Safari extension to hide Bitcoin stories on HN

Personally I think one should only upvote for the content of the link, not for raping the front page because one think some topic is more interesting than others.

Using an extension to hide the stories is ignoring them. It's just automated and highly efficient.

Well, when you consider that Hacker News was called Startup News when I first became aware of it,

http://web.archive.org/web/20070226001637/http://news.ycombi...

I think that misses out on a lot of the history that made this site what it is today.

The rest seems to be driven by speculators, and possibly borders on something like a pump and dump scheme to drive the price up so the speculators can make more money, at the expense of the later participants who fall for the hype.

We reside in a world controlled by a collection of political forces. Money is the primary lever by which pressure is exerted in order to execute political policy.

I am not an enormous Ayn Rand fan, however there were a few parts of Atlas Shrugged I really did find very eye opening. The effete playboy of the series had a good one that I'll briefly include here to outline the importance of the core issue as it relates to the subtle strings of force in our political existence;

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

I still find the use of terms like moochers and looters loaded, but the core point is extremely potent. Money is the primary friendly lever in modern society, it is the primary incentive for production. For this reason alone, the ways in which bitcoin can upset the apple cart should be thoroughly considered and not simply discarded offhand.

People objecting to bitcoin are making a cursory glance at it and it hits one of their suspicion triggers and they instantly discard it; Enriches early adopters? Aha, must be a ponzi scheme, no need to dig deeper here.

There are far more interesting objections that are actually bounded in the fabric of what is real rather than a cursory glance and misunderstanding of what is seen. What about an execution of the age old idea of assassination politics with bitcoin as the medium of exchange? If you really want to fearmonger, think hard about what might actually happen when the primary lever of society is completely immune to government. This is both frightening in some ways and exhilerating in others.

How about superfluid buying and selling agencies run by speculators that contract to traders exchanging local fiat currencies for bitcoins on the wire and instantly back to local fiat for the receiver at the end, reducing exposure for the merchant and buyer and abstraction from the messy cryptographic details of the implementation and enabling the speculators, as well as providing hefty profits for the administrators of such agents, in turn incentivising an enormous bazaar of such agents to exist in a huge snowball effect that makes regulation even more of a distant, ridiculous idea.

Think about it, really, really hard. This has already changed the world, the only question now is how will the chips fall. It is exactly appropriate that it should get a lot of attention here.

First is (subjective) oversaturation. It's like the days when there's some announcement or scandal involving Apple, and you know that for the next little while this is all you're going to see. After a while it's just "oh, another Bitcoin story?"

Second is that it seems to turn off the rational-thinking centers of many brains. You end up with lots and lots of threads full of people who either A) once read a Neal Stephenson novel and now are convinced this is the Crypt (it's not) and the Black Chamber dudes are coming any minute (they aren't) or B) are being hit hard by the Dunning-Kruger effect and think they know more about economics or world politics than they actually do.

Third is that, well, it's pretty boring. OK, you made an alternative currency. This is not new. The specific selection of buzzwords around this alternate currency is new, but that in itself isn't really something that gets me excited, and in fact I think that's more of a turnoff, if only because my experience has been that the more buzzwords you pile on (decentralized peer-to-peer non-fiat non-inflationary alternative currency with hard crypto anonymization!), the less likely you are to actually have an interesting product.

(and fourth is that sooner or later somebody's probably going to blow it wide open, security-wise, but that's neither here nor there)

    @@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ for(var index = 0; index < tds.length; index++)
         td.getAttribute('class').indexOf('title') != -1 && 
         td.firstChild && 
         td.firstChild.tagName == 'A' &&
    -    td.firstChild.text.match(/bit\s*coin/i))
    +    td.firstChild.text.match(/(hide|block|ban).*(story|stories|article|submission|comment)/i))
       {
         var tr1 = td.parentNode;
         var tr2 = tr1.nextSibling;

But I still find it silly.. Just don't click on stories that don't interest you. heh

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Perhaps I could make it into an extension.

also, i've periodically been popping in to read the comments in Chrome or on iHackerNews.com

Woah, wait, what? Even if everything else you said is right (and if nothing else, these guys are shady), Mtgox has done a volume of 38825BTC in the last 24 hours -- that's a volume of $411541 today. (At the current rate, which means it's probably more like $380k, but whatever)