Woman makes $420k by buying insurance on flights she predicted would get delayed - <AUTHOR> https://mothership.sg/2020/06/woman-china-scam-insurance-delayed-flights/ <comment><USER2> I recently collected nearly £2500 from an insurance company because a policy had been mis-sold when I bought a house.

The policy was sold so the agent could get their commission. There was no credible justification for it. Worse, there was no record showing that I ever signed any paper authorising the charges.

When I talked to the investigation department, they said that off the record, between you and me, record keeping is incredibly poor, and my case was only unusual because I'd questioned the payments - and most people don't.

My partner is going through something similar, but the paper trail in her case is even more tenuous. The only justification on file for thousands of pounds in payments collected from the 90s onwards is a mortgage application she made a few years ago - and didn't even go ahead with.

This is on top of a national Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal which forced insurance companies and banks to return billions of pounds.

Somehow this never seems to be labelled criminal fraud. It's always "Mistakes were made..." and no one is ever personally responsible.

So honestly, I'm finding it hard to be sympathetic to the poor exploited insurers in situations like this.

<comment><USER3> I recognize this as well.

I once didn't fill in my Dutch VAT taxes (0 euro's by the way, it was an administrative formality) and I was fined.

Another time the tax authorities didn't pay me money back for almost 9 months, and it was only because I found out and they forgot because of some administrative mishap.

However, I'm not allowed to fine them.

I find it weird, because I'm pretty sure the mistake is similar in behavior and intention. Yet, I have to pay up and they don't.

<comment><USER4> Huh. HMRC in the UK realised they owed me money back in, IIRC 2018 and kept sending me actual paper cheques as their computer worked through consequences of the mistake year by year for the next few weeks. It was tiresome actually because I had to go to a physical bank, but I guess if it annoyed me that much I needn't have paid the cheques in.

They pay 0.5% (which is better than most of my bank accounts) on all sums they owe as a result of their own mistake rather than either your mistake or some third party screwing up (e.g. your employer fat-fingers paperwork causing you to pay say £1000 extra tax, you don't notice for two years, then you point out the mistake, HMRC are happy to fix it but won't pay you 0.5% interest on the mistake because it wasn't their fault)

<comment><USER5> Yes, HMRC is generally a very good service. Will be a sad day when it gets outsourced to a contractor:(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This kind of thing goes way back and used to be much easier.

Over-booking of flights used to be a huge problem back in the 90's and earlier. You'd get on the plane, someone would be in your seat already, and that's when you found out you didn't get to fly on that flight.

Airlines figured out this pissed people off and started counting tickets before letting people onto flights. If they had too many people waiting to board a flight, they would make an announcement and start offering free stuff to people willing to be bumped or take a later flight (this still happens in rare circumstances today but used to happen on most flights for a few years).

I remember listening to a gate agent threatening to call the cops on a college age guy who was picking up his third free ticket of the week for accepting being bumped off an Oakland to Las Vegas flight. He'd apparently figured out that that flight was always overbooked (which wouldn't have taken a rocket scientist given the high rate of overbooking at the time), and the only reason he got caught was the same agent kept getting assigned to work the counter for that flight often enough to remember his face.

Interestingly, I also flew on a nearly empty flight once during that era. The pilot came on the loud speakers and said "the next time you are wondering why flights are over booked, remember this flight - this plane was booked to 120% capacity (or some other number well over 100%) for this trip."

<comment><USER7> For a flight to have gone from 120% to nearly empty would mean that some large group didn't show up. Maybe an entire tour bus was delayed by a flat tire or something. Statistically speaking, a hundred people simultaneously missing their flight is vanishingly unlikely.

<comment><USER8> > Statistically speaking

Statistics generally (there are exceptions of course) makes very broad assumptions about independence and random selection of your samples.

For a group of people as correlated as having the same destination at exactly the same time using the same airplane I would be very wary of applying any statistics at all, even ignoring the possibility of a large group.

Hundreds of otherwise independent people can decide to not show up simultaneously due to terrorist attacks, corona, a cheaper alternative, a conference being cancelled, etc.

<comment><USER7> I think you are restating my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The Paper later found out that many insurance companies have already fixed > the loopholes that Li took advantage of to get rich.

> The ones they checked with now have a clause that says they will not be > responsible for any payout should the insured, at the time of buying, > already knows or reasonably deduces that the flight can be delayed anytime.

What kind of clause is that?

<comment><USER10> It's a bit like the clause about how you shouldn't be buying fire insurance for a house that is already in the process of burning down.

It's not an unreasonable one.

<comment><USER11> You analogy is incorrect as it would mean that she would buy the insurance when the flight is officially delayed. Here she is making a prediction, which may or may not be correct. It is exactly the same as when you are buying option or contract on the stock market. Here the issue is that the insurance company has a fixed premium which not based on the likelihood of delay. This is completely on the insurance side. Otherwise the stock market will have big issue if you apply the same analogy. This new clause is in effect a blanket one to not pay anything... if you pay for an insurance you have the conviction that the flight might be delayed... otherwise there would be no point to buy it....

<comment><USER12> I'm guessing you don't have this woman's inside knowledge of the airline system in China. You're assuming here that a person can't reasonably know or deduce a flight will be delayed, but her track record says different.

Sometimes, often in fact, it becomes pretty obvious a flight will be delayed but they just haven't bothered to officially announce the fact yet. Such as if the plane isn't even there because they are delayed on the previous leg, and boarding time is about to start. Or when the airport cancels all flights for an indeterminate time due to incoming bad weather and the airlines wait to update times because they don't know what to say yet.

<comment><USER11> Yes I do know by experience that it is very easy to deduce if a flight will be delayed. By experience in Europe, last leg of the day of an Easyjet flight -> 75% chance that your flight will be delayed. Snow during the night (look at the forecast) -> 90% your morning flight will be delayed etc. etc. No need for an advance ML model. Of course what she did was more like insider trading, but I'm pretty sure that you don't even need that.

<comment><USER13> The difficulty to make money out of this might be to determine the delay with some accuracy, not just that there will be some delays. Flight are routinely delayed by tens of minutes (has a low-cost flight ever left on time?) and that won't award compensation.

European laws define mandatory compensations when a flight is delayed or cancelled. This starts after 30 minutes if I remember well and depends how long the delay is and how long (distance) the flight is.

Also, delay is measured on arrival time, not on departure time. Planes frequently depart late then arrive on time, because they fly faster to catch up.

<comment><USER14> It was 2 hours, but recently they changed to 3

[https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger- right...](https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger- rights/air/index_en.htm#compensation-delay-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the insurance companies were so consistently mis-pricing their contracts, instead of calling the police they should have hired this woman and used her expertise to design dynamic pricing algorithms.

The article says the insurance companies have now closed the loopholes she exploited. To me, she deserves every dollar she made for making the insurance market more efficient. I'm sure those errors would have cost these companies much more than $400k over the long run.

<comment><USER16> Its kind of sad that the #1 comment right now is basically saying "the company involved here should have been charging its customers far, far more money", instead of protecting their customers and looking out for the best for them.

Insurance is NOT a financial instrument. Insurance is supposed to be a safety mechanism that protects you if something bad happens.

We can think of insurance as a call and/or put option. Financially, they behave almost identically to options. But that's not the intended use for the product.

\</comment></comment><comment>--

Where you see inefficiency, I see humanism. The company believes that its users wouldn't act like this, and for the most part... citizens do not commit large scale fraud involving 20+ fake identities.

<comment><USER17> > Insurance is NOT a financial instrument

Unless you are attempting to redefine the word insurance you are simply incorrect. Insurance is one of the most commonly used financial instruments in existence. If insurance was somehow not a financial instrument, it would not be insurance, but something else entirely.

<comment><USER18> I can't speak for insurance markets everywhere but in Denmark, you are simply incorrect. Insurance companies have existed as consumers' co-operatives since the first insurance 'company' in Denmark, founded after a city-wide fire in Copenhagen in 1728.

These agreements were never meant to be traded between insurance companies and in most cases simply weren't. The only major exemption from this rule are for companies offering life insurance but they aren't allowed to offer regular insurance.

