A scientist makes the case for the power of DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/11/08/a-scientist-makes-the-case-for-the-power-of-dna <comment><USER2> It seems that "genetics" is increasingly becoming the essentialism of the 21st century. Because you now sound silly if you use words like 'soul' or 'energy', people increasingly rely on 'genetics' or 'biology' to prove all sorts of political points or argue for public policies. As someone whose job is literally staring at and manipulating fasta files [1][2] all day, I find this newly found fascination people have with their own DNA (and others') deeply unsettling. People want it to be our 'source code', our 'blueprint', our video game character starting stats, any kind of proxy for one's soul, but there's _so much more_ to the self than a dumb fasta file, we're only barely beginning to uncover it. And I'm not talking about the environment either (and by the way, the genetics/environment false dichotomy has been outdated for a while; whenever I hear things like 'nature/nurture' it makes me cringe). Epigenetics, microbiota, DNA spatial structure, all sorts of developmental stuff... these all contribute too, and have little to do with one's 'upgringing' or 'nurturing' as most people understand it.

It's all the more pervasive because some of the talking points are _sort of_ true, but then people _immediately_ jump to conclusions regarding social issues. Which in my view shows that people are not really interested in the science itself but are more looking into a way to map their mental model onto it so as to provide a socially acceptable justification of their opinions. This has been done for hundreds of years (from racialist theories to Lyssenkism to all kinds of foodstuffs lobbies) and I would very much like it if there weren't a resurgence of this kind of thinking in the current political climate.

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there is an enormous danger in abuse of this knowledge. People simply don't understand the concepts and statistics very well.

The part about how heritability varies between countries is very important observation. A country successful at creating great opportunities for the majority of the population will measure very high heritability values because naturally most differences seen will be genetic if the environment is mostly optimal.

This hides the significance of the environment. E.g. height has a heritability of 90%, yet that is easy to misinterpret. Height in various populations have varied dramatically over time and that can primarily be explained by changes in the environment: health care and nutrition.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Instead he advocates the use of such scores when choosing between candidates > for a job.

What a ridiculous and offensive suggestion, widespread genetic discrimination. You don't have to be a scientist to understand why that's bad. Even if (or precisely if) some skills and proclivities are mostly inherited, that should not prevent people that managed to overcome their native shortcomings to find a fair place in society according to their actual, developed skills.

We already know for a fact that males are more aggressive, females have lower orientation skills and Asian kids are less agitated. The genetic markers are so strong there you can read them on the person's face, yet, discrimination on any of those gender or race characteristics should be repulsive to anyone.

<comment><USER5> This.

Eugenics is all fun and games until they come after you and your family.

<comment><USER6> It's not only ethically wrong and offensive, it may actually be factually wrong also. How much of a person--and their suitability for some role--is genetic predisposition, and how much is their nurture and experiences?

Furthermore, if you did identify the "ideal" person for that role, then you'd want more of them: so you'd want clone factories, eg Kamino.

No, we have genetic diversity for a reason.

<comment><USER7> Genetic Diversity is rather an outcome of a fact that mixing genes helped us evolve (mutations - vs diseases, environment changes etc)

Now or rather soon, when human species will be able to takr control over evolution process, genetic diversity will make no sense because you will be highly immune to anything and environment will be no different.

I know its hard to admit even now some families are highly superior to other when it comes to genes inheritage, but thats how it is.

Some may say that Eugenics sucks because for example it would not allow mentally ill people reproduce and they have such ppl in family, but overall majority of population has no such issues and mby they would like to have those genes out of the genes pool. All depends on how you look at that, collective vs single entity etc.

<comment><USER8> Just because you have a bad gene doesn't make you a bad/inferior person so yeah when humans take control over their source code they may put some genes on sleep.

You also forget that there are always trade offs. You can't be "perfect" because there is no such thing.

Back to real world, we all pay taxes and live in this world so I believe we should demand and receive equal opportunities.

<comment><USER6> > a bad gene doesn't make you a bad/inferior person

In fact, we don't always understand the interplay between, say Asbergers and savant skills, or schizophrenia and intense creativity. We might need to live with some of these to retain the whole spectrum of humanity.

My personal feeling, no facts here, is we should look at low hanging fruit that we all agree is isolated and can bring no benefits, such as Tay Sachs or Huntingtons. Those will not be missed and we well gain experience with the harder problem of evaluating the harder choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There may be generic markers and genetic predisposition, but it's not because a person comes from a "long race of X" or "long family of Y". Even if that's true in fact it's wrong in policy. It's dangerous to consider some better than others.

Changes to family traits may be slow, but can be cultivated! We should encourage and help all families and communities to improve their environment to bring about positive changes in their lives and children's lives.

From TFA:

"These are problems of emphasis rather than accuracy. But in a field as ethically fraught as genetics, even that can be troubling. For instance, as Mr Plomin notes, the size of the genetic component of a particular trait—its "heritability"—varies between different populations. The heritability of educational attainment in Norway has increased since the second world war as the country widened access to health care and schools, flattening out environmental effects. That trend seems, worryingly, to have reversed in America in the 21st century. The irony is that the heritability of many traits rises if states do more to provide for all their citizens equally."

</comment><comment><USER10> > Instead he advocates the use of such scores when choosing between candidates > for a job.

I'm struggling to understand how this doesn't wind up being a proxy for racism/sexism and the other things we abhor when considering equal opportunity.

<comment><USER11> > being a proxy for racism/sexism

Genetic variation inside races is much larger than between them. I don't think that that genetic screening is a good idea, but if it would be rigorously and blindly applied, it would probably break up many race and gender barriers.

We already do ad hoc screening based on phenotypes determined by genes.

* taller men have higher wages than shorter men.

* beautiful women get jobs more easily than ugly women.

* facial asymmetries and other small deviations from the norm affect the prospects of many people.

<comment><USER12> >Genetic variation inside races is much larger than between them

Do you have a source for this? It sounds suspiciously like feel good propaganda.

<comment><USER13> Do you have a source that states "races" are determined by genetics?

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a- social-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social- construct-scientists-argue/)

[https://www.americanscientist.org/article/is-race- real](https://www.americanscientist.org/article/is-race-real)

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/genetics- history...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/genetics-history-race- neanderthal-rutherford/)

Those are literally the first three results from the google search "is race real from science point of view".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gattaca here we come !! (We are already in 1984)..

</comment><comment><USER9> Blueprint is the wrong analogy. Recipe book is more appropriate.</comment>


Why Do Startups Win? - <AUTHOR> http://jooseph.com/post/why-do-startups-win <comment><AUTHOR> Hello everyone,

I just wrote a post about how can group of 5 people win a battle against big corporation by changing the rules and escaping the competition. Those are my observations and experiences, nothing scientific.</comment>


How to be polite - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c

<comment><USER2> In case anyone is interested in the HN community thoughts on this, it was discussed at some length 9 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8178536)

It was also submitted many times, showing that quite a few people thought it was interesting. Here are some of those submissions, even though they generated no discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8584823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8584823)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8440675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8440675)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8226605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8226605)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8212817)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8173722)

Found using this search:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20to%20be%20polite%22&s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22how%20to%20be%20polite%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> That is an interesting perspective on party conversation - mentally, if someone says [insert thing] sounds hard, generally my first reaction is to be mistrustful due to insincerity. If someone is on autopilot with what they say, I will always doubt the intention of that person because the person is on sales mode, and as a sales tactic, it does not sell me on a desire to be around the person long.

<comment><USER4> You only remember the polite remarks that came across fake. Like the author says, real politeness goes unnoticed.</comment></comment>


Dynamic Language Support on the JVM - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/dynamic_languages.html

<comment><USER2> "We noticed over the last couple of years that the Java developer community — unlike the .NET developer community — was starting to experiment with dynamic languages."

What? He must have missed IronPython and IronRuby. IronPython's performance has been far superior to Jython primarily because of the dynamic language support in CLR. Unfortunately, MS seems to have abandoned these efforts.

<comment><USER3> Written in 2006.

IronPython was quite young at the time (1.0 only made it out in November of that year). As far as I can remember, IronRuby didn't even exist at the time, and the CLR had no dynamic language support.

So he's probably correct in that the .NET developer community hadn't yet significantly embraced dynamic languages on the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From 2006... have things changed since then? I hope so, but I don't think so...

<comment><USER5> They plan to get it into Java 7.

<http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk7/features/#f353>

<comment><USER6> Which will be released roughly 6 YEARS after Java 6. The JVM is an excellent platform but any hope Java (the language) had of remaining even remotely modern died before Sun did. So sad...</comment></comment></comment>


How Hy backported "yield from" to Python 2 - <AUTHOR> http://dustycloud.org/blog/how-hy-backported-yield-from-to-python2/

<comment><USER2> They wrote a Lisp, and added a feature to the Lisp, which they can do really easily because Lisp has macros.

Their choice of runtime environment (Python 2) doesn't impact anything. They didn't port "yield from" to Python 2 the language, they ported it to Python 2 the bytecode interpreter.

