Great idea!

Just this week I was approached by a recruiter for a crypto-app building company that I know of and really like. I was (imo) a great candidate for them skill-wise, but they only pay in BTC. And while I'm a fan of crypto, I have bills to pay and they all want dollars. I don't want to deal with converting to USD every paycheck and figuring out if I need to pay taxes, transferring to my "real" bank account, etc.

I REALLY hope you all can help with stuff like that!

totally understand the hassle of figuring out how to pay taxes etc.

we definitely want to champion this idea of having fiat and crypto side by side, and how to do it properly.

going all crypto might be too brutal and we think the hybrid approach makes more sense: work for a company that pays you in fiat (for bills and legacy stuff ;)) and crypto.

life is an experiment ;p

safely deposit: Does seem convenient, but I'm not sure I could get over my privacy concerns.

You could ask them the same things you ask any human, but get radically different (and perhaps very interesting) answers.

You could look at their art, listen to their music, learn their philosophy - assuming they have any of that, and that it's comprehensible to us.

I would be unsurprised if some other species had oral histories. It seems that elephants and crows are able to communicate about specific locations and people while their referents aren't around.

Agree, new art, new music, new philosophy (I personally don't expect it to be much different from ours). But will it have any important effect on average human life ever?

The author, Ted Chiang, recently released his book of short stories, Exhalation. This story is included in the book.

It's good, but not as good as his first book, imo, "Story of Your Life and Others". Story of Your Life was the inspiration for the movie "Arrival". That book was amazing.

The first story though, in Exhalation, "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate", is one of my favorites. It's also available standalone.

That is a really good story. I think I kind of downgraded "Exhalation" a bit because I'd read that story before so it wasn't new to me.

In any case, thanks for mentioning it. Thoroughly enjoyed Story of Your Life and Others and had no idea he released a second short story collection a few months ago.

It's going straight to the top of my to-read list.

Thanks for the recommendation. I am part way through Exhalation, and I just bought “Story of Your Life and Others”. I really liked the movie Arrival - it is one of the few movies that I have purchased so I can watch it whenever I want.

We really do live in a world with so much great entertainment in the forms of literary art and movies.

How strange. I posted this 2 days ago and it didn't make it to the front page, but not for some reason it says I only posted it 6 hours ago?

Likely due to a mod re-upping the post as described here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380

Content is often tinkered with on HN by the two mods but it’s usually noted and for a purpose, might be one of them just really likes pops.

Is the .pizza just for fun or am I missing a reference?

Its because pies start out as unorganized messes and end up as a pizza.

Also for fun

I have 529 plans for both my kids. Lets say I save up enough for them to pay for their entire college. If an alternate family, making the same as us, saves nothing, could they qualify for aid, while we wouldn't?

It's hard to say without knowing how much you make, or what schools your kids might go to, but it is certainly possible. Many schools use FAFSA not just for federal aid but for determining how much "need" your kids have for other assistance beyond what the federal government might offer. They look at how much they think you can afford, assume willingness to take on some amount of debt, and weigh how much they actually want your kid in their school. If you make so much that the schools are going to consider you able to pay full tuition no matter what, a 529 will only help you. If you might qualify for some aid based solely on your income, it could make a difference: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-feldman-529/dont-l...

Not likely. FAFSA is almost 100% determined by your parents income from the previous year tax reports. It doesn't typically cover everything, even if you get the biggest possible grant. I got a decent FAFSA package, went to a very-affordable in-state college, but I still have loans that probably would have been avoidable if my parents had invested in a 529.

Why do I have to give you my email address before you'll let me figure out my carbon footprint, and how much this will cost?

We use the email to save your progress, but if you'd like you can just use any fake email

Consider using a cookie for that purpose. I was looking for the calculator everywhere until I realized I had to enter my email first. That's a pretty big trust hurdle – no thanks.

I suggest you let people use the calculator freely, and when I enter e.g. "4 transatlantic flights per year" then you show me what that sin translates to specifically for one of your offset projects, e.g. "1000 briquettes" (with photos, of course). Personally speaking, that would make me pay up.

Oh, and the 20% fee is really problematic. I'd like to see a pay-what-I-want slider where I can adjust the percentage. The slider minimum would be set to min(0.2*x, $10) or some other reasonable amount, and you can calibrate that function to maximize donations.

But at the end you don't just show the footprint online, you only have the option to get it emailed to me.

Your footprint should be available on that page—you should be able to see your annual total, your breakdowns by category, and how that compares to global averages. The "Email me my footprint" button just sends you a link so you can save it. I could see how you may want to change the email you entered once you get there though. We should add that!

Thanks for pointing that out

I just ran through the page after seeing this comment and was also confused. To me the phrasing and styling of the "Email me my footprint" button makes it feel like the end of the process and that I need to click it. It didn't immediately occur to me that I should keep scrolling down. In my case I happened to scroll so that the "Step 3: Offset" was just out of view which made it feel even more like an "OK you're done!" button, but I think even if I saw there was more I would've wanted to click the button expecting that to be the way to see my results. Maybe the two of us are outliers but it might be worth it to explore some small design tweaks here. Love the concept!

This is a great point, you're right. Thank you for that feedback, we can edit that soon.

My in-laws recently downsized to a townhouse and needed to get rid of some books, so I ended up with about 20 Jack Reacher (and similar) books. I grab one whenever we head out on vacation.

They're great, because there's no need to read them in order, or remember previous plots. They're good enough to keep my attention but not so great I can't put them down when it's time to do something else.

I don't know how they thread that needle so well, but they do. I expect when AI write the first decent book, this is what it will look like.

"A chair who asks, “Is everyone OK with choice A?” is going to get objections. But a chair who asks, “Can anyone not live with choice A?” is more likely to only hear from folks who think that choice A is impossible to engineer given some constraints."

It's funny - I've adopted a similar approach towards getting my kids to agree on something with each other. Instead of asking, "Should we do A or B or C?", and having one want A and the other dead-set on B, I ask which one do they definitely NOT want to do. Works pretty well for kids under 10...

There was a good podcast with a famous FBI negotiator, Chris Voss, who recommends if you want to sway someone, frame it as, "are you opposed to doing X?" rather than "should we do X?". People are more likely to agree with the former.

Would that still work after having worked in such an organisation for years, if the question is always phrased that way, or is it just an uncommon way of phrasing that works only so long as people are not yet thoroughly used to it?

Getting a shared mindset on what's at stake with a decision, regardless of the outcome, is the critical point.

This is a great way to understand if anything at all is at stake.

And for kids under two, you give two options and place the one you prefer second and emphasize it. Most of the kids agree. And then disagree. and then agree. and then disagree. and then you distract them with a snack and they happily go with whichever!