The science of new year's resolutions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-science-of-new-years-resolutions-why-88-fail-and-how-to-make-them-work

<comment><USER2> When it comes to something as abstract as "willpower",I can't help but think that these "facts" only serve to hinder potential. Every "scientific" discussion regarding willpower always presents the same old rehashed Marshmallow experiments, blah blah blah. Same as the quick fact at the bottom of this article which argues that strong willpower isn't a character trait.

To all those "facts" I say "so what?". So what if you're a bit delusionally optimistic? So what if you genuinely believe that you have the willpower of an ox? So what if science tells you not to tackle too many habits, why not try? When it comes to these scientific "facts" about abstract concepts, especially when the scientific facts begin to place limits on what I can or can't do, then I just discard them.

At the end of the day, belief is what gets things done, period. It reinforces commitment, breeds passion, and instills hope when others would give up. Belief accomplishes what "rational" humans will exclaim is impossible. If that involves a little bit of ignoring the "facts" then so be it.

I think the rest of the article makes great points about visualizing highly- specific habits to achieve abstract outcomes, but other than that, don't let science define your beliefs on what is or is not possible.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess instead of having a resolution that goes 'great at programming in a year', switch that to 'write a program to do xyz in abc language within 6 months. Make a list of the basic concepts of the language. Set deadlines by which one has an understanding (not mastery) of each concept, working towards the goal of writing xyz program.'</comment>


Technology: dizzying but invisible depth  - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13fxdhxipjbhlbyv04cjtfbrwqmz12pghk

<comment><USER2> Amazing post.

I was talking to my colleague not an hour ago about how deep technology goes, and what sort of mentality we have. It occurred to me that under normal circumstances when people talk about a "big number" they mean a number that has a large whole-part (millions, billions, trillions etc.). Talk to a computer scientist and a big number is defined as how many significant digits are present (no matter where the decimal point is, milli, micro and nano are still big numbers to us). It's amazing how being entrenched in technology changes your perspective of the world - even the small things can be complex.</comment>


Setting up 2 Factor Auth for your Google account and Microsoft account - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SettingUpTwoFactorAuthenticationForYourGoogleAccountANDMicrosoftAccount.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's amazing to me that most financial services don't offer two factor authentication for their accounts (Scottrade, Schwab last I checked).

Meanwhile, a lot of games (mmos) and email services provide two factor authentication.

<comment><USER3> Schwab is especially obnoxious in that they they silently truncate your password to 8 characters.

However, you can get a physical two-factor authentication token for Schwab: [http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/legal_compliance/schw...](http://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/nn/legal_compliance/schwabsafe/we_guard_your_account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish Yahoo would do the same. Instead of 2-factor they have a feature where they only require a second verification if Yahoo deems the attempt suspicious. Their approach strikes me as being simultaneously less secure and less convenient (no code-generator app).

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm glad to see Microsoft reusing the algorithm that Google uses instead of inventing their own. Now if Blizzard would just do the same...

</comment><comment><USER6> It probably isn't exactly wise to post what I assume is your secret TOTP code (the 2d barcode) on your website.

<comment><USER7> The author is more clever than you realize. (Go scan it)

<comment><USER8> Ahem. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Space Jam (1996) - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacejam.com/ <comment><USER2> I am amazed that it is still up, it is a real living time capsule to the web in 1996.

If you wanna make sure it stays alive, follow [https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck](https://twitter.com/SpaceJamCheck) for updates.</comment>


The Rise of the Lean VC – Consumer Internet Gets Its Own Investors - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2010/08/05/the-rise-of-the-lean-vc-%e2%80%93-consumer-internet-gets-its-own-investors/ <comment><AUTHOR> This made me laugh:

In his indomitable way, Dave McClure describes this shift best, but I have to screen-scrape his posts, paste them into Word and clear the formatting to read them.</comment>


The State of Breach Protection - geek-advised https://www.cynet.com/blog/2020-state-of-breach-protection-survey/# <comment> geek-advised Few highlights from the survey:

\- Only 11% rated their consolidation level in their organization as high

\- 78% stated that their main obstacle is the Management, maintenance and operational overhead of the security products already deployed

\- 72% said that difficulties in managing the security products in place is the main reason for stopping new security projects in 2020

\- 77% said that a solution that they would prioritize investing in a solution that is capable of consolidating their required breach protection functionalities.</comment>


Ask HN: Why did this submission get penalized? - mck-

Moments ago, this post[1] was in the Top 10 (30 points in 5 hours). It is now bumped down to the third page. Is there something I need to understand?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203866 <comment><AUTHOR> As others have said, there is a heuristic flame war detector. It seems that a penalty is applied if an item has more than 40 comments, and fewer points than comments. It's actually a good idea, but it has many false positives.

That said, if people want to comment on something but don't think it's worth upvoting, maybe it really doesn't belong on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER2> It's kind of old now, 5 hrs with 30 up votes is sort of stale and it has more comments than up votes so probably got dinged by flame war detector too.

</comment><comment><USER3> If something is controversial and doesn't have very many upvotes, its rank takes a nosedive once it reaches 40 comments.

</comment><comment> mck- Thanks, learned something new :)</comment>


Blimp's Open Design: Day Three - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getblimp.com/2013/11/more-powerful-tasks/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for getting this on HN. We really need feedback on our app redesign, and the process/approach we're taking. We're really excited about it!</comment>


Project Cybersyn (1971) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn <comment><USER2> This keeps coming up. I read pretty much everything Stafford Beer put up about the functioning of the system, but we never really saw a specification of the system dynamics-based model of the chilean economy it was supposed to be based on.

Now, if you've ever played with how a sys-dyn model is built... timing your delays is crucial. "Real-time control" is a super cool idea, but there are stochastic deferrals between actions by policy-makers or decentralized agents and their systemic consequences. Mis-time these and you'll just be inducing cycles.

That's a reason why modern economic planning is all based on watching response signals. We watch inflation and unemployment not because the relatively low thresholds that trigger action are catastrophic, but because inflation is a symptom of an overheated economy. We can't track demand and supply at the level of every commodity, and if we did, we wouldn't know how capacity expansion relates to effective availability to the consumer (this is a mistake countries that try to deal with hyperinflation with heavy intervention keep making, with the inevitable shortages in supply).

TL;DR: Zomg tech

<comment><USER3> This is cool but... given the moden economy is built on automated statistical models, couldn't we look at advanced capitalism as a sort of highly supervised, decentralized version of this?

The problem for me with the way we do things currently, is that the criteria the model is optimising (arguably economic growth) for don't seem to completely describe what most people would want the economy to do (improve living standards, individual freedom, 'happiness')...

<comment><USER4> In a way that's what some of the early 20th century Marxists (in the group of "Orthodox Marxists") were arguing. In the extreme form of that view they had a view on management that aligned nearly 100% with the view of the big capitalist "barons". A common view among industrialists of the era (starting in the late 19th century) was that modern scientific management, statistics, supply-chain-management, etc., was making bazaar-style capitalism obsolete, and ushering in an era of efficient, centralized, vertically and horizontally integrated, scientifically optimized production. That was one of the arguments used against anti-trust legislation: industrialists argued that anti-trust legislation was just purposely shoring up obsolete, inefficient models based on the medieval bazaar, which were out of touch with a modern scientific, centralized industrial sector.

A certain variety of early Marxism said more or less: yes, we agree with all that. Except for one thing: once industrial capitalism has centralized the economy, with a few huge trusts running things as a smoothly oiled production machine, the shareholders are now more or less superfluous. So, we'll just knock 'em off and distribute the proceeds of this machine among all the workers equally. The industrial capitalists only disagreed with the idea of socialist central planning in that they didn't want to distribute the proceeds of central planning, not in believing that decentralized planning was better. Many did agree that _some_ kind of redistribution was necessary so that all society benefitted, but they preferred redistribution managed by the monopoly capitalists themselves in the form of philanthropy, which they felt they would be able to thoughtfully manage (Andrew Carnegie's _The Gospel of Wealth_ is representative of this view).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone interested in this the Eden Medina book provides some historical background. I think eventually that Cybersyn will be viewed as an early attempt at post-capitalist economics in which resources are efficiently managed in real time and there is feedback at every level.

<comment><USER6> From the Marxist perspective, isn't communism post-socialism?

IMO, as an idea, this isn't post-anything. It fits very nicely (almost to the point of cliche) into the "modernist" family of ideas. Socialism was the most prominent political and economic philosophy of modernism. Objectivism is another example. Anti-socialists of the modernist period (who often objected to modernism as a whole) kind of parodied modernism in a way that is similar to this. Super efficient computers that calculate truth and can run everything optimally.

Fredrick Hayek (an early postmodernist) parodied social "scientism" and socialism in just this way. He argued that this kind of planning is doomed no matter how big your computer is because the requisite information is unknowable, not just unknown.

I see this as something like a 1950s science fiction work. But I'm biased. I don't think this will ever work and I hope it won't either.

<comment><USER7> That argument, commonly associated with Hayek, quite trivially does not make sense.

