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Exactly. I really liked Yudkowski's framing of the rationale behind his political beliefs and agreed with his progression of ideas until he reached his conclusion. In particular, I liked his stating the issues in terms of pragmatism rather that principles because it allows for some consideration of "the public good" (which idealistic libertarians bristle at), even though that idea is admittedly hard to pin down.

I won't hesitate to acknowledge the (seemingly inherent) problems with government. However, laissez-faire capitalism has it's own inherent failings: every non-libertarian has their own list but they tend to include externalities (environment, public health, ...), ideas of "fairness" (large income inequality, valuing lives in terms of income, opportunity, ...), commons (turning things that are naturally shared---public spaces, roads, ideas, water---into private monopolies). There are well-worn libertarian responses to all of these concerns, but each issue is complex and I've not generally been satisfied with purely laissez-faire approaches (so far).

I like the idea of government serving as an (imperfect) check-and-balance on corporations, just as voters and separate branches are imperfect checks on government. As broken as government tools like regulation can be, I suspect the threat of their use is government's most effective tool.

Interesting that he claims that it's difficult to change a regular expression to cope with new requirements but easy to change a hand-coded loop.

In my experience, the opposite is true (up to the point when your grammar becomes non-regular).

Probably also on sites linked from HN.

I doubt many people are using G+ circles for the value judgments your post seems to imply. Labeling people as "family", "sorority sisters", or "coworkers" is not such a tough decision and I think few would say its a "bad thing to do".

On the other hand, perhaps there's some use for having a circle of people unlikely to be offended by your dirty jokes or political rants, but even applying those labels doesn't seem too onerous or harmful (there's a safe default for tricky cases).

I don't see why a hacker would do this. They've already broken the law so this just increases their chances of being caught. If they wanted to be "nice", they could just have stolen fewer of the bitcoins.

I bet this is the explanation. It's certainly one of the few reasons I can imagine why they'd give and then revoke an offer.

I believe the new network could choose to accept the old coins so you wouldn't have to start from scratch.

Bitcoin is designed to undergo change. It just requires convincing enough operators to use the updated version.

I think this article nails the description of a problem that Russ Roberts also alluded to on EconTalk -- that bitcoin can change and those changes are made somewhat democratically.(http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/04/andresen_on_bit.htm...). I think libertarians assume that the bitcoin network will be full of other libertarians. The article is right that the network may also be full of big entities whose behavior is regulated. Whatever your feelings about regulation, this would seem to make bitcoin less interesting.

I think one option is to accept that the bitcoin protocol will be forked massively and design it from the ground up to support exchanges between various versions of the protocol. That way, libertarians could avoid versions with inflationary policies. In this setup, would there be any reason for an entity to choose an inflatable flavor of bitcoin? Perhaps certain businesses and banks would be coerced to through regulation and that would create more widespread demand for those forks. It seems possible that most users would use the regulated bitcoins and the libertarian version might become a black-market currency.

All this feels not too different from the current situation where you can invest in gold or leave your money in a fiat currency. I guess the main difference is that the "gold" (i.e., the non-inflating bitcoin forks) might be less traceable and more liquid than true gold is today. I'm beginning to suspect that, while bitcoin is a damned-cool technical idea, it isn't likely to massively change the world other than, perhaps, to grease the wheels of black-market transactions.

Thanks, this sounds promising. I'll take a look. I never cease to be impressed by Amazon's collection of services.

I wonder if there is some kind of official annotation that can be added to a person's record indicating that they should be inconvenienced and harassed? If so, are officials "officially trained" to perform this function?

Or else, is this a case of local officials seeing that someone notorious is passing through and abusing their discretion to harass them and cause them to miss flights?

Let me first say that Haskell is extremely cool and every developer should experiment with it. Laziness supports beautiful/declarative expression of programs, and there are some useful ways of structuring programs (e.g., operating over lazy lists) that are far more natural in Haskell than OCaml.

However, for some programs, having a type-system that is fussy about side-effects imposes a significant effort burden for a meager correctness payoff. (For other programs, this bean counting is a huge win.) Also, I find it tricky to reason about the performance of lazy programs.

OCaml (and presumably SML) hit a practical sweet-spot in the statically-typed functional programming world.

Thanks for your take. I quite like OCaml---it's syntax is a bit quirky, but I guess I've used it enough that I've mostly stopped seeing the quirks. I've wanted to use Haskell for a larger project for a while now, but the right project hasn't presented itself.

I'm curious what industry you're in that you're able to make significant use of Haskell?

I'm a happy Google user, but it's nice to have some choices. Nonetheless, I agree that Google will probably dominate until something game-changing comes along.

It's about design, which relates to both.

Thanks for the pointer. My first thought is that I didn't see anything overwhelmingly compelling there, although I can see the benefits of having a "standard" language with many implementations vs. an implementation defined language.

As far as OCaml OO goes, I rarely use it (with one exception: objects implementing the "visitor pattern" for traversing the AST of a C program [1]) so its existence doesn't affect me. Perhaps I'd view the resulting language complexity as a negative if I had to maintain OCaml code that was OO heavy.

