Fiat currency is valueless and can only be used because people trust the government issuing it. If Bitcoin can gain the trust of enough people, it can easily become more 'valuable' then many currencies in existence at the moment.
What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example, would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps it could be.
The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.
Either way, I agree that this article probably shouldn't be on hn.
EDIT: It looks like this has been flagged and removed from the front page
I don't want to be too rude, but to quote the hn guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I'm not saying that this article belongs here, but hn is not just for discussing hacking and startups.
I was recently pointed towards Principles[1] by Ray Dalio by someone here on HN, and I highly recommend it. He talks about getting what you want out of life, and how that starts by figuring out what you want. He then lays out a process to get you there. If you're thinking about your career path, give it a read. It's long, and somewhat tedious prose, but it provided me a lot of insight as I'm figuring out what I want to do post-graduation.
I'm still in school; just finished 3A, so ive got a pretty fresh look at things. It seems to me Waterloo's stature is rising in The Valley, and they are offering more jobs. I had about 30-40% of my class go to Apple this semester, for example.
I'm just running off personal experience here (I've been through the Velocity Residence and Eng), but of the 10 smartest kids I know, all but one is in The Valley/Seattle. I think they plan to stay South after graduation.
Why do you think you can you get better talent? Less competition? People want to be closer to home? You can offer more in perks, salary, ect compared to local companies?
Being a Waterloo engineer, I agree with this wholeheartedly. Perhaps even more importantly, I'd say the top talent disproportionatly dreams of getting out of Waterloo. Most quality students want to get down to Cali.
I respect what Litt, Pebble, Bufferbox are trying to do, but I don't think young talent is the reason their doing it. I think that the cost of living, tax credits and familiarity are the reasons they're back in Waterloo.
All the power to me, but for me, California sunshine seems too good to pass up when there's three feet of snow on the ground in the middle of February.
Perfect for local business shops too. Think of a local flower shop, I bet birthday orders could be huge for that type of thing. It scales decently as well if the business adds itself.
Musk is one of my hero's, but his first company was a web start up that help publisher's get news articles and other content online. He then built a money management system, which eventually became part of Paypal. These are hardly the world's important problems. But the exits from these wins allowed him to do what he is doing.
I think that's important to keep in mind if you want to belittle guys building Web 2.0 apps like Flipboard, reddit, ect.
Microsoft is eyeing consumers with this announcement, and once consumers switch, they will adapt to the new interface. Once consumers adapt to the new interface, the overhead that you are talking about decreases, and companies can roll out Windows 8 without totally killing productivity.
MS is betting the house on Windows 8, but they know there will be growing pains. This $40 upgrade strategy is one way to mitigate the risk of alienating corporations by driving adoption in the existing consumer market.
> America was not actually founded solely on "tired and poor masses yearning to breathe free", but on a huge takeover and displacement plan for the native Americans.
America wasn't founded in order to take anything from Natives; this was a very unfortunate side affect. Your right, slavery was a stain on America for nearly a century. And there was racial tension against Irish, Jews, Italians ect, just like it is for Muslims in some sectors of society right now.
But these people were still given an opportunity to flourish through their own doing, and many of them have. The Kennedy's are the most obvious example of an Irish American family doing supremely well despite lingering prejudice towards Irish immigrants. Obviously other examples exist.
The Muslim question you bring up at the end is different. The reason people are so scared is that Islamic Law contradicts the notion of freedom. We can and should allow freedom of religion, but not before we ensure that all people are free. And Islamic Law flies in the face of a lot that is presented in our Constitution.
Cal Newport of at Study Hacks [1] has been talking about this type of stuff for a while. He approaches what he might call "a philosophy of deeply thinking about hard problems" from an academic standpoint, but I think you can apply it generally. He's done some pretty good interviews/detailed posts on the topic.
I really think that pseudo-work is a killer. PG talks about this a bit here [2]. This type of constant context switching is dreadful for productivity, and also stresses you out. Saying that, some startups actually do require 100 hour weeks. Read Max Levchin's interview with Jessica Livingston [3]; he spent like 4 days getting the Paypal demo ready, and then fell asleep at the restaurant table after showing it to the VC's. But there are also times when you have explore; Max said he had this later when Elon Musk came in as CEO and was trying to change direction. Max had tons of free time, so he started playing around. This led to the discovery of the fraud detection system that probably saved the company.
So there's a time and a place for 100hr weeks, but you can lose sight of the big picture if your head's to the grindstone all the time.
Also from Waterloo, but I think you got this mixed up. There is an outflow of talent because there are only few exciting, innovative places to work in Waterloo. So sure, you can call it a shortage of jobs, but really the culprit is a lack of innovative/entrepreneurial/managerial expertise. Things are changing for the better, but slowly.
Also, it's goina be pretty hard to convince someone from Silicon Valley, NY (or even Redmond) to move to Southern Ontario, let alone Waterloo, unless your doing some really cool, or you can pay them a lot. Obviously people who go to school here are much more likely to stay, but even then, most of them would take a job in California if they had the chance.
You can seen Peter Thiel's homage to Atlas Shrugged with funding this thing, but I think logistically its a little bit too much. I'm firmly in the libertarian camp, but things in this country would have to be pretty bad to move full time to a place like this.
Another cool idea is the possibility of creating self governing city's, with minimal regulation, inside of existing countries. Ex-Stanford economist Paul Romer is proposing ideas along these lines. If you partner with a country (Honduras is considering this) who give you land to set up an independent city, you could have the type of self-governing, anti-tax/regulation environment that libertarians yearn for. I can't see the US ever agreeing to something like this, but some countries would.
>So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means.
Does Fair Trade really benefit all of the producers in the third-world? What are the side effects of Fair Trade? I think you could postulate that it drives down conventional coffee farmer's profits, since non-fair trade coffee will try and compete on price.
Wouldn't this lead to lower wages and higher poverty for the majority of the farmers?
I have no data to back this up. Anyone know any facts about this and care to share?