gyom

8 ms·

61.
by gyom 13y ago
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 some
62.
by gyom 13y ago
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
63.
by gyom 13y ago
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.
64.
by gyom 13y ago
Only if you're a bank. Or the FED.
65.
by gyom 13y ago
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 lo
66.
by gyom 13y ago
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. =)
67.
by gyom 13y ago
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&
68.
by gyom 13y ago
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 surprise
69.
by gyom 13y ago
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
70.
by gyom 13y ago
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.
71.
by gyom 13y ago
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
72.
by gyom 13y ago
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
73.
by gyom 13y ago
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 probl
74.
by gyom 13y ago
Exactly my reasoning.
75.
by gyom 13y ago
You could say the same thing about land or real estate in big cities.
76.
by gyom 14y ago
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
77.
by gyom 14y ago
I like your analogy with the "empty calories". It's easy to make the association with the empty shopping malls or cities in China.
78.
by gyom 14y ago
> 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 shor
79.
by gyom 14y ago
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 tr
80.
by gyom 14y ago
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 loser
81.
by gyom 14y ago
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.
82.
by gyom 14y ago
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
83.
by gyom 14y ago
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
84.
by gyom 14y ago
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.
85.
by gyom 14y ago
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
86.
by gyom 14y ago
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 pot
87.
by gyom 14y ago
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 wa
88.
by gyom 14y ago
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 healt
89.
by gyom 14y ago
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 Hac
90.
by gyom 14y ago
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 tr

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