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svrocks's comments

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Washington Post has lost all journalistic integrity

Barry Eichengreen...what else is new. Career Fed-monger. I remember reading his book in college about how the gold standard was the cause of the Great Depression. Later on that year I attended a guest lecture he gave in which he made fun of Joseph Stiglitz.

Status-quo economists have too much power in this decadent society.

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Review my startup: Housefed.com - Airbnb for food

After I discovered AirBnB I was hoping someone would implement a food-based version. Well done!

I like the photosharing idea and your home page setup has that minimalist feel that's trendy right now. I'd get rid of the uninspired "Most Likes" sidebar title/tab title though. Something more snappy like "Top Chefs" would pop out more and be less confusing IMO.

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: How one guy turned his C&C skills into millions with online poker

Agree completely, coding >>> poker although it is possible to merge the two by making a bot.

Anyone curious enough should check out http://code.google.com/p/openholdembot/

that eliminates all the nuts and bolts of botting (screen scraping, action-taking, etc.) and leaves you time to figure out strategy. About a year ago I made a bot that 12-tabled at low stakes and made about $10 an hour...and then I realized I could be doing more interesting stuff with my life instead of staring at a screen, making minimum wage to make sure my bot didnt crash and lose my whole roll

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: 41,000,006 reasons why I think we're in a bubble

We're not really in a bubble until Color.com (NSDQ: COLR) IPOs at a $500MM valuation and quadruples on its first day of trading.

And then we're not REALLY in a bubble until Air.com, the leader in the social breathing space IPOs at twice that.

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Cardpool (YC W10) Launches One Gift Card To Rule Them All

This was the first thought that popped into my head too. Gift cards exist because they mitigate the risk of an unwanted gift while also mostly avoiding the paradox of choice and the taboo of giving cash as a gift. A universal gift card would force the recipient to go through the hassle of getting a gift card first, albeit at a discount. Gift cards already display some laziness on the part of the gift-giver. A gift card for gift cards sorta takes that to a whole new level. Instead of saying "I don't know what you want to buy at this store that you shop at a lot", it says "I don't know where you shop at all...here's some bastardized version of a prepaid debit card...knock yourself out"

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: 1 bitcoin worth more than dollar

To try to answer my own question, I believe the asymptotically decreasing inflation in bitcoins is compensated by its increase in value against traditional inflationary currencies.

For example, on the surface it looks like a bad deal to lend someone bitcoins when almost all bitcoins have been generated. You will most likely receive a very low interest rate. Why wouldn't you just convert to some other currency (say USD), lend money out in that currency, and capture a higher interest rate? The answer is that because since bitcoin inflation will be nonexistent by that time, its exchange value against USD would increase by precisely the amount of US inflation.

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: 1 bitcoin worth more than dollar

I really like the idea, but I have a question about how transaction growth can be sustained once all 21MM bitcoins have been generated. In order to support borrowing/lending IMO you need an increasing supply of currency. Otherwise where will the interest on debt come from?

The only other type of non-inflating "currency system" I can think of is the market for collectibles (baseball cards, limited edition artwork, etc.). But collectibles have intrinsic value while bitcoins only have value inasmuch as they are useful for transactions.

So, TLDR I am concerned about the long-term viability of bitcoins

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)

Matt made assembly language and multithreading entertaining to learn and accessible for undergrads, which was no small feat. So those of you bashing his teaching need to step off

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: 19, developer, burnt out, advice please

You don't have to go to college if you are self-motivated. I actually think it's detrimental because it fills the time and gives you an excuse for being lazy. "Oh but I'm going to school already, I don't have time to hack together X with all my schoolwork!".

My unqualified advice: learn machine learning/AI. MIT OpenCourseware has good lecture notes and I believe Stanford's ML course has free lecture videos. These were the most interesting parts of my undergrad experience (and very practical too)

svrocks | 15 years ago | on: Tell us your naughty stories

the fancy boarding school i went to had a monopoly on book-selling. Every year students would pay full price for textbooks in the fall and sell them back to the bookstore for a fraction of the cost at the end of the year.

I decided this was retarded and made a riskless market in textbooks at the end of my senior year by matching buyers and sellers and pocketing the spread (often >50%). I think I made like $800.

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