If the information is unknowable, then it cannot play any role economically. If it is unknowable, the market itself cannot act upon it either. The idea lurking here is of inarticulable knowledge or inexpressible information -- and it is a contradiction in terms.

Hayek's big point -- in 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' \-- is really this: an economic system is a cooperative system, a cooperative system requires networking/sharing information, and money and markets are a way to convey and share information.

Hayek does not prove that centralisation is impossible, nor does he prove that money and markets are the only means to run an economy. An argument based on information is not going to get you there -- rather the opposite in fact.

Later in that article, Hayek says -- about gathering dispersed knowledge etc. -- (not) "likely" rather than "never", and also says "it is just conceptually possible". That is the sensible view: if the market is performing a computation, then any sufficiently powerful general computer could emulate it and any sufficiently good network could transmit the relevant information around. Indeed, with enough power you could process _more_ information than the money-market system.

And that is actually where we are now. When there is a pocketable networked computer for every human on the planet, that rather blows away the idea that we need money to solve the 'economic calculation' problem. The money-market system is already obsolete, it will just take some time to evolve away from it.

<comment><USER8> The information is expressed through demand. People spend money according to their values. If people don't have money, then it's very difficult to determine their actual preferences. That is how I always understood the argument anyways. Likewise producers need to express their values for the materials they need, and those producers have values for the materials they need, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love this kind of modernist, socialist utopian ideal. It's gratifying to think that whilst the idealogical battles of the 20th century were still playing out, the idea of marshalling effort and resources toward the common good without capitalism was viewed positively.

And the chairs, I love the chairs.

It reminds me very much of the Dharma Initiative from the TV series Lost.

<comment><USER10> And now think that quite the opposite idea, the post Pinochet free market economy, was what made Chile the richest country in South America.

As a rule of thumb, good intentions bring very bad results if you need government violence to implement them.

<comment><USER11> Whereas Pinochet implemented his "good intentions" without violence? Reality check, please.

<comment><USER10> He obviously did use violence. However, are you suggesting that you need government violence to minimize goverment's involvement in economy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Millions wasted on expensive systems and software to manage and negate the damage caused by an inherently inefficient method of running an economy. One size does not fit all, no matter how much state software you create to make it so.

If you combine this level of technology at a micro level, combined with the incomparable efficiency of the market, THAT is when you start to see incredible things starting to happen.

From small businesses monitoring their sales and orders in real-time, sharing their data with their marketing agency via api's. To construction companies using internet of things to monitor structural wear to alert them of replacements needed. It's at this market oriented macro-level that you will see the greatest advantages.

Creating and making the technology to power that is most important. And that's where we come in!

</comment><comment><USER13> Stafford Beer's Chilean Cybersyn project was one of the inspirations for the Community Memory ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory)) project in the Bay Area in the early seventies, which, being the first public computerized bulletin board system (and flea market), helped lead to today's World Wide Web and related.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you want a 5 minute video digestion of this, including who Stafford Beer is, I gave a lightning talk at Liverpool Ignite.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkxvVOm01g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJkxvVOm01g)

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a software implementation of Beer's Viable System Model in Smalltalk. The VSM was part of the basis for Cybersyn. See:

[http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/VSA.html](http://ss3.gemstone.com/ss/VSA.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> ...but it was not even _let to_ to either _work_ OR _fail_ on its own, so we'll never know if some of the ideas could have worked.

...like it happens with all attempts of any kind of technocratic government: sooner or later some groups of power totally freak out contemplating god knows what imaginary consequences of its future development and pull the plug on it and paint it as another "failed experiment".

When will we actually become mature enough to be able to truly run social- engineering experiments in a scientific way and asses their results? (repeatedly and periodically, because with time people's mentalities change, so what didn't work in the past might work in the future and viceversa). When will we accept that "political 'science'" can only be an experimental 'science', so we have to at least try and run unbiased experiments from time to time and see what works better, instead of just letting the blind watchmaker of evolution run its inefficient search of the problem space?

As an analogy [EDIT+ to clarify] of how wrong I think we do politics and social engineering now [/EDIT]: Imagine that in medicine you'd run 10% of a drug trial, then stop/pause it and make an "educated guess" based on this 10%, and based on this published guess have people vote whether to put the drug on the market or not. Sounds reasonable to anyone? :)

<comment><USER17> To run with your analogy. Let's take the case of vioxx, which was voluntarily withdrawn by merck after post-approval experiments showed statistically significant increases in heart attacks - never mind that this is exactly biasing the 'experiment' against vioxx ([http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to- run-an-ab-test.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab- test.html)).

The people vote to withdraw vioxx from the market. Because, heart attacks! Well, what of the plenty of people who decide that they'd rather have a slightly increased risk of heart attack instead of debilitating, quality-of- life-shattering daily pain?

To take it further, what about conditions that specifically only address a minority of people, let's say that we made a drug that cures sickle-cell anemia, but gives a 100% chance of getting cancer by age 70. Who should make these decisions?

Also: Who gets to be the person deciding on the 'educated guess'? And how can I be this person so that I can pick my pharmaceutical stocks ahead of time?

<comment><USER18> The era of evidence-based medicine will be remembered for trying to apply population-level analyses to individual cases, which as I've understood it is not really the point of population level analyses.

<comment><USER16> well, in medicine we'll soon have personalized/individualized-medicine.

but you can't really have personalized/individualized societies, unless we all isolate ourselves from each other and leave as ascets in caves :)

<comment><USER18> You can do population analysis, but thats valuable in terms of making population level decisions. Not decisions about individual care. An example being; where do we build a hospital. Not; which medication should we give this person. Right now we have universalized standards of care for things like hypertension that clearly do not work for the entire population yet we have accepted that x% improvement overall is the best. I think the future will involve identifying the subtleties of genetic and microbiome impact on all medications, and tailoring regimens based on those indicators rather than the EBM-based standards of care.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Artificial Leaf Harnesses Sunlight for Efficient Fuel Production - <AUTHOR> http://www.caltech.edu/news/artificial-leaf-harnesses-sunlight-efficient-fuel-production-47635?utm_source=Elektor+United+States+%28English%29&utm_campaign=79c067ec54-140EN9_17_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b7374950c-79c067ec54-234904333&mc_cid=79c067ec54&mc_eid=7fba0d115c <comment><USER2> Have they made a cheap device entirely out of sustainable materials? No. The photoactive GaAs/InGaP would be extremely expensive to fabricate. Have they tested it for commercially relevant timescales? 40 hours is hardly close, realistically they need to do stability testing for thousands of hours. They did use non-precious materials to protect the semiconductors from the corrosive solution and inexpensive catalysts, but this is a very long ways from practical. Further, they didn't even hit the 10% efficiency mark which has long been heralded as starting point for these devices.

It is not clear to me that this approach could ever be economically viable even with the right semiconductors. H2 just doesn't provide enough bang for your buck.

<comment><USER3> > H2 just doesn't provide enough bang for your buck.

This seems to be a stretched generalization. You do need energy accumulator to use it in transport systems, and H2 is pretty efficient by mass. It's not without problems of course, but dismissing it as a whole...

<comment><USER2> Absolutely not. H2 gives 5.6 MJ/L @ 700 psi, which is too weak compared to diesel which gives 35.8 MJ/L @ 1 atm. Also, compressed H2 is considerably more difficult to work with than diesel.

The Department of Energy mandated that these same researchers pursue liquid fuels in the future (note, they do not mean H2) from the reduction of carbon dioxide, because they do not think H2 stands a chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right but the advantage of H2 using a system like this could make solar a viable round the clock energy source. If one could run on conventional solar cells during daylight hours whilst also using another array of these to stockpile H2 for use in a fuel cell at night, then it could provide 24hr power vs. Lion batteries with .6MJ/kg. Clearly they have a lot more work to do before it would be viable, but I think it has interesting possibilities.

<comment><USER2> Right now every solar hydrogen production technology is an order of magnitude more expensive than steam reforming with little opportunity of ever becoming competitive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know scientists have been working on this problem since decades before 2010. Have these guys really solved it?

If so, it's absolutely huge news, not the little footnote this is getting so far.

<comment><USER5> They haven't resolved all the practical problems, they just seem to have made some incremental progress.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to learn web dev/programming from videos? - <AUTHOR> Can you learn mainly from video tutorials? There are a lot of seemingly great paid ones out there and some also free ones. I'm having a hard time with reading but seem to be able to grasp concepts from videos fine.
I need to hear that I can learn enough mainly from videos to be employable as a web developer/software engineer.
I don't have a problem reading small amount of text like the description of what a function does and I can read Hacker News. <comment><USER2> 9 users said yes and probably when you asked the question yesterday [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650470)

Looking further in the past you've asked this and similar questions (reading vs watching videos to learn programming) a dozen times [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Onixelen](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Onixelen) Are you looking for different answers from those you already got? Are you currently learning via videos?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Are you looking for different answers from those you already got?

I'm looking for a lot of yeses.

> Are you currently learning via videos?

I am.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can learn almost anything from the videos, but you have to do your part. You have to code. A lot. No way around it.