Instead of acting as financial instruments, insurance companies are required to have, on-hand, the necessary liquidity to pay-out enormous sums.

<comment><USER19> In the US there's basically a 110% chance that whatever insurance policy you took has become a part of some derivative contract with swaps or whatever.

And everyone financially engineers insurance if they have anything resembling a free market.

Reinsurance in denmark: [https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=654d1fd4-cffc...](https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=654d1fd4-cffc-4a72-8a5c-d89d7c7f8529)

First result for Denmark insurance swaps: [https://books.google.com/books?id=XsbFBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=XsbFBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=denmark+insurance+swaps&source=bl&ots=nAmPyCE- hm&sig=ACfU3U3wm1-o99wz4ltQ8gByXF7XRKylag&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwivzoyCgoTqAhV4SDABHWuyD1wQ6AEwAHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=denmark%20insurance%20swaps&f=false)

<comment><USER20> Even the "110%" number is apt to be correct, as someone has probably sold one of those derivatives short.

<comment><USER19> Good point - I meant that as hyperbole but if you want to start counting shorts and swaps on swaps and swaps on shorts and shorts on swaps and reinsurance and swaps on reinsurance and so and and so forth, well, that gets really big really fast. Let's just say there was a reason we were so worried about AIG going under during the previous financial crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ignoring the identity fraud and supposing the information obtained were public, this thread seems to have a lot of people who believe that applying information arbitrage to insurance is in and of itself inherently wrong, and that's not a stance I think I can agree with.

As a litmus test, when the roles are reversed and the insurance company overprices a policy we seem fine with that as a society because even though any individual can have a hugely disproportionate premium the company as a whole has bounded profits (both legally and due to competitive forces). We might even try to argue that an individual can't possibly know their own risk better than a team of actuaries and that they should accept that the premiums are actually correct.

If an insurance company is allowed to knowingly profit 2x, 3x, or more on an individual's premiums based on their best models, why is an individual disallowed from doing the same if only using public information?

If so, where do we draw the line? Is it at a break-even point? What if the insurance company were trying to target an individual for 15% profits; is that person allowed to engage in the contract if they think the company will only earn 3% on average since that would also demonstrate a model better than the company's?

I can definitely see arguments against an individual having any _causal_ effect on the policy (e.g., like burning down a house), but I'm struggling to see why this kind of information arbitrage is inherently wrong.

<comment><USER22> I agree completely. I think it's a super interesting discussion whether she's actually done anything morally wrong (again, barring the identify fraud).

It's possible that the root cause of this is simply a mispricing of insurance caused by Chinese regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Well, insurance is just gambling with extra steps. Usually, you bet on something bad happening like your house getting burgled or your flight getting delayed, and the insurance company takes you up on that bet.

In a very abstract way there's not much difference between this and betting on sports.

<comment><USER24> I think this is too reductionist as an interpretation.

With an insurance (especially something like travel/home insurances) you are not trying to game the premium, you are rather protecting risk of a preexisting situation.

Sure you can use it to gamble, like buying a few dozen houses and hoping they catch fire sooner than later.

Similarly with the stock market, stocks unlike a casino chips do produce value and represent real quota ownership of an asset. It can be misused in similar ways but it posses distinct qualities.

<comment><USER23> You've identified a difference in motive between recreational gambling and insurance, not a mechanical difference. The woman in this article had different motives to the usual insurance customer.

The point is that one party says to the other "I will give you $X once a month, and if event E doesn't happen in that month, you get to keep this money, otherwise you must give me $Y (s.t.Y >> X)".

You can replace E with "my house burning down" or "The red team wins". In either case, I would call this a bet.

Insurance is just a specific type of gambling where you do it because E is bad and you want to be safe in case it does happen.

<comment><USER25> Insurance and gambling are the inverses of each other.

In gambling, the unlucky losers pay the lucky winners. The people who picked the winning horse, who threw the better roll of the dice, who invested in the right stock get paid.

In insurance, the lucky winners pay the unlucky losers. The people whose house burned down, who came down with a really expensive disease, who lost their jobs get paid.

<comment><USER26> Not really. I don't think the insurance company thinks of themselves as a lucky winner when they have to payout a claim. They lost the bet.

However, in theory insurance is more about pooling risk, where payouts from claims do not exceed premiums collected from the risk pool. Though sometimes insurance companies overextended themselves into places where they are not collecting enough from the pool to cover claims.

<comment><USER25> The insurance company isn't really taking the other side of the bet, it's the rest of the risk pool.

If you are lucky, you will never be seriously sick in your life, never lose your job, and never have your house burn down. If you are so lucky, all of that money you pay for insurance goes to the people who are less lucky.

<comment><USER26> So the insurance company is the bookie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't this a legitimate trading strategy in financial circles

Contracts like credit default swaps pay out if some organisation fails to meet their (debt) obligations

<comment><USER28> Not in this case because she used fake names to initiate the contracts to avoid detection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't really understand how she made money. She apparently still bought tickets. If they weren't delayed she refunded the ticket early. But wouldn't otherwise the insurance payout just offset the price of the ticket? Or was there a premium on top of that?

<comment><USER30> It's unclear, but it sounds like there's insurance available in China that will simply pay you money if your flight is delayed by a certain amount of time. The amount you get paid is not tied to the cost of the ticket it's simply a feature of the contract, so obviously there's a trade-off there with a profitability = Insurance Payout * Probability of Delay - Flight Cost

<comment><USER31> I mean, I'm sure such policy could be arranged elsewhere too as a custom thing, but it's basically gambling at that point. You might as well go to a bookie and place a bet that a flight will or will not be delayed(most bookies would be happy to accept such bet too).

<comment><USER32> Is this some sort of joke I'm not getting or are there actual bookies that take bets on real-world events, and if so how do they determine the odds (in sports from what I understand the odds are determined by the amount gambled on either side, but I can't imagine there is a big enough market for bets on flight delays to make that work)?

<comment><USER33> > in sports from what I understand the odds are determined by the amount > gambled on either side

This is incorrect. This is what applies in a totalizator market like some racing betting agencies. They take the pool of money (eg for a win) and deduct a fixed fee before paying out to the winning bet. The "odds" there are determined by which competitor the market thinks is most likely to win.

But bookmakers actually provide odds based on their own assessments. They are taking the "other side" of the bet and can suffer losses.

And yes, there are bookmakers that will take bets on almost anything. They do it the same as any risk takers, by researching the probabilities.

People bet on political outcomes, sports outcomes, all sorts of different real world events.

<comment><USER34> _> And yes, there are bookmakers that will take bets on almost anything. They do it the same as any risk takers, by researching the probabilities._

Aren't there insurance companies (eg. Lloyd's) that will do the same?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> FWIW - Flight delay insurance in China is sort of like buying a scratch-off lottery ticket. The terminal is dotted with little kiosks where you buy the insurance for 20-50 yuan and hope it pays a couple thousand yuan for a delay.

[https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/25/flight- delaye...](https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/25/flight-delayed-in- china-theres-insurance-for-that/)

</comment><comment><USER36> > The ones they checked with now have a clause that says they will not be > responsible for any payout should the insured, at the time of buying, > already knows or reasonably deduces that the flight can be delayed anytime.

Wait how is that the solution at all? That seems like might be a lot worse for everyone involved, including innocent insurers. I would expect them to somehow reduce the payout to only the cost of the flights or similar, resulting on a net neutral for the insured.

<comment> martin-adams I guess part of the reason people have insurance is to cover other losses, such as hotels and onward flights. Reducing to the cost of the flight might lose a lot of customers.

<comment><USER37> Yup, I've never heard of insurance for just a missed flight, but I have heard of cancellation insurance for the whole journey.

<comment><USER34> > Yup, I've never heard of insurance for just a missed flight, but I have > heard of cancellation insurance for the whole journey.

If you only get insurance for outright cancellation, there is a "donut hole" between that and what the airline will cover in the case of longer delays.