<comment><USER3> You don't _need_ macros in Python. In Maslo's Hierarchy of Programming you can get by with first class functions and an AST module just fine. But it is a fine day when you can generate code using the same primitives you would use on plain old data.

It's not the most interesting example of macros but it does illustrate one small point: we can use _yield-from_ in an expression as if it were any other symbol in the language. This is what Lispers mean when they say that you can program the language with macros. They're mini-compilers. It's when you start layering them together that things start to get interesting. You can use the _yield-from_ symbol in any valid place within an expression... and since Hy is all expressions and has no statements it gets expanded out and put in the right place and just works.

In languages without macros you have design patterns. The lack of facility for linguistic abstraction forces us to use primitives to describe more sophisticated phenomenon than our language provides by default. So Twisted has had sub-generators in Python 2 for a while and they work rather well via its Deferred abstraction. It works well and I was glad to have it... however its implementation is much more complex than the macro described in this blog post. We had to wait for Python 3 to have them integrated into the language. Macros can bypass that which is the point the OP was trying to make.

The point I'm making here is that you can do pretty much everything you want to do without macros. You'll just have to write quite a bit more code and come up with many more metaphors and analogies in order to get it to work. Macros just let you get straight to the point by extending the language.

<comment><USER4> We can look at it like this.

You essentially _have_ macros in Python: they are hard-coded in the form of phrase structure rules in its grammar.

Macros are essentially this: new phrase structure rules in your interpreter/compiler that you program yourself and stick into your application.

What you're really saying is actually that you don't need any new macros beyond the phrases which the benevolent dictator for life has bestowed upon you in the parser.

Whenever a programmer upgrades to a newer Python which has new syntactic transformations in its updated grammar, and then uses these new things, that programmer contradicts his or her earlier claims that no new macros were needed.

<comment><USER5> I don't need everyone else in my shop making horrible sloppy messes at an unnecessarily high level of abstraction using macros. I'll be picking up after their cute shit at the end of the month, under emergency conditions. There's currently no problem with them recompiling Python to make weird one-off syntax because that's clearly crossing a line. I could add my own syntax and recompile, but I legitimately don't need or want to. No, I _don 't_ need a general runtime macro capability in Python. It's not a good idea and it doesn't buy anything I actually need.

<comment><USER6> Take OCaml for comparison: It has a more or less reasonable way of extending the language with an extensible parser camlp4 that ultimately yields a fixed AST. No one would get the idea to use it just for fun, or one-shot abstractions, but it is integrated into the toolchain well enough that you can reliably distribute libraries that use syntax extensions. The general attitude that "coders are dumb, we need to protect them from themselves" lead to the development of mediocre languages like Java. Compare that to something like Racket, where despite some flaws most of the macros provide an obvious and very real benefit, without overcomplicating the compiler (for example the match macro, or the macros that constitute the C-FFI). Ideally in my eyes a language should provide the programmer with maximal possible expressiveness without compromising a core simple design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Chris gave a great talk about Hy at ChiPy (Chicago Python) last year: [http://pyvideo.org/video/1869/hy-a-lisp-that-transforms- itse...](http://pyvideo.org/video/1869/hy-a-lisp-that-transforms-itself-into- the-python)

You should also check out his work on MediaGoblin. "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc." [http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I really should play more with Hy someday. I discovered it when I was still too new to Lisps to make sense of such a new project (and such new and experienced-user-oriented documentation).

</comment><comment><USER9> Nothing to see here. Even the PEP of yield from contains code simulating a 'yield from' with plain 'yields'. The thing is, you are just simulating it with the expense of switching generators back and forth.(like a trampoline)

</comment><comment><USER10> inspect module offers isgenerator and isgeneratorfunction. the author should have used that.

[https://docs.python.org/2/library/inspect.html#inspect.isgen...](https://docs.python.org/2/library/inspect.html#inspect.isgeneratorfunction)

<comment><USER11> Which does exactly the same as what the code in the example does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like they use defmacro/g! from let over lambda.</comment>


1,760 PlayStation 3s form new supercomputer - <AUTHOR> http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2010/12/air-force-playstation-3-supercomputer-122410w/

<comment><USER2> My first thought when reading about this is I know NVIDIA makes rack mounted devices with their "Tesla" GPU for HPC applications like this. I would feel more confident with hardware designed for what the Airforce is trying to do and it seams like the Tesla servers would have a lot less wasted hardware and may be more efficient in a server environment.

So I googled it and found out IBM already moved from Cell to Tesla last May.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/05/ibm-cheats- on-c...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/05/ibm-cheats-on-cell-with- nvidia-tesla-for-servers.ars)

I'm also curious how AMD's new APU will affect this market.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2067057>

<comment><USER3> The reason that most of these mini clusters made of ps3's came up is because Sony was subsidizing a good percentage of the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> what a waste. They could have bought IBM BladeCenter solution with the same processors, but with Infiniband and more memory.. instead they have a big toy.

<comment><USER5> With greater power consumption and a much higher cost.</comment></comment>


The 200th firefighter just died from a World Trade Center-related illness - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/18/us/200-firefighters-died-world-trade-center-illnesses-trnd/ <comment><USER2> One day our descendants will look back at incidents like this and wonder how we tolerated such inhumanity towards the most vulnerable among us.

<comment><USER3> We live in a country where owning a gun is considered a sacred and inalienable right, but healthcare is a privilege subject to the whims of the market.

I think our descendants will look back and judge that our priorities granted us the society we deserved.

</comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 Related illness?

I can't help but make a parallel with Chernobyl liquidators. There are about 50 confirmed deaths among them (physical trauma and acute radiation syndrome).

The numbers regarding long term effects however vary enormously. The WHO estimates it at around 4000, but some organizations states numbers over 100000, while others say it is statistically insignificant.

I wonder how a death is "WTC-related". Firefighters are at a greater risk than the general population. So what tells us that a disease is the result of 9/11 rather than the rest of their carrier. And BTW, I hope that firefighters who displayed acts of bravery unrelated to WTC still get proper compensation for resulting health problems.

<comment><USER4> I think you're probably wrong, but I consent that the article didn't present any information on the illness.</comment></comment>


Fight the silencing of gun research - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/fight-the-silencing-of-gun-research-1.22139?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews&sf88393096=1 <comment><USER2> "And the problem may be worsening. According to one study, the rate of mass shootings tripled between 2011 and 2014 (see go.nature.com/2rkdtaw). During the past decade, gun suicides increased by 30%; gun murders increased by more than 18% from 2014 to 2015; and 2015 saw 2,600 more gun deaths than 2014 (see go.nature.com/2qnp4m2)."

Good data is important, so I'm dismayed by this paragraph that reads like straight out of 'How to Lie with Statistics' used to advocate for it:

-"rate of mass shootings tripled between 2011 and 2014" \- true, but depends on how you define mass shooting [1], and more importantly, mass shootings represent a tiny share of gun crime [1].

-"gun suicides increased by 30%" \- regrettable, but should not be conflated with violent crime.

-"gun murders increased by more than 18% from 2014 to 2015" \- interesting choice of time frame, given that just the previous sentence talked of a 'decade'. Going to the same source they cite, one sees no clear trend for the 2000-2015 range, but looking at the 1981-2010 range [2], gun murders have almost halved.

-"and 2015 saw 2,600 more gun deaths than 2014" \- despite the word 'and', this is mostly the same data point as above, plus 600 suicides, which were already covered separately.

A simple gun homicides vs. time graph would have done much better. Or the violent crime rate in a country that _did_ ban guns, before and after the ban, e.g. [http://www.karenselick.com/GunOwnershipViolentCrimeEng.gif](http://www.karenselick.com/GunOwnershipViolentCrimeEng.gif)

I should note, the above is just one of the first few graphs that popped up when searching for gun statistics on google. A comparison of more such cases may well find the UK to be an outlier, and something else caused that increase in crime. Notably, there's a strong correlation between gun deaths and rate of gun ownership in US states, but again, correlation != causation, and rate of gun ownership correlates with all sorts of things.

Finally, I'll add that I'm more than a little uncomfortable in using data to curtail freedoms - how many times has freedom of assembly been used to form gangs and plan crimes? Should therefore everyone have to wear ankle monitors?

[1] [https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-violence-facts/mass- shootings-...](https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-violence-facts/mass-shootings- rare-united-states)

[2] [https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-violence-facts/gun-homicide- de...](https://www.vox.com/cards/gun-violence-facts/gun-homicide-decline- crime-drop)</comment>


A Faster Pseudopolynomial Time Algorithm for Subset Sum (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02318 <comment><USER2> One of the authors here. Later we showed a much simpler algorithm for the O(u√n) running time. [https://chaoxuprime.com/files/papers/subset-sum- simple.pdf](https://chaoxuprime.com/files/papers/subset-sum-simple.pdf)

We have also prepared a journal version that combines those papers, and with some extra results. whomever interested can contact me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this apply to the discrete Knapsack problem too?

