there's no fallacy here.
Sure you could also pay your groceries with lead dispensed from a gun. But that's currently nowhere near broad addoption. It just doesn't meet the definition of "currency", though it will virtually always be current.
Shift isn't sustainable in it's current form. They are temporarily not charging for domestic transactions. Since there is a cost for those transactions, there will eventually be a fee per transaction.
Those four role models don't look like me, and I think they're all awful examples of people someone should look up to. But you need to acknowledge both sides. Stop being so stubborn and look at it objectively. We do need more diversity in role models, however by saying you want less of the current role models you are initiating a direct attack. It's tricky business either way. But perhaps it would be better to say that you wish four great role models that look like you also held such prominent mindshare.
>We do need more diversity in role models, however by saying you want less of the current role models you are initiating a direct attack.
Literally nobody is saying this. If people are reading "we should have more role models who aren't men" as "we should have fewer male role models" then that is _their_ problem, not a legitimate point which needs to be debated.
Did you even read the post? It says he wants more Grace Hopper rather than more male role models. It's an absurd and offensive thing to say but unfortunately one which will be cheered in many echo chambers.
Practically speaking, how can anyone make more role models that satisfy some arbitrary appearance standard? The implication is that we have those role models because of their appearance and reject equally deserving ones of other appearances. Again that's absurd and offensive.
<throws wrench> ... why does X need role model X? Can't an X have role model Y? Why wait for there to be role model anything. Those who want to come in, come in!
Realise that you're talking about human beings, not machines. Human beings are raised from birth in human society and do not make decisions like "what kind of things do I want to be interested in?" in a perfectly logical and informed manner.
When you come across popular figures in any area, if they look like you the immediate reaction is "wow, so I could do that too?". If none of them look like you, then the reaction is not that. You might end up doing that thing anyway - no corellation is 100% - but the idea that children have role models that they can relate to is not some hard hitting hot take.
Who are these people that need a role model? How do you know they even exist? It really sounds like you've just cooked up a theory with no supporting evidence.
I know because, staggeringly, there has been actual research done and I talk to human beings who this affects. Like, literally five seconds on Google Scholar could have answered that question.
Do you have counter-studies to cite, or is just a case of academic consensus not agreeing with you and so being ignored? I'm actually astonished by your responses here. You're writing with an air of superiority and authority while asking basic questions like "Who are these people?" and "How do you know they exist?" which I had assumed were fundamental bases of any legitimate discussion on the topic.
No, it is not a fundamental truth. I haven't seen any evidence. It sounds like you could show me, but you haven't.
My original point was nothing to do with whether such people exist or not, by the way, I'm just asking that question now because you seem to be referring to some research that I'm not aware of.
>Like, literally five seconds on Google Scholar could have answered that question.
You're probably going to consider this flippant, but: Having the same arguments over and over again with people who haven't done any research is too boring for me to be willing to do it again. I have limited time and it isn't my job to google for you. If you were saying "I disagree with the research" or "I have problems with the research" then that's interesting enough to be engaging, but "I am unaware of the research" means we'd just be having the same conversation I've had a dozen times before. No thank you.
I believe technology will ever erode privacy, and that the best we can hope for is to make sure the transparency goes both ways. The government should become more transparent to the people as the people become more transparent to the government. Like you though, I'm afraid we'll end up with a vast and reliable surveillance system which police will be able to use, while the police themselves are still "struggling" to get their body cams to work reliably.
What's telling to me is that while the list of investors if full of famous names (politicians, founders), there isn't what I would consider a single reputable silicon valley investor anywhere in the list.
I know companies do this, but I don't understand how it works. Given the competitive nature of hiring good engineers what type of candidate would accept a contract position when they probably have five other offers?
As I said below - I will at the proper hourly rate. With the right hourly rate, I can make more than enough to make up for any gap in employment and I'm in a market where jobs are a dime a dozen.
Besides, there are some opportunities where companies just want someone to come in, fix a problem and then after that it's just boring maintenance work. If it's a contract, I can come in, fix the problem, and look for a more interesting full time job without being labeled a "job hopper". I can just put on my resume that the 6 month job was a contract.
I prefer contracting but I found that more companies are willing to pay me my minimum salary than the commensurate hourly rate I ask for to make up for the possible gap in employment, unpaid time off, and self employment taxes.
But, my wife has a stable government job with decent benefits that allows me to go back and forth between contracting and permanent and allows me to take risks working at companies that pique my interest without concern about the long term viability of my job.
I think there's two different complaints at play in this thread. Surely you're not suggesting that candidates be exempt from proving themselves. The number of developers who become incompetent over time is high. I think the question is whether they should prove themselves through algorithmic questions. I'll never higher anyone just because they have credentials. A Computer Science degree is a credential, yet so many with that credential cannot write the simplest of programs.
It's probably too late to come back to this thread, but no, I'm not talking about the narrower but more common complaint about algorithmic questions. I think the entire approach of constant proving is misguided. There are lots of other ways to do this with lots of prior art in other industries. I believe we have landed on a poor but self-perpetuating solution. What we do to hire is akin to what they do in the performing arts, but our work is entirely dissimilar.
Do mechanical engineers draw up a design for a valve or something at every job they apply for?
Firefox will never match Chrome head-to-head, and is a dying browser. Then only way Chrome doesn't win is if a new competitor appears.