pseud0r's comments

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: Fiat is Effective: fiat for the crypto crowd [pdf]

If a cryptcurrency grows large enough to be the size of an economy, the value of the cryptocurrency should grow or shrink with the economy, like a stock market index. At that point keeping money in the cryptocurrency should be similar to keeping it in an index fund.

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: Fiat is Effective: fiat for the crypto crowd [pdf]

That would be an argument against stock market and interest rate as well.

If a significant number of companies waited those 3 months to invest, there would be no deflation.

The deflation will be the same as the increase in a stock market index.

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: The fertility of the older mind

There's plenty of people who does revolutionary work after their 30s.

Look at current nobel prize winners in physics for example. Many of them weren't young when they did their most important work. I read an article about this some time ago, but I wasn't able to find it at the moment.

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: Exposure to the bacteria in soil can be good for mental health

Not all kids I went to school with is alive, for example there was one guy who one day went fast down a hill on his bicycle, straight onto the road and was hit by a car.

One guy I know let his four year old play outside, just for a short while without supervision, he fell into a pond and drowned.

I always felt safe when I was five years old playing outside by myself though, even though I sometimes went several kilometers into the forest. There was no cars there and I was already a good swimmer, so I can't really imagine anything could have happened though.

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do I earn money as a teenage programmer?

If you're in a rich country, you're still very likely to get very poor rates through friends and family as a teenager, around 1-10% of market rate for a college graduate, at least that's my experience, but maybe I just sucked at marketing myself when I was a teenager.

pseud0r | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why isn't Prolog more popular?

Perhaps the compiler could be optimized using deep learning. Isn't basically the problem that it has to go through a search space that's too large to find an ideal solution?

pseud0r | 9 years ago | on: CRISPR eliminates HIV-1 infection in live animals

Huge amounts of the cost of clinical trials could in theory be cut by automating many of the tasks. A lot would be done if all computer systems across hospitals (and lab equipment) could seamlessly talk to each other, medical records were completely standardized and contained all necessary information in machine readable formats etc, not that I see this happening in the near future though.

pseud0r | 9 years ago | on: Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, has died

Objectively useless and destructive drug is quite a statement, when there is a lot of research that suggests it can have positive effects.

It doesn't kill you, nor does it irreparably alter your personality in a completely senseless way. There are studies that suggest people who has tried LSD has their personality altered in a positive way, in that they're more open to new ideas afterwards. It is true though, that some people get very enthusiastic when they first try LSD, some overly so.

I know a lot of people who do LSD now and then and the vast majority of them are successful upper middle class people who's had no ill effects and lots of positive ones.

There are also many people who's successfully used LSD as a problem solving aid http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70...

That's not to say people don't have negative experiences though and I don't think LSD is for everyone. Some people freak out completely by even small changes in their perceptual experience for example, though usually not if they know the basic of how LSD works and how the mind works. A very useful thing to know is that what we experience as reality is basically just one view of the underlying data from a set of sensors (our senses), there's a neural net with multiple layers that starts with simple things like edge detection or whatever and builds up the 3D model we consciously experience from a mix of the external data, but also internal data, etc., there's no right or wrong view of this data, we could have evolved to experience it completely different and we can make computer program to visualize data in numerous different ways and on psychedelics you can experience things a bit differently from what you're used to. The reason it's useful to know some of this is because if you experience something strange when doing psychedelics, you'll know you're not being kidnapped by aliens, going insane, talking to god or whatever weird thing that some people sometimes seem to think.

pseud0r | 9 years ago | on: Hiring without whiteboards

Most interviews I've been to have been the same. I was talking about the ones where you have to solve some tricky algorithm questions at a whiteboard while someone is staring at you. I have no problem doing that in front of my colleagues, but find it difficult to do at a job interview.
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