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Jacob Appelbaum likes to call this to the attention of people by comparing it to safe sex practices.

When you engage someone online, you'd like to know a few things about how that person with handle your personal data. If you know someone to be incapable/unwilling to secure your data (analogous to someone indulging in risky sexual behaviour), then you can refrain from interacting with that person on a deeper level (i.e. don't have sex with them).

Pretty hard to do in practice, but if everyone understood this concept it'd be easier to make it work.

I saw that sentence with the word "refraction" and I wasn't sure if it was the whole idea or if refraction was just one part of a clever design to enhance the effects of another artificial light source.

That's why I felt it was misleading. Looking at the article again, though, it's probably clearer than I originally thought it was.

The problem with the article is that they're obfuscating the fact that this does not produce light. It's basically a smarter way to poke a hole through your ceiling. It's not a device that converts energy into light.

Only if you're a bank. Or the FED.

That's an interesting question.

Maybe all politeness is fake to some degree (you're interfacing with someone by being nice regardless of what that person does), but we say "fake politeness" when you're spending a lot of energy to keep the politeness filter on.

Tell me if you have a theory about real vs fake politeness.

Oh, wow, I'm sorry. I should have seen that one. I guess I liked "long tail" and the alternative didn't occur to me. =)

It sounds nice, but when I think about what exactly is meant by "long tail" I can't come up with an answer that would be compatible with the idea of the "long tail" in statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail).

It does sounds better than just "in the long run, throughout history, just following orders is wrong". It seems like it's referring to people who are outliers and through which all the change is happening, but technically it's not really saying that. No ?

IANAL, but in some states there are certain legal mechanisms that prevent domestic violence victims to back off and drop their charges (as a "safeguard" against intimidation leading to dropped charges).

I wouldn't be surprised if some states had laws that more or less forced the potential victim to go through the trial even if she intends on testifying in your favor. I dunno. Just sayin'.

That's part of the problem with impulsive purchases on Steam. Paying $50 for a game on Steam that I'll play for 100+ hours is an amazing deal.

For a game that you don't play, paying any amount is not worth it. And there's almost no limit to how many of those I can buy using a "latte argument".

Thank you for pointing that out. Sometimes I feel as though movies should have a negative cost because they're generally not worth the time required to watch them.

And then that quickly turns into a argument supporting piracy.

The "harassment" component for sexual harassment is as much a requirement as the "sexual" part.

If someone asks for a hug and you don't want it, you can offer the handshake and just wait. The next time around, they probably won't offer the hug, but if they do you can do the same thing over. Nobody will seriously judge you for being a "handshaker and not a hugger".

As for doing some kind of predatory hugging, then yeah, it's obviously not cool, but I don't think any male could pull it off on a female without paying the social price.

It's a bit strange to be comparing any kind of recreative drug to alcohol.

What if I had a pill that had nothing to do with alcohol, but was super fun to take with friends and there was no detectable hangover ?

Would calling it a "synthetic alcohol" give it more chances of being legal in the context of the ridiculous War on Drugs ?

It's a good point to raise because we are used to accepting violence (it was in movies and television that existed before modern video games).

I remember listening to a video online where the person explained how the american army had problems with the use of torture on TV because it always worked on TV when Jack Bauer needs it. New officers came in with these preconceived notions about torture because they had "learned" from TV that it worked (without saying it was moral or not).

Exactly my reasoning.

You could say the same thing about land or real estate in big cities.

They're not worthless if you can purchase real stuff with it instead of converting back into fiat currencies.

The same can be said of every fiat currency : they're useless unless you can get real stuff (or services) for it at the end of the day.

I like your analogy with the "empty calories". It's easy to make the association with the empty shopping malls or cities in China.

> it brought about the longest sustained period of economic growth in human history, without which we would not even have Bitcoin to celebrate right now

The industrial revolution happened while on the gold standard (with just a few short periods where it didn't apply, as I understand). Steam power, railroads, electrification, refrigeration, anaesthesia, early automobiles and so on.

I'm very fond of the computers that we have now (yay 20th century !), but it's a bit hard to brush aside the 19th century just like that. There's insane economic growth that happened in that period.

