I really enjoyed this article and the one about the ambient notification cube! Well-written. It's nice to hear someone else talk about how hard it it to stay consistent with worthwhile projects while maintaining a day job. Congrats on sticking it out!
I use Insomnia everyday. Thank you for making it! I shared it with my coworkers and described it as the REST client I would make if I were to make a REST client. Happy to hear it's working out for you :)
I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?
It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.
Cards Against Humanity raises $100,000 to dig 'tremendous hole'
Makers of party game livestream a backhoe digging a gigantic hole somewhere in the US, saying ‘as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging’
The kid tried to do it again. It didn't work. The reason it worked the first time was people bought it out of curiosity then it went viral over traditional news media and then original purchasers reaped profits leading to further hype leading to further buying craze leading to further frenzy.
Eventually the last bit of 1000 pixels went for 37k.
If the kid had extended the page another million pixels, you could have measured the peak interest and the subsequent decline.
>Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room
but then supports a candidate that denies climate change and replaces scientists in government positions with company stooges. Never understood Thiel.
Köln created a website where people were able to buy pixels of an image of Podolski for €25 per 8x8 pixel square, in order to gather €1 million to reduce the cost of the transfer;[1][2] Formula One driver and Köln supporter Michael Schumacher bought several pixels for €875.[3]
BitCoin, where the inventor managed to convince people to accept a new currency, mined the first few blocks of it, and ended up with a billion dollars in paper wealth as a result.
By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.
There was a post on Hacker News several months ago to a site that posted the last five people who paid for advertising. The list made it to about $500 before the admins here shut it down.
TWiT ("This Week In Tech") / Leo Laporte did something similar to partly fund his original move from the "Cottage" to their new "Brickhouse" studios in 2011 by selling bricks on a wall.
I couldn't quickly find information about how much they cost or he raised, though googling reveals multiple companies that will sell engraved bricks to power your fundraiser.
Fun, well, that's a matter of taste so I won't debate you there.
But "fairly straightforward"? Let's not get crazy, here. IMO, ICOs are doing to cryptocurrency what derivatives did to traditional investing. Abstraction, indirection, and confusion, all to make a buck...
I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.
It probably makes more sense when you realize that many ICO buyers are "whales", big cryptocurrency holders who bought in when the currencies were much cheaper and amassed large amounts. When the news headline says an ICO raised $180M, that doesn't actually mean people spent $180M on tokens. Rather, they converted $180M of Ethereum, at its current valuation, which they may have purchased for say $1M collectively. The individual holders might not actually be spending more than $5-10K of their own money (or possibly nothing, if they got their ether through mining), but that money has appreciated to be worth say $1M at Ethereum's current value.
It's a good example of a double pyramid scheme. The value of Ethereum is itself going up; it was worthless 4 years ago but now has a market cap of $20B. And then you can "spend" Ethereum to get additional tokens out of an ICO, which means that you're buying into another pyramid scheme with tokens which themselves have appreciated. The huge dollar values, after the double conversion, generate great news stories, which inspire more people to buy into Ethereum, which prop its value up even more, which mean that the companies who did ICOs can convert their cryptocurrency to dollars at better rates and inflate their dollar values even more, which inspires more ICOs at bigger valuations, and so on.
Lest this sound too dodgy, remember that all currency is itself a pyramid scheme: it's inherently worthless, and worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be. So the endgame for cryptocurrencies is either they run out of hard-currency buyers, in which case their value comes crashing down and everyone who bought in loses everything, or they replace the dollar as the world reserve currency and everyone who didn't buy in loses everything. I think the latter option is unlikely, but also underpriced, in the sense that it's more likely than most people give it credit for.
I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme.
A pyramid scheme is one where there is a continued and ongoing transfer of wealth from new scheme joiners to earlier scheme joiners, which works great until the supply of new joiners dries up - then the thing collapses.
A new currency could work (in theory) absolutely fine with no further issuance, and no new joiners beyond the first round of adopters - not at all the same as a pyramid scheme.
I keep seeing the fallacy that all currency value is based on future expectations.
Here's a thought experiment... in the US, work full time while getting paid in Bitcoin. Make all transactions in Bitcoin. At the end of the year you'll need to file a tax return. Your final options are:
1. Buy some USD to pay your taxes.
2. Go to jail.
Demand for fiat currencies is ultimately underpinned by them being the only instrument accepted for payment of taxes.
Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that US taxpayers will need US dollars at tax payment time.
You have a third option: 3. Don't pay taxes. Live like an outlaw. Shoot the tax collector.
You're driving at an important point that I want to take a bit further. Ultimately, the "backing" of a fiat currency comes from the barrel of a gun. People continue to use U.S. dollars because the U.S. has the strongest military on earth right now. Same throughout history - the backing of the British pound came from the British Navy, and when the British military collapsed post-WW2, the pound sterling didn't last much longer.
A major adoption driver for cryptocurrencies has been the weakness of central governments. We've seen this most with China, where wealthy Chinese businessmen are eager to take money out of the country in any way possible. But the most likely tipping point that would drive widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would be if the perception became widespread that the U.S. government could no longer guarantee physical security; if, for example, we "lost" the war on terrorism. You could easily imagine people "hiring" personal drones or robots for protection with BitCoin if this came to pass, to fill the vacuum of the state security apparatus.
If the US and other national governments collapsed then every cryptocurrency would become worthless (Gas Town isn't going to accept your "money") or less than worthless (Thunderdome is going to eliminate you because your mining rig wastes valuable electricity).