</comment><comment><USER4> No. You learn from doing. You can't make mistakes to learn from watching videos.</comment>


GCHQ Boiling Frogs - russ-b-ukg https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/BoilingFrogs <comment><AUTHOR> That pdf is definitely the risky click of the day. Will it root my device and send over all my data to the Brits? Is it worth taking the risk?

Well it was not worth it. Except for GCHQ calling facebook 'FBHQ'. That was sufficiently creepy.

</comment><comment><USER2> > So why the title "Boiling Frogs?" The story goes that if a frog is placed in > a sau[ce]pan of cold water, which is slowly heated, the frog adapts its body > temperature to the changing heat of the water and gradually goes to sleep. > The frog goes to sleep at 40 ˚C, unaware that at 100 ˚C it will boil! > However, if the frog is placed in already boiling water it immediately jumps > out to safety.

I wish people would come up with analogies that didn't involve assuming exactly the opposite of what actually happens in the "analogical" situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> As titles go... "An Ode to Change" would probably be as appropriate.

Reading through it, the impression given is of an extremely long blog post... output to PDF.

It's main thrust seem to be highlighting the continually increasing rate of change in the IT sector, follow-on effects from that, and the requirement of adaptation to change.

The overall impression given (to me) is kind of like it was phoned in though... the message in it isn't new, and could be considered widely known.

Writing wise it kind of feels a bit er... "not that tight"?

<comment><USER3> With its content being this bland... maybe there's crypto or stenography challenge embedded in it? Wouldn't be too surprising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Direct link to PDF [in Github viewer]: [https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/Boil...](https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/BoilingFrogs/blob/master/GCHQ_Boiling_Frogs.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Stellar.js - <AUTHOR> http://markdalgleish.com/projects/stellar.js/

<comment><USER2> Hacking around with it now looks awesome, especially love the background effect on the documentation page.</comment>


As Economics Improve, Solar Shines in Rural America - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/solar-expands-in-rural-areas <comment><USER2> My local co-op has committed to providing 100% of sunny daytime electricity with solar by 2022 (35 megawatts): [http://kitcarson.com/electric/100-daytime- solar-energy-by-20...](http://kitcarson.com/electric/100-daytime-solar-energy- by-2022)

It's really interesting that the push is coming from co-ops. Many people in my town don't seem to understand how important and incredible our local co-op is. They mostly complain about the quality of service (there's more downtime than you would get from a traditional utility, for sure) but don't think about the alternative is a utility that belches coal smoke and outsources customer service to Bangladesh.

<comment><USER3> Co-ops are amazing. If only every business could be a coop

<comment><USER4> We'd most likely be stuck in the '40s, and the world would have about 40-80x as many people living in abject poverty. Co-ops work when everyone involved is a true stakeholder, I am not so much a stakeholder in my bank, nor in Intel, nor ASUS, but I still benefit from my transactions with them.

<comment><USER3> I do not understand your comment. A coop is simply an employee-owned company (usually with more even distribution of ownership than many nominally employee-owned companies). You do not need to work for a coop to do business with them

<comment><AUTHOR> > I do not understand your comment.

A world of co-ops is close enough to anarcho-syndicalism that many Americans get an allergic reaction.

<comment><USER5> a defect of the american mind doesn't speak to the validity of the concept as a whole.

besides, we're talking about the society which is just fine with anarcho- corporatism...

<comment><USER6> Where did the anarcho- terms come from? I don't remember seeing them in my academic Econ days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Will it be possible with solar and on-site storage to largely roll back rural electrification grid? In California PG&E can't afford[1] to maintain the rural system and it just starts fires constantly.

1: Can't afford it, net of the billion in profits they shovel into their holding company.

<comment><USER8> We'll need a lot of storage to make local solar as reliable as the grid. We may be headed for an uncanny valley, as solar makes the grid less profitable, yet still necessary.

The utility companies should probably be investing in EV charging (like the ability to buy electricity from a shared charger, and bill it directly to your home account instead of appearing on the charger operator's meter), in order to maintain/increase demand for their product as solar takes it away.

<comment><USER9> I imagine at a certain point it'd be cheaper for a utility to have truck mounted battery banks that they can drive to affected areas and supply power to, while they repair their broken onsite power generation

<comment><USER7> A truck stuffed to the gills with batteries would hold maybe 4 MW-hours of energy. You'd need a lot of trucks, except most of the time you wouldn't need any of them and they'd just sit around. Sounds expensive?

<comment><USER9> It is more expensive, but would it be mor expensive than maintaining a grid for an entire region? The power density is low, but presumably you're not running every electricity using device while you're hooked up to emergency power.

This idea may be worse than just keeping a grid around, but my point was more along the lines that we are not tied to needing a grid itself anymore if we get power generation at every home/business. We still need some sort of backup power system, but it is possible that it takes a different form</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Round Capital Goes Gangnam Style - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okueA9dFcnc

<comment><USER2> they screwed up the horse dance. how do you screw up the horse dance. it's got like, 3 steps.</comment>


Apple stock drops to under $400. No longer most valuable company.  - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see much talk about Apple these days (dispute if you like, but it's not long since half the front page was dominated). The stock is down 33% over six months, with no sign of a turnaround.

I'm not sure what my thoughts are any more.

\- I'm bored of the iPhone and I don't see where it's going to go next.

\- I still think laptops will continue to grow significantly.

\- iPads are more vulnerable to being commoditised than the iPhone. Most people use them as browsers, and they do not have the benefit of social lock- in that the iPhone enjoys through iMessage.

\- An Apple watch might do well.

\- I still want to see Apple produce a console-like device that is essentially a crossover between an Ouya, Sonos and the Apple TV. I think making a physical TV would be a mistake.</comment>


A Cosmic Burst Repeats, Deepening a Mystery - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170418-fast-radio-bursts-repeat-what-are-they-made-of/ <comment><USER2> I am reminded of my favorite part of the whole Fast Radio Burst(FRB) story so far:

Since they had only been observed at 1.4 GHz, it was natural to think it was some sort of interference, since that is a busy frequency. Similar events that seemed to be terrestrial in origin were called Perytons (a mythological bird [1]) for some reason. This called into doubt that the FRBs were extragalactic, as claimed.

Then there was this fantastic paper [2] that completely figured it out (itself amazing). Turns out the "peryton" signals were from a microwave at a nearby building (lunch area for the lab or visitors) being opened while still on. There was just a grazing angle with the telescope that didn't block the signal, and the radio pulse looked very similar to an FRB.

The nail in the coffin? This plot (figure 4 and 7) showing that these signals peaked around lunchtime! Meanwhile the true FRBs were uniform in time, and so were not the same and agreed upon to not simply be interference.

[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper on FRBs, but was not involved in that work.]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton)

[2] [https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article- lookup/doi/10.1093/mn...](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article- lookup/doi/10.1093/mnras/stv1242)

or

arXiv [https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165](https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.02165)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article kept saying "as much energy as 500 million suns". They lost me: If they meant "power of 500 million suns", then that's plenty amazing but okay. But "energy of 500 million suns" \-- wow! Just blew the top off my scale of credibility. That is, for "the energy of 500 millon suns", take the mass of 500 millon suns, and calculate the energy from E = mc^2 and get a big number, especially for some radio waves lasting only a few milliseconds.

Of course, with more context, their statement was "powered by as much energy as 500 million suns", so they were working hard to confuse energy and power.

Eventually in the article I got the impression that they really meant the "power of 500 million suns" \-- big difference between energy and power e.g., the difference between KW and KWh, between Joules and Watts (for people who like MKS units).

Also likely want to make clear that are assuming that power level was uniform in all directions from the source, that is, not just _beamed_ in a narrow beam pointed at earth.

Also of similar interest is an associated article at that site on detection of a cosmic ray with energy 320 EeV, that is, a well thrown bowling ball.

<comment><USER4> I thought the same thing. Clearly they meant the power. An explosion with 500-million suns worth of mass-energy would end life on Earth, 3 billion light years away or not.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The repeater may have created more questions than it delivered answers."

Difficult to understand as it is irregular with bursts at random intervals. "After 50 hours of seeing none during previous observations, the team now spotted them frequently, including, one time, a "double burst" of signals only 23 seconds apart."

<comment><USER5> Occam's Razor: faulty equipment

<comment><USER6> That only happens when a range of telescopes point at a certain spot in the sky? It's possible, but by now they've likely ruled out most possible malfunctions.

<comment><USER5> Could it not be signals from our own equipment/satellites/spy planes/etc?

<comment><USER7> These radio telescopes have a fairly narrow focus and when two telescopes located on different continents aim at a source several billion light years away, their focal points do not overlap anywhere near earth, so that rules out anything on or near earth. You could come up with a theory where it does originate on earth, but it wouldn't pass Occam's razor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My guess is intergalactic warfare. They can keep their magnetars, my explanation adds intrigue!

<comment><USER9> Perhaps we witnessed the birth of a new Chaos God? Or the Emporor did some maintainance work on the Astronomicon.

<comment><USER10> Galactic bypass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite theory is that they are actually artificial, alien light sails being used to travel.

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio- burs...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a25609/fast-radio-bursts-alien- space-travel/)

<comment><USER12> It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced civilisation, is a bit wasteful.

