user24

Great, and we've lost the ability to save them to your computer, and to share them outside of twitter's ecosystem.

Is there a bigger picture that I am missing? Not sure why this is significant beyond the sheer amount of money.

Bluebeep was written in pascal and IIRC it had a really impressive content management system in there.

I was inspired by it to write a UK-centric redboxing program on the Psion organiser. I can't remember what language psions used. It worked though, through a mix of tone generation and a little social engineering you could get free calls from payphones in the UK. I remember working really hard to figure out how to convert from the Mhz figure I needed to produce into whatever input the psion's sound API took. Fun times.

I wonder if this is just a retelling of the myth(?) that leet speak originated in the practice of renaming files to avoid detection by sysadmins.

I agree, but the tu-quoque is not really helpful here.

A good place to see a variety of metrics for bitcoin's growth is here: http://bitcoinpulse.com/

edit: Hmm, after I wrote that I realised it sounds a bit spammy. To be clear: I'm not affiliated in any way with that site.

Uh, before we all start getting our payment APIs to return 402s in a million different and incompatible scenarios, I'd urge everyone to remember what "reserved" means". It means "don't use this until we've defined it properly".

I think shoruzorhorheugogeuzudeazaeon actually sounds a bit more like a demon than the other candidates.

Yeah I sort of realised that as I said it. Hmm.

Look at D3 or Raphael :)

Could a textarea tag work too?

114 friends here: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/friends?and=aaron

I can see occulus rift being more suited to this than glass.

I've abbreviated Chrome to Ch (and Firefox to Fx).

Just wanted to chip in to say that the pomodoro technique works really really well, but maybe best when I actually know what I should be doing. Setting a pomodoro task of 'let users choose colours' is easy, but 'improve load times' is harder. I think the specificity has something to do with it.

But when I get tasks that lend themselves to it, I often find myself skipping the breaks and starting another session straight after, which is great.

I stand up when the timer goes off to try to combat the effects of sitting for long periods.

> There's no such thing as the "male gender"

Maybe it's a cultural thing but here in the UK at least I think male and female are seen as genders... What word should the parent commenter have used? "man gender" is not grammatical, so I can only think of one other option; "male".

(edit: and in case I'm misunderstood, I don't mean any kind of subtext on the wider debate here, I'm just asking because I think 'male' is a gender and am confused).

(edit: right, found this: http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html so basically it's the difference between sex and gender. I wasn't acutely aware that the words male vs masculine carried such an important distinction. I'm not sure if they are commonly used in that distinct way).

> Keeping Bitcoin requires you to be really good at both storing a specific string of bits, and also keeping that string of bits secret. Even for a really skilled sysadmin, trusting your life's savings to your own ability to secure and back up a single string doesn't strike me as very wise - compromise or misplacement of digital secrets is almost inevitable.

This is one of the best & simplest arguments I've heard against bitcoin-as-a-mainstream-phenomenon for a long time.

> it's absolutely impossible to delegate most of this work to a third party

I am sailing into waters I am not at all familiar with here, but I think the currently-underused multisig/escrow features might offer a solution here. But this really is the limit of my knowledge on bitcoin now.

Indeed; I disagree that it's "unlikely that whoever is in charge of Mt. Gox's assets would be that shortsighted".

Their priority will be immediate liquidation of assets. They will simply not be concerned about maximising the return and certainly not concerned with preserving the bitcoin economy. It will be about getting USD (or JPY) as soon as possible. I would think. Not an expert but this seems reasonable.

It's the same reason you can buy cheap office equipment when a company goes into administration. They could get more if they spent more time selling it, but their objective is to liquidise, pay off debts and move on.

On the other hand, is it clear that suddenly releasing 200k bitcoins would be catastrophic? I remember similar mass selloffs in the past which did cause dips but only short term (the decline in BTC value over the last 6 months is surely not the result of a few isolated large-scale selloffs!?). Not sure about the volumes involved in the past though. They were derided as irresponsible IIRC. But bitcoin survives, more or less.

I agree but am not sure whether this is a fundamental problem or merely a current one, with bitcoin.

Is it necessarily cumbersome or just happens to be like that at the moment?

My intuitive feeling is that it can't be inherently cumbersome; that _must_ be an addressable problem.

> So let this be a lesson about the dangers of trusting a third party with your money, unless that third party is insured by a government in the event of disaster.

This is a great point. I never did understand why so many bitcoiners were on the one hand extolling the virtues of this decentralised currency while at the same time storing staggeringly large amounts of it in a third party system that they didn't control.

The whole point of bitcoin was/is to eliminate the third party, Satoshi's original paper makes that abundantly clear.

None of this could possibly have happened if people had used bitcoin as intended.

I'm not defending the practice, just explaining.

It may be obvious, but the thinking is, surely, that if they don't patent it someone else will.

[SPOILERS] I'm not sure which I've seen.. in the non-original, when do you first see the alien, in the airducts?

> Problem solved.

Except it's not because the problem's still there for everyone else. Do you really that being shielded yourself but allowing your non-techy friends and family to be tracked is a 'solved' problem?

What if they just ran away on their own? Anyway the point is there are plenty of situations where you'd want to hide your location but might erroneously think a photo from your window doesn't reveal too much info.

e.g. "Finally safe from abusive ex, locked my door, staring out the hotel room window [pic]", or myriad other imaginable scenarios.

I use WP Super Cache, it's seen me safely through HN frontpages, popular reddit submissions and being linked from xkcd's blog.

Ah I misread the problem, my bad. Explanation rather than (or in addition to) downvoting would have been appreciated though.