Maybe. My bet is that economic activity wouldn't cease in the absence of nation-states, but rather some other institution(s) would arise that currently perform the function of nation-states: physical security, dispute resolution, identity symbolism, monetary authority, etc. Cryptocurrencies have the advantage of already existing here, but there's certainly the possibility that it could be some yet-to-be-invented institution.
Man, I must have been a real idiot to not get a VC to say yes in 2016. Worth noting that it seemed, at the time, like there was less interest in seed rounds (especially after Twitter's decline) and more in Series A,B, etc.
reddit's recent April Fool's experiment. They had a blank 10,000x10,000px (?) canvas where people could manipulate 1 pixel at a time with time constraints. No money involved, but seeing the panoply of different subcultures come together was unbelievably fascinating.
I've had a similar experience. I've loved the team I work for, the projects I've built, and the opportunity to have impact. I would not be as happy somewhere else.
Read reviews for games you're looking at buying? Star ratings is all I've found, but they sold this as an entertainment hub and touted how it's all integrated.
What's the point of all the flashy store interface if it's lacking what has become a critically important part of the buying process for most people?
Hmm. There are mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows that allow you to browse store. The store is also online via the web and the Xbox includes edge browser so you can search the web for game reviews..
The latest dashboard updates feature a few reviews, but lets be honest - hard problem to solve on console since providing feedback for apps is better done on a tablet/PC/laptop than with a controller.
The page about technology says, "Our sensors observe that the cyclist has extended their left arm. Detecting the cyclist's hand signal, our software predicts that the cyclist will move to the left side of the lane." This suggests to me that they're trying to deal with situations like the ones you've brought up.
So far the focus was primarily on what it would take to produce an autonomous car, which is primarily a technological challenge. But what I see as a harder problem to solve is the one imposed on all humans participating in traffic: we will have to strictly adhere and be very self-disciplined in traffic, in order to make sure that the non-humans get the correct message.
Imagine I am a cyclist and I don't signal but I swiftly swerve to the right. Unless the self-driving car is already at a slow speed, it would impose an undue risk.
Or, it is hard to expect that humans will rigorously adhere to this traffic discipline.
This is why these cars will drive slow for the foreseeable future and will frustrate a good chunk of the drivers.
Unless it gets dedicated lanes, the way bicycles do.
Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary.
> They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year
B-S. Holy revisionism BS!!
We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing.
And you make it sound like it was supposed to be released 10 years ago! Vaporware! They told us we'd have AI cars in 2006! It never came! <---- False reality that never occurred.
Why do you feel the need to lie about recent history? Shouldn't you observe that if you have to make a nasty lie to support your argument, maybe your argument is wrong?
You're definitely parroting the contrarian point here, but you're being very low-effort about it. Contrarian can be cool but please try harder.
We absolutely were talking about self-driving cars in 2006, when no less a "major player" than the US Government had already been investing in this "science fiction" idea for two years, in the form of the DARPA Grand Challenge races. The 2007 race even required compliance with traffic laws in order to win. Google's autonomous vehicle program is a direct result of this project - that's why they hired Sebastian Thrun, whose team won the 2005 race.
I don't know how serious it was, but part of the initial PR about the Grand Challenge included the goal that it would enable the US military to convert some significant fraction of their fleet of ground vehicles to autonomous operation within ten years.
I do think the previous poster was overstating their case a little, but not so badly as you seem to believe.
Wasn't there a breakthrough year with DARPA challenge? It seemed like for a while the results seemed to indicate that autonomous vehicles were basically impossible, then suddenly a few vehicles just killed it one year. I could be wrong, but seems like that threshold may have been less than ten years ago.
Hey I just wanted to remind you about the Principle of Charity[0] as well as HN's guidelines for commenting[1]. It's easy to forget when you feel strongly about something but that's a real person you're replying to and they are probably acting in good faith. We should be civil on HN even when we have strong opinions.
Caltrans and UC Berkeley were very seriously working on technology to have cars fully autonomously run on freeways. In fact my father was involved in the project some odd 20 years ago. The difference is that today you have more advanced technology, more private interests, less government interests and more media involved.
> In 2006, Volkswagen showed off a self-driving version of its Gold car, named "53 plus 1" in honor of the original #53, Herbie. Autoblog.com posted a video of the car in action.
Should I go further back in history? Because we can.
Yes, the concept is revolutionary. But so is matter teleportation, and that's not going on sale next month either.
What do we call technologies that have been hyped for 10+ years? This is not just a knee-jerk contrarian point of view. Vaporware is actually the correct term we use for these products, not a slur.
It's not bullshit revisionism. People really have been talking about these things forever but not delivering them.
> Why do you feel the need to lie about recent history? Shouldn't you observe that if you have to make a nasty lie to support your argument, maybe your argument is wrong?
Settle down, nobody's doing any nasty lying, see the link above, this discussion has been going on longer than 10 years.
If you use autonomous miles driven as a metric, there is actual progress happening. That metric is increasing exponentially btw. This tells you nothing about time to market, but it does tell you that the time to market is a definite (but maybe unknowable number).
In contrast, fission reactors have been around the corner for a long time, however, there if you use the metric of net power generated from fission as a metric, no real progress is being made there.
I see a real difference between these two "always around the corner" technologies.
I would encourage humility when considering whether to make a claim about a field that you are not well informed of. Real progress is being made, by a number of different groups, in a number of different directions.
Absolutely false.
A bit more than 5 years ago I thought quite seriously to invest on self driving cars because I thought it would be viable in the not so far future and it seemed that no one else was pushing for it.
10 years ago there were only research projects with abysmal performance compared to what today seems not too far from the market.
Any verifiable source for your claims?