BTW, it can be illuminating to read what the slightly more expensive travel insurance packages will cover; things like a helicopter medevac back to civilization, or ransom payments in case of kidnapping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Heh, I actually did a junior version of this, myself. I play Dance Dance Revolution (video game were you press the buttons with your feet), and buy foam pads to play with. Stores loved to sell you their extended warranty, which everyone tells you is a bad deal.

Well, I noticed that this particular brand/model (Red Octane 2.0 I think) failed pretty quickly[1]. So I always paid the $3, which entitled me to a quick, easily replacement (normally $50) when they inevitably broke down.

[1] Like after a few months -- not soon enough to be annoying, but sooner than they're supposed to last.

</comment><comment><USER39> So the police arrested her. Why wouldn't the police seize insurance companies assets when flights were not delayed? They do exactly same with people, right?

<comment><USER40> Sorry, please read the article. She was not arrested for normally buying retail insurance like how everyone does.

The woman faked different identities (illegal) to not fall under regular insurance quotations, and used insider information (illegal/scam in insurance policies, just how insider info is illegal in stocks).

This is akin to someone buying car insurance, faking different identities each time, and plan in advance to crash the car every single time (the insider info part).

<comment><USER41> I won't argue with the fake identities part, but she didn't force the flights to be delayed. She didn't "crash the car".

It would be more like her driving through a known dangerous intersection, following all traffic laws, and still getting t-boned every few days because of low visibility. She didn't "make" the crash happen, she just knew it would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The problem was her access to privileged information about the flights. And, misleading multiple identities. If she'd stuck to hedging and sold a service she probably would have IPO'd by now.

The arbitrage function remains useful.

</comment><comment><USER43> > The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive > relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be > delayed or cancelled.

Why does the title say she "predicted" they would get delayed?

<comment> globular-toast I wonder that same thing. This changes it from really clever to insider trading (ie. fraud).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Even though it didn't end up well for her, it's nice example of how non- technical person can "hack" the system. She definitely has hacker mindset.

<comment><USER45> Grifter mindset, you mean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> And you are seeking side project ideas :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Finally a story about a hacker in this forum

</comment><comment><USER48> > The ones they checked with now have a clause that says they will not be > responsible for any payout should the insured, at the time of buying, > already knows or reasonably deduces that the flight can be delayed anytime.

I think if burden is on insurer, then insurance can get away with any payout. They can always claim you knew weather is bad. So after all, insirance career is a big winner here.

</comment><comment><USER49> that's not really that surprising, many travellers in Europe I know were buying lot of flights during pandemic knowing they will be cancelled and they will get bonus miles as compensation to accumulate them, you didn't even need insurance for that

I know plenty of people who made hudnreds of euros on these low cost flights, it's same people who are buying error fares

there is nothing fraudulent about it

you can do actually same thing with sending packages insured for much higher value than is content to destinations where you know they are very likely to be stolen/lost

</comment><comment><USER50> She got greedy and got caught. I wonder how many more might be doing this.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder how she predicted so accurately which flights would be delayed.

<comment><USER52> _But instead of getting onto the flights herself, Li was making use of her past travel service work experience to selectively take out insurance on flights that she thought would be delayed.

The Paper, citing Yangtse Evening Post, said she was able to receive relevant information beforehand that tells her if the flight was going to be delayed or cancelled._

3rd and 4th paragraphs of the article.

<comment><USER53> "receive relevant information" doesn't really adequately answer the question of _how._

<comment><USER54> it's possible she was in talks with a co-worker who gave her insider info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> She beat the game of insuring flights, what's wrong about it to have police arrest her? She played fair, rules were set by those companies.

<comment><USER56> I guess the part where she used 20 fake identities to hide her tracks is illegal?

<comment><USER57> Ok, fake identities are illegal. But why would she need to hide her tracks? Was there something else illegal in the first place, that would necessitate her using fake identities to hide? What?

<comment><USER58> You can only get one insurance policy per flight per identity and the maximum profit per policy is limited. So to increase profits you can get more identities and then get more insurance. Kinda how some people have dozens of dropbox accounts to take advantage of the free storage every account gets.

<comment><USER34> _> Kinda how some people have dozens of dropbox accounts to take advantage of the free storage every account gets._

That's only part of the story (and trying to manage storage across multiple Dropbox accounts is a pain). The real benefit would be the expanded free storage your primary account gets as a referral incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Woman buys insurance to make money... and somehow she is arrested.

This reminds me of the other articles -- parents pay $500k to private university so their kids can be accepted... and then somehow they are arrested.

When articles write about people being arrest, do bother to document what is the violation.

Probably the best reading of "..." nowadays is "and making money is bad, so" or "and this made somebody higher-class than them sad, so".

<comment><USER60> > Probably the best reading of "..." nowadays is "and making money is bad, so" > or "and this made somebody higher-class than them sad, so".

My understanding of the university admissions scandal was that the parents were defrauding the university by bribing the admissions staff to lie to the university about how good the candidates were. It would have been legal if they had instead been honest with the university and paid however much extra was needed to convince them to accept their children. But that would have cost them more than bribing individual staff.

So I don't think that example fits your mould.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Clever woman, she should have found a legal way to bet, or working for a trading firm, because she is good at it.

</comment><comment><USER62> How much money she would made when Corona pandemic started when all flights got delayed?!

</comment><comment><USER63> too bad this article is so thin. i'd be interested to know how she made a dime. what insurance policies pays you back more than the cost of the travel arrangements themselves, which you are already out of pocket on?

</comment><comment><USER64> from the article:

"Unfortunately, the police caught up with her misdeeds and arrested her..."

:)

</comment><comment><USER65> -20 social credit

<comment><USER66> double plus ungood</comment></comment>


Cards Against Humanity holds 99 percent off sale for cars, diamonds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/23/18109070/cards-against-humanity-black-friday-99-percent-off-sale-cars-diamonds <comment><USER2> So... Did they actually sell these things? How much did they spend on that stunt?

<comment><USER3> Yes, they actually sold all of the things.

Someone over at Metafilter estimated the total at $118,450, with the assumption that there was one of everything being sold.

Now if you believe that CAH sold one of items like the Antartica trip and unlimited amounts of items like the Absurd Box ( _especially_ the Absurd Box, which is closer to $20 in MSRP than $2,000), then they probably broke even on the whole affair.

If you add in goodwill and viral marketing value, they made out like bandits. It was a brilliant project.</comment></comment>


How to Get Hired Like a Badass - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zerply.com/post/50013465049/how-to-get-hired-like-a-badass

<comment><USER2> Was it really necessary to have a _blinking_ Bluetooth headset? :|

</comment><comment><USER3> Adam Winn our resident badass :)</comment>


Nicer C99 APIs with Designated Initializers - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/10/08/c99-api-designated-initializer/

<comment><USER2> His code snippets are not showing up correctly on his site:

"bool ok = socket99_open(&cfg, &res);"

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks.

<comment><USER2> Great post! I'm a diehard embedded C programmer, so any new language tidbit is always welcome. Thanks! ;)</comment></comment></comment>


What is Syslog? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.logentries.com/2014/08/what-is-syslog/

<comment><USER2> >However, a key aspect of log analysis is to understand the format of the arriving log data, especially in a heterogeneous environment where different applications may be developed using different log formats and network protocols to send these log data.

This is exactly what we are trying to solve with Fluentd, an open source log collector with the goal of unifying log management ([http://www.fluentd.org/blog/unified-logging- layer](http://www.fluentd.org/blog/unified-logging-layer)) Syslog is a solid, "tried and true" tool, but when it comes to extensibility/modularity, it is definitely lacking.</comment>


What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_1.html

<comment><USER2> The first one is the one I had when I followed the links, and you can phrase it even more concisely: Always be looking for reasons why you are wrong, not reasons why you are right.

Works for engineering, too.

<comment><USER3> I've found sometimes I can force myself into "defense" mode just by stating to myself the opposite of what I'm trying to prove.

I may tell myself "it's impossible to use product X to accomplish this" then see that as a challenge and try to prove myself wrong. But this might only work because I can be an arrogant contrarian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Possibility spaces was a great suggestion.

It led me to look up and figure out for myself a scientifically important long-standing question I had not answered: Does the option to switch cases at the end of Deal or No Deal mirror the Monty Hall problem or not?