[1]: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~necula/cil/api/Cil.cilVisitor....

The members of the research group I work in are pretty heavy users of OCaml and I'm a big proponent of languages of the ML style. I generally have the impression that OCaml has become the de facto ML implementation. Can anyone make a case why I might want to consider using SML rather than OCaml?

I was expecting (or hoping) that the pictorial versions would somehow illuminate why these various identities hold. But they seem to be just an alternative set of symbols.

I wonder why numerals are used to represent 2 and 3 in some places, but stacked boxes are used in others?

The idea appears to be that artists find the use of colors easier to memorize / mentally manipulate compared to letters for variable identifiers. I'm not an artist, so I'm curious if others find this to be true.

The link below suggests that you're right---the price of gold was remarkably steady for at least the second half of the 1800s.

http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf

Why would the price have been so steady? Was the supply of gold increasing at just the right rate to keep it steady (unlikely) or was the economy so much less efficient at the time that prices didn't tend to fluctuate as they should (my guess). Perhaps the government played a role by owning a massive amount of gold? I don't think any of these explanations would apply to bitcoin (or gold, now).

Is there a better explanation? (and does it also apply to bitcoin?)

> yet no deflationary spiral has set in (afaik)

Gold isn't currently the currency (in most places), so I'm not sure what you mean here. If you listen to the podcast, the right-leaning (but generally fair) host makes a convincing explanation why there would be deflation under bitcoin. Also, gold and deflation are part of a popular story for explaining the great depression. I say all of this not to debate any of these points, but to point out that there is a case to be made that bitcoin would deflate over time and that it might have negative consequences.

I think bitcoin is somewhat different than gold because it is more decentralized (in practice) than having a national currency backed by gold. For example, it may scale more cleanly than gold and cash for corrupt uses, since bank accounts and the sources of money can be more readily hidden. I'm skeptical that this is a good thing.

I'm aware that people hold your views. I was more curious whether I am right that bitcoin is mostly incompatible with mine.

> Regarding the question of totality on slide 40, a naïve analysis would say that the deconstruction "let (y : ys) =" could fail (if the list returned from reverse were empty), and thus the function would not be total. Of course this is not the case, since reversing a non-empty list returns a non-empty list, but this requires that reverse be dependently typed.

You are right, I missed the deconstruction. Thanks!

Technically, I think BitCoin is extremely cool. However, I can't help but be skeptical of many of its apparent consequences:

During the financial crisis, many on the left expressed concern about a deflationary spiral. I don't claim any economic expertise, but the concern seemed valid. Bitcoin, by slowly reducing the speed at which currency is produced, effectively ensures long term deflation. Couldn't this have all kinds of bad consequences for the economy?

I favor ideas like "campaign finance reform". I also am not a fan of various forms of fraud, bribery, and organized crime. Of course these things all exist now, but bitcoin would seem to make them scale much more smoothly. I don't want government to micromanage the economy, but I also want it to be able to create and enforce laws that help correct problems caused by extreme economic freedom.

I also think taxes are needed. I think a bitcoin-driven economy is one that is hard to tax because it's hard to prove that person X has, or has received, some amount of money. Even sales tax seems difficult to collect. Is there some form of tax that would still work?

Also, will lenders be wary of bitcoin since they have little recourse to collect money from someone? Will something like credit cards still work? Will investors be scared to invest in startups since it becomes harder to trace where money is going?

I'm not trying to debate the free market with the libertarians out there. I'm curious if someone can explain why my concerns are invalid, due to my misunderstanding of the economic consequences of bitcoin.

This is a cool effort. Since agda : haskell :: coq : ocaml, I'm curious why agda wasn't used. Does it not not support extraction in the same way?

I would liked to have seen the talk itself since there are a few places in the slides where more detail would be nice. For example, I saw no reason why focusLeft on slide 40 wouldn't be total---it's not recursive, so why wouldn't it terminate? (given that reverse is total)

I also wonder whether most functions in functional programs can be rewritten so that termination is evident due to structural recursion (like the transformation described on slide 41).

OCaml: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Y_combinator#OCaml

I think the parent was referring to what you might listen to on those headphones.

Well I don't think Google has any choice about releasing their Kernel modifications, Android will still meet this openness criteria.

Or is that what you were saying? If so, that's kind of a silly definition of openness--If you care about the kernel being open source, you probably also care about the rest of the OS. I'm disappointed about the delay, but Android is still way more open than iOS in the ways I care about, i.e., I can run any app I want.

While he could have stated his point more succinctly, what made the article notable was how he used his personal experiences to make the point. You can google and pull up dozens of takes on the first amendment that come to a similar conclusion, but this article was interesting for providing an account nuanced by Neil Gaiman's first-hand experience.

Check out Amazon's fulfullment services: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....

Or maybe more similar, in effect, to getting free pieces of candy from a candy machine :).

Of course, there is a contingent that believes there is no similarity between something like this and stealing since nothing physical is taken (but I'm not in that camp).