yaakov34

37 ms·

301.
by yaakov34 15y ago
You think that's it? OK then, let me state for the record that I'm not on Microsoft's or Google's or anyone else's side in this matter. It's not like Microsoft is making the web safe for us (ActiveX, anyone?). I was making a purely technica
302.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Well, this got a bunch of upvotes and a bunch of downvotes. Quite honestly, I'm not complaining about the scoring, but I'd like to understand the thinking here. Is it just "I want the shiny new API, stop saying these unpleasant things?" I a
303.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Passionate and unconvincing. You can't get around the fact that WebGL lets a website control the graphics driver in a way which is much too direct for comfort. The central problem is the poor quality of driver code compared to OS code. If t
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by yaakov34 15y ago
Robinson is not making a good case here - the Federal Reserve Act was, at the time, seen as strengthening banks by making their reserves more liquid. If Robinson wants to argue that it had the opposite effect, he will need a lot more than h
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I understand that. Yes, it was a problem that banks were lending money to people so that those people could trade the stock market. That's described as ONE of the causes of the Great Depression in every standard history. However, this is no
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I didn't downvote this (I don't have that awesome power yet, anyway), but I think I see why people might. Your arguments are phrased in such a way that it's unclear what's being said. Maybe you got this directly from Robinson, maybe you're
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by yaakov34 15y ago
In 1935, a lot of very intelligent people thought that the Soviet model was the answer (I don't mean George Robinson in particular). It turned out that those people lacked some information and perspective, and were probably guilty of wishfu
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by yaakov34 15y ago
"If you're not careful, you might have your private information stolen online. You may even lose money to an identity thief!" "Google is a large technology company which runs the world's most popular search engine." These are NOT good stori
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by yaakov34 15y ago
What exactly is the point of submitting a simple introduction-to-bitcoin story to HN? People here have seen, uh, a couple of bitcoin stories already. If the point is driving people to buy some bitcoins, then this is not the forum for that.
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by yaakov34 15y ago
By the way, I've always wanted to ask someone who buys gold/silver as a hedge against economic collapse - are you physically holding it in your house, or what? If your gold is just 1s and 0s in some database which say that you own some gold
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by yaakov34 15y ago
Everyone could be wrong, and probably is :) I'm going to add this thread to Google Bookmarks, and revisit it in 5 years (does HN keep threads for this long? It should). Unless, of course, there will be no Google and no Hacker News and no in
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by yaakov34 15y ago
By the way, if you want to see my predictions in numbers for the next 5 years, here they are: 1. The Euro will appreciate against the dollar, because the US will have to issue a lot of currency to bail out local and state governments in the
313.
by yaakov34 15y ago
>> "Just inflate" Oh, is that all? Turned out pretty nicely for Argentina, didn't it? Argentina defaulted. It turned out to be a disaster, which, for them, may have been unavoidable. Why would the US want this? >> Unlike Ice
314.
by yaakov34 15y ago
You're seeing everything in a hypertrophied way. -- There is a difference between a default on debts and inflation. People can live with inflation. A default on the freaking US treasury debt would be a disaster. Why would they do that, give
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I can be a pessimist with the best of them, but this is just panic-mongering. -- The US would be insane to default; their debts are mostly internal, and in their own currency, which they can just inflate. Unpleasant for Americans, whose pen
316.
by yaakov34 15y ago
I don't see how you can compare this to the housing bubble/crisis. The real estate market contains trillions of dollars (everyone's money participates in it one way or another), and some of the worst stuff, like bad mortgages, was amplified
317.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Yeah, they take deposits. People have a dollar account and a bitcoin account on Mt. Gox. They may fund the dollar account with bank transfers, and they may fund the bitcoin account with bitcoin transfers. I don't know how long people tend t
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by yaakov34 15y ago
Numbers are of the essence. That site has less than 1% of the volume of Mt. Gox, and Mt. Gox is considered too thinly traded for business transactions. I don't see how the existence of that site, and trading over IRC channels, changes the f
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by yaakov34 15y ago
My point is that for something meant to be totally decentralized, bitcoin has become nearly completely centralized instead - virtually every transaction (even that buy-newegg one) has to pass through Mt. Gox, since suppliers have to be paid
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I absolutely agree, the bitcoins themselves can't be taken away and neither can person-to-person trade in them. But you do agree that Mt. Gox sitting there with several million euros frozen in its accounts (for whatever reason) and with its
321.
by yaakov34 15y ago
And does /that/ one have a license to take deposits? And is it backed by anything more than 4 stars next to someone's nic on the forum? Bitcoins are a serious investment for some people now. They've put their savings into this. This is not
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I know. My point is not so much about the possibility of front running, but about exchanges, and especially Mt. Gox, as the point of failure for bitcoin. Let's face it, 99% of the excitement about bitcoin lately is not along the lines of "h
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by yaakov34 15y ago
It's worse than that - a single exchange, Mt. Gox, has 98% of the bitcoin trading volume. The exchange operator(s) have access to all information about orders placed - and also have bitcoin holdings themselves. The potential for manipulatio
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by yaakov34 15y ago
Yeah, tell me about it - I poked in here more or less by accident (tab still open) and found your reply. Everyone else is long gone, of course. You're right about topicality being important, but there are tons of forums which I've followed
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I do understand that the current web infrastructure is not made for this, but given demand, it /could/ be adapted for the sort of reading that we are nostalgic about. There are obscure forums that I sometimes read on the portal bsh.co.il -
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I looked at it now, and it seems like you can mark forums read, but once inside a forum, like http://iwt.mikevitale.com:8080/gaming/forum/show.iwt?forumid... , you can't mark messages and threads read - they all show up. Or maybe I missed
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by yaakov34 15y ago
I didn't know about the "mute thread" capability - thanks. But maybe "the aesthetics" are somehow crucial - I've always had keyboard shortcuts enabled in gmail, but following a modern mail thread (in which most people top-post, in any case)
328.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Have to disagree, even though I'm a big gmail user and I do like it way better than the other webmail systems. A thread in gmail looks more like a pile than a real thread - it's nowhere near as smooth as navigating in a newsreader. It prese
329.
by yaakov34 15y ago
Yeah, but it's by no means just that. I was thinking of the simplest things, like messages you've read not showing up again (unless asked for), using a single key to advance to the next message, pressing a key to mark a thread read. The adv
330.
by yaakov34 15y ago
The nostalgia that this makes me feel is unbelievable. Some things about old Usenet are probably lost forever: 1. The feeling that "this matters". Usenet wasn't just one discussion forum among millions, it was The One. 2. The life of the m

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