Short answer is that it does not; switching cases confers no advantage in Deal or No Deal. I've proven this to myself by mapping out the possible outcomes. But the idea that whether the opened cases are chosen at random or by a knowledgeable host making the difference between a 1/26 or a 1/2 chance of winning still baffles me. I'm going to have to thing about that one for a while.

Which is why you should do the math instead of trusting intuition.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Haecceity also explains why you can gradually replace every atom in an object so that it not longer contains any of the original material and yet psychologically, we consider it to be the same object."

This is why sports fanaticism is very hard for me to relate to.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion, sports fanaticism is kind of a dangerous thing. It seems to me to be mostly about reinforcing "us vs 'them'" mentality, which in itself is a diluted "good vs evil."

To take it to the extreme, us-vs-them-good-vs-evil seems to be one of the biggest basis of most large scale oppressions ("the jews/blacks/muslims are less than us, less than human. it's us vs them."), and it facilitates the justification of war and the entrenching of religious bigotry through subconscious (and sometimes conscious) dehumanization.

I know I took your post off topic and to the extreme, but it just doesn't seem like a good mentality to grow up with. Thoughts?

<comment><USER7> I disagree. I think the "us vs them" mentality will exist in many people, and sports fanaticism creates a harmless outlet for it. If we deprive the "us vs them" minded people of harmless outlets like team sports, they may instead focus their attention on political or ethnic teams.

If there is any substitution affect at all, I suspect sports fanaticism is highly beneficial - compare the damage done by rampaging celtics fans to the damage done by rampaging communism fans or rampaging hutu fans.

<comment><USER8> An "outlet" is one of those Freudian concepts that hasn't been proven and Wikipedia says that scientific opinion is divided.

It just seems illogical to me.

When your options for spending time and energy are infinite, are we required to include a certain number of angry activities to expend anger? A certain number of negative activities to expend negativity? Then why should it be necessary to have a certain number of "us vs them" activities?

Sources:

Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? - <https://illinois.edu/lb/files/2009/03/26/9293.pdf>

Catharsis on Wikipedia - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it just my imagination or is everybody who ventured an opinion there a guy?

Anyhow If I had to pick just one concept, I'd probably go with either standpoint epistemology or situated knowledges. Oppression theory, intersectionality, and gender theory would all be high on my list too. For those who have read the whole article, did anybody mention any of these?

<comment><USER7> None of the specific theories you mentioned were on the first page of that list (there are many more pages than the first).

The page seems to be working at a much higher level of abstraction than your suggested contributions. Most of the suggestions on the page focus on scientific methodology (falsifiability, probability distributions), not specific theories (gravitation) or particular schools of political advocacy (Oppression Theory).

<comment><USER9> thanks for checking. i downloaded the whole document using the trick from elsewhere in the thread and didn't see any of these topics.

> The page seems to be working at a much higher level of abstraction than your > suggested contributions.

i'm not sure i see it that way. standpoint epistemology is in the same category as falsifiability: a model for knowledge. oppression theory provides a social science model for power vectors. intersectionality applies to graph theory as well as social sciences. if anything i think the abstraction level is higher.

<comment><USER7> You might be right about standpoint epistemiology, I can't say I understand it well enough to comment.

But intersectionality is merely the hypothesis that the dimensionality of experiencing oppression is O(a^n) rather than merely O(n). I.e., discrimination(black woman) != discrimination(black) `simple operation` discrimination(woman). Similarly, as you note, oppression theory is a hypothesis + moral conclusions narrowly restricted to a particular type of social science.

Probability and the concept of "Garbage In, Garbage Out" are useful to all fields. The CAP theorem, the schrodinger equation and oppression theory are pretty narrow in their scope.

<comment><USER9> You've misdescribed intersectionality [which isn't only about discrimination] and oppression theory [which doesn't necessarily have any morality embedded, and is very broad in its applicability]. How much do you do know about any of the topics you're being so dismissive of?

If somebody without any apparent background in your areas of expertise numerical wave propagation and exponential asymptotics described them incorrectly and said that they weren't as important as other areas, how would you react?

<comment><USER7> I don't know a lot about them (learned a little bit in college), and I admit I had to brush up on wikipedia before commenting. You'll note that I explicitly described my (former) field ("the Schrodinger equation") as being narrow in scope relative to the concept of probability. I didn't even bother mentioning exponential asymptotics since it's so obscure that most people need not even know it exists. It's a neat mathematical tool, useful for a few purposes. That's all.

Look, you use probability and the concept of GIGO everywhere - computing, sociology, physics, business, etc. Most people will never have any need for exponential asymptotics, oppression theory or the mechanics of securities markets.

Here is a diagram that most academics need to internalize: <http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/>

<comment><USER9> i use oppression theory, intersectionality, and standpoint epistemology as much as i use probability and GIGO. your mileage may vary.

good diagram but i'm not sure why its relevant. i don't have a PhD in any of these things, i just find them very useful transformative techniques that most people don't know about -- or don't understand well enough to apply in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I nominate awareness of selection bias in all its glorious forms.

</comment><comment><USER11> OK, my reading for self improvement for today (or this week) is done, this is so good.

A quick look at the first page reveals gems like the concept of _haecceity_ (my Firefox dictionary doesn't have this) and Haim Harrari's wonderful analog of extremism and the "edge of a circle", although as you would expect, there is lesser stuff like Lakoff's blarney.

I was surprised to see people mention probability as an important concept. Totally right. I would add a favorite quote (more for the cognitive toolkit of grad EEs): "A random variable is neither random nor a variable."

</comment><comment><USER12> How can I get all of these on a single page so I can print and read later? There's a lot of good ideas and good writing here.

<comment><USER13> for i in {1..17}; do curl <http://edge.org/q2011/q11_$i.html> >> edge.html; done

Courtesy of sivers / qcassidy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126642>

<comment><USER9> very useful, thanks! worked like a charm ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Learn to debate issues factually without taking them personally. There's more harm in refusing to admit you are wrong than in being wrong. Humans are imperfect, it's better to admit you are wrong and then adjust your ideas (and thus become less wrong) than to take criticism personally and refuse to stop being wrong. The Universe doesn't care about your emotions, it just is.

</comment><comment><USER15> That climate change is occurring is falsifiable. Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it: not falsifiable. That's what a climate skeptic really cares about.

<comment><USER16> >Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it: not falsifiable

Could you expand on this? There's a difference between 'hard to show through theory' and 'not falsifiable'.

Here are

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming>

If the IPCC's recommendations on CO2 are not followed, which seems likely, we will directly test most of these claims.

As long as you have a definition of 'negatively impact', that can be evaluated objectively, it seems like 'Whether or not it will negatively impact our world insofar that we should try to prevent it' is eminently falsifiable, as there exists an experiment which allows us to see what happens. Expensive experiments, yes, but that's a different issue.

<comment><USER15> What's concerning is that people conflate the science that the earth is warming with the "non-science" that some catastrophic event is looming on the horizon if we don't stop that warming. The first is a testable hypothesis. The latter, when you consider the complexity of modeling climate and ecology, is at best no different than stock picking. That's why I disagree with the notion that climate skeptics are intellectually insincere in questioning climate change; whether they are right or not, there is a possibility this could be the next eugenics-like pop junk science where we are told we should make sacrifices because of some purported "theory".

<comment><USER17> Insincere is comparing climate change to eugenics. Eugenics was purely a theory and promoted taking away people's right to have children (or in the worst cases, genocide). Climate change involves hard evidence that the world is warming and demands economic changes to mitigate.

Any policy debate is going to be far more complicated that any testable hypothesis and scepticism is healthy, but your comparison to eugenics is bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> When your mind wanders, it is dealing with necessary sub-thoght trails, don't abort unless necessary: [http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain- stop-payin...](http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-paying- attention-zoning-out-crucial-mental-state)

Learn to have an open mind, but not too open: [http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What- open-m...](http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-10192149/What-open- mindedness-requires-if.html)

Learn about cognitive fallacies and cognitive biases. The little thinking shortcuts minds take which lead to wrong conclusions.