I think it's more likely if FRBs are from a civilization they represent something like the output of an industrial process ( maybe for creating dark matter or other exotic materials ), or the equivalent of blasting to get access to minerals, or even a weapon, like a super powerful nuclear or dark matter weapon. Someplace the expenditure of energy is justified by the cost. Or maybe it's a race of super-advanced giants playing with enormous laser pointers just for fun.

<comment><USER13> > It seems like 500 Million suns worth of energy ( not totally converted into > momentum -- since we can observe it ) to power a spaceship, by an advanced > civilisation, is a bit wasteful.

Wastefulness doesn't stop civilizations from doing something. It could be the spaceship equivalent of a SUV.

<comment><USER12> Lol. That's good. So true. I didn't think of that. It's more like "unconscious" nature that is usually more efficient instead of civilizations. Although I don't understand why some crop genomes have so many more genomes than humans. Maybe wastefulness is everywhere.

<comment><USER14> Are you talking about polyploid genes? Having more copies of each gene per cell nucleus is effectively RAID: it protects against copying errors, and therefore against genetic disorders and cancers. This does have the side- effect of increasing the size of the nucleus of each cell, which is a problem if you're an animal with cells that need to float around in a blood stream and squeeze through tiny capillaries—but not if you're a plant, with all your cells locked in place.

<comment><USER12> That's also an important consideration I hadn't thought of. The plants can have the cell size constraint relaxed because of their different morphology / physiology.

In fact, it came from me looking at human and other vertebrate genomes, and then looking at some reference "crop" genomes and seeing multiples as many genes. I didn't know if they are polyploid copies as you say or not tho it could have been. I'll try to find the links where I saw these numbers (from a few years ago now) and update.

[edit]

Ok, for example:

chimpanzee genome, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/202](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/202)? , size: ~3Gb, scaffolds: ~50k

bread wheat genome, [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/11?](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/11?), size: ~13Gb, scaffolds: ~750k

And more summaries are at the Wikipedia page of sequenced plant genomes:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_plant_genome...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_plant_genomes#Grasses)

( there are many with over 30,000 genes ( cf humans < 20,000 ) and there are a few big ones ( Aegilops tauschii (Tausch's goatgrass) has 4.3Gb ), and most are more than 200 Mb ( cf fruit fly is around 180Mbp )

When compared with small insects and animals ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_eukaryotic_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sequenced_eukaryotic_genomes#Animals) ) plants often have larger genomes. And in some cases larger genomes than humans.

The weird thing is that genome size is correlated with "complexity" in non- animal world too. With fungi and so on having smaller genomes generally than large plants. All this seems weird because my assumption is that animals are more "complex" than plants. So either there is a lot of redundancy there or plants have some kind of unseen complexity. It would be cool to see models that try to quantify the explanations of large genomes given here by others ( error and viral resistance and freer nuclear sizing ) and see if those models can account for the sizes somehow, or if there might be more to the picture.

Another possibility is that genomes grow with genetic manipulation so cross- breeds have bigger genomes. But what does that say for humans? Are we the result of genetic breeding as well?

<comment><USER14> To put a finer point on it, the limit on cell size is closer to the definitional difference between what makes something a "plant" vs an "animal" than almost anything else. Plants, due to their stable tissue structures, don't need to worry about their cell size, and therefore don't need to worry about unbounded DNA growth. Because of this, they have evolved to _take advantage_ of having "more" DNA. Yes, polyploid plants are generally healthier, because plants expect polyploidy. But even without polyploidy, plants have large amounts of "specialized-use" genetic material, libraries of specific responses (e.g. immune responses) to specific problems (e.g. parasites) that may have only existed millions of years ago. They can just keep all these one-off solutions around, evolving to protect themselves against one more thing at a time.

(This is also why plants tend to be full of weird organic molecules like terpenes, which are _beneficial_ to nearly every animal alive today: those chemicals probably protected them from _something_ at _some point_ , and the genes responsible for making them have had no reason to be shut off since then.)

But animals, with a finite limit on gene-base size, must solve problems differently. Animals evolve along different lines—polyploid mutations usually result in non-viable offspring for animal species, because animals frequently have mutations that _assume_ diploidy, with complex machinery to favor better vs. worse versions of each diploid gene using silencing or epigenetic methylation. And more generally, animals evolve solutions to whole _classes_ of problems that have compact genetic representations. We don't have a million custom immune responses; instead, we have xenograft rejection genes, T-cells, livers and kidneys, saliva and stomach acid, the sensation of itching, skin that sheds and skin oil that clears pores, and put together, those mechanisms handle 99% of cases just fine.

And often we don't need any of those; the primary "solution" that animals have to almost every problem, is just the ability to _move away from the source of the problem_. If there's a predator, you can just run away. You don't need to know what the thing _is_ , to run away from it; you just run away! Universal solution! To do that, we need a lot of things: not just limbs, but sensory organs, to know where _we_ are and where _the predator_ is; and nerves, to link the two; and even some sort of instinct for what predators exist, or memory to record sense-fear associations. But all those genes _still_ take up far less space than immune proteases individualized for every bacterium and fungus on earth.

<comment><USER12> This is so great. Such a lucid explanation. Do you have more writing on bio someplace? Thanks very much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm reminded of the quote:

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

The universe is amazing and terrifying.

<comment><USER3> "Not only stranger than we suppose but stranger than we can suppose."!

<comment><USER15> Hey there - I was unable to comment on an old post of your for some reason. To be discreet... Do you still work at the company where you played violin lessons one night in your office and Mr. Smith heard? :) If so, look me up. Last name, Veach. I work in GPE. I have a question for you.

<comment><USER3> Naw, I left for grad school a long time ago.

When I was a B-school prof, one of my students was getting a pilot's license and asked me to contact FedEx for him, and I did. I got a note back from Smith that FedEx would welcome the application from the student but had a long list of pilot applications.

<comment><USER15> Dang! Your post was so well-informed. Oh well, if you ever come back, look me up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the difference between these Fast Radio Bursts and the Wow signal[1], which also seems to be described as a very powerful fast radio signal?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal)

<comment><USER2> The "Fast" in Fast Radio Bursts is because the signal lasts only milliseconds, while the Wow signal lasted thousands of times longer, for over a minute.

<comment><USER17> Whoa, really?

<comment><USER2> Yup. If you look on the Wikipedia article for the Wow event, it lasted for the entire observing window, so that implies it could have lasted longer before/after. Meanwhile FRBs are quite amazing because they are so quick. It's a lot of energy in a very small time, which leads people to consider compact objects as part of the origin (short burst leaves very small distance from the light travel time for the event to be coherent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The light buckets will act like floodlights in reverse, pulling in radio > waves from a huge swath of sky.

So basically, they are nothing like floodlights.

OK I get it analogies are often important to make science accessible by the public, but at some point it just becomes confusing atop of incorrect.

<comment><USER19> You mean you wouldn't describe them as basically backwards dark-suckers but in the radio spectrum?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> May I propose: There is (A) a neutron star and (B) another dense object, a neutron star or a black hole, and the two have an electrostatic potential between them and are in very close orbits. Occasionally a spark jumps between the two. If the (A) neutron star is negative, then the spark consists of electrons. Else the spark consists of protons.

The spark is the source of the FRB.

Wild guess!

<comment><USER20> You may propose it, but wild guesses don't really help. The space of all possible ideas is far too vast for a random guess to have any chance of hitting on a physically plausible idea, let alone the correct idea.

I'm no physicist myself, but in this case I suspect that a net electric charge of that magnitude would discharge continuously, because the electric field would be large enough to accelerate charged matter away from the surface. You may have noticed that even our sun produces a continuous solar wind made of charged particles. It's losing a billion kilograms per second, and it has no overall net charge.

<comment><USER3> Wild guesses are nearly always junk, but some of the best physics looked like wild guesses before lots of testing.

I didn't get into just how an object could have a net electric charge, but IIRC such a state is accepted as possible in astrophysics.

For the FRB being not continuous but only intermittent, maybe the orbit is not perfectly circular; maybe there are other effects that make the FRB intermittent.

Science does not start with a testable hypothesis but with intuitive guesses; the more solid stuff comes later.

In this case, for these FRBs, we know so little that doing solid science has to wait and all of us can guess!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is there any sci-fi book out there that describes something similar? Since we have no clue on what this is I'd be interested in reading far-fetched theories.

<comment><USER22> "the FRBs were as blinding as flash grenades in a dark forest"

Just that much should be terrifying for anyone who's read _The Three-Body Problem_ and its sequels.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, _Dark Forest_ features some disturbing paranoids :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So this thing is located 1 gigaparsec away from us. The article also mentions that this thing is "probably less than 100 years old". Which then means that this all happend 3 billion (+/\- 100) years ago but we are only observing it now?

<comment><USER25>
      ...it would take a very special magnetar to unleash
      such monstrous FRBs in quick succession. "A neutron
      star bursting at this rate for thousands of years
      would quickly run out of fuel," he said. His best
      guess is that the repeater is a very young magnetar —
      probably less than 100 years old.