<comment><USER2> It does not. For faster pseudopolynomial time algorithms to knapsack, see this [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06440](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.06440)</comment></comment>


Smart TVs Track More Than What's on Tonight - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/business/media/tv-viewer-tracking.html <comment><USER2> I try to tell everyone I know--family, friends, etc.--to _never_ use any of the online features of their "Smart" TV for this reason. Use a set-top box. Use a Roku, a Chromecast, a Fire Stick, your old game console--literally _anything_ that you can connect to the TV to watch Netflix on will be better for your privacy than the TV itself.

I haven't updated my Samsung 40" TV in about 7 years for this reason. It's damn near impossible to just find a high quality "dumb" TV.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure you can make a smart tv relatively dumb again by just not connecting it to your network though.

<comment><USER4> I worry about the near future where cell connectivity (ala Kindle Whispernet) is cheap enough for these companies to not even bother using your network to exfiltrate data.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that is a possibility, but is the percentage of people who don't connect their smart TV going to be high enough to warrant that? I imagine the vast majority of people let their TVs connect, because they want to use Netflix and the other streaming services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bought a Vizio in 2017 (because 5 HDMI ports, 4K HDR, dolby vision), and I just couldn't find one non-smart TV that was 4K HDR.

So I resorted to use it with Apple TV only (its great that Apple TV also has Dolby Vision support, so DV content looks stunning on this display).

I thought I was smart in not connecting the TV to the internets. Once I did connect it for a few days, later at some point Vizio forced me to connect it because, they changed the physical remote, sent it to me for free, and then the UI was blocked until I setup the new remote, which needed internet. For a moment, I thought of returning the TV to Costco saying "it is not working". But I didn't have the patience to do that :-/

So technically, Vizio or any smart TV can prevent you from using the TV after you start using it, if you refuse to update the firmware, remote etc.

I'm willing to pay 2x the price I paid for Vizio, if Apple comes out with a display, because thats the only brand I trust for privacy. But only problem in that case, will be HDMI ports. I doubt an Apple Display would have more than 1 or 2 HDMI ports (looking at how they are port unfriendly on Macbooks :)

<comment><USER6> I recently bought a Sony 900F. Great TV, but I'm not connecting it to the internet and the Android "smart" portion may as well not exist. There's no reason to use it when the Apple TV 4K, PS4, etc all do the smart bits better.

I too would pay a sizable premium for a high quality mid-high tier dumb TV just to never have to worry about the associated privacy implications. I'd guess most folks who have any kind of serious media center setups would also agree. Perhaps it's time for a few boutique TV companies to enter the scene?

<comment><USER7> Hopefully for that premium you'd also get a TV that powers-on close to instantly (or at least faster than whatever box you're using it with), gives you a control over display settings per-HDMI input, lets you use Bluetooth headphones (the ATV can do this, it's great).

Unfortunately it would be niche indeed, as it'd be a very hard sell to push a "non-smart" TV at a premium, and I can't see how the economies of scale could ever work. :(

<comment><USER6> A sharp, clean, timeless HUD design and FOSS reflashable firmware would a nice plus too.

I would assume the biggest cost would be that big display panel, but have no experience with manufacturing/supply chain to back that up. How does one research such a thing I wonder...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm actually going to be in the market for a new television later this year. My only use is to watch Netflix, some Blu-rays, and dock my Nintendo Switch to it. Are there any recommended high definition (4k+) televisions that aren't Smart TV's?

<comment><USER9> They're hard to look up but you need to check "commercial" series. I bought a 55" 4k LG dumb tv a year ago and I'm quite happy with it. Simple remote, no hassle. The downsides are that it only has two HDMI inputs and afaik no antenna for over-the-air channels. Also it doesn't do HDR and I don't know if they have a "commercial series" dumb-tv that does.

I'll link you to the model when I'm back at my desktop.

<comment><USER10> How was cost comparison? Did you save anything significant going with this line over a SmartTV? My future solution is to simply not plug the SmartTV into the network and if it means paying the same why not?

<comment><USER11> My dumb TV boots up from power button to pix in about 2 to 3 seconds. My MiL's smart TV takes about 20-30 seconds from flipping the power strip on. So "smart" costs about ten times latency in two anecdotes of data. My MiL is very jealous of my dumb TV, no one likes a slow UI.

My MiL doesn't have wifi internet; possibly the TV wastes a lot of time at boot trying to connect as punishment for people who don't allow it to spy, I don't know.

<comment><USER12> Smart TVs usually have a full blown operating system they have to boot. It's similar to booting a Roku, Apple TV, or your Smartphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So what is the justification for this being acceptable behavior (beyond the usual "read the 20 page, graduate-reading-level privacy policy)?

Sites like Google and Facebook provide free services in exchange for ads.

Personally I think it is ludicrous that a company thinks it OK to use _my personal information_ to enrich themselves, via a device that _I paid for_.

<comment><USER14> If you think Google and Facebook are the only companies doing this on the internet, you're in a for a huge shock. There are tons of companies that do this without providing any service for _you_.

Recall a recent story on HN about Exactis leaking data on 100s of millions of people? That's just one of them, and until the breach almost nobody had ever heard of them.

<comment><USER15> True. Basically, every time you get an annoying GDPR popup, you've found someone complicit.

<comment><USER16> That's a stretch. I worked on GDPR compliance and it wasn't because of anything underhanded or nefarious. Just had to comply with new regulations.

<comment><USER17> If you need a popup you are complicit. In that case it's very likely you are spewing my personal data to third parties.

<comment><USER16> It's the law! I'm not sure how you don't get that. People have to get explicit consent to Terms of Service and marketing. If you don't understand that times change and companies have to adapt to follow the law (with a popup modal of all things _gasp_ ) then I'm not sure what to tell ya. Good luck with that mindset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Eradicating Samba TV from my Sony Android TV was quite a fight. I ended up with a local Pi-hole server blocking everything the TV was trying to access except Netflix. Not optimal but better than nothing...

<comment> move-on-by A Pi-hole is the only real solution for this as far as I can tell if you still want to use apps on your TV like Netflix. I use a Pi-hole as well with several block list sources, my favorite being Steven Black's hosts: [https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts](https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for that link!

I haven't added a custom block list to my Pi-hole before, this looks more complicated than I would have hoped.

<comment><USER19> Okay, I see. Just use _his_ hosts file to extend Pi-hole. Not so hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Luckily, we have GDPR in the EU. And they are going to be fined if they are doing the opt-in this way.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is explicitly why the last TV I bought was a dumb TV. One less privacy nightmare to worry about. Of course, that just shifts the problem to the black box on the other side of the HDMI cable, but I can watch as much over-the-air TV as I want without anyone harvesting my viewing habits.

What we need as consumers are laws that would allow the owners of smart televisions, network-connected devices, and any other physical products with included software, to more easily control the behavior of the hardware that they own, without resorting to rooting and jailbreaking to "pwn ur own" property. (Including refusal to honor DRM restrictions.) I don't know why "you can't have your cake, and eat it too" is not an actual legal principle, but you can't sell a hardware device to the consumer and still control what they can or cannot do with it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I never connect my smart TVs to wifi. Problem solved

</comment><comment><USER23> Smart TV's are Dumb IoT's. I have found they lack proper implementations of DNS resolvers. They do not obey TTL's and will aggressively retry connections. On the plus side, some of them don't check ssl certs, so you can snoop on the data they gather. [0] You can use tc netem to rate limit the TV and add a lot of packet loss and reordering so make mitm easier, as the TV will retry many times.

[0] - [https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/cia-mitm-hacking- tool.html](https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/cia-mitm-hacking-tool.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> A few months ago I bought a new TCL TV here in China. I was amazed when, using it as an external monitor, an ad popped up over the screen which required using the TV remote to dismiss. Never buying TCL again.

</comment><comment><USER25> I bought an upper midrange dumb TV about 10 years ago (LED, full array dimming) and it's still working flawlessly. The only downside is it has massive bezels and is fairly thick.

It might seem silly, but I recently considered upgrading it purely for aesthetic reasons and was ready to spend the money, but the smart TV aspect is a major turnoff so I decided against it for now. Even if I don't use the smart TV features there's still downsides like boot time.

</comment><comment><USER26> It is interesting how they hide important details in long terms and conditions document. Cannot other industries learn from this Silicon Valley invention? For example, a car dealer could hide a condition that they are only temporarily lending a car instead of selling. There are people who don't read the documents they sign carefully.

<comment><USER15> I don't think SV invented this. It's just that this hasn't been regulated out of software industry yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a perfect case where even if you pay you still are the product. Of course this needs regulation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a cheapie TCL Roku TV. If I hook up my laptop using HDMI and play something along the lines of a movie Xvid file, a banner notification pops up asking me if I'd like to watch the show on one streaming service of another.

<comment><USER28> Yuck. How does it know what you're watching? HDMI doesn't expose file names AFAIK.

<comment><USER27> Not sure. Subtle fingerprint encoded in the soundtrack? Fast Fourier analysis fingerprint of a specific span of time near the beginning of the movie?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One of my main reasons for sticking with an AppleTV instead of switching to a Roku is that Roku also does this, but Apple has a stronger stand on privacy.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can anybody give me a good reason why I should care if my TV watching habits are tracked for the purpose of targeted advertisements?

</comment><comment><USER31> Time to put the TV on the guest network.

