nunb

>In the last couple of months, Bitcoin has passed the phase of "BC is nature's way of teaching economics to nerds"

>and entered the phase of "BC is natures's way of teaching political power to nerds"

That is one of the best quotes I've read on bitcoin.

The western world is waking up to distrusting their governments. In a low-tech way, most 3rd world countries have been there for decades. Squirreling away savings is a behavior enforced upon citizens with acquisitive governments (hello Cyprus!).

The world is changing, and bitcoin is there to help.

> Note that fractional reserve banking originated on the gold standard

Probably because the ledgers of the bullion vaults were kept secret.

Bitcoin is a global distributed ledger. You cannot claim to hold btc because the fact of the holding is verifiable through the ledger.

discovery of the truth is in our self-interest, nobody else's.

therefore, it is a more lonesome endeavour, and harder than subscribing to the pap fed to the masses.

see my [other](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968390) comment.

(edit: link, grammar &c.)

I was telling somebody my theory on this the other day, and I thought I might share it here.

Basically information is power. Due to informational asymmetry[1] being exploitable via economic, political and other forms of power, it is almost always in somebody else's interest that you be misinformed.

Therefore the person with the most to lose (and the person with the best interest in being informed) is you. And instead of seeking out the forms of information that empower us, we fritter away our attentions on trivialities and pop culture (yes, including programming pop culture). A good example of a prophet who tries to steer us programmers the right way is Kalzumeus, imho.

Part of the reason we fritter away our time is that it is simply easier to consume the mass-delusion, because the search for truth can be fairly lonesome (since you are the only interested party).

Under the circumstances outlined above, it is no wonder that most of what we believe may be false, and part of a larger (self-bootstrapping) conspiracy to keep us in the dark (cue ominous music, break out the tin-foil hats).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

What was your earlier account? I can check if the comments or submissions are viewable.

Choice is good. If the number of variables + consequences are too much for you deal with, then there's market opporunity for a startup there.

I agree with parents' feeling that were the regs to be fixed (or a new regulation enacted that stopped this bundling) a better market (as exists in car insurance etc) would develop.

A lot of context is lost in text/email/IM also remember that English is not his native language, and he's likely from a very different cultural background.

Give the guy a break.

On balance I think he's just a well-meaning kid who's achieved notoriety the wrong way, but his deepest intentions are good.

Rather like Robert Tappan Morris, come to think of it!

I really like the "raw" body-builder flavor to it: eat a cup of kale, eat a cup of almonds etc., so I hope if recipes do come in, they can somehow be turned off.

I just recommended it to reddit.com/r/leangains :-) though apparently it's been posted on /r/fitness before.

I too would like to know more.

Good link. There's plenty more (in pubmed) where that came from!

Seriously this 1980s alarmism needs to stop.

Your body makes most of the cholesterol in you, it's a vital pre-hormone.

How much you eat barely changes the amount produced by your body.

If you want a better lipid profile, eat more eggs and fewer carbs.

Everything above is really well established fact at this point, propagandists like AHA to the contrary.

When in doubt, ask the practitioners, at say, leangains.com

Can you cite some links that I can look up? "supercompensation peak" appears to be too general a search term.

If anyone wants to see just how bare-bones Shaul's gym is, he's got a channel on Youtube. This was the guide I used to make my sandbags (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j6yE8LbQTg).

The fastest way to get started on this kind of program imho, is to look up youtube videos of the exercises, and pick up a smartphone tracker. I use Strength by Airlock Software on Android. (Lite version URI https://market.android.com/details?id=com.airlocksoftware.st... and the creator also recently released an excellent HN reader on Android)

There's no point doing a program like this without keeping logs, and a smartphone is the easiest way to do that. That particular app is also very newbie friendly.

Finally, once your weights increase, please spend more time learning technique. Look up Squat RX, "So you think you can Squat" etc. Videos imho are best, though if you want to really geek out, read Rippetoe, Verstegen, McRobert, Kilgore etc too.

Smaller ports of entry with smaller queues generally lead to more pleasant experiences. The HNL and RDU airports, for example, are very welcoming to tourist and business travellers.

I've been seeing Wadwha's pieces all over the place, they are, as far as I can tell, completely rehashes of each other.

I believe in skilled immigration to the USA, and that the current system is badly b0rked (and in fact somewhat "geared" towards illegal immigration) but these articles, with their leaps of logic and poor reasoning strike me as a setback for any sort of immigration reform.

At least he's advocating, which is good, and given the low IQ of Congress, it probably doesn't matter that his articles leave much unanswered and generally fall short of being cogent arguments. But noise probably works better than cogency in this regard.

It's an open container filled with toxic nectar suspended inside a tube sock which is in turn suspended from a hook.

A wick is added so that the contents of the container are pulled up by capillary action and suffuse the sock.

