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jfergusonon The Fair Price of a Bitcoin is Zero

The price of a Bitcoin is the amount of other resource (possibly a more traditional currency, like electrum or cocoa beans ;) ) that two parties can agree to trade at.

What's fairness?

jfergusonon Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?

Or it could be intentional misdirection, as with "favour". Not that I'm particularly invested in Satoshi==Szabo, but if I were interested in deflecting suspicion, that would be one obvious-looking way to do it.

jfergusonon HTML5 game written in 0 lines of JS

No fun allowed, people. Your software either needs to be practical or intentionally pedagogical.

jfergusonon Slowing Moore's Law: Why You Might Want To and How You Would Do It

What do you disagree with from http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law#state-actors-... ?

jfergusonon The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

They are all you, until they start reacting differently to their different inputs and anything stochastic within their simulation, and at which point they stop being "the same" you is basically up to you. The difference between them after a minute or two would probably be nothing compared to the difference between you and you a year ago; if you call the latter "you", the former should probably count too. You wouldn't be aware of being 100 beings, but 100 yous would be aware of existing.

Calculating down to the quantum level is hopefully not necessary (that seems impossible to get efficiently out of any computing substrate physics will let us have). The few people suggesting that physics at that scale impacts consciousness aren't taken very seriously by neuroscientists in general.

jfergusonon The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

Some abstraction would probably be involved; the idea is to recreate all the relevant activity that impacts consciousness while avoiding going any deeper, and most neuroscientists would (I think) speculate that individual molecules aren't necessarily the finest level of detail needed. Neurotransmitters, maybe, but I imagine a neuron doesn't have to be simulated as its constituent atoms to exhibit identical enough behavior.

jfergusonon The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

Consciousness is in the brain; the idea here is to simulate the brain, resulting in the mind.

jfergusonon The Importance of Surviving 40 more years

A computer with input and output, yes. Some representation of relevant neurotransmitters and sensory inputs and such seems necessary. Think whole brain emulation, rather than extracting the "mind information" while ignoring all the physical information.

jfergusonon Google announces Calico, a new company that will focus on health and well-being

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

jfergusonon Ask HN: If you know Clojure and Scala, is Java still worth learning?

For a small number of tasks in Clojure, it's very sensible to write a Java program that handles what you want to do, then call it from Clojure. Here's an example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14949705/clojure-performa...

jfergusonon Rules of a Zen Programmer

> Like for example manually copy/pasting stuff from your managers Excel sheet into phpmyadmin. This can take you days, and it is really boring. You cannot always quit your job when you got a boring task.

As valuable as accepting inevitable boring tasks is, that seems to leave you not much room to want to automate the task. Does anyone have something deep to say about simultaneously being accepting of your circumstances and seeking ways to improve them?