<comment><USER32> That won't stop it collecting data.

<comment><USER31> It would stop collection of data on other devices on network,but yeah.

<comment><USER33> That depends on how the companies determine "the same network". If it's external IP based then a guest network is of no use.

<comment><USER31> I own my own router and the guest network is isolated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> LG has something similar called "Channel Plus" which is an app that has a bunch of (frankly, mediocre) IPTV channels in exchange for you consenting to data collection on everything you watch. I didn't read the TOS closely, but it wasn't clear to me whether it collected data just when you were using the app, or on all content viewed with the TV even in other apps, OTA, etc. I'm suspicious because you have to consent and enable data collection in the global settings for the TV.

<comment><USER35> Channel plus on my oled spams me with notifications even though it's disabked. Clearly lg doesn't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> (1) Who watches TV these days?

(2) Most all of the "smart" TVs in my area don't use any of their features. They are all used as dumb monitors. They either take signal from a proprietary cable box, a game device, or some other media player.

(3) I have yet to see a TV that requires an internet connection to function. If you have one of these things, blacklist it on your network. At the firewall, or just don't give it your wifi password.

<comment><USER37> A lot of people watch physical TVs, even if they don't watch "TV". This is about tracking what people are watching on the physical device, no matter the source.

If I watch a Blu-ray or Netflix, my smart TV will still send a fingerprint of that content to their servers for analytics.

As far as not connecting your TV you the Internet: (1) The default setup says you need to, so most people will since they want to watch Netflix. (2) There's so much free wifi around these days I wouldn't be surprised if TVs try to connect to any open wifi for "automatic updates".

<comment><USER38> Can that be constructed as CFAA if they then bypass some agreement button or so?</comment></comment></comment>


ARM based baremetal SSD cloud servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleway.com

<comment><USER2> Main discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459)

</comment><comment><USER3> Welcome news. The ubiquity of Intel disturbs me. I would love to see more diversity in processors.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great stuff looking forward to seeing more ARM based hosting services.

Been using labs.online.net for a few months and it has been fantastic.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Not aarch64 :( 32-bit ARM makes me sad panda.</comment>


The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hardest_logic_puzzle_ever <comment><USER2> <http://www.xkcd.com/356/>

<comment><USER3> Along the same lines, I read somewhere you can basically shut down an entire IT department for a couple of days by handing out rubik's cubes to everyone.

<comment><USER4> Make sure that they're shuffled first. Solving it will be a compulsion for some geeks.

<comment><USER3> Maybe just peel the stickers off and put them back so that it's not possible to solve. Should keep most people busy longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> +1 for Raymond Smullyan's books. Lots of fun.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would ask each of them "are you lieing?". Then, when their heads have exploded, they could all be identified as "dead gods".

</comment><comment><USER7> My head hurts now. I should have prepared for this with more sleep.

</comment><comment><USER8> Aha! The problem is unsolvable.

<comment><USER9> I thought they showed the solution (besides the exploding head question) in the wiki .. ?

<comment><USER8> Unsolvable by me.</comment></comment></comment>


BitGigs - Bitcoin Job Board - <AUTHOR> http://bitgigs.com

<comment><USER2> 1\. Are people actually anonymous or does it just say that? I guess they would be if they were using Tor, but I think it's a shame it doesn't mention this anywhere on the site that I can see.

2\. Is there some kind of reputation connected to the accounts. I think that this matters a lot on an anonymous message board.

</comment><comment><USER3> Y'know what would be a great idea? A bitcoin _discussion_ board, so that y'all don't have to keep spamming all these stories here!

What's that? A discussion board for bitcoin already exists? Hey, how about that!

<comment><USER4> Let's take all the Apple stories to the Apple forums, too, while we are at it.

<comment><USER5> I'm kind of tired of all the YCombinator posts too! Let's keep the links here just to hacker news.

<comment><USER6> We should all move to thehackernews.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love the idea. My one concern is there's no guarantee or assurance services will be delivered.</comment>


Show HN: Selfbox – It's Like Instapaper or Pocket for Your Inbox [Pre-launch] - <AUTHOR> http://selfbox.co

<comment><USER2> sounds interesting, when this is getting live? would like to add your product to our site.</comment>


15 year old electronics hacker from Sierra Leone turns scraps into useful tools - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOLOLrUBRBY

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to donate to the cause of this young gentleman, try here:

<http://www.crowdrise.com/innovatesalone></comment>


French philosopher laid low by "Botulism" - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/world/europe/10levy.html?scp=1&sq=bhl&st=cse

<comment><USER2> Not sure it matters much either way, but fwiw, BHL (as he seems to be known) isn't associated with French philosophy in the school-of-thought sense Americans use the term, although he's clearly French and a philosopher. That is, he isn't associated with the prominent intellectual currents that characterize post-WW2 French philosophy (post-structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, etc.). Rather the opposite; he's mainly a critic of the mainstream of French philosophy, and politically somewhat towards the right, e.g. opposing socialism and supporting the Iraq War.

(This episode will probably strengthen his critics from the left who tend to accuse him of being a media-savvy intellectual lightweight.)

<comment><USER3> To clarify, while BHL finds himself _on_ the right in some public debates, he isn't _of_ the right. His most frequent criticisms are of the left—he's somewhat like the Christopher Hitchens of France: a disaffected man of the left, criticizing the relativist left for failing to uphold its ostensible values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Keillor takedown of Levi's book (I had the misfortune of reading it serialized in The Atlantic) is even better than this article. You'll find it linked to the article. Click that link! What a schmuck.

</comment><comment><USER5> While he considers himself a "french philosopher", BHL is not regarded as a philosopher by everyone. In fact, it is very common to make fun of BHL because of this. He is certainly more known as a journalist and a well marketed public figure than as a philosopher.

<comment><USER6> I hope this blunder will help hearing less about him. His book "American Vertigo" mentioned in the article was horribly written, with sentences going over multiple pages for the only and clear goal of appearing like a great writer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Worth a read in conjunction with this Wikipedia entry <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Botul></comment>


Four Big Banks to Create a New Digital Currency for Inter-Bank Transactions - <AUTHOR> https://news.bitcoin.com/four-banks-create-new-digital-currency/ <comment><USER2> Sounds more like a digital currency than a blockchain currency. When this is just between a few banks, which inherently trust each other, there's no need to build a sophisticated P2P blockchain for a job that can be done with a couple of SQL tables.

<comment><USER3> Err.... no, banks definitely do not "inherently trust each other." Not when the incentive to misrepresent your position is so high. They use very expensive record keeping and clearinghouse arrangements (often involving quite a lot of physical paper) that in theory could be cheaper to do with a distributed ledger.

<comment><USER4> Yes, there's no 100% trust of course, but the banks, merchants and general population trust other banks more than they would trust some random entities or bitcoin exchanges for example.

There are of course reasons for that, the major ones being the shared (and regulated) clearing system you're referring to (which I'm assuming this "bitcoin alternative" is aiming to replace) and then there's the fact that these are accredited financial institutions with reasonable controls in place to keep them honest.

In a hypothetical scenario where credit card authorization succeeds (meaning that the issuing bank is guaranteeing the funds to the merchant), merchant ships the goods but the funds don't make it to their account on the merchant bank side because the issuing bank "misrepresented the position" \- if the issuing bank gets caught doing this they'll be in all sorts of trouble.

<comment><USER3> It's not that just about having an inherent distrust of one another. When they do have a dispute, it is necessary to have very good documentation to bring to court. Legally doing a mediocre job with keeping records is barely better than not keeping records at all. So they end up spending a lot to mind their p's and q's, even though they do have a good amount of trust.

With a blockchain it becomes cheap to add a layer of ex-post verifiable mutual agreement between mostly-trusted parties.

<comment><USER4> I'm all for a blockchain (or ripple or whatever) type solution replacing today's antiquated setup.

My point however is that I highly doubt that it's the trust issues between financial institutions that is the primary driving force behind this implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article references a paywalled FT article: [https://www.ft.com/content/1a962c16-6952-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a...](https://www.ft.com/content/1a962c16-6952-11e6-ae5b-a7cc5dd5a28c)

From that FT article: "The coins, each convertible into different currencies".

This suggests that they're using blockchain as a distributed ledger, and that the 'coins' are just fungible IOUs for existing government-backed fiat currencies.

So, it's a Bitcoin alternative in the sense that it can move money quickly. But they're not creating a new currency. They're just creating new paperless non-interest-bearing bearer bonds.

<comment><USER6> How does this differ from a currency?

<comment><USER5> Two things which make me see it as something other than a currency:

1) The 'coin' will not be the unit of account. The underlying currency (e.g. US$) will be the unit of account.

2) If the underlying currency (e.g. US$) ceased to exist, the 'coin' would have zero value.

Consider how the above two points compare with:

A) Bitcoin (which I say _is_ a currency)

B) Zero-coupon government bonds (which I say are _not_ currency)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in 1994 I worked at startup created by a consortium of banks that was intended to deliver tools for intra-bank settlement, B2C, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certco_(financial_services)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certco_\(financial_services\))

It was plagued by being ahead of its time, having technology in search of a use case, having predatory and venal business folks (and I like most biz folks!), a high burn rate, development split across two locations (long before this was a solved problem), issues with corporate culture, dysfunctional technical management that saw testing as a problem to be routed around, etc.

