Hacker News Reader

ceolon Bitcoins: The Second Biggest Ponzi Scheme in History

The data that there are three pro-BTC articles on the front page every day. It's personally why I've stopped visiting as often.

We get it: You want to keep convincing yourself you didn't waste thousands of dollars on a huge, pointless bubble. Don't get pissed when it gets pointed out, though.

And another data point: Your account has 6 comments, all Bitcoin-related in different threads. I wonder what virtual currency you invested in?

ceolon A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

Credit cards are not a feature of a currency. You could just have credit cards that keep debt in BTC instead of USD.

The point of the person you're replying to is that, for 99.999999% of businesses, there is no benefit to using BTC. It doesn't offer the buyer any protection, it's extremely volatile, and it would require an overhaul of the entire economy's infrastructure to implement in any meaningful way.

ceolon A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

The most exciting thing since the web? Really? It's an interesting technology, but let's not forget Foursquare launched the same year and has had more of an impact on business, and Instagram launched a year after and has had more of an impact on the general population.

ceolon A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

Woo, bacon lollipops, server hosting, and pizza. Truly the essentials.

You need grocery stores, gas stations, clothing stores, and restaurants to start accepting it. Until then, it's really just a novelty for middle class college Libertarians.

ceolon Dear Spike Lee

Surely you're a lawyer with extensive experience in copyright law to make such a claim.

ceolon CyanogenMod Installer Application Removed from Play Store

"Apple world" is pretty big.

ceolon CyanogenMod Installer Application Removed from Play Store

Conjecture: End users can be confident everything that they purchase in an app is tied to their iTunes account. Purchasing an Amazon e-book using the Kindle app means the end user — who is not the most tech-savvy — needs to have an Amazon account and they need to be aware that anything purchased in the Kindle app (and only the Kindle app) doesn't get associated with their iTunes account, which is a different behavior than every other app on the App Store.

Of course, the 30% cut that Apple wanted to take most likely had something to do with it, but there is a good reason to forbid developers from implementing their own in-app purchases.

ceolon On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

And every time someone talks about those terrible startup jobs, everyone agrees they're garbage.

ceolon On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

We have no idea what your office is like or how much they make. We do have an idea how much PA makes, and it's enough to hire at least two people to handle these tasks.

ceolon On Penny Arcade, Exploitation, and the Myth of the Do-Everything Rock Star

> They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. The wifi at PAX Prime 2012 was unusable the majority of the time. How do you mitigate that?

Their website developer is supposed to be in charge of their convention networking?

> 'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.

Not if there's only one person handling everything. Normally, you have the main developer and someone who is on-call. However, PA wants a developer, a sysadmin, a DBA, and an IT guru all rolled into one, and they want this unicorn to be on call for all four of these jobs 24/7. That's not normal. That's horse shit.

ceolon How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties

If you can't make interesting conversation without talking about sex, politics, or religion, that sounds like a problem with you.

ceolon One Woman's Dangerous War Against the Most Hated Man on the Internet

Rape victim-blaming still happens. A lot.

ceolon You are not a software engineer (2011)

The author didn't say that every engineering project was perfect — only that he would believe an engineer if they gave him a very specific estimate.

ceolon Python 2 vs. Python 3: A retrospective

That's the best time, so that people don't think it's a function they should be calling without understanding exactly what they're doing.

ceolon Python 2 vs. Python 3: A retrospective

I forget if it's Jinja or Django's template, but one of them has a function that only exists inside of for loops that returns the current index. I thought that was a great way to handle it, since it's always available without changing any syntax.

In retrospect, I suppose the .index() method would be fine, since Lists can't hold two of the same object, and Dicts return the key by default.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

I love how you automatically assume I'm a feminist or have some connection to the feminist community, despite me never proclaiming that. Is this another PUA technique? To fall flat on your face in an argument?

ceolon Shopify accepts Bitcoin

You made the BTC-zealots angry. Be careful; most of them have nothing to lose.

