HN user

awt

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news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: How do you apply deliberate practice to programming?

awt
6pts3
www.youtube.com 14y ago

How to make sense of Conspiracy Theories

awt
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Is Bitcoin really a Ponzi scheme?

awt
7pts8
groups.google.com 15y ago

Remind HN: HN Parents Google Group

awt
2pts0
mobile.salon.com 15y ago

Is science fiction dying?

awt
27pts55
blog.owyheesoftware.com 15y ago

Automatically generate screenshots of your rails tests

awt
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Users offer to help with your non-OSS project. What do you do?

awt
3pts2
motodiaryapp.com 15y ago

Rate my App HN: Minimal daily journal app. Just start typing.

awt
20pts35
blog.owyheesoftware.com 15y ago

A Blog is not a Journal -- Why I Made MotoDiary

awt
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Ask HN: Please review my app: MotoDiary

awt
3pts0
blog.zumodrive.com 15y ago

Get Your ZumoCast T-Shirt

awt
14pts1
news.ycombinator.com 15y ago

Thesis HN: People are now targeting blog posts at Hacker News

awt
28pts27
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: How do you respond when someone says a feature is confusing?

awt
3pts7
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask HN: How do you organize your git branches?

awt
7pts5
www.guardian.co.uk 17y ago

Neanderthals may have been eaten by early humans

awt
7pts11
video.google.com 17y ago

Bernays and the Roots of Consumer Culture

awt
14pts1
www.newscientist.com 17y ago

How Your Brain Creates God

awt
4pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Bottom Up Programming Question

awt
16pts25
www.google.com 17y ago

Code Snippets in Google Search Results

awt
2pts0
blog.jayfields.com 17y ago

Targeted Languages

awt
2pts1
viming.blogspot.com 17y ago

Vim: Registers

awt
2pts0
loglibrarian.blogspot.com 17y ago

Use YAML in Your iPhone App

awt
1pts0
www.nytimes.com 17y ago

A School Chief Takes on Tenure

awt
5pts0
loglibrarian.blogspot.com 17y ago

Guess which country searches the most for "email account?"

awt
1pts0
paultyma.blogspot.com 18y ago

A few ideas about Negotiation

awt
1pts4
www.edge.org 18y ago

Generatives

awt
4pts0
reason.com 18y ago

The Theory of Moral Neuroscience

awt
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC News: Why doesn't Google provide a useful Adsense API?

awt
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 19y ago

If you are reading this you are not working on your startup.

awt
45pts28
20bits.com 19y ago

The Social Graph, Facebook and Virality

awt
2pts0

People complaining that bitcoin is just for crime are just slandering it.

This one really gets my goat. There are so many ridiculous laws. It’s illegal to consume alcohol in Saudi Arabia. It’s illegal in Russia to use profanity in theaters, and in Thailand it’s illegal not to play a salute to the king before every film. Besides geographical differences in current times, the differences throughout history are more striking.

For example, all present-day populations show about two percent of Neanderthal ancestry which means that Neanderthal mixing with the ancestors of modern humans occurred soon after they left Africa, probably around 50,000 to 55,000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East.

I thought subsaharans lacked Neanderthal admixture?

Please provide a definition of harm that excludes the violation of property rights. We need not consider the difference between private property rights and property rights because these things are one and the same.

If you can come up with a logically consistent definition under which the creation of public property does not itself cause harm - I will be surprised.

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

Saying Bitcoin is like one thing does not preclude it from being like other things. Never the less, it's not necessarily useless just because it doesn't have the use some people mistakenly thought it had.

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

The point is not that Bitcoin is a government bond, if that wasn't obvious, but that just because some people said it's a currency and proceeded to build failing businesses on that faulty premise doesn't preclude it having actual, unrelated uses, such as a store of value with a vastly different risk profile than any other asset ever known.

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

Government bonds are stable if you ignore tail risk. Governments tend to collapse eventually, at which point your bonds are not a great store of value.

Bitcoin is however similar to a government bond in that it a) has value, b) is not directly useful for consumer transactions. Also, I dunno that behaving like money can be put in such stark binary terms.

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

What it was "meant to be" hardly matters. What it actually is is more important than the misrepresentations presented by various misinformed parties.

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

I don't see the relationship between "meant to be" and "is" here. Doesn't it only matter what it actually is rather than what some people thought it might be?

Bitcoin is a Cult 8 years ago

Government bonds have been around for hundreds of years but I can't buy coffee with them. Thus they don't do anything.

How could Gresham's Law apply to Bitcoin if it were not divisible? Or are you suggesting that comic books could be considered money (one property of which is divisibility) to the same degree as Bitcoin? Hopefully we agree that divisibility is not an "ostensible" characteristic of Bitcoin, but a "factual" characteristic of it?

Also your tendency to define things in binary terms (liquid/illiquid, value/no value) is troubling.

Why the struggle to pretend not to be able to tell the difference between Bitcoin and limited edition comic books?

Although this is a true statement it is not persuasive in that Bitcoin (unlike a special issue comic, or any other rare thing) has specific, meaningful properties (fungibility, divisibility, durability, etc.) that interact with the world according to well known principles (Gresham's Law, Lindy Effect, Theory of Computation, Network Effect, etc.) that must be shown not to apply in order to disqualify it as the best available store of value.