Yes, billions of years ago, there was a thing that lasted possibly one hundred years, but in that time during its existence it emitted radio bursts, and we're only noticing them right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's just a bug in the holomatrix of the universe. As we get better peering behind the curtain, we'll see more bugs and maybe even be able to exploit them. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

<comment><USER27> One variation on where an exploit of the simulation might lead to:

[http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png](http://i.imgur.com/8KrABb5.png)

<comment><USER28> On the one hand, we sure seem pretty cooperative for a race designed to be warlike. Though on the other, I can imagine a race to whom we're horrifically warlike. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.

<comment><USER4> We're pretty social with other humans. But we tend to treat other animals pretty shitily. Also, there's serious argument that we committed genocide upon Neanderthals and perhaps some other early-human offshoots.

<comment><USER29> >We're pretty social with other humans.

I don't think that's an opinion that would survive reading the history section in a Library for very long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hmm... something funky going down in Quemado? Experiments at the lightning farm? If you haven't done the self-guided tour of the VLA, you've just not lived yet! Though it was pretty cool seeing the all out there (highly recommend taking along some lawn chairs and camping out a bit north of Quemado for some very dark sky viewing)

<comment><USER31> I went to college near there. I really miss being near stuff like the VLA. Plus every (clear sky) night being perfect for looking up!</comment></comment>


The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/welsome-plutonium.html <comment><USER2> Los Alamos National Lab: "The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments". (1995; 233 pp.) [https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl- repo/lar...](https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl- repo/lareport/LA-UR-95-4005-09)

DOE: "Human Radiation Experiments" [https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/](https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _the plutonium in the vial had undergone an unanticipated transformation overnight. Some of the liquid had been converted into gas and was pushing against the walls of the bottle. Other molecules were tunneling into the sides of the glass itself.

Unaware of the small bomb he was holding, Mastick snapped the slender neck of the vial. It made a small, popping sound in the quiet laboratory. Instantly the material spewed out of the bottle and onto the wall in front of him. Some of the solution ricocheted back into his mouth, flooding his lips and tongue with a metallic taste.

[...]

He had just swallowed a significant amount of the world's supply of plutonium.

[...]

When the mouth washings finally were finished, Hempelmann ordered the young man to lie down on a cot. Then he pumped out his stomach several times. Carefully he transferred the stomach liquids into a tall beaker.

[...]

Hempelmann gave the young chemist a couple of breakfast waffles for his empty stomach and some Sippy alkaline powders to be taken during the day. Then he turned and handed him the four-liter beaker of murky liquid.

Go, he said, retrieve the plutonium._

</comment><comment><USER3> This has nothing on the Nasal Radium Irradiation tests on children during the same time period. My mother was one of the subjects.

[http://ahrp.org/1948-1970s-nasal-radium-irradiation-nri- of-c...](http://ahrp.org/1948-1970s-nasal-radium-irradiation-nri-of-children- at-johns-hopkins/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Note that this is just an excerpt from a whole book on this topic, "The Plutonium Files" by Eileen Welsome. It's a riveting and disturbing read.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like Don Mastick died in 2007. I guess swallowing some plutonium didn't drastically shorten his life.

[https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/northjersey/obituary.aspx?...](https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/northjersey/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=94552787)</comment>


How to Be Successful at Anything - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@m_rlons/how-to-be-successful-at-anything-7a3495edafaa#.hsy8rkmj0 <comment><USER2> > I'm good at bullshitting. Writing.

I applaud the author's honesty, but perhaps it's not the best idea to proclaim your flair for bending the truth in an article that promises an elusive answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this article plays to his strengths, You know, "bullshitting and Writing"

</comment><comment><USER4> Well, I definitely believe him that he's good at bullshitting.</comment>


Ask HN: What Office document renderer for Web/Electron do you recommend? - <AUTHOR> I know there are online viewers from MS and Google, but all open source projects seem to be either dead or quite limited. Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> discussion on stackoverflow: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27957766/how-do-i- render...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27957766/how-do-i-render-a- word-document-doc-docx-in-the-browser-using-javascript)

There are online viewers from MS and Google. They are only good though if you have no Electron offline scenario and want to send your data :-/

JavaScript conversion always has its limits:

[https://github.com/lalalic/docx2html](https://github.com/lalalic/docx2html) — docx to html, most elements are supported, but project seems to be dead

[https://github.com/mwilliamson/mammoth.js](https://github.com/mwilliamson/mammoth.js) — supports headings, lists, tables, endnotes, footnotes, images and text boxes

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/docx2html](https://www.npmjs.com/package/docx2html) — Converts DOCX documents to HTML in the browser or nodejs, based on lalalic library, thus also dead

[https://github.com/artburkart/docx2html](https://github.com/artburkart/docx2html) — apparently, works in the browser, also dead

not sure, if there is a complete and supported project out there</comment>


Dating with Graph Search - <AUTHOR> http://jacksongariety.com/journals/dating-with-graph-search <comment><USER2> _When you really get down to it, high school is about relationships with the opposite sex, both intimate and friendly._

Not quite true for everybody.

 _The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable._

That's the crux of the matter right there — nobody normal realizes every click, every website visit, every posted word, every posted picture, every mobile refresh, and every contact in your auto-stolen address book betrays you.

For most people, the betrayal doesn't matter. The local barista/actor doesn't want to understand thousand-dimensional data analyses and what that portends for their future. Mainly, because it doesn't matter for them. Who does it matter for though? Future important people? Assembling massive future corporate blackmail material? Thoughtcrime? Crime by association? Or does none of this matter at all and it's just people bitching about bad dinners, good vacations, and showing unlimited baby pictures?

There's nothing new to be said to us about the evil of Facebook/Google, but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

<comment><USER3> >Thoughtcrime? Crime by association?

I think this point rings especially true, especially in the light of recent events at PyCon. Social media has vast power to build or ruin reputations, and having all your private information on facebook can give you a larger surface area to attack.

<comment><USER4> This has always interested me (well, maybe not always--I'm not that cutting edge :p).

I used to have Facebook but deleted it, because I didn't like the whole concept of people using your online persona against you. Yes, my profile is still in Facebook's database but at least it is no longer immediately searchable/accessible.

And what I'm getting at is I have some friends with anarchist tendencies. Two of them are computer scientists and they had/have no problems voicing their anarchist thoughts on Facebook.

The other person was in the (German) languages field and she would never talk about it nor post anything related to it on her Facebook.

I still don't know where I stand because I travel to and from the US a lot, and feel if they associate me with anarchist _stuff_ this may complicate matters when trying to cross the boarder.

For example, I was going to post a photoquote (I just made that up) with Thoreau and the statement "If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."

But I decided not to. Hurrah for self-censorship, brought to you by the gov't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > These machines will know more about you than you do. These machines will > decide what you eat, the kinds of clothes you buy, the books you read, the > television shows you watch, and the kind of person you are.

While I very much applaud your interest in data analysis, this is very much an overreach. Even assuming that facebook has as much information about you as you think, there has been no service which is better at predicting what you like than you yourself. Furthermore, I have yet to come across a music discovery service which can predict music that I like when I specifically give it songs that I like.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that facebook only knows as much about you as you tell it. I dont use foursqare, checkins, status updates, instagram, photo uploads, etc; not because of some ideology for privacy, but rather because I simply dont find them useful. I know that I am not the only one like that. Facebook has relatively little information about me. I also do not stay logged in to facebook so the link tracking is also nearly useless.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if facebook archives any of this information? In the past I was very active on facebook interacting with my friends during college. However I have now graduated and slowly began deleting myself from facebook because I no longer have a use for it (and I worry about jobs). If I completely delete my profile, i wonder if they still have my information

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely they archive this information. The of the monetizable web depends upon it!

<comment><USER7> This is actually not true, and has been verified by the Irish Data Commission ([http://www.dataprotection.ie/documents/press/Facebook_Irelan...](http://www.dataprotection.ie/documents/press/Facebook_Ireland_Audit_Review_Report_21_Sept_2012.pdf) see Page 44)

User accounts that are deleted have all associated user created content and data hard deleted after account is deleted. Additionally, a user deletes content (status updates, comments, etc..) that data is hard deleted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I had a list of 10 young women who went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home phone numbers. Did I purposefully cause chance meetings with people at my high school? I did. Did I go on dates with a number of those people? I did. Do they, to this day, have any idea how we came to meet each other? Not in the slightest."

Is that more than a little creepy? Yes, it is.

<comment><USER9> What's creepy? That he described what he did or that it's _possible_ to do now (quite easily, in fact). Your comment implies the former but I find the latter more interesting.

Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?

<comment><USER10> It's always been possible to stalk people and gather lots of information about them in order to increase ones chances of striking up a romantic relationship with them. it's always been possible to do this with many people at once.

It's always been creepy.

"Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?"

How did you get that? He didn't say anything like that. He pointed out that this is creepy. Just because people have been creepy for as long as there have been people doesn't change that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> _Facebook isn't a novelty anymore, it has become something much worse. It has become a necessity._

\-- Well, not really. I don't have an account open with them and never have.

Since I'm out of the loop entirely, what have people really gained from using Facebook? The only thing I've heard was reconnecting with old friends (why would I want that?) and mindless browsing. I guess the other thing is that people prefer to use their chat service instead of using text on their phone.

