My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins • Hacker News Board

Re: My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins

#11

Post by notahacker » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 9:07 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #3

You're a casino, and you have the gall to describe users taking advantage of a promotion that you ran as "stealing"? I mean, your entire business is based on interpreting your own rules in such a way as to give yourself a structural advantage. When a user plays by your rules and wins, I guess it's "theft".

Casinos can generally be highly profitable whilst being completely scrupulous and honest about their dealing and their percentage take. That said, it's also not difficult for a completely unregulated casino to be unscrupulous.

Actually, operating a casino is genuinely the smartest BTC-based business model I can think of. Minimal overheads and BTC is vastly more attractive because players consider it to be "real money", but regulators and international money transfer laws don't

As far as taking advantage of promotions goes, I made a lot more than a dollar per account in hard currency with casino introductory bonuses in my student days...

Re: My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins

#12

Post by jaggederest » Thu, Oct 31, 2013, 11:58 PM UTC

ronaldx wrote: post #10

jaggederest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that you're not a native english speaker - I'd like to give you some feedback to make your sentences sound more natural. This isn't meant as criticism of you, at all - I only speak one language! Typically we use two-word nouns (in your case 'ice cream') as a whole - they would not be shortened. Also, generally a sentence like that would be constructed with the continuing tense - 'putting' versus 'put', sin…

I downvoted this comment because found the parent's comment more natural/conversational, and I believe you improved neither the sentence construction nor the comment thread.

I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful. My friends who speak English as a second language have solicited my help in the past, so I've generalized that. Usually get good reactions from people since English is difficult.

The GP post definitely didn't scan cleanly for me, and I had to think about what the intended meaning was for a minute before I understood it, so I was trying to help avoid confusion.

Re: My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins

#13

Post by FreakLegion » Fri, Nov 01, 2013, 1:50 AM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #12

ronaldx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted this comment because found the parent's comment more natural/conversational, and I believe you improved neither the sentence construction nor the comment thread.

I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful. My friends who speak English as a second language have solicited my help in the past, so I've generalized that. Usually get good reactions from people since English is difficult. The GP post definitely didn't scan cleanly for me, and I had to think about what the intended meaning was for a minute before I understood it, so I was trying to help avoid confusion.

I don't doubt your intentions, but the original really is better, stylistically. Try restoring the conversational deletion[1]:

So then there come a lot of people, [who] just put in 2 euros, demand their ice and soda, and as soon as they eat the ice, they vanish.

Now you don't have to wallow in all those awkward participles, which are almost without exception weaker than direct constructions. (You might want to omit the second 'they', but conversationally it adds a nice flavor, and certainly isn't wrong.)

1. http://english.stackexchange.com/a/66994

Re: My conversation with a user who tried to steal our bitcoins

#14

Post by jaggederest » Fri, Nov 01, 2013, 5:54 AM UTC

FreakLegion wrote: post #13

jaggederest wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just trying to be friendly and helpful. My friends who speak English as a second language have solicited my help in the past, so I've generalized that. Usually get good reactions from people since English is difficult. The GP post definitely didn't scan cleanly for me, and I had to think about what the intended meaning was for a minute before I understood it, so I was trying to help avoid confusion.

I don't doubt your intentions, but the original really is better, stylistically. Try restoring the conversational deletion[1]: So then there come a lot of people, [who] just put in 2 euros, demand their ice and soda, and as soon as they eat the ice, they vanish. Now you don't have to wallow in all those awkward participles, which are almost without exception weaker than direct constructions. (You might want to omit t…

I just don't know anyone who would actually speak that way, nor have I ever seen writing deliberately like that save possibly as a stylistic thing. Omitting the cream from ice cream is completely strange. Ice is more of a modifying element there - it's iced coffee, you'd just say coffee, not 'iced' by itself. I often see 'icecream' as a single word, in fact.

I didn't mean to get into a long aside though, I just wanted to help someone out. I should have known that here I would get overanalysis instead of people just ignoring it if they didn't appreciate it.