Learn how to learn: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1276882>

Start asking smart questions: <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

Read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, discover that most of your thinking goes on without you trying at all.

Read "The Gift of Fear" by Gavin DeBecker, our emotional responses to our world can be sources of surprisingly accurate insight.

Develop the ability to create complete silence in your mind, no chit-chatter. Creativity is greater in people with this ability. *scientific american

Learn how to estimate and do it right: [http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/97805968095...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/9780596809515/learn- to-estimate/learn_to_estimate)

Becoming a functional perfectionist: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you- be-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-you-be-too- perfect)

Some of these links are behind pay-walls, sorry, but they are amazing articles, some google searching can get around them.</comment>


Is the Bitcoin bubble about to burst? - <AUTHOR> http://guru8.net/2013/11/is-the-bitcoin-bubble-about-to-burst/

<comment><USER2> I wish I could vote this post down, an empty article with no insight that gets it completely wrong in the very first sentence.

<comment><USER3> i wouldn't get too worked up. i skimmed it and then noticed that the author is a 9-year-old school boy from Uganda, not exactly a financial analyst on Wall Street. That's what we get for having an open community and embracing all posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another reminder of Betteridge's law of headlines[0]?

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome article. Can we see the perl script that wrote it?

<comment><USER6> lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whether you're a Bitcoin hater or fanboi, you can't ignore that there is "something there". Every time someone predicts the Bitcoin bubble burst, and it's correct, it comes back faster, harder, more profitable, and becomes more resilient after the fact.

Personally, I'm enjoying watching the anthropological and economical impacts of Bitcoin on our culture. It may end up doing nothing long term, and just a crypto kiddie hobby, but it may also turn heads, and cause concern for legal regulation by law makers.

/me grabs the popcorn.

</comment><comment><USER8> Whenever the bitcoin price hits a new benchmark ($50,$100,$500 etc) there are a bunch of posts saying it will eventually burst.

This one really doesn't provide any insight as to why the author thinks so.

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe.

That's all anyone can say to "Is the <noun> bubble about to burst?".

If it was, it would have burst already. If it weren't, it wouldn't be a bubble.

That leaves, "Maybe.".

</comment><comment><USER10> Has HN become the new /r/technology, or something?</comment>


Ask HN: What should every programmer know? - <AUTHOR> I am about to graduate college, I have had an internship for almost the past 3 years as a software engineer and prototyper, mostly working with Java.  I am about to look for a full time job and was wondering what should every programmer know?  This can be anything from web development, to requirements, or to database entry.  So that way I can be prepared for an interview and become a better programmer.  I looked online and wanted to know what you guys think. <comment><USER2> StackOverflow is the right place for such questions and it has been asked already. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/132798/what-should- every-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/132798/what-should-every- programmer-know)

<comment><USER3> Another good one on Stack Overflow - "What should a developer know before building a public web site?"

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a- devel...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-developer- know-before-building-a-public-web-site)</comment></comment>


Abusing my friend's emotional turmoil for science - <AUTHOR> https://gastrograph.com/blogs/gastronexus/emotional-turmoil.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author of this post and the CEO of Analytical Flavor Systems - I'm happy to answer any questions!</comment>


21 Lessons from Jeff Bezos' Annual Letters to Shareholders - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder-letters/ <comment><USER2> How scalable are these lessons to other companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> They all seem pretty generally applicable to me.</comment></comment>


Facebook pay checks make Wall Street look cheap - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/16/facebook-pay-checks-make-wall-street-look-cheap/

<comment><AUTHOR> First off I believe Sheryl Sandberg move to Facebook had less to do with money and more to do with intellectual challenge. She was set for life before FB. I am sure the money only helped her decision making.

These figures seem pretty crazy, but competition for top talent in the tech world is nuts right now (Amazon, FB, Apple, Google, MSFT, not to mention other cool, smaller companies). I would be curious to see how FB compares to the banks in total compensation (including stock/options). Most banks have moved away from cash compensation. Tech is hot now, but I bet during similar cycles in other industries these figures would not be completely off. Things within the industry should normalize long-term.</comment>


Why APIs Matter - <AUTHOR> https://www.hellosign.com/blog/why-apis-matter <comment><USER2> It's definitely getting important for all businesses to understand/use APIs—not just the tech-focused ones.</comment>


IBM to build brain-like computers - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7740484.stm

<comment><USER2> A headline from the 1950s.

<comment><USER3> We know much more about the brain today.

A similar headline can be found for using "brainlike techniques" for object detection. <http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/2214233>

But the algorithms in this case are from numenta, jeff hawkin's company. The methodology is:

      1. Study the brain
      2. Come up with theories on how memory and processing in the brain work
      3. Write algorithms with the same structure.

I'd call that brain-like.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, except that Step 2 is super sketchy and arguably unscientific at this point.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't call the thousands of researchers in the field unscientific at all. And this process is iterative. If you have an algorithm that works, the proximity to how the brain actually works is largely irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Haven't these guys heard of software? I thought the only good reason to do something in hardware was speed, but maybe I'm just crazy.

<comment><USER5> The BBC article left out a critical constraint from DARPA. The final deliverable (with the "complexity of a cat's brain") isn't just a model or a simulation. It has to be a physical artifact which requires no more than two liters of volume and consumes no more than two kilowatts of power (this information comes from the DARPA BAA). So yes, prototyping will be done in software, but to reach that kind of efficiency, drastically new hardware is called for.

I'm not intimately familiar with IBM's plans, but this is one of the applications HP has lined up for the memristor technology they've been working on (HP is another one of the three prime contractors on the original DARPA grant). The benefit to the HP approach is that data and computation are both local to the applicable memristor, which is much closer to a neural system. That means no time or energy is wasted shuttling data around and the entire system state can be updated in parallel.

For an idea of why this is so exciting, keep in mind that HP plans build memristors at about a density of a trillion per square centimeter, clocked at about a kilohertz. You get the rough equivalent of one floating point operation _per memristor per cycle_. At this estimated manufacturing density, the expected performance of these things is on the order of a petaflop per square centimeter, drawing on the order of tens of watts. It isn't really fair to make a comparison to Von Neumann machines since the architecture is so dramatically different and so application-specific, but for certain kinds of computations these new chips will be _vastly_ faster and more efficient.

(for the sake of disclosure, I'm working on the DARPA SyNAPSE project, but not with IBM)

<comment><USER6> How can I apply for a job working on this project?

<comment><USER5> Well, it depends. :-)

Drop me an email with some information on where you're coming from and what kinds of roles you're looking for and I may be able to point you to the right people. (bchandle at gmail)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool story, but when I saw the picture (of the cat using the computer), all I could do was think of the LOLCat caption that got cropped out.

"I can haz brain?"

"I thinkz lik computr?"

"I'm in ur nural netz, thinkin ur thotz"

It got so bad I couldn't finish the article.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder, will the brain-like computers need sleep?

<comment><USER9> Oh yeah. Just like microprocessors can't be left switched on too long due to the risk of transistors melting by overheating/heat-accumulation; similarly brain-like compus will need rest, probably more that traditional comps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the future is in large-scale parallel computing. They shouldn't be wasting their money on this. So working on parallel processing would be the most practical path to attaining this goal.</comment>


Google just launched three new photography apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16763544/google-appsperiments-storyboard-selfissimo-scrubbies-apps-photography-motion-stills <comment><USER2> Fuck them. Their crippling/abandoning of Picasa should make it clear not to trust their efforts.

</comment><comment><USER3> And this will be the last time they ever update these 3 apps.</comment>


Bill Clinton on NSA: Americans need to be on guard for abuses of power by US - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/21/clinton-nsa-scotland-speech

<comment><USER2> > But he said it was crucial there was accountability and transparency in the > use of surveillance and interceptions by agencies such as the NSA – an area > which he said was "blurry, grey and made people uncomfortable".

The un-warranted (in both senses of the word) surveillance and interception of communications by the NSA is neither blurry nor grey. It is breaks both the spirit and the word of the law.. That is why many people are uncomfortable.

Attempting to portray it as a "blurry" or "grey" only tries to hide the issue at hand and give the NSA an excuse. There is no excuse.

