mbrock

60 ms·

571.
by mbrock 9y ago
An interesting dual to that is "cigarettes are a social network."
572.
by mbrock 9y ago
Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that, which is why I didn't say it! I do think a truth-based approach to drugs should be a part of general education, and that the current older generation has failed embarrassingly and awfully in its
573.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's the same opportunity cost whether you spend from your BTC account or your USD account! You're choosing between "should I buy a phone or 0.1 bitcoin with these dollars?" I think the presence in the market of an asset
574.
by mbrock 9y ago
By this standard, gold and USD also don't really scale, because you can't send them fast enough. Interbank clearing is pretty slow. We already have exchanges and clearinghouses like Coinbase for example. It's easy to imagine
575.
by mbrock 9y ago
It definitely means people won't use it as a unit of account (for debts, budgets, etc), which is one primary use for a currency... But I don't think it means people won't spend it or trade it for some other currency or asset.
576.
by mbrock 9y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you imagine that my comment meant to say about today?
577.
by mbrock 9y ago
I remember when I was much younger, when I would hear or read something about how cannabis has been used by humans for a very long time, I thought that it was like a kind of "conspiracy theory."
578.
by mbrock 9y ago
I kind of agree, but also not! For example, the GNU project always had thoroughly documented software. Emacs is a great example. And GNU does have an aim of getting users! So I don't think "marketing" (evangelizing, teaching,
579.
by mbrock 9y ago
Open source isn't synonymous with hobby! I develop open source systems in my work, partly for internal use but also to help grow the ecosystem our firm is in, and to make a name for ourselves. We don't market heavily right now bec
580.
by mbrock 9y ago
The boredom of internetlessness has strange side effects...
581.
by mbrock 9y ago
I had your same kind of problem, or more like just not having any kind of robust interest in art, and I was living in Amsterdam for a while which of course has great art museums... I also didn't have an internet connection at home nor
582.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's kind of like, do you think it's humanly possible to correctly encode the rules of chess in, say, 6502 assembly? You probably won't do it on the first try. And you wouldn't immediately bet a million dollar on it. But
583.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think basic properties would go a hell of a long way, especially combined with a cultural inclination toward simple contracts. I don't think proving basic security properties of simple contracts is far off. Solidity itself has recent
584.
by mbrock 9y ago
That's not really how Solidity libraries work. They don't prevent non-delegate calls. And library functions can call selfdestruct. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7bem7v/solidity_l...
585.
by mbrock 9y ago
I work for a firm that does Ethereum audits and we would have demanded a complete restructuring of Parity's multisig and major simplification.
586.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think imperativity vs purely functional is mostly a red herring. Lambda functions won't solve your logical mistakes. What we really need is the ability to automatically verify the possible outcomes of a piece of logic to guarantee cr
587.
by mbrock 9y ago
The moving parts is kind of the whole point, but yeah. I hope and predict that these disasters become million dollar lessons on what kinds of autonomous functions you can trust with money, and what "security auditing" actually mea
588.
by mbrock 9y ago
It's like if you have a bunch of cash, and then you see an ad on TV: Get your Amazing Super Safe Cash Box today! With loads of advanced features that may or may not be useful in the future! Made by some of the cleverest people in the
589.
by mbrock 9y ago
Currying is a form of higher order function, and it's not necessarily preferable, but often just makes sense. I think it is in some way overused in Haskell for example. When your function takes five different parameters, it's unli
590.
by mbrock 9y ago
I happen to think that a lot of people don't feel "emotions" when "viewing art" because the art that's obviously available is either totally irrelevant to your life (e.g. bourgeois portraits of rich people from
591.
by mbrock 9y ago
Is it clear that Python, Ruby, Perl or PHP are better than Node with JavaScript? I don't think so. They're all slightly idiosyncratic dynamically typed scripting languages with their own sets of quirks. BTW, the main selling point
592.
by mbrock 9y ago
Quick, what's the syntax for updating a hash table in Scheme? "Well, it depends on if you mean SRFI-44 maps, SRFI-69 hash tables, R6RS hash tables, Racket hash tables, MIT hash tables, Scheme-48 hash tables, or . . ."
593.
by mbrock 9y ago
I think a big standard library is a tradeoff question, but also, the standard available functionality is something I really like about Node. It's got map, filter, reduce, just like all modern browsers, and it's also got nice and
594.
by mbrock 9y ago
Out of all the dynamically typed scripting languages, I prefer JavaScript. Is there something horribly wrong with me? Linguistically, my second choice would be Scheme, but I still find JavaScript to be more ergonomic for most tasks. It&#x
595.
by mbrock 9y ago
PowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF a
596.
by mbrock 9y ago
When you ban that 90%, all that desire and energy and capital will sink into the other channels, and the outcome will be nothing like you wanted, just like banning drugs is nothing at all like deleting drugs from society.
597.
by mbrock 9y ago
Depends on how you define advertising. It's fundamentally impossible to have a market without marketing. The cinema gets its audience by posting events on Facebook, and that's advertising, right?
598.
by mbrock 9y ago
Gödel, Escher, Bach awakened my intellectual curiosity about formal systems and other autistic modes of beauty as a teenager. After "The Selfish Gene" it was the first book I bought and read on my own volition, so I have to credit
599.
by mbrock 9y ago
Sounds reasonable, but in the context of the need for an urgent screeching halt to avoid global disaster, such legislation has only a slim chance of passing in the most "enlightened" districts, so it seems kind of useless to talk
600.
by mbrock 9y ago
I'm on mobile and can't find great sources, but there's OECD statistics and it seems like global meat consumption per capita rises. https://ensia.com/articles/these-maps-show-changes-in-global... I first

More ›