Hope this newest spin on the idea has better success.

(It would be hard not to - Certco was a perfect storm. That said, some great people worked there, and after a certain point I was a dysfunctional employee with a bad attitude myself. )

<comment><USER8> It's hard to envision how a new technology can change your business operations until you see how other businesses are using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This isn't a Bitcoin alternative.

It's just a blockchain based currency.

<comment><USER10> Considering Bitcoin is a blockchain based currency, and this is a blockchain based currency that isn't Bitcoin, it sure seems like a Bitcoin alternative to me. Perhaps you can elaborate on why you feel otherwise.

<comment><USER11> Bitcoin's core mission is enabling people to do payments. It's "consumer"-targeted, cash alternative.

USC looks like more of a settlement layer that could be used for more than just moving monetary amounts around. I think it will just end up being used as a more reliable contract agreement between banks, not that it won't be useful to them. It's pretty obvious that they need something like that, but in no way it's an alternative to Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The devil is in the details. Banks have been talking about "permissioned blockchains" for awhile, and whether this is really a bitcoin alternative, or just using the blockchain as a jumpstart for interbank transaction software remains to be seen. (The article is very light on details.)

If it is a bitcoin alternative then it will be distributed and tustless. Those are some of bitcoins key innovations. Being distributed means that no central authority can rewrite history by changing balances. Being trustless means that the system keeps accurate records even if participants are compromised (assuming less than %51 are compromised.)

Banks are unlikely to want to give up that level of control and probably will make it centralized (eg: a few banks run the miners) and trusted (eg: only authorized transactions and probably they will put in a way to rewrite history.)

Which means, if those assumptions are true, this isn't an alternative to bitcoin, but simply banks jumping on the blockchain hype to create a centralized system of fast settlement.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just don't call it "Ecoin" please, do not want to upset Evil corp

</comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this just a shared ledger to encourage more trust, with the other banks all keeping a copy so that if UBS say they settled with Santander but there's disagreement then they can ask the others to verify?

</comment><comment><USER15> When I read the title originally, it reminded me of when Microsoft wanted MSN to replace the Internet, seemed like the exact same scenario.

</comment><comment><USER16> So a centralised decentralised coin ?

<comment><USER3> A distributed ledger is only "decentralized" among the users of the ledger. We're talking about a consortium of banks making up both the developers and the users of this ledger. There is no mismatch in how "centralized" it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If big banks re-released Tether, that would work decently well

The proof of concept is already there.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm reminded of the US currency situation prior to 1863, when any bank could print its own money and you needed to figure exchange rates on every transaction.

The status of 'unlimited legal tender' which the USD enjoys today is a major factor in the growth of the US economy.

</comment><comment><USER19> and just to point out we (clearmatics) are hiring

[https://clearmatics.workable.com/](https://clearmatics.workable.com/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Bitcoin is dead and the blockchain has been coopted.

</comment><comment><USER21> Acronis is the first customer to adopt blockchain.

<comment><USER22> They are using MD5 to hash the data: [http://notarystorage.acronis.com/certificate/eebb9edc63a06c5...](http://notarystorage.acronis.com/certificate/eebb9edc63a06c588dbeafbbff88a0709d99afc03cd1955cddfe38b475716553)

Ouch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The title is a bit misleading.

This new "USC" (utility settlement coin) is for inter-bank transactions only, not for the general public.

It apparently is backed by a blockchain as a distributed ledger.

Details are a bit sparse across the web, but apparently it is intended as a way for fast money transfer between and within central banks and regular banks.

The coins act as a proxy for 'real' money issued by central banks.

<comment><USER24> What's the point if it's not public? Wouldn't it be faster to just wire money as it's being done currently?

<comment><USER25> Blockchains are good for preventing double-spending without a central authority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you can't beat them join them?

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin isn't in direct competition with the financial industry in any meaningful way. It's basically just another currency like all the others in the world. The financial industry doesn't suffer from servicing new currencies. Bitcoin is more in competition to fiat money, since it is not issued by any government and is extremely hard to control or track.

But even if it's not in competition,the ideas behind Bitcoin are very useful for making banking more efficient and cost effective.</comment></comment>


You can increase your intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/07/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/ <comment><USER2> Every day, I train my memory by memorizing a pack of cards. I started because I had lousy memory and I wanted to improve it. I have been going at it for a few weeks now, memorizing and shuffling a deck of cards (twice a day). I can now memorize a deck of cards in just a little over 3 minutes (I started at a painful 19 minutes). Have I noticed am improvement in my memory? Yes, and much much more.

What I've come to realize is that memorizing a deck of cards trains so much more than your memory. The way I memorize is to associate every card with an object and its corresponding action, and memorizing the deck of cards is a matter of creating a sequence of events that corresponds to the sequence of cards. So by memorizing a deck of cards I'm actually training different parts of my mind: recalling the item that is associated with the card, coming up with creative stories on the fly when I see a card, and holding the story in my mind as I add 52 objects into the story one by one.

Each of these steps was painfully difficult in the beginning, but now I'm starting to see the fruits of my training. I almost never misplace my things (keys, wallet, etc) anymore. Mind blocks like, "what was the company's name? I used to know it...", happens less frequently and I can recollect facts much faster. Most importantly though, I have seen a dramatic improvement in the speed I learn and understand things. I'm not 100% sure, but I think that the rapid association of cards to objects and creatively creating a story have somehow improved my ability to comprehend and grasp new knowledge.

I whole heartedly believe that the brain is a muscle that can be strengthened through exercise.

<comment><USER3> How did you decide to embark on this challenge? Do you have any online resources that you can link to so we can learn more?

<comment><USER2> I started with this 10k memory competition, did really poorly, and decided to continue after the competition because it seemed to me helping me alot. [http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory- competiti...](http://www.memrise.com/course/44056/the-10k-memory-competition/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this! I really needed memory exercises but didn't know where to start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article kindly submitted here is from 2011. There is a new article, from today,

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful- minds/2013/10/...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful- minds/2013/10/09/new-cognitive-training-study-takes-on-the-critics/)

that follows up on recent cognitive training research. The research conclusions are becoming more and more nuanced, and thus are better and better guides to practical things you can do for your own intelligence boosting.

<comment><USER6> It appears that the new study is as flawed as Jaeggi's previous one: [http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful- minds/2013/10/...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful- minds/2013/10/09/new-cognitive-training-study-takes-on-the- critics/#comment-357) (comment by this guy: [http://www.uncg.edu/~mjkane/](http://www.uncg.edu/~mjkane/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of us on HN have enough intelligence. Other qualities (focus, dedication, ambition, sociability) will have much greater impact on our success in life.

<comment><USER8> Focus!

Here I am wasting time/procrastinating. There certain days, that no matter what I do, consistent concentration is impossible.

<comment><USER9> Hear, hear. I'm getting kinda desperate in my non existing pursuit of being able to focus / getting things done. I am considering meditation but I'm not sure there's actual evidence that it actually makes it easier to focus.

<comment><USER10> If meditation does not make it easier for you to focus, you will be unable to progress with your meditation. It's that simple - increasing your focus is integral to progress in meditation practice.

Meditation consists of two main "directions": Concentration practice and contemplation practices. Most schools of meditation has one of these as their main focus, but contemplation practice includes certain levels of concentration practice as pre-requisite, either explicitly (separate ways to train your concentration), or indirectly as part of practising a form of contemplative meditation.

Concentration practice is generally what you might think of if you think of meditation as emptying your mind, repeating mantras or similar.

Try this simple exercise:

Set an alarm for five minutes.

Sit comfortably. Floor is traditional, but not at all necessary; a position that is comfortable enough that physical discomfort does not distract you too much is much more important. Half close your eyes (you can meditate with your eyes fully open, or fully closed, or anything in between - it is a matter of preference, but until you know consider that fully open means your eyes will be dry and there will be more distraction, and fully closed increases your chance of falling asleep).

Then breathe in and out through your nostrils. Count 1, 2, 1, 2, 1,2 as you breathe in and out.

Every time you notice that you have stopped counting, try to estimate (quickly) how long you have been "off track", and start again, until the alarm goes off.

Congratulations, you have just meditated. If you can make the whole five minutes, try it again but without counting, just noticing the breath.

Most first timers/beginners are lucky if they manage 30 seconds consecutively without going off track, often for minutes at a time. If you manage the full five minutes without finding yourself thinking about something completely difference, your concentration skills are already well above average. With practice, you can keep attention like that for hours. And it does translate to being able to keep focus in other situations.

If you want to try more, "Mindfulness in Plain English" is a good introduction: [http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html](http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html) ; the html version is free. Gil Fronsdals "Introduction to Meditation" series of recordings are also great, free, and includes guided meditations that are quite useful to beginners: [http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/](http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/)

These focus on vipassana - insight meditation or mindfulness. This is a contemplation practice, but the introductions above spend a substantial part on the basic concentration practice of meditating on the breath, which is a common concentration practice in many schools of meditation.