</comment><comment><USER3> We should take whatever "big name" that publicly opposes the surveillance state we can get, but let's not fool ourselves here. Bill Clinton is only saying this because he wants his wife to be seen as "against this", when she runs for president again - just like Obama in 2008.

In reality, I'm 99.99% she's going to continue Obama's surveillance policies if she becomes president. Bill Clinton pretends to be surprised by this, but Carnivore/Echelon started under him. Plus, Bill Clinton has basically been one of Obama's mentors since he became president, so I doubt he was unaware of what Obama was doing.</comment>


Heroku needs to improve presenting addons - <AUTHOR> https://addons.heroku.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Uff.. I like Heroku but its sad that I can't filter down addons by category. :-/</comment>


Apple Loved You Pro Users; Loves Your Money More, Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/23652/Apple_Loved_You_Pro_Users_Loves_Your_Money_More_Now

<comment><USER2> I actually have no problem with Apple's prices. People don't buy a Rolls-Royce because it's a car, they buy it because it's a Rolls-Royce. Comparing the purchase price or mpg to a Toyota Camry is missing the point.

I build my own machines, and don't buy Apple products. However, I see nothing wrong with charging what the market will bear for an upscale product.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would seem to be an ill timed article as the 6 core per chip Mac Pros are here this month. The cynical part of me thinks it is timed now to make it look like he took those into account (which he didn't). Also note the " __* Estimated score" at the end of the performance graph.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a hard time making sense of those graphs since I don't see units or a scale on th y-axis.

<comment><USER5> I know, right!?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to Showcase Favorite Hacker News URLs? - <AUTHOR> I have 75+ tabs open on my phone with my favorite HackerNews articles.
I want to move this to an extremely minimal website where I can keep a running list of all my favorite articles, and share it with my friends.
Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> You can add them to your favorite page in HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=juan4thewin](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=juan4thewin)

A feature I miss is to be able to sort them, or classify them as supersuperuperfavorite / superfavorite / favorite, or something like that. I'm not sure how is the best method.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use: [https://app.getpocket.com/](https://app.getpocket.com/) Default in my Firefox and extension in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER4> literally just an html file + any free web host

</comment><comment><USER5> Pinboard.in</comment>


Ask HN: Litra – fake submissions? - <AUTHOR> Looks like there is a lot of submissions for "Litra Healthcare blockchain" posted by one only submission people. :( <comment><USER2> Just flag them.</comment>


iPhone 8 Plus allegedly 'explodes' while charging in Taiwan - <AUTHOR> http://shanghaiist.com/2017/09/29/iphone-8-explodes.php <comment><USER2> In the video it looks like she was still able to use the phone, the angle is such that you can't see the crack while she is scrolling. Are there any other videos where she uses the phone and you can see the crack? Or, do her comments, which I don't understand, shed any light on usability after the crack?</comment>


Ask HN: Did anything actually happen due to Y2K? - <AUTHOR> While it's obvious that the Y2K bug didn't have the apocalyptic impact that people were freaking out about, I was curious if anything major broke/malfunctioned/did-something-unexpected because of it. <comment><USER2> I'm currently consulting on a workforce management SaaS. (Think of workforce management as a time clock where people can punch in and out).

It was interesting to learn that starting in 2015 some customers were having trouble generating payroll for their youngest employees (aged 16 years) at the time. In debugging the issue it was concluded that Y2k was the issue (sort of).

</comment><comment><USER3> Lots of consultants made a fuck tonne of money

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, this is the worst one that I've heard of: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1541557.stm)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like a procedural error too, giving patients a probability, not a test result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was a contractor at a Fortune 500 company in 1999. We had a six month code freeze. We couldn't even make changes to development. So I was very bored. Taught myself PalmOS development while I waited.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah: Tech Support

Peachtree changed their tune early on from "Yes it will work past 2000" to "We only support versions beyond version Y for the Y2k changeover" (no direct mention that the older versions will work)

Many publishers' tech support got ran over by marketing to con people to buy new software/hardware based on various real and imagined FUD. Y2K was a big inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER8> I remember that New Mexico's driver's license system went down.

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember hearing of isolated incidents, but nothing major happened that I'm aware of. I guess the biggest thing to happen was a lot of COBOL programmers made pretty good coin leading up to January 1, 2000.</comment>


How to Get Started with Bitcoins - <AUTHOR> http://pzxc.com/how-to-get-started-with-bitcoins <comment><USER2> What nerd doesn't love the idea of virtual currency?

But, it seems like all of the exchanges have closed or are temporarily closed to new registrations. This seems problematic, and means the only realistic way in or out is dealing directly with other people and businesses who believe in this particular currency. I spent some time reading the list of people and companies accepting Bitcoin payments, and was extremely underwhelmed. Lots of pyramid schemes, random low-rent affiliate crap like phone cards, etc. No actually useful goods or services. And, a lot of the websites that are talking about this stuff have a definite "get rich quick" vibe about them.

Basically, it's all extremely flaky seeming stuff. This brings me to the thing that makes me worry more: Who developed the code for Bitcoins? How do I know it is secure? The people that seem to be most involved in Bitcoin discussions seem to be...well, kinda dumb. I don't trust dumb people to build strong encryption (I don't even trust smart people to build strong encryption, unless they're talking it over with lots of other smart people). Reading the FAQ at Bitcoin.org doesn't do much to alleviate my concerns. There's another FAQ in the wiki that mentions SHA and a few other reassuring things, but I'm not having much luck finding the real meat of the thing, and names of people responsible for the security of the system.

In short, if this is a serious virtual currency implementation by people who understand the security implications of such, I'm unable to find strong evidence of that fact. And, so, I worry about dealing with it.

<comment><USER3> My basic problem with them is question three in the FAQ (<http://www.bitcoin.org/faq>). In a nutshell, "What backs BitCoins? Nothing." It is true that a currency that is accepted by people is by definition valuable at the point in time where they accept it, but that does not mean you can create a backless-currency and have it all just magically work, nor that it will necessarily work across time. A dollar is accepted because you can use it to pay your debts to the US Government. Inductively, another economic entity will accept them for another good or service because they also have that value for a dollar, and further inductively because they know they can then use it for some other good or service, until the inductive net spans the globe. But they're trying to skip the base case. That doesn't work.

(And I suspect even if you could magic wand it into existence it would still be very vulnerable. Take any fiat currency today of your choice. Remove the government backing. How long does it last? Probably not zero, but it probably crumbles at the next crisis at the latest. It would only take one metaphorical bank run to demolish the entire currency in a heartbeat. And it would only take a small nucleus of savvy people to prompt such a bank run, too, and such savvy people definitely exist.)

And in startup parlance, this is just about the worst possible "boil the ocean" plan possible. Virtual currencies will eventually happen and I'd even bet within a century you could live entirely off non-government-backed currencies, but it'll happen organically, not by fiat. And, no joke, it'll probably be some form of MMORPG cash, because those are by far the best seed I can think of for this sort of system to crystallize around, though probably some future MMORPG that makes today's look like tinkertoys.

<comment><USER4> We could imbues bitcoin with intrinsic value if we use bitcoin as a notarization database.

The problem with that is the use of bitcoin as a notarization service will erode bitcoin as a form of money. You would need to pay higher fee to prioritize bitcoin over big documents such as DNS record and contracts. That become inconvenient real fast for those who transact in bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm getting sick of hearing about bitcoins already, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to get more sick of hearing about them over the next year or so. (Then, one day, I'll mysteriously never hear about them again.)

Why? Because everyone who owns some of this intrinsically worthless asset immediately has an incentive to start working on talking them up. Social news sites are the front line of this battle... write a story about how they're going to be the next big thing and submit it, and you can be guaranteed a bunch of upvotes from everyone _else_ who owns some bitcoins. This story alone probably caused at least a 10% increase in the value of 'em.

Personally I'll buy some bitcoins the moment they become exchangeable for pogs.

<comment><USER6> I will send you 2 pogs for every bitcoin sent to this address:

        1AiU5WBxdPxQkbrHKRrK3555cbL2ujzmqm

Please include shipping address in the transaction. Limit 100 pogs per address. Offer expires May 1, 2011.

