I'm having hard time wrapping my head around the time-money analogy here. In the case of money, by investing it or delaying spending, you can have more of it in future. In the case of time this does not hold, because time is essentially a shrinking resource. You can't have more time in future by delaying spending or 'investing' it in the manner OP suggests.
Return on time, (ROT?), is always something other than time and thus measures of it are highly subjective. In the end, what you are spending is your life and although there might be preferable ways of doing it, I'd imagine that being the achievers they are, HN members usually err on the side of investing it. Actually PG's essay offers a nice exposition of spending time (having fun) vs investing it vs fake work:
Seems to me you can spend time now to save more time later. That isn't the only reason that time is 'invested', but neither are future financial returns the only reason people invest money.
And that's leaving aside entirely the idea that time == money (ie. you can often substitute one for the other, or invest one to later gain the other).
Yes, the sensitive folk who object to GMOs will get shouted down soon, I hope, when people need food and it isn't there.
Myself, I look forward to microchips that manufacture carbohydrate and protein chains directly from electricity and air (water?). Then food, water and energy will truly become fungible commodities. And grain becomes irrelevant.
I think Quora handles this better than HN. It gives you the option to be completely anonymous on a case by case basis, reap the benefits/upvotes even when you are anonymous. Most people on HN/Reddit resort to throwaway accounts when they want to be completely anonymous and not tarnish their username, even though that username has no connection to a real world ID.
People/usernames are brands in online discussion, so the way we generally weigh people's opinion is affected by those brands, which is kind of a function of their comment history and any IRL connections. Say, if the username is 'pg', even if it's a hit-and-run comment with not much thought put into it, you view it differently.
As said earlier, identities is quite important to many users. Quora has done it quite well.
However, with the anonymous feature to ask question, I have seen a rapid degradation of the quality of questions coming on Quora.
I am not the only one who has felt this way. We can find a lot of people complaining about the quality of questions of late.
Buying Bitcoins while their price is so bubbly is nothing more than a gamble. Investing in other online currencies, or in companies that can help the Bitcoin economy develop, looks like a sensible use of a venture capitalist’s money.
Also from the comments section this one is particularly insightful:
If you want to value Bitcoin's potential properly you have to understand it's at minimum a decentralized payment network which will provide most of the service of retail banking offers for free or minimal fees to all the unbanked of the world. Actually considering how antiquated the banking system is, it will also offer serious competition for the already banked.
Can you imagine a world where anyone can set up a shop on the internet and instantly accept payments from all over the world to sell its product or service without any intermediary ? Well that's only one face of what Bitcoin enables. And It enables a world of possibility after that. If for people who understand Bitcoin, we can't even grasp what's going to be done with this technology. It's like trying to grasp what's going to be done with the Internet in 1990.
So you want to value Bitcoin's potential, you have to compare it to Gold as a store of value and to m1 of major currencies. Anybody that builds a model for Bitcoin's POTENTIAL without landing AT LEAST in the hundreds of billions of $ at minimum is doing something wrong.
Not everything with an exponential curve is a bubble. Technology adoption follows a S curve. And Bitcoin could be the most important technology invented since the Internet.
I agree. After talking this much about complexity, it is rather simplistic of him to praise Ritchie over Jobs in terms of impact.
On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things.
Well, actually you can't imagine what computing world would have been like unless you assume technology develops in a purely deterministic manner, in the absence of any market or cultural influences. There is a name for this line of thinking: hindsight bias[0].
Also, in the presence of this level of complexity and different layers, comparing people's impact would be necessarily subjective and rather reductionist in that, a la computers a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square sans Jobs. This would do disservice to the legacies of both Ritchie and Jobs.
Basically it sucks in your contacts from Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook etc, and schedules follow-ups for you.
Obviously, they monitor all your communications across these networks, but for me the benefit of nudging and analytics outweighs my concerns about privacy.
FWIW, if you go to http://www.amazon.com/pr (which I think you can safely expect to be owned and operated by Amazon), you DO get redirected to corporate-ir.net. That's what ultimately convinced me that the press release was legit.
I actually got started on that site. I went through their questionnaire and it told me 53 wikis met my needs and that made for a bit of a ridiculous looking comparison matrix.
