211–220 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah! That is incredibly endearing. I've also had friends remark (more joking than serious) that if you happen to glance at a clock that reads 11:11 to make a wish because it's lucky. I have obsessive compulsive disorder, so unfortunately these cosmic peccadillos really throw my brain for a loop!
Read this comment, then checked my clock. It was 11:11. This will be a lucky day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What Apple Pay transaction fees? They’re exactly the same standard credit card transaction fees because they ARE standard credit card transaction fees. Apple doesn’t take a cut.
"they ARE standard credit card transaction fees" Creditcards are robbery, they are not very populair and cost retailers money. Why does everyone want to make money from transactions? We are talking about a basic service that costs less than a cent.
The reason Bitcoin hasn’t seen much usage is that it’s worse on every one of those metrics. There just isn’t a non-ideological market for a slow, expensive system with no fraud protection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can there be a second one if there isn’t a first one?
How can an arrow move if it needs to get halfway to wherever it going first? Lots of paradoxes you can construct with infinitite recursion or self reference in the absence of time. In this case, interesting is fundamentally a temporal concept and there is only a paradox if you pretend that it isn't.
I don’t think the solution is related to time. Rather, it’s simply a matter of recognizing that it’s ok for something to be well defined that does not exist. The notion of an interesting natural number, such that it’s a binary property and being the smallest natural number, just doesn’t work. Thus we can conclude that there’s no such thing as “interesting” as defined like this. You can fix it by making interestingness a continuous value, or using a definition such that being the smallest number in a set isn’t enough to be interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the doctor could fix your broken leg, you'd die of old age eventually anyways.
Equally distributed wealth is not as common as non-broken legs. In fact, the reason you call a broken body part broken is because it diverged from what its natural state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah! That is incredibly endearing. I've also had friends remark (more joking than serious) that if you happen to glance at a clock that reads 11:11 to make a wish because it's lucky. I have obsessive compulsive disorder, so unfortunately these cosmic peccadillos really throw my brain for a loop!
Read this comment, then checked my clock. It was 11:11. This will be a lucky day.
>"hashing is one thing that’s considered safe from quantum computers."
Why is it safe? Is this because the number of cubits that will be available in the near future would be too small for something like SAH256? Something else entirely?
There is, without a doubt, a Bitcoin cult. Or more generally, crypto-currency cults. The headline reads like it's only a cult, which isn't the case. Even the most critical observer must concede that these distributed networks are novel and interesting. The farther you move from social media, the less cult-like things get. The best discussion remains on listservs, and there is a lot of interesting and substantive disc…
Nope.
Anything you can do with blockchain you can do simpler and easier and cheaper either with a standard database, or something like git with signed git commits and a trusted third party.
The blockchain exists to try to remove trusted third parties but leads to every increasing energy consumption or order to fuel incentive for "proof of work", and the coin concept is a flat out ponzi scheme.
All these ideas need to get relegated to the dustbin of history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can an arrow move if it needs to get halfway to wherever it going first? Lots of paradoxes you can construct with infinitite recursion or self reference in the absence of time. In this case, interesting is fundamentally a temporal concept and there is only a paradox if you pretend that it isn't.
Zeno’s Paradox is solved with real numbers and calculus. This paradox is explicitly on the natural numbers, meaning you have a well defined notion of “smallest” for any nonempty set of them. I don’t think the solution is related to time. Rather, it’s simply a matter of recognizing that it’s ok for something to be well defined that does not exist. The notion of an interesting natural number, such that it’s a binary pr…
In the interesting number paradox a solution can be related to time (or recursion depth) such that, as the person you were responding to mentioned, the first few otherwise not interesting numbers can be considered interesting without considering all not otherwise listed numbers as interesting. The wikipedia page gives a different example solution involving time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That actually has an interesting failure. The first interesting number that's interesting because it's not special works. The second might qualify, the 10008 does not.
How can there be a second one if there isn’t a first one?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can there be a second one if there isn’t a first one?
Because I constructed a set of otherwise boring numbers. The first otherwise boring number can arguably be interesting, but if you accept numbers are not inherently interesting by being on the number line you need find a reason to remove them from the otherwise boring list.