<comment><USER7> It's not possible to include extra information like 'shipping address' in a bitcoin transaction, unless that transaction is sent to an IP address (vs sending to a bitcoin address).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By my understanding, this system requires _every_ transaction to be published to _everyone_ , and to be remembered _forever_. That sounds like it inherently can't scale very far.

Details:

The basic data structure is a hash-chained list of blocks of transactions, with each block including one transaction of XX bitcoins from /dev/null to whoever generated that block. A node trying to calculate a next block include all (valid) transactions it knows. If the list branches, nodes ignore the shorter branch (this makes transactions more secure as they get older, assuming the swarm has more computing power than any troublemakers; so the time for a transaction to "clear" is whenever you trust that there are enough later blocks). In order to know if a transaction is valid, the node needs to have the prior transaction(s) that the involved bitcoins came through last (and any other subsequent transactions of that prior one). That prior transaction could be arbitrarily far back.

<comment><USER4> 1\. There had been talk of pruning information that the blockchain don't need, especially information that got confirmed a gazillion time.

2\. There had been talk of a lightweight client that download the block header or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I might have considered this a good idea, before I played SecondLife with Linden dollars, or used points on Listia, or got gold on Gaia Online.

The problem with these virtual currencies so far is that they're very unstable and they suffer from quick and dramatic deflation and inflation (usually the latter) that makes them absolutely terrible as primary currencies if you don't want to starve to death.

This isn't to say that gov't backed currencies don't have this problem; far from it: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hype...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hyperinflation)

Keeping currencies stable is very difficult, which means that I'm really nervous about any system that isn't well-established already. It's not a guarantee, but it's better than nothing.

<comment><USER10> _The problem with these virtual currencies so far is that they're very unstable and they suffer from quick and dramatic deflation and inflation (usually the latter) that makes them absolutely terrible as primary currencies_

What is different about Bitcoin is that the amount of it will be fixed, therefore no monetary inflation is really possible.

That said, its value in dollars can depreciate if M3 in dollars + outstanding credit in dollars contracts. And this might happen in the following years since outstanding credit in dollars, with the exception of Government debt, is contracting.

I think Bitcoin is a good idea but it solves a problem (hyperinflation) that we don't have right now. If we had hyperinflation Bitcoin would become the Napster of central banking.

<comment><USER5> _What is different about Bitcoin is that the amount of it will be fixed, therefore no monetary inflation is really possible_

Until the day that everybody decides the bubble is over, at which point the value of the bitcoin drops to zero. But hey, you might make some real money in the meantime!

<comment><USER10> _Until the day that everybody decides the bubble is over_

Same thing can happen with any fiat currency, like the dollar or the euro. Actually, the same thing can happen with any currency, period. Even with a gold-backed one. If science finds a way to make gold without mining it, gold would drop in value.

<comment><USER5> True. All that gold and dollars have that bitcoins don't is hundreds and/or thousands of years of history _and_ billions of people who think they're worth something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with deflation though is that it encourages people to save them and not spend them. Why would you create a currency which is meant to deflate? In most cases, deflation is worse than inflation.

<comment><USER12> That's because in a debt based economy, deflation means a shrinking of the money supply, and a shrinking of the money supply means less money is being lent, and less money being lent means economic stagnation.

An economy based on bitcoins couldn't work like this - because deflation doesn't shrink the money supply, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with less money being lent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a reasonably long time HN'er, and also just got back from a business trip with the owner of Mt. Gox, really the only working BitCoin exchange. In fact, I'm in Liberia, Costa Rica right now, checking HN waiting to fly home from my trip, and I saw him this morning.

We have, in fact, been discussing a co-founder partnership deal, so I have lots of right-now thoughts... Here's my summary on BitCoins, and what I think the system needs:

There are currently four categories of people interested in BitCoins:

1) Deflationary Currency wonks / Gold-standard tinfoil hat types

2) Crypto and Currency Nerds

3) Speculators

4) Russians

Here is what BitCoin is good for:

Semi-anonymous-to-the-rest-of-the-world transactions of bitcoins, accomplished relatively quickly with no regard for global borders.

The system is reasonably anonymous, reasonably secure and makes some fundamental innovations in how value is transferred around: Consider if you can think of any other digitally transmitted, no-central-authority, semi- anonymous value systems. I am unable to think of any, and have been thinking for a number of months now.

To naysayers like SwellJoe, I have a degree in Theoretical Math and a background in Cryptography, and I have read, fairly thoroughly, the process and mechanisms used, and would say that the system does a reasonably good job delivering what it promises. Of course, it's open source, so go crazy and come back with an alternate viewpoint.

So, to my mind, there's clearly a place for BitCoins on the internet. I believe they will be useful in four possible scenarios:

1\. For digital goods that one wishes to purchase privately.

2\. For international value transfers

3\. For activities like 'tipping' others on the Internet

4\. In a credits-type system where the developer cannot or will not produce their own system, either because users do not trust the developer, or it's just easier to use an existing one.

I don't believe BitCoins will ever be useful in a currency-for-hard-goods situation, for a few reasons, one of which is that labor is unlikely to accept it (except possibly in Russia, or places where the government currency is seriously broken), the second -- extreme currency fluctuation against USD is likely to continue for some time.

There are roughly a thousand users of BitCoin right now, maybe 2k. The coins are released, 50 per 10 minutes, regardless of number of users. Consider -- what will happen when 10,000 or 100,000 new users enter the system? If the currency tips at all, or multiple times, it is highly likely that demand will push cost of BitCoins very high. So, this makes it an appealing thing to speculate in right now, of course. And, might make you wish to participate in an online exchange as a founder.

To counterbalance, the issue of running an exchange for BitCoins has a few major hurdles. A quick scan of my listed usage scenarios indicates that Bitcoins are best for money laundering russian mafia and porn sites. Combine that with the fact that an exchange is allowing people to trade a fungible currency derivative semi-anonymously, and you have a LARGE raft of legal items and compliance issues to take care of. I've had three separate estimates run in the roughly $1mm to do filing and compliance, US only. Ouch!

To counter-counter-balance, if I ideate properly, a well-run BitCoin exchange could conceivably be a sort of Paypal/Visa competitor -- providing merchant services and easy payment transfers to a wide range of people who really need it. That's appealing.

I hope this has been interesting, I enjoyed getting my thoughts down on HN paper.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if it's possible to pool computing resources and share the resulting bitcoins. Having to wait one year for a block (50 coins) is a real turn-off.

Consider using up 0.2kW continuously for a year (a typical mid-end PC at full load), with the local price of 13 cents per kW-hour, it works out to about $228 worth of electricity for 50 coins (note the computer itself would depreciate in this time). That means $4 per bitcoin minimum costs, far above the 20 cents at which it is trading now.

What are your costs where you live? Calculate:

      cost_per_coin = 0.2 * 8765 (hours in a year) * your_kWH_price / 50 or
      cost_per_coin = 30.56 * your_kWH_price

<comment><USER7> Yes you can. There are mining pools that work cooperatively and share the resulting generated block. See <http://mining.bitcoin.cz/> and <http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1458.0> for two different approaches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to the FAQ it takes about a year to generate 50 bitcoins, and at the current exchange rate they'll be worth about $12.50 USD. That's very little value for a year's worth of computation, and they're still quite rare. As more are created the exchange rate is going to drop unless they become very widely accepted, but there probably won't be enough of them to support a large economy.

<comment><USER16> The idea behind it is that they're (nigh-) infinitely divisible. One bitcoin in existence, forever, would be enough; 21 million just makes the numbers nicer to look at. The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else.

<comment><USER5> _The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else._

It's also a key part of the marketing spiel -- selling people on the idea that they can get bitcoin-rich for free is a key part of getting people hooked on bitcoins. If I tell you "I've invented a new currency, want to buy some?" you'll tell me to sod off, but if I tell you "I've invented a new currency, you can mine it yourself as a background process" then you might be persuaded to give it a go. Pretty soon you've got some bitcoins of your own, and every incentive to start talking them up to everyone you meet.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoiners already downing everyone that think they can generate bitcoin for free.