I've of course seen Facebook pages and I've seen some truly amazing social media marketing campaigns on it that are worth studying, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what the appeal is for a person, thus I don't get the quote about it being a necessity. I don't want people holding data about me and I don't want people stalking me. I don't want to have a bunch of "friends" I never met and I don't want to live a life where I "deleted 200 friends." That's nuts and downright frightening.

<comment><USER12> Stories. So you think about all the people you've known, the interactions you had, and some folks naturally wonder "I wonder what ever happened to ..." Its even a cliche in movies where during the final credits little pop-ups appear over the characters and say something funny about what they ended up doing after the events of the movie took place. So if you happen to run into someone from the "old days" there is often a period of "catching up."

Facebook scratches that itch in spades. Sometimes in a quite creepy way. But it is insanely entertaining to lots and lots and lots of people.

<comment><USER11> I probably met 2 to 3 thousand people in my life and I honestly couldn't remember their names. Part of the magic of life is remembering those experiences, moving forward, and creating more experiences for you to live. Knowing that I crossed paths with interesting people is enough for me. If I really wanted to keep in contact with all the people I knew, I would have kept up. A simple email would suffice in most cases.

The fact is that we all change and we all grow apart at some point. Your statement makes me wonder how easy it is to slide into that unhealthy territory where you live in your past, and that is my philosophical issue with it.

So what if I missed out on a high school crush? Chances are she is married and has a kid by now. The real chance is that I see her now and realize she is not that pretty, not that smart, or has the same exact personality that I remember, but now it grates into me. There are other people and experiences hanging around the corner that are more than happy to see the future with me, no matter how brief.

I couldn't care less what my friends in HS had for lunch at the nightclub last night. I could take great photos and make it look like I live in paradise.

Anyway, the point I took issue with is the idea that Facebook is a necessity, and your statement does not prove the case in point at all. Why is it a necessity to look back and wonder? Why is it a need to connect with a large group of strangers? Why is it a need to see what someone you haven't seen for 15 years does for a living? Fine, check because you are curious, but once you check 5 times, you are inching closer to the line of obsession and refusal to let go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is exactly what I was wondering the other day if it was possible, you nailed it on the head, major props. Basically nobody in high school is on match.com or other dating sites because it's not legal and kids just don't seem to do it. So this is a fantastic algorithmic way to optimize who you should be talking to. A huge factor in finding a good person to date is familiarity and their closeness to you. If they see you all the time and you send out trustworthy, non-socially awkward signals, they are likely to trust you more.

<comment><USER14> > If they see you all the time and you send out trustworthy, non-socially > awkward signals, they are likely to trust you more.

What a staggeringly ironic sentiment, given the context.

<comment><USER13> Haha very true, I was going to continue on with that comment and explain more. But then I went back and actually read the end of the article and realized it was about how creepy Facebook is and not really about finding a better date through Facebook. So I was going to either delete the comment or just leave it as is and see if anyone understood it, so it's funny in that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > With another minute of manual curation I had a list of 10 young women who > went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, > the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they > went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home > phone numbers.

It's creepy that it's so easy to grab that much information about someone.

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and without the use of an API.

<comment><USER16> Why does use of an API matter one way or another?

<comment><USER15> because that makes it much easier to automate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So.....how'd those dates turn out?

</comment><comment><USER18> > _... around a couple of corners, past a drinking fountain that nobody uses > ..._

Off topic, but now that you mention it, I don't think I've seen a single drinking fountain anywhere on campus in the year I've been working here. An odd observation, but the prevalence of microkitchens with tons of options (including filtered water dispensers) kind of negates the need for fountains everywhere.

<comment><USER19> I've noticed that trend lately in new buildings and attributed it to management wanting to sell more bottled water from vending machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved the research you did, a little apocalyptic at the end, but nonetheless a great read.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just a heads up: Your website looks strange on Chromium "24.0.1312.56 Built on Ubuntu 12.10, running on LinuxMint 14"

<http://i.imgur.com/zXmcCwC.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> I JUST pushed this change moments ago hoping nobody would notice. I reloaded apache before I compiled assets. Thanks, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The information they have is getting rather noisy though. People are liking and sharing all kinds of random stuff nowadays. Wonder if they can mitigate for this.

</comment><comment><USER22> someone needs to hire this kid!

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually spoke with multiple social data companies on the phone today, calls with people who read this post. What a great way to get hired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Your design layout and grammar and personality give me violent impulses. Just thought you should know since that kind of data isn't available through FB's APIs.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Did I go on dates with a number of those people?" Is that number 0?

<comment><USER24> "Masturblogging (verb): the act of repeatedly fiddling with the look of one's blog, often to the point of social seclusion." — Jackson Gariety

This dude faps to code

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lets see it on #github

<comment><USER25> Hashtagging Github in a comment on HN? What is the world coming to?</comment></comment>


Extensions for Google Chrome Coming In May? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/05/extensions-for-google-chrome-coming-in-may/ <comment><USER2> I'm so happy with Chrome. Google's seemed heading downhill to me: I've lost my love for some of their services, and after I got Mail.app I ditched the online Gmail largely. When Chrome came out it was like the Google I knew and loved: minimal, effective, and fixing a problem in ways other people hadn't thought to fix it.</comment>


Wikipedia Recent Changes (Live) Map - <AUTHOR> http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#en <comment><USER2> This is a really well done but depressing visualization of the frequency and scope of Wikipedia vandalism.</comment>


Crispr's Next Big Debate: How Messy Is Too Messy? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/06/crispr-mutations/ <comment><USER2> This recent note in an "obscure but high-profile journal" (what?!) is entirely a technical observation. I fear that the CRISPR phenomenon has a lot of people, even scientists, who know just enough about the topic to want to affect stock prices. And this too seems to be the Wired article's interpretation even after its own semi-clickbaity headline: "But most scientists, while skeptical of the results, were more disappointed in the way the paper was blown out of proportion."

The promise of CRISPR was _not_ that it was to be the singular tool that would change how genetics and biology behaved. Rather the Cas9 protein could be used as a cheap and fast technique to colocalize with specific DNA sequences. And that is fantastic, useful, and worth all of the praise the tool has gotten. But that's it.

That Cas9 happened to also actually allow a modification at specific sites using its inherent DNA cleavage capability was a great little bonus - and that it could be cleverly controlled to use that capability to actually, today, cure some diseases, was amazing.

There is very little in biology that is binary in nature - it takes a lot of energy to maintain such an entropic dam between two states. So a protein that cuts at ATTGCTTGTA with 80%/hr/molecule efficiency, will also cut ATTGGTTGTA with some non-0% efficiency as well. Every scientist who works with Cas9 (should) already know this. I don't think Cas9 is fantastic for it's ability to cleave DNA - we've had restriction enzymes for a long time - but rather for it's ability to colocalize with arbitrary DNA sequences. And with that colocalization we can now bring to bear all the rest of the fantastic tools we already have in synthetic molecular biology. And that is the interesting part of our future - in which Cas9 is but a single (very useful) tool in our kit.

<comment><USER3> "If it squirms, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. And if you can't understand it, it's mathamatics."

― Magnus Pyke

Anyway, thinking about your example it occured to me that someone using Cas9 should be able to look at the sequenced genome and identify all sequences sufficiently similar to the target sequence that could be unintentionally affected by Cas9. There's one idea for an experiment. As for mitigation, they could try to find another specimen (fat chance) or species which does not have such similar sequences. Of course, mutations will still happen for a myriad of reasons other than Cas9, as they always do.

<comment><USER2> Sure - those are good ideas, and they do (did) such searches prior to determining which sequence to look for in the genome. Just a few caveats off the top of my head though:

\- When you are sequencing a genome how do you know whether or not the windowed sequence you have is found only once in the genome? A solvable problem for most sequences, but still not a trivial caveat.

\- Organisms _utilize_ genomic duplication in order to create backups/redundancies/variants of their most critical systems. These backups eventually 'drift' from their parent, but how much drift is required to know whether or not it will be accidentally 'found' by Cas9.

\- Cas9, like squirmy biology, is time dependent. If you give it 100 years it will likely cut most any sequence at some point during the period. So how do you measure/account for the literal number of Cas9 proteins, much less the amount of time they remain in a given nucleus.

\- DNA is relatively hardy as far as biological molecules go, but there are all sorts of different kinds of chemical errors (much less intentional modifications) associated with DNA that could make a given sequence more/less likely to be misread by Cas9.

\- Are all your gRNAs _actually_ the exact sequence you think they are? RNA is much less stable than the hardy DNA mentioned above. What if some of your RNA is being modified before it even gets to go homing around for its complementary sequence.

etc. etc. etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be clear- the fact that gene therapy is "messy" has been one of the biggest issues holding it back for the past 20 years. This isn't a new concern based on "one study," as Wired seems to frame it. Crispr is just the latest and most promising method and it should be framed in that context. One step forward, not a silver bullet.

One example of this concern stopping research in 2002, but there were some in the late 90s too iirc: [https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6912/full/420116...](https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v420/n6912/full/420116a.html)

<comment><USER5> I'd argue that it's closer to five steps forward than one, on a ten step scale.