I answered three of those where I didn't have to think too hard to follow the reasoning. It would be nice to have the answers eventually after the experiment is over.

One of my theories so far is those computer-generated proofs don't use triple equalities (e.g. "a = b = c") even though it makes a better explanation in certain limited situations.

Calling it a zero-sum game makes it sound like some people are exploiting others. You can make the same argument with gold by saying that, if everybody stopped caring about gold on the same day, then everybody owning gold would be big losers in the zero-sum game of gold.

Moreover, the argument that the cited video makes about criminals using the currency (i.e. "honor among thieves" doesn't exist) is fundamentally at odds with the concept of the infinitely iterated prisoner's dilemma. That's why the whole concept of "reputation" envolved (in Nature and online). Someone with 98.7% positive feedback might screw you to save $50, but doing so would not be beneficial in the long run.

And maybe the 5k seller wasn't even trying to game the system. He/she just wanted to get out.

Imagine a hedge fund with an order of magnitude more monetary mass trying to provoke those kind of sell offs and benefit from them.

I like your slides and I'll probably check out the talk later on.

I think that depending on what the future looks like (no zombie apocalypse, massive wars, etc.), there will be some kind of cryptocurrency that basically replaces gold. It's very exciting.

At the current time, though, given that bitcoin hasn't withstood the test of time, it's a bit hard to claim that gold is outdated. It's not hard to convince someone that gold or silver have value because of all the historical precedents. That counts for something when considering in which money to invest.

My first idea would be to see if it's possible to create massive sell-offs by crashing through many people's "stop on loss" barriers.

For example, let's say that the exchange rate is 100 USD per bitcoin at the moment and that you have tons of people who would absolutely sell their bitcoins if it went below 90. I'm not in the bitcoin game, but I think mtgox offers "stop on loss" features so that people could get out of bitcoins automatically.

If you're sure that you want to be in bitcoins, but you think that there are a lot of scared players who put their "stop on loss" too high, you might be able to provoke some kind of selling avalanche by selling sufficiently many bitcoins at once. The price drops below 90, which triggers a lot of automated selling. This makes the price drop even further, triggering other stop on loss barriers, driving the price to 80 and so on.

With your $5 millions you buy up all those bitcoins at a rate of 50 USD per bitcoin when the avalanche stops. Then people realize what just happened and the price of bitcoins crawls back to 100 because that was more or less the fair market price.

The point is, with $5 million dollars you might have the power to create digital panics, a "flash crash", and use that to your advantage.

I don't know if $5 million is enough for that, and it's not a guaranteed return.

I like his point about how trivial "tl;dr" summaries often don't get at the core idea of an essay, but they still work for news formats which are kinda "tl;dr" already.

He wasn't talking about homunculus, if that's what you mean, but I didn't imagine there could be confusion about what he meant.

It's basically like thinking about the kids that could have had if you had descendants with person A instead of person B. There's nobody around to be disappointed for not being born, but those who got be alive are "lucky" in a certain sense of the word.

The most interesting part of that post ties with something that Richard Dawkins likes to remind us :

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia."

This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX.

Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.

To the person who just wants to save for retirement and doesn't want to invest in the rollercoaster stock market, the best thing that money could do is to at least retain its current purchasing power.

You can talk about "maintaining a healthy flow of currency", but to some people it's more like "use your dollar coupons before they expire" and they don't like playing that game.

It seems to me like almost nobody in the comments on HN believes his story to be genuine. And yet, this guy updated his blog to add :

"Wow, I really didn't expect this story to blow up the way it has. I've never had anything voted up on Hacker News before, much less gain the top spot. I'm still not convinced it hasn't all been a fever-dream."

which just supports the hypothesis that he's just bullshitting everybody.

Reminds me of an idea in Schopenhauer's "The Art of Being Right".

He says that, when you argue against someone who is part of a cult, you can use his cult's beliefs in the argumentation against him (because he's supposed to admit them as truths). However, he cannot use his cult's beliefs in arguing against you.

So, TPB can reprimand a copyright organization for violating copyright, but it doesn't work the other way around. It's not hypocrisy.