That's why you need to do a CPS transform to transform every call into a tail call, and wrap the continuation up on the heap, so you don't blow out the stack.
As much as I want E-cat to be true, it's almost like the creator(s) are following a well thought out plan. Parts of it might include "copy perpetual motion machine" and "remove obvious flaws." Other parts might be "create fictitious investors", and "claim partially working unverifiable product." Only next steps I can see is to gather additional investors (real profit), create fake orders(get investors), and disappear with the money.
> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT...
Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting?
We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT!
Though, I do notice that "Easter Island Heads are in fact not merely heads" is not among them. Maybe I should edit that, given the popularity of this story among what are supposed to be a community of knowledgeable and intelligent people :)
Finally, you say it's a story about "discovery". The posted article doesn't really mention anything about a discovery. The original article kind of does: http://www.eisp.org/3879/ Has the same pictures, nearly the same text, maybe it's a bit TL;DR for this crowd given that you even had to summarize your one-sentence post:
> tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.
In which case, congratulations to anybody who read this far.
Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations.
So I read the FAQ and guidelines. As far as I can tell the things you mentioned are not specified.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
So did a blog post with 3 pictures and a paragraph of text satisfy your intellectual curiosity? What did you actually learn from this single site? Sure, the pictures are purrdy but it's hardly good content. IMO it matches the off-topic, more than the on-topic. "Moai statues have bodies, more pictures at 11!" An intelligent site aggregator without the bullshit fluff is too much to ask for I guess. I'll be over at lamernews.
That picture was not the least bit awe inspiring to you? That someone along time ago moved huge masses of stone and created something like that?
Its not just me though, apparently a lot of other people liked it too, and it made it to #2 on hn:classic. Why continue this argument? Even in their hayday the big tech aggregators (/. , kuro5hin, etc) had posts that were not OMG, ROFLScale! I wrote a webserver in Clojure+Assembly that runs on my thermostat!
http://www.eisp.org/ has way more information on the topic than the linked blog. I don't think it's off topic, I just think it's a poor article which has no real substance (hence the reddit comparison).
This story is also of interest to the 'classic' HN votes, so it's not like one can argue HN "has changed": http://news.ycombinator.com/classic
Snippet-stuff that makes you rethink something has always been a part of HN. (That said, I prefer it to be a majority of tech stuff myself and usually only submit tech stuff: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=timf )
Bitcoin is essentially a giant pyramid scam. The early adopters have cashed out long ago. As mining gets more and more difficult, less people will cling to the liquid currency. Why trade with a deprecating currency, anonymous or not? The fact that the exchange rate is below the cost of mining should be alarming for many reasons.
I'd assume the creator/first adopters do not care, either way.
It's free market, everyone is free to buy and sell as they wish. It's not a scam since there is the same information to everyone.
I'm pretty sure that the early adopters couldn't guess this year's rise in value, and couldn't guess the price drop either.
While I believe in bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in the longterm, I'm still pretty sure that bitcoin value will stay very volatile in the coming years. The stability will take time, and widespread adoption for this kind of innovation will take years if not tens of years.
Your reply missed his point as bitcoin is 'mined' not just bought and sold. The difficulty of that mining is set based upon the computing power of the miners. Add to this the fact that the number of coins available to be mined each day is designed to be reduced over time, and you end up with early adopters (formost of which being the creators) controlling a massive proportion of the total worth of bitcoins.
Well, I guess that most startups are pyramid scams, since the founders (early adopters) end up controlling massive proportion of the total worth of the company.
Is that much better than printing money and distributing the new money to major banks? That is what the US government is doing now. Most countries do a combination of distributing newly printed money to domestic banks and the government itself.
Fine, money is loaned to a bank, and they have an obligation to repay the loan. With what does said bank repay the loan? Money, of course. Where does that money come from? Ultimately: other loans.
"It's not a scam since there is the same information to everyone."
does this really make something not a scam? As far as i've seen, most people do have access to the information needed to prove something a scam. It doesns't mean they will both find it, and believe it.
No, the exchange rate ($2.6/BTC) has still not fallen under the cost of mining for the average miner who selects the right GPUs ($1.8/BTC).
The current difficulty is 1468e3. It takes 2^32 * 1468e3 Bitcoin hashes to solve a block of 50 BTC. The majority of people mine with HD 5000 or 6000 series. If you pick efficient ones, you can count on 2 Mhash per Joule. The average worldwide domestic electricity price is $.10/kWh. So the average cost of production is:
I'm in the school of thought that anyone who says Bitcoin is a pyramid scam is trying to scam Bitcoin and/or intentionally depress the value of BTC for personal gain.
I am an early adopter, I was one of the first 100 people to mine, and I've mined thousands of BTC (including 650 with a single CPU), and I wrote the most popular miner, DiabloMiner.
If it was a pyramid scam, why would I currently be ignoring the current price of BTC in USD? It just means the demand is currently low, and since I'm not selling, who cares?
Mining is not about making money, its about preserving the cryptographic integrity of the currency. Also, no, the exchange rate is not yet below the cost of mining for many miners. It will have to drop below $1 before everyone is out.
> I'm in the school of thought that anyone who says Bitcoin is a pyramid scam is trying to scam Bitcoin and/or intentionally depress the value of BTC for personal gain.
That is ridiculous. Anyone who criticizes Bitcoin is automatically a scammer themselves?
As a small-time miner, I don't care. I always thought the value should be stable at roughly $1 at this point in time. I am in it for the long haul, I am waiting to see where it goes in the next 5 years, not trying to cash out to dollars.
> Bitcoin is essentially a giant pyramid scam. The early adopters have cashed out long ago.
This may not be relevant, but not all of them have. Something like 800,000 of the early bitcoins have never moved in the blockchain since they were minted (leading to speculation that they have been held onto by Satoshi).
It is my understanding that Pyramid Scheme was an explicit, stated design feature of Bitcoin. Because the only value of the coins are in the network effects, there would otherwise be very little motivation for early adoption and the idea would have died on the vine. By giving a huge advantage to early movers, the whole system was kick-started.
I expect that the creator already considers the system a success. The goal was not to create an investment vehicle. It was to allow people all over the world to exchange value without corporate or government interference. $30/coin or $3/coin doesn't matter. Either way, it's working.
Of course it matters. If you "exchanged value" with someone in return for bitcoins three months ago, then approximately 90% of the value of your transaction has disappeared (whether lost by you, or someone else you passed the coins onto). Unlike hyperinflation of currencies backed by governments and banks offering interest, the only way for you to have retained value received in bitcoins was to dispose of the bitcoins in favour of something else. So after getting burnt by a lot more than Paypal exchange fees, you probably end up converting to a government/bank backed medium of exchange anyway. That's not dysfunctional?