The "mindfulness" part is sort of in the gaps: Rather than trying to hold an "iron grip" on your mind to focus on the breath, the purpose is closer to "catching you thinking" (or feeling, or sensing, etc.) and paying attention to the sensations an quality of what arises in you, while you try not to get pulled away from paying attention to the breath, and then rather than forcing the thought away, to let it "fade" by "simply" (it is by no means simple) not follow the thought with another.

Both of these introductions are of buddhist origins, though if it matters to you one of the things that appealed greatly to me about them is that they are careful to keep the material mostly secular (there's some brief mentions of buddhist faith, but they are explanatory rather than essential toe the meditation practice).

<comment><USER11> While I'm familiar with everything you described from previous experience I have to say that was masterfully described. I've found that meditation has so much cultural and 'religious' sounding baggage attached to it that people who would benefit most dismiss it out of hand. Your post cut through that.

When I started meditation I thought it would give me some sort of mental superpowers (Tibetan Buddhist IMO are quick to sell you on those). However in my experience the benefit is more like developing resilience against all the drama and bullshit that life or your own mind throws at you. A potential downside is that I notice more clearly how other around me are swept up into unnecessary frustration or anger. Of course it would be overstating to say I'm a competent meditator, but on some days I consider meditation the most valuable thing I do for myself.

I'm motivated now to try the guided meditation your linked above. Thanks!

<comment><USER12> The spiritual baggage comes from the fact that in these traditions meditation is a tool to develop concentration so that the meditator can focus his/her full attention on some form of the question "who am I" \- that is, "what is my true identity" \- sometimes aided by focus on a koan (a puzzle meant to spur an insight into ones real identity)

Spoiler alert - you're supposed to discover by direct experience that your real self is neither a homunculus looking out through your eyes, nor is it coterminous with your body, and this direct experience that your true self is everything that is, is intended to lead to compassion for other beings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article: >"One of my first clients was a little boy w/ PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Delays-Not Otherwise Specified), a mild form of autism. When we began therapy, his IQ was tested and scored in the low 80s—which is considered borderline mental retardation. After I worked with him for about three years— one on one, teaching in areas such as communication, reading, math, social functioning, play skills, leisure activities—using multimodal techniques [pdf] —he was retested. His IQ score was well over 100 (with 100 considered "average", as compared to the general population). That's a 20 point increase, more than one standard deviation improvement, by a child with an autism spectrum disorder!"

As a parent of a PDDNOS child this put a lot of noise in my mind. When my son got his diagnostics, the psychologist couldn't finish the IQ test because he couldn't focus on the questions. Now three years later, all people who know the case agreed that he is a brilliant boy. So was that a huge increase on his IQ? or Was just a noisy measure of the IQ at the beginning?

</comment><comment><USER14> I've always been surprised people thought any different, given the content of IQ tests. Is basically just puzzles and you usually get much better at puzzles if you do them all the time.

<comment><USER15> Increasing your score on an IQ test is one thing; getting the benefits expected from more "intelligence" may be another.

In such matters, keep in mind Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

In the domain of IQ, we might observe a very high correlation between higher- IQ and certain desirable results, like a longer/healthier life, lower rates of victimization, higher incomes, and so forth. And we might have a strong case that the test is, at least at the outset, measuring some sort of "general intelligence", and that there is a causal link from "general intelligence" to the other correlated beneficial outcomes.

But, then you start aiming to increase "general intelligence", and your only measure is the IQ test, so your target for evaluating all interventions is the IQ score. Now you are quite likely finding interventions that _only_ raise the IQ score, and perhaps skip any "general intelligence" benefits. Even if your IQ score goes up, you might not get the other benefits. Meanwhile, others still researching the correlation/causation questions may see the original correlations start to weaken, or the case that IQ measures "general intelligence" weaken.

And in fact the originally-valid ideas are weakening! Motivated action around that target has started to thwart whatever signal it once offered.

The problem is universal - in regulation, in education, in investment, in semantics. It's why a lot of high-performing organizations keep their true 'measures' secret... to slow their dilution through motivated optimizations.

<comment><USER14> The other thing with optimising as a strategy is while it likes small changes, it really hates structural ones as they make it very hard to compare what you have now with what went before, so anything that is hard to measure is resisted. But usefulness and ease of measurement are not always particularly aligned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm happy with mine, I want to improve other people's. I'm sure you can think of a couple places where that might be handy today.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting! If anyone wants to give it a go, I just made a quick Dual-N-back app a couple of days ago, after reading Gwern's (who else?) excellent FAQ on the subject.

My web app: [http://nnback.ukoki.com](http://nnback.ukoki.com)

Gwern's FAQ: [http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ](http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ)

<comment><USER18> Incidentally, if this is intended as some sort of response to gwern's other post [1] as if he's never heard of dual n-back... please do read that FAQ. All 124 pages of it, according to my Firefox print preview.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521885)

<comment><USER19> Or if you're lazy, just check the latest version of my n-back meta-analysis ([http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis#control- groups](http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis#control-groups)): looks like the current point estimate for n-back's increase of IQ is 0.15 (so, 2 IQ points), and is not statistically-significant (p=0.14).

A few of the researchers in the area have encouraged me to clean this up for publication, which would be nice.

(Not that the rest of OP is much better than the n-back material. 'I worked with autistic kids and I can cherrypick a few examples of improvement!' As if he had never heard of regression to the mean or selection effects.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The author says roughly "I helped many kids raise their IQ"; there is nothing novel about that, it is well established that intervention has large effects on IQ in children, but most of those effects have disappeared by the time they are 18.

</comment><comment><USER21> As gwern points out in his meta-analysis of Dual N-Back [1], and his Dual N-Back FAQ [2], the results of Dual N-Back have been very mixed. Some studies show massive improvement. Other studies show minor improvement, while some studies show no improvement at all. It is by no means clear in the literature that Dual N-Back actually helps more than an active placebo.

        This is very damaging to the case that dual n-back increases IQ. Not only do the
        better studies find a drastically smaller effect, they are not sufficiently
        powered to find such a small effect at all, even aggregated in a meta-analysis,
        with a power of ~11%, which is dismal indeed when compared to the usual
        benchmark of 80%, and leads to worries that even that is too high an estimate
        and that the active control studies are aberrant somehow in being subject to a
        winner's curse or subject to other biases. (Because most studies used convenient
        passive control groups and the passive effect size is 3x larger, they in
        aggregate are very well-powered: 94%; however, we already know how they are
        skewed upwards, so we don't care if we can detect a biased effect or not.) In
        particular, Boot et al 2013 argues that active control groups do not suffice to
        identify the true causal effect because the subjects in the active control group
        can still have different expectations than the experimental group, and the
        group' differing awareness & expectations can cause differing performance on
        tests; they suggest recording expectancies (somewhat similar to Redick et al
        2013), checking for a dose-response relationship (see the following section for
        whether dose-response exists for dual n-back/IQ), and using different
        experimental designs which actively manipulate subject expectations to identify
        how much effects are inflated by remaining placebo/expectancy effects.

That said, there isn't any evidence of _harm_ , either, so at worst, you'll waste your time if it doesn't work out for you.

[1] [http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta- analysis](http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis) [2] [http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ](http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ)

</comment><comment><USER22> The question is... Can you make yourself less intelligent by indulging in the antithesis of the authors five principles? (viz. Seek Novelty; Challenge Yourself; Think Creatively; Do Things The Hard Way; Network)

<comment><USER23> Let's see... Avoid novelty; Only take on easy things; Don't think creatively; Do things the most convenient way; Don't network.

...in other words, live a stationary life, do the same things you always did in the same way with the same people.

I don't know if any research exists to support this but it seems pretty likely, to me, that this will make one less intelligent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This may seem very good and useful at first sight but it actually doesn't mean anything. The classical stance is that intelligence it's something fixed and can't be improved, so the smart guy will outsmart the average guy. Now they say that intelligence can actually improve so it's possible for the average guy to outsmart the smart guy. Well, not at all. If intelligence can improve this means that the average guy can achieve an intelligence on par with that of the smart guy, but the smart guy can also, so the gap still remains. Maybe I'm missing the point but I don't really know what make of the whole article.

<comment><USER25> Are you suggesting that if both weak and strong people go to the gym regularly then the differences between them will remain?

<comment><USER26> Not weak and strong, but rather big and small. If someone is 1.6m and another one is 1.8m; the second guy obviously has an advantage (being a bigger guy).

Sure the 1.6m can beat him. (exercise often, learn fighting techniques...) but if they both exercise in the same amount, the difference will remain.

<comment><USER25> People do not go to the gym to increase their height.They are focused on things like increasing the size of their bicep,so the weak/strong analogy holds better.

<comment><USER26> I was not talking about biceps size, but about who is stronger in a fight. The bigger guy has an advantage. See the other child comment as it explains that it can work the other way around (bigger being a disadvantage)

<comment><USER27> Your comparison is completely silly as it relies on something which can't be changed by determinated effort, unlike human brain and mental skills/capabilities and our physical body.