Get it?

ceolon Shopify accepts Bitcoin

If someone holding an opposing view to you leaves you speechless, it generally means you are indoctrinated in your belief and should reevaluate it.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

Probably the same way, but being a female pickup artist doesn't carry all of that "constantly objectified in media" and "the subject of a steady stream of slut-shaming (but if she doesn't put out she's totally a bitch)" baggage that's there when a man is trying to manipulate a woman into having sex with him.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

I had to scroll all the way down here to see someone use the word "feminist" as a baseless insult. You guys need to step up your game.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

Yeah! It's about empowering socially awkward people who just have trouble holding conversations! That's why it's called "pick up artistry": because you're picking up conversations!

Wait...

---

I honestly wonder how far up your ass your head has to be to completely ignore just how saturated the PUA community is with terms designed to objectify, marginalize, belittle, and disparage specifically women, and just how many of the highest regarded figureheads of the community are throbbing dickholes whose only goal in life is to find a modicum of self worth by pandering to the most cliche stereotype of traditional, toxic masculinity.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

> But the book never stated that the pussy flow was blocked in Denmark, just that there was low quality, masculine pussy.

He sure isn't helping his case. All of the random claims of "socialism" and "left-leaning" don't help, either.

In fact, none of his clarifications actually prove she misquoted him, and each time he quoted his book in that post, it fit exactly with the original review.

From his language (referring to women as "the pussy" instead of as, you know, actual people) to his extreme generalizations of women and cultures, it's apparent the original review was spot-on for both Roosh's book and PUA culture in general.

ceolon Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

Nobody's buying it, man. PUA techniques are for the socially awkward the same way blown glass pipes are for tobacco smokers. What people claim and what the vast majority use it for are two different things.

All you have to do is look at the OP's profile to find this picture.[0] That sure doesn't look like some poor bloke who has trouble talking to people.

[0]: (slightly NSFW) http://www.pualingo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/herbal-ty...

ceolon A Critique of Lavabit

If you're the type of person who can actually get through the install process,[0] you're the type of person who doesn't care about having to access it via localhost.

There's nothing wrong with making a web mail client this way. Many people already access mail via their browser, so this is not drastically different. It also means they don't have to develop and test three different codebases.

I imagine they will get to the point of having the client wrapped for the platform so the user doesn't have to fudge around with it and can just click the icon and have it open in their browser (or the client's browser.)

[0]: https://github.com/pagekite/Mailpile#setting-up-the-basic-co...

ceolon California woman ticketed for wearing Google Glass while driving

Isn't Glass always turned on and waiting for user input? Does "is operating" mean the device is powered even if it's not doing anything?

These are some of the things the courts have to figure out.

ceolon The Slash Programming Language

Really, the only reason Python and Ruby have the same "noticeably higher" barrier to entry is because most cheap hosting services don't support Python and Ruby the same way they do PHP. Python and Ruby are just as easy, if not easier, for a beginner to get into outside of web dev.

ceolon The Slash Programming Language

> PHP is a general purpose programming language.

No no no no no no no. Nonono. No.

It's a web framework and template language built around a handful of C wrappers and awkward database interactions. It can't even represent unsigned 64 bit integers. Any complex math requires you to convert the numbers into strings.

PHP is an advanced template language for HTML.

ceolon Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period”

While you're in that hospital, ask what their procedure is if you've been infected with rabies within the past week. It's most certainly not "curtains and sedation."

Just that bit of factual nonsense leads me to believe you are speaking far out of your area of expertise.

ceolon Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

You used their trademarked brand name in a product and URL for that product. That's a huge mistake.

Plus there's the whole issue with your app sidestepping reddit's "delete", "remove", "edit", and "private subreddit" functionality. Those things exist for very good reasons and are nothing like what Social Fixer did.

ceolon FBI raids alleged online drug market Silk Road, arrests owner

Wait, are you talking large as in amount of land, amount of people, or amount of GDP? Because I don't believe the US is the largest in any of those.