shadowOfShadow's comments

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: How to launder Bitcoins

Starting, eh? The author basically says the bitcoin handler at the coffee shop will know how much you have unless you go through a massive scheme (which is probably borderline illegal for decent reasons) to gain back any sense of normalcy.

This is what happens when people take their own ball to go play in their own yard.

If it's going to take the amount of time, energy, and expertise to barely make bitcoin usable, how does the cognitive dissonance not overwhelm the coinbugs?

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: The Insanity of Our Food Policy

Give poor people money to buy food, they will likely optimize in fat+ ways. Pay people to be healthy. The needy can be healthy. Put a floor under everyone and then progressively incentivize health.

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: The Insanity of Our Food Policy

Not amazing. Those subsidies have quite a logical nexus actually.

Most fruits and vegetables can't be stored or transported like grains - unless they are picked before being ripe & at peak nutrition.

Playing games on the supply side is a fool's errand. Incentives become unpredictable, if not counter-productive. Boost demand and incentives will work themselves out. Pay people to live healthy lives and they will drive the farmers to produce healthy foods. Put money on the behaviors you want to see more of - and you will see it. Pay to encourage price stability (farm subsidies) and you'll see price fixing. Pay people who get and stay fit and they will drive the markets to healthier plateaus.

Year-round fresh fruits & vegetables for 300M people can not be grown in the US. You can't subsidize farmers enough for them to make the sun shine longer and breed apples with a 6 month shelf life. You also ought to consider the global effects of shipping fresh food a few thousand miles or more, not to mention the human costs of raising and harvesting all those tasty luxuries.

Grains (and other starches) are stable, travel well (though they can grow closer to everywhere), and can provide an adequate base of energy and fiber within a diet tailored to a healthy individual.

If you want economic incentives done better, tax the fat and transfer it to the fit.

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: Coin: A step in the wrong direction

Where's the meme picture with some guy laughing as credit cards fall all over him... "What am I going to do with all this access to money???"

I'm just going to carry my bitcoin mining rig everywhere - suckers.

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: Get Shit Done: The Worst Startup Culture

What are you working on? / The shit. How much longer? / Not much. Almost done. Is it hot? / It IS shit. Is it tight? / It's DONE. Awesome. Can I blog about it? / Yeah... you're the CEO. Later... Hey - this is a pile of shit! / It IS done.

You're a cog in someone else's machine. You are a means to an end - which is some form of naive auto-fellating bullshit. Shut up and get the shit done. Someone wants to disrupt the treehouse club!

Treat me mean. I need the money.

Maybe they should A/B the color of their log in finding the A players.

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: The E-Cigarette Industry, Waiting to Exhale

There's been a fair number of fluff PR and guerilla marketing - even directly at HN readers - around vaping. It's likely organized and funded, etc. blah blah. How far did you have to read through this article to get any voice of someone NOT paid by the company or by the company of the author?

The whole e-cig thing is trying to re-build the signalling that real cigarettes have had instead of the self-medicating, addicted idea people have at this point. Rebellion, authenticity, ritual, nostalgia, freedom etc. vs. Addict

It must be turned into something you do in front of people to be safely contrarian. Why not just have little capsules that you can get a high dose rush from that essentially is minimally enveloped nicotine? Just enough toying to get it straight to the blood stream?

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: Why Microsoft Word must die

try .docx since it's an open format. It's interesting to see OP and you both talk about .doc. It shows your familiarity with the details of the topic.

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: Tessel: The end of web development as we know it

Look, we can bolt training wheels to embedded!

This is all fun for sparking creativity, but it always seems like a massive diss to the EE's in the crowd when web devs run around fronting that they are going to disrupt the embedded world with their transpiled bloatware. EEs are so stupid and use such crap tools!!! Put some damn Bootstrap on that circuit-to-PCB layout tool. It's so not even flat OR responsive! How the fuck am I supposed to drag-n-drop my codez?!?!?!

My favorite is when someone posts a vid of LED PWM or, worse, just basic blinking... You spent how much time and money on what? And you created the embedded version of the blink tag? Definitely a web developer.

Tester board acquired. Let's go find some problems!

Can't wait until craigslist is full of requests for bringing a dream device to fruition... It'll be an iPhone-killer that also sets the temperature of your house and blinks to let you know your dog bowl just tweeted you and donate a bitcoin to the NSA because you forgot to put the induction recharger next to the eFacuet controller this morning. Equity only. NDA required.

One person converts an arduino or whatever to a red-inked start-up that gets taken out for $1B and it's on...

shadowOfShadow | 12 years ago | on: Don't reinvent the scrollbar

I dislike scrolling. I dislike scrollbars. All.

Re-imagine content. Eliminate scrolling. Keep content represented on the screen. Elegent, progressively granular navigation on the screen.

I love when a scrollbar handle thins to represent the proportion of content on the screen and shits the usability bed.

You have only so many words left to say or type. Use less. Live/Say more. Condense information to fit the medium. Lose you paradigm.

Writers are paid by the word and we pay by the byte. Writers shit the net. Don't waste my life with words. Get to the point. We're dying here.

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