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bdron Ask HN: What would happen if Bitcoin value went lower than the cost to mine

Yes, there is a byte limit to the size of a block. If blocks become infrequent enough due to decreased mining power, it's conceivable that a backlog of transactions would build up. At the next difficulty adjustment, though, speed would pick back up again.

bdron As MtGox trading remains suspended, bitcoin price falls from $160 to $60

Don't forget to look at the bid/ask instead of just the last traded price. Big spreads lately might make it look like there's an arbitrage opportunity when there really isn't.

bdron Bitcoin falls from $266

You are empirically wrong. Please, quantify your idea and go backtest it on the stock market.

The efficient-market hypothesis does not have an asterisk excluding cryptocurrencies.

bdron Bitcoin falls from $266

> paranoia

MtGox has said they were subject to DDoS attacks: https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/317423311174909954

> If you looked at the log plot[2], it still looked exponential!

Trying to divine future price movement from looking at a graph has been proven definitively, repeatedly to be foolish.

bdron Bitcoin falls from $266

Actually, you can set a price floor on Bitcoin. It's the dollar value of the transaction float at The Silk Road.

bdron Ask HN: Why is Bitcoin so volatile?

Yes, there is manipulation of the price via DDoS. MtGox has said so. But the exchange rate would still be highly volatile and momentum-based without that manipulation. Almost all of the current exchange rate is speculation, not intrinsic value. It is the first successful cryptocurrency, and no one knows what's going to happen.

bdron Coinsetter raises $500k to bring leverage, shorting to Bitcoins

Your point is true, but fyi the M:tG aspect was long gone by the time gox was sold to Tibanne. It just happened to be a domain the original founder had around.

bdron Krugman's Baby-Sitting Co-op Explains The Design Flaw At The Heart Of Bitcoin

Just because an asset perpetually appreciates does not mean it has a present value of infinity. I hope to write a deeper rebuttal soon in the form of a blog post.

bdron Show HN: An anonymous P2P social network for Android, written in Clojure

This is so cool. It makes me want to switch to Android just to use it. Any thoughts on a desktop client?

bdron An A from Nabokov

E-reader? Psh, just buy two copies. ;)

Have you read any of Brian Boyd's work? I think you'd really like this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691089574/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

bdron An A from Nabokov

Great point!

if you like puzzles, it might be better not to spoil the fun by reading the wikipedia article

Yes please. It's absolutely better that way — the most fun book I've ever read. Just pick it up and start reading.

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Thank you! It's basically jQueryUI + lots of thinking about what different user actions should mean. I hadn't seen paperi.st, but the basic effect isn't hard: just create a new auto-focused input where the user clicks.

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Email me

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Thank you! Yes, it does. The way this currently works is that you can add people as members to your page, from the settings pane. What's your use case for a locally hosted version?

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Django, Heroku, Postgres, Backbone, CoffeeScript, Pusher, Redis

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Ok, I tweaked it a little, see what you think.

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Thank you, Walter. I'll take a look.

edit: the link should be more obvious now

bdron Show HN: Jotleaf is a free-form, collaborative canvas for web content

Thanks for your feedback! There are three categories of usage for an app like this. The first is document creation, where you're trying to produce some content to use somewhere else. Google Drawings is better at this one than Jotleaf. And it shows in their design, which looks and feels like an Office app. The second is social. You mentioned chat. This has been the biggest driver of Jotleaf usage so far, and I think we're better at it. People make a Jotleaf for a group of friends, and follow each other around in realtime, creating different spaces, and talking to each other freely. It's like a spatial chatroom, or a playground. Finally, there's creating destination pages, and we're better at that too. You can create a beautiful Jotleaf and send people a link to it. With the Drawings interface, I don't see that happening. We've tried hard to make your work look good.

I'm curious: you've mentioned a lot of features of Google Drawings. What do you actually use it for?

bdron Bitcoin rises

1. Or – third possibility — many people have recently raised their expectation of the future value of the Bitcoin economy. If you're familiar with stock trading, this is analogous to having a high P/E ratio.

There is a lot of uncertainty here. Intelligent, rational people disagree wildly on the future of Bitcoin. There are all kinds of risks: legal, technical, and competitive.

If the exchange rate crashes, and takes a long time to recover, you'll feel justified in calling all buyers "speculators feeding the hype machine", when in actuality many of them were simply wrong, or early.

2. False dichotomy. Some people are speculating. Others are using it to exchange value. Inventions don't need teleologies.

Your concern, if I'm understanding you, is that speculators are harming Bitcoin's potential as an alternative to the current economy. I wouldn't worry about that. The exchange rate is either going to $0 or $1000+, and the behavior of the community short-term isn't going to affect that.

