Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

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.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

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.

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.

As a “lifelong” technician, I am finding that bitcoin lends itself well to technical analysis. Here is my take on the recent price action. (THREAD)

Elliott Wave Theory: Looking at the chart pattern since the recent high of 64,870, I can't help but notice that a textbook 5-wave decline may be unfolding. According to EWT, primary trends move in 5 waves and corrections are 3 waves. /2

The typical progression is that wave 1 is generally dismissed as noise, then wave 2 is a sharp and deep retracement of wave 1 (at least 62% but sometimes 75% or more), which creates the false comfort that it was indeed just a minor correction. /3

Then wave 3 comes & that's the big one. It's called the recognition wave & is typically the longest & most impulsive wave (usually 1.618x wave 1). /4

After the wave 3 low, the 4th wave is often a triangle or "zigzag" (a triangle pattern that retraces much less of wave 3 than wave 2 did of wave 1). A rule of thumb is 38%. Finally we get wave 5, which is often equal to wave 1, but often also less (0.618x). /5

Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.

But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.

An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.

Of course, that's a bad heuristic in a casino, which relies on a constant influx of losers. But in other environments, particularly with persistent populations and no evidence for sudden changes in the underlying laws, it makes sense.

The new age of privacy, and the crypto ecosystem that will enable it.

A Thread.
$XHV $SCRT $RUNE
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Throughout my research, @HavenXHV The Haven protocol renewed my faith, that privacy wasn't just a temporary trend, but something with actual, sustainability. The creation of a private bank, exchange, and access to real world assets in completely privacy of my own vault. $XHV
2/

Haven's offering to the world, with it's private assets $xUSD $xEUR $xGOLD and xSilver, made me research what else can be done privately, now that I have private stable coin options. My first question was, if I wanted to sell my private assets, how would I do it? $XHV
3/

It didn't take me long before I discovered $RUNE and @thorchain_org and their cross chain liquidity pools and decentralized exchange capabilities. How anyone can offer liquidity and earn rewards and trading fees for doing so. But also,how all trading pairs,are interchangable.
4/

This made me realize that as Thorchain grows in popularity,they will provide the ability for everyone, across the cryptosphere,to trade any coin for any coin. Kind of like uniswap, but cross chain,and outside, yet including, the erc-20 ecosystem. It's uniswap on steroids. $XHV
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