The comparison of going to gym holds perfectly, as _anybody_ can go there and bulk themselves way, way bigger, fitter and more muscular with _effort_ than almost anybody else who _doesn 't_ go there. Same is definitely possible with human brain as numerous studies show that after exposure to a new skill, learning it does physical changes to our brain(neuroplasticity) and thus modifies it to work better/more optimally, making it more capable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> By a strange coincidence, yesterday a link to this article appeared on the same Hacker News page as this.

[http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics?2](http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics?2)

The argument there is that - in healthy people - not much can be done to improve intelligence, and speculates on reasons why. The qualification suggests that experience working with autistic children is not relevant to the general population.

That this link has been voted up to the front page and the other hasn't perhaps says more about the optimism of the community than the respective merits of the two positions.

</comment><comment><USER29> Couple of points:

1) Use it or lose it, neurons act just like muscle fiber in this regard. I'd be more interest if someone can prove that deep thought and learning can lower the chances of cognitive disabilities like age-related dementia.

2) If you want to have a high IQ just retake the IQ test until you do. Maybe one day someone will make a test that will indeed measure intellect across a wide range of contexts, including social and abstract thinking.

</comment><comment><USER30> It amuses me that even in today's times we believe that IQ = intelligence. Not true. All it requires is some practice. That doesn't make you intelligent. I mean "Einstein intelligent" :). Every few days I read the news anyway "This child has an IQ more than that of Einstein". Oh well. No wonder. He used his mind at better places than solving some puzzles "fast" enough.

</comment><comment><USER31> Of course I can. If I manage to stop drinking.

<comment><USER32> Drinking excessively makes one smarter. Consider it culling the herd. The weaker slower brain cells die off, leaving the stronger faster brain cells to propell your brain power to peak levels.

<comment><USER31> I don't know. But for the fifteen years I've been doing it, every weekend when I go out with my friends I can feel my IQ dropping down with every drink. And don't even ask me to solve the simplest crossword puzzle on a Sunday morning. Not necessarily bad, though. It's fun and releases a lot of stress...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you are interested in how people learn, you may be interested in this comprehensive review published by the National Academy of Sciences: [http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368)

</comment><comment><USER34> all well and good, for a lot of people i know the more immediate concerns are the basic trilogies of diet/exercise/rest, and learning the tiger parent things your whole life (math, programming, foreign languages, musical instruments). These things work because they require sustained effort/concentration, adn dealing with frustration and plateaus

[http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle- six-w...](http://www.sott.net/articles/show/216086-Mental-muscle-six-ways-to- boost-your-brain)

(the 6 things above: bright light, tDCS, food, exercise, playing music, meditation

</comment><comment><USER35> I had to stop reading when I got to the part about GPS where the author says he almost lost his job, due to tardiness, becuase he refused to use GPS.

</comment><comment><USER36> Andrea Kuszewski is awesome! I recall reading this when it published, have been following her on twitter ever since.

</comment><comment><USER37> But will I get dumber by wasting my intellectual capacity?

</comment><comment><USER38> Intelligence is just a fancy name to "determination"</comment>


The Internet of Washing Machines (a satiric rant) - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/internet-washing-machines-rant-joachim

<comment><USER2> What will actually happen: your washing machine will get pwn3d by Russian email spammers.

Seriously. If you see the phrase "internet of things", mentally translate it to: "UNFIXABLE HEARTBLEED EVERYWHERE FOREVER."

<comment><AUTHOR> agree!

I wonder if in a worst-case scenario (if you'd picture a matrix style authoritarian and Orwellian society) ... these bugs could be the only things that the "common man" has in order to escape the tentacles of surveillance or to throw a proverbial spanner into the works of such a system.</comment></comment>


The Bitcoin Report 2 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2tdZG8OsWtLU1BPbGNPNnc0Unc/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> _"There is no capital nor wealth creation to speak of; only as much money as was put in. While somebody may buy a bitcoin for $1 and then sell it for $200, no value was added in this process, so it is simply a transfer of wealth. The people who profit will do so by taking from those who lose.

As the deflationary feedback amplifies the desire to hoard, the exchanges will become illiquid. Eventually, buyers will give up while waiting in absurdly long queues, and demand will loosen. Soon after, things will turn pear-shaped as the world's fastest liquidation occurs. The exchange rate will fall faster than orders can be fulfilled, so that less than $2.5 billion is recovered. After all, it was never really there anyway."_

Nailed it.

<comment><USER3> This describes what happens in the short term, probably repeatedly. But what happens in the long term? Traders learn; they adjust with respect to risk. People will become acquainted with the volatility of the BitCoin currency and adjust their buying and selling practices as a result. People will hold onto the currency longer because they've seen it crash before and recover. The curve will flatten and become a slope. As the rate of deflation steadies and shrinks transactions will begin again. As more and more users flow into the BitCoin economy mass-sellings will have less and less effect because most people who hold the currency will not be responding to short term blips in the price - i.e., day trading. As the volume goes up the chance that a small number of people can destabilize the currency will shrink. There will still be bubbles but they will become cyclic on a longer period, happening on intervals of years as opposed to hours and days, much like in national economies.

<comment><USER4> Long term? People stop using bitcoin.

You theorize that the boom/bust swings will diminish in intensity until eventually bitcoin becomes stable.

Others theorize that the boom/bust cycles will grow in severity until eventually everyone just gives up on bitcoin.

So far there's very little evidence for the stability option and a lot of evidence (and economic theory) for the speculative bubble theory.

Do you have any evidence of the "market share" of bitcoin users who are in the market for purely currency reasons growing relative to that of those who are in the market for purely speculative reasons? From everything I can find out it seems as though the reverse is true.

<comment><USER3> I've very rarely seen something with a > 1 Billion market cap and millions of users simply disappear. (To use an unrelated example, even MySpace still exists :)

Very simply, the more users are in Bitcoin the more vendors there will be who accept BitCoin. The more goods and services can be bought in Bitcoin during the relatively smooth periods the greater the proportion of people who like to have the currency for currency purposes, because it can be used to buy goods and services. There will be 'induced traffic', a network effect - more roads into Bitcoin will pop up because there's an incentive to start an exchange (you make money off of each transaction, after all!). More roads = greater demand for more BitCoin. It is the fact that some buying power of BitCoin still exists even given the boom/bust cycles that will support the currency in the long run, and that this buying power will on average be higher on every contraction than the previous contraction. The fact that an anonymous, decentralized currency that prevents double-spending is desirable (i.e. has inherent value) to a lot of people will also support this buying power, and support the currency in the long run.

<comment><USER4> Geocities, lycos, CompuServe, Excite@Home, so many others.

Those were all companies which sold at a billion dollars or many billions of dollars and have sense been shut down or are worth a tiny fraction of that amount today.

And those are just examples from the last 20 years, we could go back to nearly countless examples of other speculative bubbles going back centuries.

<comment><USER5> If ever there were a textbook example of apples/oranges, this would be it.

<comment><USER3> The example is helpful, though. In each of those cases something very much better came along to replace it.

The same thing could very well happen with BitCoin. Someone mentioned forking BitCoin and tweaking the algorithm to remove the artificial ceiling of 21 million units, and replace it with an algorithm which monitors all the transactions taking pace and adjusts monetary policy in response to them, in order to produce a steady inflation rate. Such a currency might very well be more desirable than one with deflationary tendencies.

Bottom line - unless someone figures out a way to replace BitCoin with something better, I see no reason to believe BitCoin is going away anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The value of BTC just doubled from 60 to 120 in 40 minutes.. wtf is going on there? (looking at btce/USD)

(disclaimer: i'm not trying to hype, I expect it will come back down again shortly, it just seems weird to change that much that quickly)

 _Edit:_ yup.. back down to 80 20mins later.. can anyone tell what kind of volumes were traded in this period? ..I wonder if anyone was able to double a serious amount of money in 40 mins(!). Or how much money would have been needed to shift the price that much?? I suspect trading volumes are lower than normal due to mtGox being closed.. I really am having doubts that closing to let things 'cool down' is really going to work out (side: why should that even be a role for MtGox anyway?!).

Anyone have any thoughts on what will happen when it comes back online? Presumably a lot of people are only registered to trade with mtGox so have been prevented from buying/selling while the price has continued to fall.. it would seem to me we're either going to see a significant worsening of the crash or a recovery. ??

<comment><USER7> Interesting statistic- Bitcoin Days Destroyed _skyrocketed_ during this crash.

<http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed>

BDD measures how many "old" coins are being moved around, so it seems likely that a lot of early adopters cashed out this time. Will be interesting to see what that means for the future of the BTC itself.

<comment><USER8> It provides some information about the dwell time of coins. It's hard to see through it and say much about just how old the coins trading are. It doesn't take all that many old coins to get to 50 million BDD (~ a weeks worth of 3 year old coins...)

My rough calculation is that there are more than 5 billion bitcoin days outstanding, so there is still plenty of room for a wild stampede.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does it even make sense to consider Bitcoin as a separate economy containing "no real value"? I see it more as an alternative banking system, the money it contains comes from real-world value _and_ gets converted back into real-word products; it's not a virtual currency.

