It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

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.

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

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

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):

Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.

"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."

Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.

Google's interview system is not great but there are various reasons why it feels less than it is. Most candidates don't know what the goal of our interviews are. First rule, it is not about finding an optimal solution or any solution at all.

You are interviewed for multiple skills simultaneously. Cognitive skills, communication, leadership are a few to name. If the point is not finding a solution, then what is it? Let me explain.

Your interviewers try to understand what it feels like to work with you on a daily basis. An interview question is just a tool in achieving that, it is not there to specifically measure your skills on a topic but a tool to understand the depth of your thinking.

Before the interview starts, ask them what they want to get out of this interview. Good interviewers should already have a plan and a set of expectations. Ask them what you should do. Don't start coding yet. Ask them you should produce. Discussion, diagrams, pseudo code, code?

Then, start cracking the question. List whatever questions you think it is important to solve this question, ask your edge cases. Get to a point where you are discussing about pros/cons of the solutions. These steps are critical. Don't just start coding. Have a consensus first.

Ok, here is a thread for you.
What happens when you have:
Netflix
Apple
Amazon
WarnerMedia +
Disney+
SonyCrackle (Reboot)
Verizon All Access (after they buy CBS/Viacom)
UniversalSkyMedia
By 2021
Answer? Internet Slows To A Craw and Dies.
Why?
Bandwidth.

Netflix's gets 35% of all internet traffic.
Now we all know Apple Coming to Netflix Corner.
We know that WarnerMedia Planning One
We Know about Disney+
Now how will the net handle 8 Streaming Platforms all at once?
Answer - IT CANT.

But Novid, the speed, the 4K the all everything?
NOOOOO BUDDY.
Even if you could do it and even if AWS ran six million clouds, The Net Will still slow to a crawl. 35%, goes to nearly 90% if any of the 8 or all of the 8 eat at netflix's numbers.

Oh, they wouldn't be running at once.
FOOL. You forget how bad things were when game of thrones season premieres came around. HBO SERVERS FALL DOWN GO BOOM!

Now see if a season like 2021 come around and they air shows on a same day. It gets crazy. AT&T and others gonna realize they cant build out forever. Something will give and it might be your entertainment consumption big time.

The Phantom of Heilbronn (or how for 16 years the German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist)

(Thread, non sweary version here: https://t.co/iDOIhaFgIT)

Between the years of 1993 and 2009, police in Heilbronn, Germany were tracking just about the most elusive serial killer since Ted Cruz.

Known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, or occasionally The Woman Without A Face, she was implicated in so many crimes that the police eventually put out a reward of €300,000 for any information leading to her arrest.

The case that brought her to the media's attention and earned her two ridiculously badass nicknames

(honestly, if you don't want people to do murders you're going to have to come up with less glamorous nicknames - what's wrong with Jack Shitshispants or the Zodiac Cuck)

A quick thread on intelligence analysis in the context of cyber threat intelligence. I see a number of CTI analysts get into near analysis paralysis phases for over thinking their assessments or over obsessing about if they might be wrong. (1/x)

Consider this scenario. A CTI analyst identifies new intrusions and based on the collection available and their expertise note that the victims are all banks. Their consumer wants to know when threats specifically target banks (not just that banks are victims).

The CTI analyst has, from their collection, at this time, and based on their expertise enough to make an activity group (leveraging the Diamond Model in this example) that meet's the requirement of their consumer. So what's the problem?

The CTI analyst begins to over think it. "What if I had more collection? Would my analysis change? I really don't *know* they aren't also targeting mining companies in Australia as I don't have collection there."

The analyst knows their analysis is going to be shared. Maybe even public. "What if another team or professional intelligence firm has more collection and ends up noting that it isn't banking specific at all. Banks are victims, not targets. Will my consumer distrust me later?"