CRISPR is a gigantic leap forward in simplifying and expediting gene editing across the board. It has also significantly reduced the cost. The tools, such as SHERLOCK from Broad, that are already cropping up around CRISPR are well beyond what was previously possible.

China as one example has found it so easy and inexpensive to work with, they're likely to rapidly leap ahead of the West in gene editing due to their willingness to allow for higher rates of risk. They'll have perhaps dozens of human trials under way by the end of 2017 / mid 2018. Just on the back of CRISPR they're going to go from lagging far behind in biotech, to being a global leader within two decades. Technologically they're going to skip the decades of traditional pharma / biotech build-up, as with jumping to cellphones and bypassing landlines.

<comment><USER6> > due to their willingness to allow for higher rates of risk

You're making this sound more harmless than it is. I'd rather say "due to their willingness to reject and destroy all previously common-held ethical boundaries of science".

<comment><USER7> Are you referring to anything specific?

<comment><USER8> I'd throw out testing on prisoners as a possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the best critiques of the Nature Methods article was in the Wired piece, pulling it out here for quick reference:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/05/31/tro...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/05/31/trouble- with-crispr-maybe-but-maybe-not)

Derek Lowe is an awesome writer about these kinds of issues. He highlights some of the best of criticisms out there, notably that it's not clear whether the increased rate of apparent mutation and the striking amount of mutations shared between the two treated animals was due to the "experimental" animals being siblings, but the "control" animal being more distantly related. This article isn't the final word by far, and I think the authors didn't claim it to be either. They wanted to put a concern out there for the scientific community to investigate, as well they should, and the community will figure this out.

Remember though, CRISPR is by definition a mutagen. It does create rather substantial disruption in DNA structure (double stranded breaks), and relies on intrinsic DNA repair processes to affect the desired end result. This is likely to be a somewhat noisy process, and we shouldn't be terribly surprised if unexpected changes do occur. Indeed the scientific community is well aware of these limitations, and I think the more popular press shouldn't sell CRISPR as equivalent to programming DNA in the same way we write computer programs.

</comment><comment><USER10> Off-targets is something you always look for. In a research setting, you'll usually be back-crossing to the parental line to clean up the background anytime you transform something.

My experience is in plants, so my point of reference is agrobacertium tumefaciens transformation (agro). To say that CRISPR is cleaner is a massive understatement. It takes a little doing, though, with some labs optimizing for particular species. Some of these optimized results have been astounding, often with no detectable off-site modifications, and 100% efficiency (no need to wait for the T2s for homozygotes)!

I'm not worried. I suppose it's good to point out that it's not ready for full-scale gene-therapy yet, but I'm not aware of anyone saying that it is.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had a roommate once who was a molecular biologist. I told him I was excited about the CRISPR developments and his response was "Yeah, man. Fucking CRISPR." \-- in a tone of voice which I read as "I'll wait until the hypetrain passes on this one before sharing your enthusiasm."

I guess his domain knowledge allowed him to foresee challenges the rest of us are now becoming aware of.

</comment><comment><USER12> Earlier discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446204)

I asked: "How many FVB/N zygotes were injected to generate those 11 original mice?"

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a great blog post response to the article: [https://medium.com/@GaetanBurgio/should-we-be-worried- about-...](https://medium.com/@GaetanBurgio/should-we-be-worried-about-crispr- cas9-off-target-effects-57dafaf0bd53)

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe the Engineers in Promethus/Alien Covenant were using CRISPR to make that black Xenomorphic goo.

</comment><comment><USER15> The fact that its name is missing the penultimate "e" should have clued people in that it was an over-hyped up sham.

<comment><USER4> It is an acronym proposed in 2001: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats</comment></comment>


PayPal's Braintree Embraces Bitcoin, One-Touch Payments - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/08/paypal-braintree/ <comment><USER3> Serious question:

If one is engaged in entirely legal activities - no money laundering, no drugs, no illegal weapons, no tax evasion, no slipping around international monetary controls - why would one want to use Bitcoin?

With the volatility of Bitcoin's price, transfer costs of traditional payment methods (1-3%) are totally dwarfed by the risk of holding Bitcoins for even a short period of time.

Maybe there is some opportunity for arbitrage in currency conversion rates, because of the low daily trading volume? But that doesn't seem like a likely profitable investment when you can lose 4% of your value at 3am because of a cascading margin call on a single exchange.

Other than currency speculation and the ease of evading the law, why would anyone want to exchange a reasonably stable national currency for bitcoin?

<comment><USER4> > why would anyone want to exchange a reasonable stable national currency for > bitcoin?

Name me 10 currencies you'd be comfortable holding. It'll probably be very difficult. Fact is, billions use currencies with high inflation rates and with relatively short lifespans. And it's not just places like Zimbabwe that have many problems besides insane inflation the past decade. It's also relatively developed countries like Argentina that suffer from insane inflation. It's also small stable countries with a nice standard of living ($27k GDP PPP) with an educated population like Cyprus where many lost their savings as bank deposits were frozen or seized.

And that's just protection from governmental malfeasance that hundreds of millions have to be aware of. But it's also the fact that billions are unbanked. We at HN know more than anyone that providing a physical service (like mail delivery) is 1 million times more expensive than a digital service (like e-mail). Same for banking, for vaults, for ATMs, for services like lending, payments, remittance or money transfer. A digital version can be much cheaper, as well as more accessible. (for a bank you often need proof of identity, residence and employment. Good luck when you have no birth certificate, when you live in a slum, when you have an off-the-record job like selling fruit on the corner of the street). Digital banking can bring cheap financial services to hundreds of millions who don't have it, yet have (intermittent) access to networks as simple as SMS or radio, which can plug in to gateways to the bitcoin network.

Next up is us, the wealthy who enjoy relatively nice financial services. Bitcoin can save 1-3% in fees on any transaction. Imagine that there's a 1-3% tax on everything, not value added, everything, every transaction, whether B2C or B2B, and you have a way to remove that. That's very significant. Entire industries run on margins of 1-5%. Amazon's 2013 margin was 0.35%, imagine they could shave off even 0.5%.

Now that doesn't mean we all should actually buy and hold bitcoin. As you say, the volatility dwarfs this percentage. But volatility can be exclusive to investors. For example, Bitreserve (founded by the founder of CNET) lets you lock in the price. That means you can buy $100 of bitcoin, and see $100 on your account, as if it was Paypal. And then you can spend that $100 anytime you want, and it'll always be worth that much. On the backend the service then lets investors create a market to lock in that price, where various investors make short or long bets, a derivatives market can take out the volatility for the customer, thereby allowing people to use bitcoin, save costs, yet be shielded from volatility. That means business to business payments, too.

Besides that there's lots of other things. Like the fact it can be much more secure. Creditcard fraud is rampant as your password is essentially on the card and you have to share it everytime you pay, it's crazy. Chargeback fraud is an issue. Identity theft is therefore an issue. And you can envision crazy things like a Google driverless car paying, on the fly, to another driverless car infront of it, to move away, so that it can take that lane and go faster, because the one in the back is willing to pay extra for speed, and the one in front is okay with arriving a little later. Those kinds of thing can almost only be built on a global, permissionless protocol layer. So indeed none of us may use bitcoin, it may just be a machine to machine currency, it's too early to tell, it can have an impact in many different ways.

<comment><USER3> But so little of that is exclusive to BTC as opposed to a digital transaction valued in national currency, and almost none of the benefits you list accrue to consumers - they all benefit merchants.

\- Getting rid of charge back fraud also gets rid of charge backs - <USER2> important consumer protection.

\- I don't need 10 currencies I'd be comfortable holding, but any of these - [http://fxtrade.oanda.com/analysis/currency- volatility](http://fxtrade.oanda.com/analysis/currency-volatility) have far lower volatility than BTC.

\- Bankless people need banks, not cryptocurrencies. There's no difference to a bankless person between a mobile app to an online bank and a bitcoin gateway.

\- My credit card pays me back a chunk of that "1-3% tax on everything," my bitcoin wallet doesn't. Until bitcoin gains market share and the tax goes away, I'm just paying more to use bitcoin.

\- My credit card company provides fraud protection for when my card is stolen, my BTC wallet does not.

Looking to the future doesn't make me want to transact in BTC right now.

<comment><USER5> \- Chargebacks happen when cards are stolen. Cards are stolen because they are fundamentally pull payment methods. Every time you pay, you hand the keys to your money over to someone else. Think about this for a second, because it is absolutely insane.

Whenever you pay with a credit card, you have to trust the merchant to (1) charge the right amount, (2) only do it once, and (3) themselves take your privacy seriously enough to not have your information stolen by another party, who, if they did get hold of your card info, could abuse it at will and then share with more 3rd parties or have it stolen from them!

Credit cards are broken fundamentally. If the only kinds of payments were push payments, where consumers choose when to pay and the merchant has no ability to pull at will, the entire issue of credit card thefts - think Target, Home Depot, or the Russian hackers - would simply not exist.

So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there. Sure, there are other use cases for chargebacks, like you felt you didn't get what you paid for or something, but that switches to a customer service issue which increases competition among merchants.

