itchitawa

This observation lends weight to my naked women theory. That extravagent P has arms, legs, a head and ... :P

Surprising discovery about the Voynich manuscript - it contains hundreds of pictures of naked women, probably outnumbering the pictures of plants. Maybe the focus on botany is misguided!

Or at least cause you to consider the risk of loss compared to the value of using the software while not panicking when you receive a spam email with a suspicious looking xls file attached.

Indeed. Or even "don't click on suspicious emails or visit suspicious websites" which are actually always harmless. How about simply "don't run a program you don't trust" and we wouldn't need virus scanners at all.

It helps to highlight our cultural biases. In some cultures pornography is more acceptable than homosexuality. These are just different prejudices that different people hold. It's not obvious which is more right or wrong.

They're probably just trying to be sensitive to their audience and sponsors. Google also censors pornography because a subset of users are offended by it.

"suburban moms in mid-west buy those stocks" There's no need to blame. Those investors are trying to make free money without doing productive work or even investing in productive companies. They're also the ones who lose the most if it fails so they automatically experience the rewards or blame financially.

Ha. I did exactly the same thing with a dryer years ago but with a neodymium magnet from a hard drive head actuator.

In other news - China Global Warming: Made in America?

Industrial interest in the moon is a good thing for the development of space travel and discovering new things. Also, you might find America's human rights abuses to be worse than China's when you count all the imprisoned American people who shouldn't be there and the forced conscription around the time of America's moon missions. America's pollution is certainly worse than China's when summed over the last century.

Low-polluting, low abussing countries like Tuvalu are typically not well equipped to go to the moon.

After a century of failing to manage its economy, Argentina continues to fail to manage its economy.

In other news, water is wet.

I don't think this is a valid argument. It seems to be "I'm right because I believe people in the future will agree with me". Maybe so but the author can't know that until the future comes.

The same goes for a lot of stats about America. But who notices Israel's massive per capita tech industry?

MegaUpload, Silk Road shut down by US government. Piracy, drugs, child porn, online gambling. These are things Americans feel are OK to silence. Inciting violence (they have deadly anti-government riots), destabilizing the government. These are things Chinese feel are OK to silence. Different stokes for different folks. In either case you need enough staff to monitor for such illegal content.

How many people are afraid to walk down a dark alley at night? That's a freedom we should have but plenty of people are forced to get a taxi or stay home because of a real fear of being robbed. I live in a city where it is safe, even for young women alone and I'm amazed when I remember what a restricted life it was in more dangerous, yet more "free" cities. If someone demands money from you in a deserted street, do you have the courage to refuse? If not then you need something, perhaps not these poorly defined laws begging to be abused, but something to protect you from those subtle threats that constantly erode your quality of life.

Without the link from his own site we can't tell who even claims to have done the typing. Someone who isn't PG may have all sorts of reasons to fake it. Gentle suggestion - if you think the answer to someone's comment is obvious then it's a good sign there's a miscommunication and you should consider other interpretations.

Thanks. That's an important link to know where it came from.

Is there a way to verify this is actually Paul Graham writing, not someone else who reenacted it based on the published essay?

My bank requires a 4 character password with no letters or special characters! Oh wait, a PIN doesn't count?

Nor does glass or plastic-coated aluminium. There are lots of shiny things that people don't want in their jewelry. If diamond were as common and cheap as glass, we'd probably see just as much diamond jewelry as glass. They're not massively "better" at being shiney. Even artificial gems are worth less in than natural ones even if they have fewer defects!

Who's an early adopter? Before December, every single day in bitcoin's history was a good day to invest and be an early adopter. But nobody knew at the time. They could have lost everything. Nobody knows when the final peak will be and if today is part of the early or late adopters stage. Another point - Even late adopters can obtain millions of dollars worth of bitcoins just buy buying them with millions of dollars. In other words, people who are enormously rich with real money (by whatever unfair ways) can be enormously rich with bitcoins too. All we have is those same rich people plus a few new ones (early adopters). Someone who inherited a fortune can buy bitcoins and be another "unfairly" rich person. What difference does it make if they got their money from bitcoin luck, inheritance luck, or anything else?

One of the Therac-25 victims died 3 months later from cancer. Presumably the same cancer they were trying to treat, and thus avoided needing a hip replacement for the radiation damage. If your life is in such extreme danger from the disease itself, it can be worth taking risks with novel treatments. I'm sure some very old people with nothing to lose will be willing to try anti-aging, no matter how risky.

It's easy to blame the government but the majority of Americans vote for the government they have or none at all. That means they are either happy with it or they're incompetent and should not be allowed to vote. It's easy to blame politicians but really it's the short-sighted self-interested voters who are at fault. If you vote for a party with a history of doing terrible things then you are asking them to do more terrible things.

Here's how missing the news affected me: When I finished my CS degree, I decided have a go at postgrad in another field. I reasoned that if it didn't work out, I'd just quit and get a programming job like my classmates had done easily. It didn't work out. But when I went looking for a programming job, it was surprisingly hard. That led me to change career direction. Only later I found out what the "NASDAQ" was and what had happened to it while I was indecisively loitering at university in 2001.

Has Hacker News cost billions of dollars in programmer productivity? :P

Yes. There's not much to this article. Same goes for a kid shooting it. It would just like a kid shooting a car or a person. The law provides protection. I suspect regulation will be the biggest obstacle - as it already is in the US.

The real problem is the viewer who get suckered. Let people watch both and learn to make decisions for themselves.

tl;dr It will fail because it will fail.

Spend a $1 billion of your early bitcoins disrupting Bitcoin or spend $1 billion to buy bitcoins today and disrupt it. Either way costs the same doesn't it?

Gmail does something a bit more sophisticated than this but it's a real pain trying to check your mail from the airport in another country when your phone doesn't work either to confirm that way. Also annoying for VPN users who may appear to be in another country.