<comment> matthew-wegner I think this is a hugely important distinction. The linked-to analysis seems to assume that BTC are bought with USD, sit around in a wallet, and then come back out as USD.

When in fact, BTC's usefulness is its frictionless-but-secure, anonymous transactional nature. Its anonymity is even stronger if you mine coins yourself (or acquire coins directly from a miner for favors or whatever).

You can probably make the case that BTC _must_ be deflationary, in order to draw in traders/investors, who actually provide necessary market liquidity to proxy BTC as USD, backing the worth of BTC-for-goods transactions...

<comment><USER10> It's not really anonymous though, transactions are publicly recorded for all time. It's also not 100% frictionless. There are fees and though they are currently low, they are there.

<comment> matthew-wegner I know there are transaction fees. I meant friction as--once you have BTC in a wallet, you are absolutely free to spend them as you wish. There is no way for anyone to prevent a transaction.

Bitcoin addresses are public but anonymous. But yes, you can analyze the public ledger to tie known data (publicly-posted donation addresses, etc) to try to de-anonymize someone. There _are_ coin tumblers/mixers in place in some markets, although it's hard to tell how effective they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a bunch of nonsense. The report makes extreme predictions without any backup or weighting of arguments. There is no reason to believe that the network should crash.

The author has no clue about economics, so please.... (not that Ben Bernanke or Mario Draghi have, but anyway).

There will always be a use for Bitcoins. Think about other countries than you yourself are living in. Think about people who have to pay 20% for cross- border transactions.

</comment><comment><USER12> _The market is capitalized at $2.5 billion, but what does that mean in an economy with no production?_

Does the author define "production" as manufacturing where the exclusive currency used (for raw materials, wages, utility bills, etc.) is bitcoin? If so then I'm not sure of the relevance.

One could make all sorts of clever but offtopic points about a fiat paper currency when viewed through the lens of a P2P currency like bitcoin. "The Canadian dollar is supposedly worth more than the USD today, but what does that mean when the Canadian network has zero nodes?" The wrongness of such a statement leaps out since fiat currencies are familiar to us. In contrast, bitcoin doesn't need a manufacturing base, but this is less obvious since P2P currency is a new idea that people (myself included) don't well understand.

<comment><USER13> No, production is not exclusive to manufacturing. It means valued-added. For example, if you bought a dvd from amazon using bitcoin (I have no idea if this is possible), then very little of what you paid would count in bitcoin GDP. All of the costs of production (warehouses, delivery, labor, servers, etc.) are done in the US economy using dollars, so that basically doesn't register as bitcoin GDP.

On the other hand, let's suppose someone is buying a bag of... something. Well, everything that got that bag to the dealer was done in some other production economy. So the only value added, that would count as a service in bitcoin GDP, would be the dealer's profits, measured in bitcoins.

To my knowledge, there are no investment projects being financed in bitcoins. If there were, then they probably just defaulted on their loans, which increased tremendously under deflation. Therefore, it's best to think of the bitcoin economy almost entirely as pure exchange, with very little value added and very little wealth created.

As for fiat currencies, why is everyone so interested in the nominal exchange rate anyway? This was a peculiarity that I noticed a while ago. In college, I went on a study abroad program to Mexico. When we arrived, we all exchanged our dollars for pesos. Everyone was carrying on about how strong the dollar was, because one dollar could buy ten pesos. But then I noticed something. I went to McDonalds, and instead of a "dollar menu", they had a "10 peso menu". Who cares how many pesos you get for a dollar? It's about how much you can buy with that dollar worth of pesos, and that's measured by the real exchange rate. I realized at that moment that purchasing power was much closer to parity than most people think, because they put so much weight on nominal rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A "report" not covering the greatest current use case for the currency - namely anonymously buying weed through the Internet tubes? Not saying it is a good thing, just that there's actual value creating going on. Right now.

<comment><USER13> Hi there. Actually, I did cover value of Bitcoin in use as a medium of exchange in footnote 2. Because there is no production in the bitcoin economy, or very little to be entirely accurate, the real exchange rate should basically be one. Why? Because most users of bitcoin live within very large production economies. Why would buyers pay more or sellers accept less, if they would be better of transacting in the domestic economy?

You might imagine a slight premium for bitcoins because they facilitate transactions that would be difficult in the domestic economies, such as money laundering or black market trade, but you could just as easily argue that the real exchange rate is less than one due to the relatively lower number of people to trade with, concerns regarding being hacked, and uncertainty regarding future government regulation of bitcoin. That's why I decided the most neutral approach would be to assume purchasing power parity across bitcoins. Admittedly, this assumption may not be great as speculation runs rampant and everyone runs for the exits, which would imply a heavy discount in the real exchange rate.

<comment><USER15> _money laundering or black market trade_

Moving money across borders is an use for Bitcoin as well. If you're living in Iran (or North Korea or Syria or Palestine) Bitcoin could very well solve your liquidity problem, in the same way the TOR network helps to solve a government-imposed-firewall issue.

<comment><USER8> How many ways are there for the people accepting the currency in country to get their hands on bitcoins?

I guess they could also act as an intermediary for people that want to send money in. Might need some deep currency reserves to play at that though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > [...], sudden and large increases in the user base cause dramatic increases > in the nominal exchange rate. _This is because the money supply is > exogenously fixed by the mining algorithm._

I think the reasoning here is too specific. Most currencies are only inflationary long term. If during a 10 day window a trillion euros flood into the US dollar market, I doubt the Fed will be able to respond fast enough to keep the prices fixed.

<comment><USER13> First of all, if our actual markets started to experience this kind of volatility, circuit breakers would kick in.

Second, even if they didn't the Fed could easily respond in real time. It's not as if the Fed actually, literally "prints money". They would just go onto those forex markets and sell people dollars, transferred digitally and made up out of thin air. And their servers wouldn't crash while doing it.

Edit: I should add to this that, at least to a first approximation, the Fed is not terribly concerned with the nominal exchange rate. They are charged with maintaining full employment and price stability within our own economy, while the nominal exchange rate is allowed to float against other currencies. Because have have our own production economy, there are good fundamental reasons for fluctuations in the real exchange rate that should be permitted to occur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It appears Bitcoin's primary function, namely to perform anonymous transfers of US dollars for goods and services, is being eclipsed by speculation.

Welcome to the world of foreign currency exchange.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background - despite the absurd name, a friend of my posted this (relatively anonymously) to Reddit last night. Unfortunately, it got downvoted into oblivion for not possessing enough cute memes.

The data shows what happens to a currency like this is very predictable, and the behaviors we're seeing (deflation, currency hoarding, stagnation of real bitcoin output) are great predictors of crashes like this.

<comment><USER18> Nice article--I like that it's concise and sticks to the data to make its point. This article last week from Forbes makes the same point with Paul Krugman's babysitter's co-op column: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/04/05/k...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/04/05/krugman- baby-sitting-co-op-bitcoin/)

<comment><USER19> The deflationary aspect is only important for currencies backing an economy - if you just use bitcoin for quick anonymous transactions, say dollar-->bitcoin-->purchase, then you don't care what the value is doing over time.

It is interesting to consider alternatives though - bitcoin could be the Friendster of crypto-currencies.

<comment><USER20> _if you just use bitcoin for quick anonymous transactions, say dollar-- >bitcoin-->purchase, then you don't care what the value is doing over time_

If you expect the value of bitcoins to keep going up, why would you only hold them for short periods of time? You're suggesting that people would wait until the last possible moment to change their dollars into bitcoins. But by doing that, they're losing money if the value of bitcoins is going up relative to dollars. In that case, the best strategy is to switch into bitcoins as early as possible, and hold them as long as possible.

<comment><USER19> You wouldn't hold bitcoin if you're not interested in currency speculation.

I'm arguing that despite likely wide swings in the value of bitcoin, it's value as an anonymous transaction currency will prevent it from going extinct.

People hoard it, driving the price to $10,000 and driving speculators to tears of joy, still people can make quick transactions in fractional bitcoin. It goes bust and the value dives to $10, yet the people using it for transactions could care less.

<comment><USER21> If they transfer $500 over to buy some computer hardware parts on newegg but can only get a mouse pad by the time the transaction takes I think they'll care less.

BTW, it's "could _not_ care less" as in "I could not possibly care less than I actually do". If you _could_ care less that would mean that you _do_ care. Sorry, personal pet peeve.

<comment><USER22> > BTW, it's "could not care less"

Oxford recognises "could care less" to mean "couldn't care less".

"I couldn't care less" is pretty new, first seen in mid 20th century. "I could care less" is newer, but has been in use since at least 1969.

This page has some interesting talk about Yiddish stress patterns. When you think about it you can imagine someone saying, sarcastically, with palms up and arms spread, "I could care less", meaning "As if there's anything in the world I could care less about".

(<http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> looks like a high school homework assignment to me.

<comment><USER13> Would you prefer I write in in LaTex and using fancy graphs from Matlab, R, or Matplotlib? Or are you just being mean?

<comment><USER11> Please, at least attempt to prove some of the wild predictions you are making. Science is about proofs, facts, etc. ... not just assertions.</comment></comment></comment>