\- Who cares about volatility? You don't need to own bitcoin to use it. When you want to send it, buy it at the time, then send it. Big whoop.

Also what is volatility on $100? Are you that concerned about losing or gaining $5, $10, $20 in a day, with a total maximum limit of losing at most $100 if it goes to zero, which seems extremely unlikely? Nobody said you have to invest your life savings. Participating in the technology is as expensive or as cheap as you would like.

\- "Bankless people need banks, not cryptocurrencies." \- _Why?_ You didn't actually say.

"There's no difference to a bankless person between a mobile app to an online bank and a bitcoin gateway." \- Which is _great_ , because since "people need banks" (your words), bitcoin can finally provide it to them.

\- "My credit card pays me back a chunk of that "1-3% tax on everything," my bitcoin wallet doesn't." \- This is short-term thinking. Wouldn't you want something that can provide lower fees to gain market share in the long term, so that discount is not just available to the exclusive group of people who qualify for nice credit cards, but to every person, regardless of qualifications or payment methods?

\- Last point is covered by my first point.

<comment><USER6> > So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there.

That is far from the only reason there is credit card fraud. Actually most credit card fraud is linked to identity fraud (a hacker stealing someone's financial credentials or posing as them on an online/offline store).

Most of the credit card information stolen from Target and Home Depot is not used but sold as quickly as possible on underground forums to "the greater fool" who is willing to take a risk to use it (if it still works).

Because of the chargeback system, those millions of credit cards stolen are not a huge issue for consumers because they can immediately lock down their card. Cards are replaceable keys. If you believe that you've been compromised, chargeback for whatever amount was stolen from you and change cards. It's a pretty incredible system for consumers when you think about it.

Contrast that to bitcoin. Your third-party bitcoin storage service gets hacked, your bitcoin are gone forever. You choose to store your bitcoin locally and you're exposed to physical theft (like keeping cash under your mattress).

Bitcoin does not solve the fraud/theft problem. I facepalm every time I hear that argument. Chargebacks are omnipresent today because they protect consumers because theft has always been and will always be part of any financial/payments system — simply because thieves don't target "how" you pay (push vs pull doesn't matter) but target where you store your wealth.

<comment><USER5> > thieves don't target "how" you pay (push vs pull doesn't matter) but target > where you store your wealth.

I wasn't arguing against this. Your credit card is where your wealth is stored, if it can be used to purchase things. And your wealth is stored with Target if they have your CC info. So places like that seem a likely target for attacks.

> Contrast that to bitcoin. Your third-party bitcoin storage service gets > hacked, your bitcoin are gone forever.

M-of-N key schemes will prevent this in the future. Also not the only option.

> You choose to store your bitcoin locally and you're exposed to physical > theft (like keeping cash under your mattress).

I don't see how. If your stuff is encrypted or your devices locked, then they would not be susceptible to theft from your mattress. They'd have to be stolen from your hand while unencrypted or device unlocked.

Not sure that I buy that most CCs are somehow gotten through a means other than 3rd parties who have them.

Another point is that if you get your info stolen, why should the merchant take the loss? They've already given out the product. It's your money to be responsible for, if the merchant doesn't hold the means to charge it, which they wouldn't with bitcoin. This realization will lead to more secure systems, since consumers would not be able to charge back willy-nilly.

<comment><USER6> > Your credit card is where your wealth is stored.

Your credit card is just a means of payment (a key). Your wealth is stored at your bank.

All these merchants may have your bank keys, but they can't use it to charge you illegally because they will incur costs (a chargeback fee and then some). It a great system in which both the consumer and the merchant are incentivized to behave correctly...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coinbase business development is kicking ass and taking names.

<comment><USER8> They'll end up bought by a big name company if Bitcoin continues to grow, I'm sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The official Braintree post on the one-touch side of things is super interesting and vague[1] - does anyone know what the UX is like from a developers point of view?

[1] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one- touch](https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/one-touch)

<comment><USER10> Hey I work at Braintree on our SDKs. You can find the list of things you need to do to enable one touch here[1]. For Android there is nothing outside a normal Braintree integration you need to do and for iOS you need to register a URL type as well as make two changes in your app delegate to tell us about it.

We generally think about two ways you can integrate with Braintree on the front-end: the drop-in UI and custom. Drop-in [2] means you yield control to us, but you get a dead simple integration which includes one touch paypal and venmo out of the box. If you go the custom[3] route it's obviously more work to integrate, but adding one touch only requires some button that starts the paypal or venmo flow.

 __Edit: __You can also download ParkWhiz ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book- parking/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkwhiz-find-book- parking/id595743376?mt=8)) and install the PayPal app to see the user experience for yourself!

[1] [https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one- touc...](https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/guides/one- touch#enabling-one-touch) [2] [https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop...](https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/drop- in) [3] [https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/payp...](https://developers.braintreepayments.com/ios/sdk/client/paypal- and-venmo)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the links! The UI looks clean enough, I wonder how many users will chose to use paypal/venmo over adding a cc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bitcoin was created to get rid of the likes of Paypal.

<comment><USER12> Was it?

As in, do you have some empirical basis for that statement -- as in, you know, something related to actual statements made by the creator(s) of the original bitcoin protocol itself? Or is it just something you find nifty to believe in (therefore it must be true)?

Please clarify.

<comment><USER8> The original creator(s) just envisioned money designed to work in a digital medium. From there people derive that if Bitcoin is money for the internet it can replace PayPal, though in practice is more complex than that.

The reality is that as it stands now, Bitcoin is hard to understand and properly use, so even though it can be used as-is if you know _well_ what you are doing and are careful, for Bitcoin to be usable for the vast majority of people a layer on top that makes it more consumer friendly is most likely necessary. Thus Bitcoin itself probably won't replace PayPal on its own, but a service that "consumerizes" it like Coinbase or Circle might, if Bitcoin were to become massive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

<comment><USER14> I don't think bitcoin won yet. I haven't heard of paypal allowing people to pay for bitcoins yet. (as in transfers of funds to exchanges) They accept it for their service, but noone else can.

<comment><USER15> Using PayPal is a really bad way to sell bitcoins, because PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment. If you sell bitcoins via PayPal, you're taking a big counterparty risk (not to mention the 3rd party, PayPal itself).

<comment><USER16> > PayPal lets the buyer dispute the transaction, reversing payment.

What would be the alternative? CC, ACH, and most other payment systems also have a mechanism for chargebacks.

<comment><USER17> Small claims court.

Seriously, this is precisely the kind of thing common law and the court system is for. Just the same as your recourse with cash. As for international trade, buyer beware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Bitcoin remains the best and most liquid savings vehicle over the last five years of its existence. Assuming savings = holding currency for over 1 year.

On 98% of the days that you could have purchased Bitcoin you would have realized an increase in purchasing power in a year's time. In those 2% of cases where you could have purchased Bitcoin and seen a loss over one year, you would have still seen an increase in purchasing power in another 300 days. (This is mostly dealing with the June 2011 bubble)

There has never been a time where you could hold Bitcoin for 2 years and lose purchasing power. On the contrary, holding Bitcoin brings on average a 5x per year return in purchasing power.

Past performance, future gains, blah blah. Judgement is about taking into consideration the facts we have now and comparing them against past performance. There are very good reasons why Bitcoin is valued around $6billion now and very good reasons to think it will be valued higher in the future.

You should be placing your life savings in Bitcoin, and only purchasing the USD that you require and holding it for as short of a period as possible. This would have been the best strategy for 98% of 1 year periods over the last five years, and 100% of 2 year periods over the last 5 years.

Debit cards that draw on Bitcoin balances and allow you to use the VISA and Mastercard networks should be the most interesting products -- because they allow you to expose yourself to the dollar's periodic collapse against Bitcoin for the shortest period of time.

I'm sure I'll be downvoted and that people will tell you that Bitcoin is super risky and that you should only invest what you can afford to lose -- but shouldn't that be the case for the dollar and not Bitcoin?

The dollar loses 90% of its purchasing power against Bitcoin on semi-regular schedules, and people keep purchasing more after each collapse. This routine should get old after a while, but that's what happens when you don't use Bitcoin as your unit of account!

<comment><USER19> You're using a time-span that's a full 20% of the item's lifespan. Anyone with a single college level statistics class wouldn't be able to keep a straight face reading this.

 _over the last five years of its existence_ The first exchange didn't come online until summer of 2010.

What's the 1 year picture like for everyone who had coins in Mt. Gox?

<comment><USER18> I've been through college level statistics classes. Nothing I learned in them suggested that holding currency for less than a year was an appropriate measure of savings.

You're complaining that Bitcoin hasn't been around long enough to make a proper measure of its performance. Then you complain that people who gave control of their coins to Mt Gox didn't get their coins back.

I don't understand what these complaints have to do with the fact that Bitcoin has been a fantastic savings vehicle for five years running. (Or four if you prefer)

<comment><USER19> I don't deny its performance, and I'm actually quite bullish on it. I just think 365-665 days is a fairly arbitrary number, and a lifetime of 4-5 years is not enough to draw conclusions from.</comment></comment></comment></comment>