nhaehnle

92 ms·

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by nhaehnle 13y ago
There is no universal agreed upon convention whether the natural numbers include zero or not. There is a lot of tradition of it not including zero, because non-computer scientists find counting from one more intuitive. On the other hand, th
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Surprisingly, different economic circumstances call for different approaches. Norway is swimming in money from exported oil. Countries with balanced foreign trade need a different approach to the macro-economy.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
... massive consequences such as keeping your population alive. Don't buy into the free market propaganda too much. The biggest proponents of free market propaganda (I am looking at the EU and the US) have programs that explicitly targ
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Actually, the debt statement is more problematic even ignoring the questionable number that you cite, because the debt is mostly just a representation of relationships between citizens and institutions within a country. If you want a reason
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Keep in mind that the price level in Norway is very high. Depending on how the NOK numbers are converted in USD, the numbers might be misleading.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Even worse, whether government activity is labelled 'intervention' does not follow any sound logical pattern in practice. To make it painfully obvious: When was the last time you heard somebody characterize the existence of limite
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
What you write is not quite wrong, but it must be taken with a spoon of salt due to the way this kind of science is usually done. If you fix a binary hypothesis, and then run your experiment for that specific hypothesis and only that hypot
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Here's a potential scenario as some food for thought: Apparently, the process was so simple for you because both you (the buyer) and Overstock (the seller) operate via Coinbase. Clearly, the process would have been less smooth if you h
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
In terms of exchange rate, Bitcoin will become less volatile, yes. I suspect that kaonashi was referring to something else: there are macroeconomic problems associated with a gold standard, such as its tendency to push countries into recess
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The interesting point about the second possible attack is that a weaker form is possible even with less than 50% of the hashing power. The term to search for in a search engine is "selfish mining", e.g. here: http://bit
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Isn't Valve located on the west coast as well?
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Despite the good responses, there are two points that I believe are important that haven't been pointed out yet. 1. While a 51% pool operator could double spend, none of the participants can do that. The social incentives against a p
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I guess we can agree that the money is shifted downwards in the income spectrum relative to where it was before. Other things equal, lower-income households have a higher marginal propensity to consume. So shifting money downwards will boos
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
"offbeat" views (e.g. numerous courses that take Marx seriously) Right, how could anybody possibly take one of the most important thinkers in the history of political economy seriously! Marx has important but inconvenient things
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
3) For those who do not lose their jobs, the fact that they didn't lose their jobs is indicative of more major problems...they either don't understand the value of their labor, or they don't know how to negotiate with their
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
There have been proposals for anonymous payment that relied on a bank issuing tokens. That is certainly a kind of "crypto currency" despite the central control.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I would second this. We know for a fact that the NSA uses BIOS malware. I don't believe we know for a fact that such malware is routinely installed by border guards, but it's not a very far-fetched worry at this point. The technic
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
> when goods are traded between two Euro countries, these goods aren't really paid for This is a very politically biased and misleading perspective on reality. Consider an alternative world in which the central banks of the Eurozo
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
> The currency is never the problem ... Not being able to devalue your currency prevents external trade. So it is the currency that is the problem :-)
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
All that is of little relevance, because the crisis in Greece is not a crisis of inefficient use of resources. It is a crisis of disuse of resources. Just look at the unemployment numbers to see what I mean. Had Greece not been part of th
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I largely agree with what you write, but I'm somewhat skeptical about blaming the ECB. The thing is, it seems that monetary policy is actually pretty powerless when your goal is to increase economic activity (rather than slowing it d
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Everybody who wants to comment on this story should be aware that there is a mismatch between title and content. The content - the interesting part that should be taken seriously - is about whether basing our economy on Bitcoin is a good id
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
They are only able to remove the DRM on their own games (which is what he was surely talking about). The article is about a game that is not made by Valve but merely distributed via Valve's distribution channel.
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
They don't have to do a full disk scrub on the physical SSD to fix this security problem. All they have to do is what every sane sparse disk image implementation in the history of mankind has done: catch reads from unwritten blocks in
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
So don't go to Krugman for technology insights. Go to him for economic insights. Consider the recent discussion about "positive vs. normative economics". It's a similar point here. There are Bitcoinistas who would like
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
The problem with that thinking is that Bitcoin is not transaction-fee-free. Transactions are subsidized by block rewards, but already today, your transactions might get stalled if you don't pay fees. And this is only going to get worse
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
You do realize that software development existed before app stores, right? Lone developers created and released applications all the time. App stores are about convenience, and so they are not like your other examples, which are about de
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
This is a neat coincidence: I rediscovered an old box of SimTower just last week. Unfortunately, I could not find the disk any more. I remember the most infuriating weakness of the original game was that the speed of transportation was link
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the Bitcoin network already costs more than those mainframes in terms of carbon footprint - after all, the Bitcoin network is basically the world's largest supercomputer [0]. On top of that, you have to
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by nhaehnle 13y ago
Judging from a follow-up discussion, I believe you're using the word "redistribution" in a way that is meaningless and/or needlessly gives ground to a libertarian framing of the situation. In a nutshell, if you say &quot

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