Did you mean the "value of money is going up" in your last paragraph?

Does "deflates the yuan" mean the yuan is deflationary?

In that case its value should get higher and exports should decrease, as happened with the Japanese Yen.

I don't think you can learn to program anything related to "web-businesses" in University. I've done a MS in CS at OSU, and I always pitied the poor schlubs doing their undergrad. It's just a bunch of hoops.

My recommendation would be that you pick up a beginner PHP book and learn to build basic websites. Beginner level 0. There was a link on HN about how browsers and html5 work, see that, or see diveintohtml5.org

Then, if you see holes in your knowledge, look up something like stackoverflow.com -- SO also has a list of free CS books, look that up.

To actually program, start with HTDP or similar, mentioned in the SO bookslist. That will get you approx 7.53 times further than sitting in some braindead Java class, struggling to get above a 3.0...

Use your hard-earned money to spend on MIS courses. They'll get you a job out of school while a undergrad level java class won't. Don't do any of the courses you mentioned above either: DS, CO + asm (you're kidding!), SE. PS some of MIS is similar, you sound smart and motivated, so read the CS coursework books for fun if you want, buy them used.

Kudos on the Stanford MIT stuff btw. I would recommend starting with something like the iPhone programming course on iTunes U -- fill in the gaps as you come across them (which is the big advantage of self-study.)

Finally, CS has only one theory that you need to know; you'll like the title too. Google "shtetl optimized complexity". SO has some articles on it too, and codinghorror tried explaining it once at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/11/your-favorite-np-co...

PS Feel free to ping me offline if you wish.

I'm going to assume a couple of things while answering. Feel free to point out which of them is unwarranted.

1. You won't write the code (ref. hiring developers)

2. Webapp software, not desktop

3. You have time or developer constraints (basic economic choices to make)

If the industry does not need "innovation" that does not mean that the software itself will not be fairly complex. For example, a simple undo feature can be a complex thing to implement, regardless of how fossilized the industry the software is being written for is. Building software that scales, and especially software that contains lots of social linkages is a complex problem.

Risks are ever-present and must be balanced. You should consider:

A) Time to write the software

B) Hiring new developers

C) Buyout risk

D) Platform risk

E) Social risk.

IMHO, and speaking as a Clojure developer in a startup that uses it almost exclusively:

A) Platform risk is negligible. As someone who has done plenty of Common Lisp programming, I can confidently assert that the Clojure platform is way more accessible, and moving faster. It's the JVM after all.

B) Hiring: plenty of new blood. Apparently at ITA, it was quite easy to onboard newbies to Common Lisp. IMHO Clojure is easier. It even has fewer parens than idiomatic, equivalent Java.

C) Time: I believe time is highly correlated with LOC. Clojure clocks in with the lowest LOC, most elegant solutions I have yet seen. Haskell is no doubt similar, though it's sweet spot / domain is likely different.

D) Buyout risk: I believe perceptions will change. Several large companies are now Scala shops. They're like the early adopters who bought into 8088 PCs. The Mac-like era of Clojure is yet to come. We've already seen one or two buyouts of Clojure shops.

E) Social risk: lots and lots of new libraries, access to all the old java libraries. Almost no risk here, imho.

Now, a lot of your risks may actually fall into the class of "good problems to have". While I cannot speak to Haskell or other languages as much, my feeling is that Clojure is a better bet in comparison.

Of course, if the use of niche languages is not your choice, you should ask your developers why they want to use it. They should be able to explain their reasoning.

Also, at least in the webapp domain, a lot of complexity arises from the interplay between webservers, javascript, backend code, hosting providers etc. Clojure has a lot of nice features here which help, but it's rather more the interplay which contains the complexity. IOW, this aspect of complexity is outside the domain of the backend language. Clojure has a secret weapon here too, clojurescript, but its implications are not yet well understood. It has a lot of potential though.

hth, and btw, if this is my boss trolling me, well, /me starts scheme-ing

As someone who's used Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure; out of that bunch I would highly recommend Clojure for a beginner.

Pros: 1. Easier to setup (with a single script from https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) 2. Benefits of a lisp-1, with nicer syntax (fewer confusing parens) 3. Easier to get started with Emacs + swank-clojure + lein 4. Wealth of Java libraries 5. Functional

Cons: 1. Can't think of any, unless you want Interface Builder and similar, or are desperate to program using call/cc or are in any of the above ways a non-beginner. drscheme is a nice counterpoint though, in that the learning enviroment could include a bit more hand-holding.

IMHO for those coming from ruby/python etc. Clojure is a huge win. With square brackets for function-args, if you turn off or dim parens (emacs has several options such as rainbow-parens) the source looks very much like python.

And with M-q and friends and sexp editing, it behaves better.

Infinitely Beta at Dhole Patil Road, Sunday, June 12th suit you?

