I don't think that anything new could be said about bitcoins right now, and it's been like that since summer, really.
Some people do indeed believe in them, whether for technical reasons or for simply being invested, while others just keep thinking that it will crash. Both sides have a point, and majority of the people are convinced that they are right, but there's no way to predict the future.
> Yeah I'm pretty disappointing in the quality of this article, especially considering its coming from the Economist.
The Economist is not really written having crypto enthusiasts or HN crowd in mind. The article is a decent summary of the current state of affairs to someone who's just curious about what the hell is bitcoin.
I guess quite likely? In this scenario, it sounds like the goal of Series C was just to get some, any return. And getting back your initial investment sure sounds better than getting nothing back.
I doubt that was the goal of series C as any investor in that round would have been throwing good money after bad. If you're the VC in that case you're probably better off investing in a growth operation that trying to salvage a previous bet
Same. Might be a cultural thing or something but I'd absolutely hate the idea of being pinged about work things on personal channels (whatsapp, messenger, etc), especially after working hours. I know because I used to work at a place where I'd receive feature requests and bug reports, after working hours, on facebook messenger. Nope.
That's pretty much my reaction the first time I went to SF. My first BART experience was 16th and Mission and that left... quite an impression. It's surprising how people get used to it.
Mental illness is a huge issue. Previously, many homeless lived in mental hospitals but such institutions have been universally abandoned.
While only tangentially related to rising cost of living, it deserves as much merit as a solution as low-income housing, steeper property taxes, and steeper progressive taxation.
If you want to see mental illness improve in San Francisco, attend the San Francisco Mental Health Board meetings. If you can't be physically present, you can also call in. The website is: http://www.mhbsf.org/
You can call 415-255-3474 on Wednesday, November 15, 2017 before 6:30PM (and every month afterwards) and ask to be put on the conference call. Put it on your calendar. You can start by just listening in and hearing what people say. Everyone who calls in has a legal ability to comment on what's been said, after the board has spoken. You might have an idea no one else has heard.
I serve on a different mental health board. I can answer some questions if you have them.
Thank you for posting a way for members of HN to actually contribute to their community. It’s better to have an actionable item then to have opinions float about.
I had a personal experience with someone that made a serious attempt at suicide. Checked into the ER, released to the street 24 hours later with no options offered at all.
One reason for the decrease in state-run psychiatric beds was the rampant abuse most facilities hosted. As this was addressed, a replacement was not introduced.
I have my doubts as to whether that was the real driver or just the scapegoat. The real driver was probably the direct costs. Abuse existed, but the alternative is all of these people living on the street.
Isn't a better alternative to give people free access to early intervention (especially early intervention in psychosis services) and free access to treatment in the home?
I don't know the larger picture, but from my personal experience that would mean lots of adult schizophrenics (or similar) living with their parents. The sad fact is that there are just a lot of people that can't manage on their own. In today's system they are all homeless or in jail.
The replacement was the Mental Health Services Act, which gives more resources to local governments. Mental Health Boards play a part in figuring out what to do, even if it's only an advisory board.
Grew up in Berkeley and Oakland, lived in SF for years.. It has always been like that.. Thats where the crazies congregate. You get used to it. Im 32 and I have no other memory of SF being all that different from what it is now.. Homeless camps, crack zombies, poo streets..
Maybe I'm just unlucky but the vast majority of all 'awesome lists' that I've seen are just massive dumps of links, of extremely varying quality (I mean the links themselves), which isn't that helpful.
You're not unlucky, but there are some gems out there. For someone like you who is experienced in the area and can tell garbage from good stuff, it's worth digging around to find the gems.
This doesn't help someone who is completely new to the list topic though. Even worse they're probably going to get bad information.
Working from home is often touted as a solution to all problems but it's just not that simple, and many people who do actually work remotely will tell you that.
Allowing remote work is not enough. It requires effort from both parties. The company needs to provide money for home office setup, and the employee needs to spend time and though setting one up, which might be tricky in places with insane real estate prices. Working from sofa is not really sustainable for long.
Although work from home eliminates distractions such as constant movement of people (although this is not unique to working from home and same could be done with private offices), it opens a plethora of new distractions, be it running errands, playing with pets, or just goofing off instead of TV while keeping an eye on instant messenger.
And the list goes on. But that's not the point. Sure, working from home has a lot of advantages and at the end of the day I am very glad that I made the switch. It's just not as simple as some might make it appear as.
> TransferWise captured the UK<> Poland corridor and expanded from there.
Close! They started with UK <> Estonia, both co-founders are Estonians. IIRC in the very very early days, the whole settlement was done by users themselves over a Skype group.
Within the Eurozone bank transfers are generally free of fees, but banks still like to rip people off on exchange rates between different currencies and the EU doesn't seem interested in doing anything about that.
I think the exact rule is this: International bank transfers denominated in EUR below 50.000 EUR can’t have higher fees than domestic transfers.
FX fees and spread can still remain.
Neat project! I did something similar a couple of years ago in python: https://github.com/gedrap/xs-vm these toy projects are really good to try new things and, you know, just build something :)
A tiny nitpick, but what's with the trend of using stock symbols in non-financial context? GOOGL isn't much shorter than Google, same with AMZN and Amazon. It just looks... annoyingly out of place.
Regarding the article itself, the topic of Facebook/Amazon/Google domination is much spoken and written about and this post doesn't really add much new. This issue is well known for a quite a long time, especially in the HN and similar social circles. What most of the posts are missing is how do we escape this? But that might be too late.
A not-so-subtle way of pointing out that these are all profit-seeking companies? A lot like how people used to write Micro$oft, back when Bill Gates was the nerds' devil. We're all sophisticated financially-aware grown ups now, so we've moved on to ticker symbols, as a way of signalling our enlightenment.
Just the opposite. It actually started in the 90s during the dotcom mania when what a company was doing, for good or ill, became eclipsed by how much money its stock could make the reader base. Ostensible tech sites turned into The Wall Street Journal. During the early 90s it was "Microsoft announces a new version of Windows. Here are the features you can look forward to (or dread)!" The late 90s turned more toward "Microsoft (MSFT) experienced a stock price jump when it announced a new version of Windows."
I tend to agree. It's a way to signal that one is above the everyman and everywoman who don't indulge in the cants and argots that abound in the industry.
On average, when people can, they do try to sound more sophisticated than necessary to express a message, including in this message.
"in chats". This is a blog post, a forum, not an SMS conversation with 1998's prices. Acronyms look-up on Google gets old really fast. I had to look for YANBU yesterday and it was not fun to get back to the orignal text after that.
Sure I do. But if one has an aim to be understood, it's better not to make everyone lookup what you're referring to. If something has a well known name, use the name!
Some people do indeed believe in them, whether for technical reasons or for simply being invested, while others just keep thinking that it will crash. Both sides have a point, and majority of the people are convinced that they are right, but there's no way to predict the future.
Let's just see what happens.