Obviously, I'm long Bitcoin. See this blog post from 2011: http://andrewbadr.com/log/10/bitcoins-and-why-im-buying/

bdron Goodbye, Malcolm

Malcolm was brilliant, and sweet. When I submitted my first patch to Django, it was his encouragement that gave me the confidence and motivation to keep contributing. At Disqus, we brought him in for a few weeks of contract work, and watching him clean up the mess we'd made was perhaps the most programmatically-enlightening part of my career so far.

bdron Not Lisp again (2009)

That's a fair point, but it's a different point than the one btilly is making. (I'm not trying to be rude, I just think btilly's theory is interesting enough to merit some defense.)

Consider the formal grammar that might be used to implement a programming language. When we use the word 'grammar' here, it's obvious that Lisp has less of it than, say, Python. It's roughly equivalent to saying that Lisp has less syntax. So, his argument is independent of any VSO/SVO distinction.

Ben is arguing that Python's additional syntax, by formalizing common structures, allows us to (in some sense) externalize the inherent complexity of a problem (i.e. out of our brain). The downside is that it introduces some rigidity into the language. Lisp makes a different tradeoff: we are forced to handle all of the complexity ourselves, but in return the language is flexible enough that we can build exactly the right abstractions for our problem. There's a kind of conservation law.

bdron Programming Languages Are Simply Not Powerful Enough

Evidence to the contrary:

* Heterogeneity of object abstractions: in order of complexity, you use namedtuples, classes, and metaclasses. In Lisp you'd use the same kind of abstraction across complexity levels.

* Similarly, there are lambdas, plain functions, and bound methods, all for pretty much the same thing.

* Which do you use when? How hard is it to change? http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/djangos-cbvs-were-a-mistak...

* The way so many configuration variables in Django are strings, that just "coincidentally" point to a class, module, or function.

I've been using Python for 10 years, and Django since pre-1.0. My current startup is built on it. The parts start to show.

bdron Ten years of PyPy

Awesome. Is there somewhere they've documented the wisdom they've gained in more detail? I'd love to hear more about the issues encountered with JavaScript, ctypes, and LLVM, and lessons learned in general.

bdron Ask HN: Which Shift key do you primarily use?

Heh. Here's some previous data: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486317

bdron Stupid Languages

Here's what I use:

  # Adapted from http://autotelicum.github.com/Smooth-CoffeeScript/literate/partial.html
  F.partial = (func, a...) -> (b...) ->
    func (for arg in a then arg ?= b.shift())..., b...

For example, do `parseInt10 = F.partial(parseInt, undefined, 10)`, then `[].map(parseInt10)` does the right thing.

bdron A farewell to bioinformatics (2012)

James Murray was the true Scotsman.

bdron Looking for a learning opportunity

You might have better luck if you posted some of your work.

bdron Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn't Near (2011)

When "The Singularity Is Near" was first published, I asked Bill Gates what he thought of the book. He said "I don't know how near the singularity is, but I haven't heard any convincing argument why it won't happen". That seems like a more sensible position than the one offered by Allen in this piece. There is indeed a lot of uncertainty in the rate of progress. But Allen contorts that fact to say that the singularity isn't near. He offers three basic critiques:

First, he points out that Kurzweil is extrapolating, and extrapolations can be wrong. This seems obvious. And it doesn't do much towards Paul's "isn't".

Second, he says that software and hardware will have to keep improving, and that might not happen. Again, this seems intellectually equivalent to saying "you might be wrong". No evidence is provided that progress will slow.

Third, he says that the singularity will require either a bottom-up biologically inspired model, or a non-biologically inspired "AI" system.

The complexity of the former will take a long time to overcome. Since Allen concedes that sufficient computational power is already here, he seems to be arguing that it will take over a hundred years for us to have a detailed model of the human brain. Looking at the progress of science, this seems terribly conservative, yet little justification is offered. Allen's posited "complexity brake" seems positioned tendentiously — why are we going to start hitting it now, instead of fifty years ago?

As for the AI route, he writes: "But when we step back, we can see that overall AI-based capabilities haven’t been exponentially increasing either, at least when measured against the creation of a fully general human intelligence." What does it even mean to be exponential relative to a binary variable? He is right to say that current methods are limited, and don't achieve generalized intelligence, but offers no reason why that won't happen. His argument seems equivalent to simply saying it hasn't happened yet.

This piece offers little intellectual contribution, and the only reason we're reading it piece is because of the author. It reads like he started from the conclusion he wanted, and threw some paragraphs in that direction. His argument, essentially, is that he's betting against continued progress in science, software, and hardware. That just seems crazy.

bdron Show HN: Soundslice – YouTube + synced guitar tabs + HTML5

Calling preventDefault on the mousewheel event stops swipe navigation in Chrome. You may want to restrict this to when the tab pane's scroll position is 0.

bdron If you’ve done your work, you’ve only done half of your job

To be fair, you could put just about any human activity after "so we now need a crud app to..." and hit a successful startup.