Infinitely Beta Technologies (http://infinitelybeta.com)

We're quite centrally located, have wifi, and seating for about 30 people.

Stragglers can stand! Sunday June 12 is best.

I use weblocks for small demos and private stuff, but at work it's all Clojure now.

Emacs pinky is mostly a fault of keyboard designs. Emacs' reliance on ctrl-combos exacerbates this (vi has fewer issues, Esc and the colon).

Typematrix.com keyboards ameliorate this, as do the (not shipping yet) keyboards at trulyergonomic.com

Thumbs should be used for common keys, the Maltron, Kinesis and Typematrix keyboards make this possible.

So does the Alphagrips.com device, which I am eagerly awaiting.

Just curious: what ROMs come with Sense? Do you mean that owners of say, a Galaxy S2 want to (and could be) running HTC's Sense?

The problem with all these horizontal setups is that when looking at a screen for long periods of time, neck cricks are inevitable, and what's worse is that those cricks are just harbingers of future woe.

I strive to stay vertically and horizontally aligned to both my keyboard and my screen.

Even though I have a 1920x1080 monitor, I keep windows stacked in the center, and use multiple emacs frames rather than one frame C-x 3'd into multiple columns.

1440 pixels wide is about what I think is ideal at 1.5 feet of separation.

I use some revive mode code a friend wrote to revive my frame config.

Just like desktop-save, I do C-x S instead, and it saves all open frames, and the buffers they contain (no frame size or position though, afair).

C-x F to load in the rare event I need to restart emacs.

The code is at https://github.com/nunb/revive-mode-config

I would be interested to know where in the US this was. I was once in a Statistics program in Ohio with a bunch of students who were working towards their Masters in Education, and they were solidly in the middle-lower end of the class but the upper end was taken up by dept. students anyway.

> Making super-bold claims like "Metabolic syndrome ... is the "best" predcursor/predictor for cardiac mortality" .. example of over-interpreting.

That is an unfair charge, the claim is not based solely on that study. Taubes reviews 50+ years of observations and research on this. Besides, that claim is my hypothesis, which is yet to be tested.

I in no way present it as anything other than a theory.

> In conclusion, your level of belief of well-established science (such as statin trials; >100,000 people, total)

Citation?

> is too low, and your willingness to extrapolate from very small studies (50 people, total) is too high.

I will grant that this is the case. It's because the large scale studies for the hypothesis I put forward do not exist yet. I would like to see NIH funded diet-intervention studies at the same scale, even n=200 would be a great thing.

> each study, instead of in proportion to your desire for the study to be true. It's hard for all of us to do, but it's the hallmark of the scientific approach.

Nice burn in the last sentence!

While I agree that my hypothesis has not been tested, it has not been negated either.

I would like to see well funded and well designed studies to settle the issue conclusively, therefore the charge about the scientific approach is a bit off the mark: I am not holding on to a belief in the face of overwhelming evidence against it, I merely postulate an alternative hypothesis which has the potential to neatly (in the Occam's razor sense) explain several inconsistencies in the current model (and should be tested for merely on that basis, if for no other).

The ApoB issue was raised as there were some pubmed papers that discussed the test and what advantages it had over others in predictive power. I cannot find the ref. right now, but it should be easy to search for. In any case, that was a tangential point I made and you spend a lot of time addressing it, while not addressing other tests like homocysteine levels etc.

MS is a catch-all term for several coincidentally occuring symptoms, as far as I can tell. IR is one of them, abdominal obesity is another, prevalence of LDL and high triglyceride counts are yet more markers. For all I know, IR is the major symptom, that's why at one point I refer to IR and then say "aka MS". Again, this point is tangential.

When you said "Cholesterol" I naturally assumed "Total Cholesterol". I note that you have clarified that. Also, LDL-C I presume includes the VLDL counts? That raises another possible issue: what if the symptoms observed in these studies actually indicate that VLDL is highly correlated with mortality, and that due to some confounding factor, the subjects in these studies have very high VLDL? In that case LDL would be unfairly blamed. Do you agree?

> Looking at coronary calcification is no better than looking at lipoprotein fractions; both are intermediate endpoints. I see no reason to trust calcification if you don't trust LDL. Reduction in LDL correlates so well with ... FDA-got-bought-out-by-pharma sort of problem.

You did not address the Agatston score point, which iirc was the main rebuttal I'd made to your earlier comment. As this discussion is threatening to run off on another tangent, I will end here.

> To reject the overwhelmingly data-backed LDL hypothesis, I'd need to see something much more compelling, I must say.

Perhaps GCBC may itself be compelling?

I will state that most of my stance is covered in GCBC (to the extent that you could say I got it from there) and it should be quite easy to test the alternative hypotheses laid out in that book. Perhaps we can revisit this thread when the issue is settled to our satisfactions and marvel at the different positions we took.