"Unless you have a GPU farm, go buy bitcoins instead" and variations thereof.

<comment><USER5> And as a computational physicist I think the thing that probably annoys me most about all of this is the amount of CPU time which is going to be wasted before this particular bubble ends. I could be using those millions of CPU hours to actually _do_ stuff, y'know.

<comment><USER17> Agreed - it would be really great to be able to have a currency that gets issued to the solver of protein folding problems or something, but unfortunately I don't think those solutions have as nice mathematical properties as spinning and computing SHA hashes all day.. : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bitcoins sound interesting, however I don't like the fixed 21 million limit, which the bitcoin community seem to promote. A fixed limit means all the people who got started early and have thousands of bitcoins will then be very rich and wealthy in this new currency.

Sounds like bitcoin community has a lot of the "inflation is bad, back to the gold standard" pseudoeconomists

</comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting. I've always been interested in virtual currencies (and virtual countries, anyone remembe freedonia?) but as the author mentions they've mostly fallen prey to money launderers. I think it's an interesting experiment to limit the money supply, it gives you an incentive to get involved _right now_. I'll be trying it out, anyone else?

<comment><USER20> I tried running it for a while on my laptop while at home. Let it run for a week, didn't see a single coin. Calculated how long it would take to generate one on average, concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. There is teraflop GPU at work at the moment which is completely fallow, and I might be able to get some bitcoins out of that, but that would be misappropriation of resources. (It's not true, as the article claims, that generating bitcoins uses fallow resources. Computing those hashes burns a lot of juice...)

<comment><USER21> It would be interesting to calculate the current cost per bitcoin, in terms of electricity used to generate them (and hey, perhaps the quantity of CO2 produced too!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 21 million bitcoins seems like a low limit to set. According to <http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/Exchange+Rate> the exchange rate is currently 221 Bitcoins per USD, so the total value of all possible bitcoins is only 95000USD.

<comment><USER2> Deflation seems to be happening at a _tremendous_ pace (for a unit of exchange). So, that 21 million bitcoins will, if things continue, be "worth" dramatically more in the future. I suppose this is built-in to the system as a means to encourage early adopters.

But, given that there are very few means to cash out into other currencies, and the products one can buy with bitcoins are extremely limited and generally virtual goods, it's still wildly speculative that they have _any_ longterm value.

<comment><USER16> Their low cash-value is probably almost wholly due the difficulty in _getting_ cash for them.

Deflation of bitcoins can effectively be infinite, but should slow significantly if/when a significant amount of people get in on it and start using them.

<comment><USER23> I think it would be enough to jumpstart the process if one service that already reliably trades virtual currency for money (say, EVE) were to start accepting bitcoins for the purchase of said virtual currency.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely true. Which won't happen until the developers of a game such as Eve can use bitcoins for buying something more than phone cards and online poker chips. Developers need to eat.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What I Like About vim - <AUTHOR> http://www.patmaddox.com/2009/10/27/what-i-like-about-vim/

<comment><USER2> The thing I like most about Vim is that I'm not forced to configure it.

Emacs has modalities too, but you can't bail out of them by hammering on ESC...

I'm sure I could get comfortable in emacs, but then I'd be one of those guys that has to copy his config files everywhere.

<comment><USER3> I always hear this and even emacs people reinforce it. Maybe I'm abnormal but I don't do much configuration. My .emacs loads up a few modes specific to certain programming languages I use, that do syntax highlighting and such. There's maybe one or two global keybindings I can type in from memory if I have to, and otherwise I just use the defaults and it's fine.

<comment><USER4> These are both good points by you and the parent that I never really realized. If you don't 'like' (for lack of a better word) configuration then Vim is definitely the better editor.

I'm indeed the type of guy that carries his config files with him :) (be it on a USB stick, my website, Dropbox, GitHub, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like everything the author likes about vim are simply features he found more easily than he did in emacs. Duplicating a line in emacs is not difficult. emacs certainly has macros as well. A few simple google queries or looking in the emacs help system would reveal this very quickly. Not that there is anything wrong with vim, but the criticisms against emacs and other editors just seem lazy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I switched the other way (vim to emacs), and whilst there are some annoyances and it's not quite as "pure", I'd never go back.

I'm surprised that an emacs user says that macros in vim are "awesome" - they're there and very straightforward to use in Emacs, too.

</comment><comment><USER7> What I Don't Like About Wordpress

      Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 1310720) (tried to allocate 28 bytes) in /home/patmadd1/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 248

</comment><comment><USER8> i use vim and emacs both every day for different purposes. it's my opinion that vim is a better text-editor, but emacs is clearly the more powerful of the two.

in the bitter end for me it comes down to whether or not i can swallow the indentation that emacs wants to shove down my throat for that particular language. for lisp, yes, for javascript, no thanks.

</comment><comment><USER9> I just wish there was a good SLIME equivalent for Vim.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like Vim because:

(1) I've used it more than Emacs and most keybindings are now muscle memory.

(2) Goto (1).

</comment><comment><USER11> Site went down.</comment>


Lessons in incompetence - <AUTHOR>

I can't remember why now, but I recently tried to register for a service.  I remember thinking it was really quite good.  Well thought out, useful, and worth the risk that I'd end up getting spam, as I had with eMusic.
But when I tried to register, the box for my email address was clearly limited to 30 characters, and my email address has 31 characters.
So I thought I'd be helpful and send some feedback so they could improve their site, and I could use it:

    The original message was received at Thu,
    18 Jun 2009 08:43:09 -0400 from
    localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]

   ----- The following addresses had
         permanent fatal errors -----
    <firstname.lastname@example.com>
    (reason: 550-5.1.1 The email account
    that you tried to reach does not exist.
    ...
 Way to go guys.  prevent people from registering, and then prevent them from giving feedback.  Good one.  Life's too short to investigate their problems, I've tried to help, now I'm moving on.
How often have you tested your feedback mechanisms from external addresses? <comment><USER2> This is surprisingly common - [http://www.eph.co.uk/resources/email-address- length-faq/#ema...](http://www.eph.co.uk/resources/email-address-length- faq/#emaillengthallocated)

Some developers think even 20 characters is enough (the mean average email address length is around 22 characters)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think most people would not bother to give feedback when something goes wrong. I know that I certainly do not. I have tried in the past and you always run into some sort of problem with the feedback mechanism or they simply do not care about your problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed - the clear lack of effort to allow or respond to feedback has trained people not to provide it. My alpha testers seem to find it hard to notice the huge "FEEDBACK" link on my site, and after analysing their trajectory through the site, they aren't then telling me anything.

There are lessons to learn here - if you want feedback, you have to pull it. And if someone is willing to give you feedback, make it effortless for them.

And test, test, test, test.</comment></comment>


Hacker News Telegram Channel - <AUTHOR> https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed <comment><AUTHOR> Hacker News Top stories from [https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: [https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot](https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot)

If you have any questions contact me directly: @philr [https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed](https://telegram.me/hacker_news_feed)</comment>


Smokejumper - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokejumper <comment><USER2> Those smoke-jumper guys are f'in crazy, and totally badass. As a former firefighter (who did mainly structural firefighting) they have my utmost respect.

This also reminds me of an old joke:

Q: "Why are there wildland firefighters?"

A: "Because structural firefighters need heroes too."

<comment><USER3> Came here to say the same thing. I remember at my peak fitness (a time when my afternoon / evening hobby was to briskly walk a few miles uphill into the mountains surrounding Missoula) encountering some smoke jumpers on a conditioning session. I was unladen and walking at a very fast clip. I got passed on the trail by some guys wearing the largest packs I'd ever seen.

Later, I worked for the Forest Service doing IT, and remember seeing the smoke jumper training which involved taking off from the airfield in Missoula and getting dropped somewhere in the surrounding hillsides, and them showing up back at the smoke jumper center several hours later with their packs.

Totally badass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've done a lot of static line parachuting.

So far, I've successfully avoided the trees.

Aiming for trees?

No thanks.....but good on those who do and then climb down to fight fires.

</comment><comment><USER5> Coolness beyond words!</comment>