So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.

TRIANGLE MASTERCLASS - a thread.

what's the simplest, most effective method of trading a market that trends as hard as cryptocurrencies?

trendlines.

one trendline on its own is strong, but when you put two together you quickly realize just how powerful this simple tool can be.

i've been using triangles for as long as i can remember.

it seems dumb, and almost counter-intuitive to approach such a complex game like trading with such a simple approach like shapes...but maybe when markets start acting stupid its okay to dumb down our approach.

look, not all triangles are the same.

anybody can draw some lines on a chart any way they'd like. sometimes, we let our bias affect our charts rather than the other way around.

i personally have done this more times than i can count.

you see...triangles (and analysis as a whole) is not necessarily intended to make trading easier as much as it is to make trading simple.

you want a fluid bias that can change easily, rather than one relying on 10 steps of conflicting confirmation before entering a new trade

trendlines enable us to maintain a fluid bias.

i mean, how much simpler can it be than "above this line bullish, below this line bearish" ? 😂

one trendline on its own can be enough to make a good trade, but when you put two together it can turn a good trade into a great one.

Think crypto is confusing?

You're right.

Let's make it easier.

Here's Crypto Terminology 101: 🧵

Altcoin:

Any coin that's not #Bitcoin

Ether (#ETH) is the second most popular coin overall and the most well-known Altcoin.

Ether is the native cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain.

There are thousands of other altcoins, but for now, this is the one to know.

Bitcoin: (#BTC)

The first decentralized digital currency.

Launched in 2009 by an unknown person or organization known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto."

It is the most famous, and most valuable cryptocurrency.

Blockchain:

The core tech behind Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies.

An open, distributed, general ledger where transactions are organized into blocks which are then connected using cryptography.

Coin:

A store of digital value that lives on a blockchain.

Some blockchains, such as Bitcoin, use the same name for both the network and the coin.

Stable coins are another type of cryptocurrency which are backed by fiat currency (e.g the US dollar) or commodities such as Gold.

NFT Crypto Guide 101 📚

🔹What are Non-Fungible-Tokens?
🔹What are NFTs used for?
🔹What do I expect for the NFT space in 2021?
🔹What NFTs do i hold?
🔹Where do I buy NFTs?

I will go through all of these questions.

Thread below 👇

🔹What are Non-Fungible-Tokens (NFTs)?

NFTs are crypto tokens that represent something unique. They are not mutually interchangeable.

This means that one NFT is not the same as the other.

Unlike for example Bitcoin, where each satoshi is exactly the same as the other.

These NFTs exist on the Ethereum Blockchain. Instead of ERC-20 tokens, we call these NFTs: ERC-721 or ERC-1155 tokens.

Each of these NFTs have an unique ID that seperates them.

For example, The Hashmask with ID #6718 is completely different than the Hashmask with ID #9939.

Different visually as well as the ID on the blockchain.

🔹What are NFTs used for?

NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity and digital ownership.

The main applications we see today are:

🔹Digital Art
🔹Collectibles
🔹Games

1/20 Stablecoin Tweetstorm- I have a fairly unique perspective on stablecoins... I was an "unofficial advisor" to the launch of USDT (Tether) Some of my best friends were CEO/CTO/Founders, etc. I didn't invest at the time (which was a lucky move) as the company sold

2/20 for a loss to Bitfinex within two years of creation. It had very little usage, banking issues, and really no clear path to growth (that is until one of the largest exchanges on earth began using it) So with this short background let me share a bit of my thoughts on

3/20 this category and why I think it is so important... (Full Disclosure: after all these years I finally found a stablecoin project that I thought was worth investing in and i will be shilling it later in this thread:-)

4/20 The community knows all about how important stablecoins are to the overall health and usage of the entire crypto marketplace. With an overall market cap of in excess of $1 Trillion the crypto market is large and growing... No category of crypto is growing faster than

5/20 Stablecoins: With a total category value of just over $33B and over $10B per day in trade volume it is no longer just a "niche" Stablecoins are a major category and I predict this category will increase in value faster then the overall crypto market. (My bet is $100B