>I regularly go a couple days in a row with no sleep at all so that was amazing.

Yeah I routinely have sleepless nights as well which was what prompted trying weed in the first place - I was complaining about how sleeping pills knock me out but then I can't wake up again in the morning. I was always oversleeping my alarm and repeatedly showing up late to work. One of my stoner friends suggested I try smoking pot every night before bed and it worked. I didn't really have a problem with it until I discovered that smoking right when I woke up took the haze away from the night before and gave me an appetite for breakfast (before then I would mostly just not eat until lunch). After that it was all she wrote, I was (slightly) high all day every day for about the last five years, starting when I woke up and then I would get extremely baked right before bed. My wife never smoked in the mornings but she would smoke with me at night - for some reasons in the mornings it gave me energy, but in the evenings it made me tired - for her it just made her tired any time of the day.

So now I have sleeping problems again but at this point I'd rather have a sleepless night every now and again than keep spending the money we have been spending on this shit.

That would be a lot of fun! :)

I'm no longer a preschool teacher and now I'm working to become a professional photographer, so that is new :D

I still check in from time to time.

I've been good, and occasionally convincing people that we aren't the same person. :)

That's pretty funny. People think we're the same person?

some warty looking citrus type thing

That sounds like ugli fruit (which I think is a pretty amusing name).

I'd just like to offer my own $0.02 and say that I agree with thundara, imo if you dropped the tag limit it would benefit the hubski experience immensely.

Mining is not very profitable anymore unless you have an ASIC, which is a very expensive computer created specifically to mine them. Mining difficulty rises over time. When it started, you could mine with your CPU and make a profit. You can still do that now, but it's a waste - it uses far more electricity than you will gain in bitcoins. GPU is slightly better, just about break even iirc (like converting electricity into bitcoins). I'm running a java GPU miner right now (http://bitminter.com). As ASIC's get more popular and more common, GPU mining will enter obsolescence just like CPU mining did.

In other words, bitcoin mining has entered the big leagues.

The problem with negative articles like these is that they are missing the whole point of Bitcoin. Sure, an individual Bitcoin is just worthless bits of data, literally nothing but a digital fabrication. However, the real value of Bitcoin isn't the "coins" themselves - it is the transparent, distributed, anonymous payment network that makes up the entire Bitcoin economy. This economy is steadily growing, day by day, and if you look at the core structure of the system and really consider the eventual worldwide ramifications, it is simply amazing. It is popular in Argentina right now. I imagine people in countries such as Zimbabwe would see the usefulness in it as well - you can't spend gold bars from your smartphone.

There are a lot of speculators in the market right now trying to make a quick buck. The exchanges are small, unreliable, and points of failure in an otherwise distributed network. The recent crash may have never happened had MtGox, the largest Bitcoin exchange with over 80% of the market, not fumbled the ball at the crucial moment and caused a panic. Every day there are more and more businesses accepting Bitcoin, more media coverage (it was mentioned on The Colbert Report tonight), more people finding out about it and researching it for themselves. This is a revolutionary new technology, and I am very excited about it. I only wish I had paid more attention to it two years ago when I first heard about it.

I've actually started moderating in the SFWPorn Network again, mostly because I missed talking to my friends in modmail. I've also been pretty active in the /r/bitcoin subreddit recently (because cryptocurrencies fascinate me) with my second reddit account /u/syncretic2 - I've had a backup account for some time in case anything happened to my original account. I have bouts of depression at times and the "Gawkergate" / Scopolamina controversies (which involved two online friends of mine who were treated unfairly by the reddit admins) was a tipping point of sorts for me during an already otherwise dark time for me. Things have turned around considerably for me recently and I have a new outlook on life. The "2" in front of my username is a reminder to not let the internet cause me any undue stress in the future, especially not reddit.

Lol, when did they accuse me of that? Sounds like they're scared of a little competition.

I bought a bitcoin today, just to play around with the market on Mt. Gox. Incidentally, I sold it immediately, as the price started to drop. With all of the recent volatility, I want to see if I can double the $115 I put into it within the next week by buying low and selling high.

Even if I lose it all, it will be fun. ;)

This is excellent news. Thank you very much!

Sure. Personally, I'd subscribe to a lot of the major news websites (nytimes, washingtonpost, etc), and then by ignoring specific tags, hopefully I'd be left with only the interesting stuff. On the flip side of that coin, I'd also love the option to ban domains from my feed as well ;)

I hadn't even considered the ability to follow domains. That sounds like a wonderful idea. I would definitely follow my favorites.

My dad is currently playing victim to a romance scam on Facebook. Thankfully, it's a simple Western Union scam, and my disabled father isn't actually leaving the safety of his own house, he's simply wired thousands of dollars over a period of almost a year to someone who he thinks is a penthouse model living in Missouri, but is most likely a large black man living in Nigeria.

He still thinks she is going to show up one day to cook his meals and clean his house and marry him and start a new family with him. He is 50, "she" is supposedly 36... and deaf, which explains why she doesn't own a phone (lol). I have tried and tried and tried to convince him that she isn't real and is just a criminal leeching off of him until he has nothing more to give, but he becomes irate with me and will not listen. It's almost been a year since he first met this person online, and he has sent probably $5k in that time. He receives a disability check of $2k per month, so that is almost three months pay. Not chump change for a disabled man living alone.

I don't know what to do at this point except make sure that I will be here for him when he finally realized he has been lied to and scammed. Every time he brings it up, I tell him how I feel, and he gets upset with me. She is supposedly flying in every few weeks, but something always comes up, and then she needs more money. It's gotten to the point where I will avoid him so I don't have to have the same conversation. He is stubborn and very much believes that children should not question their parents. He says God spoke to him, and she is the answer to his prayers. I feel so powerless and upset at this point that I avoid his calls because it is causing physical manifestations of stress.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should do? I keep hoping he will finally see the light. How many times can a grown man be lied to before he figures it out? He is a very smart man, college educated and a linguist. He has MS, a degenerative brain disease, but his symptoms are very mild and mostly physical. He walks with a cane and his hands shake to the point where he cannot type very fast anymore, which is why he is on disability (formerly he was a medical transcriptionist). My mother passed away a year ago, and he met this person online not even a month afterwards. I know that love and grief both cloud your judgement, but this is ridiculous.

Let me put it another way. Wikipedia links are so popular on reddit that I will see one on my front page most of the time... and yes, part of that is because I subscribe to learning/history subreddits that feature mostly articles, and Wikipedia articles are a great source of information. However, sometimes I just get tired of seeing them all the time, so I go into RES and ignore that domain. I usually keep it that way for a week or so, until I realize I haven't seen a Wikipedia article in a while, and I'll go back into RES and disable the filter.

It's just a whim, personal preference that goes back and forth, sometimes I like them, sometimes I get tired of them for a bit and want to read something else. I do the same thing with my subreddit subscriptions, I will subscribe or unsubscribe to the same subreddits frequently, simply on a whim. I do the same thing with the tags I follow on hubski as well. I just like the power to be able to customize my own feed exactly the way I want it, when I want it that way... surely other people can understand that?

If there were a 3rd party extension that did the same things RES does for reddit, I'd just use that instead. Reddit doesn't support filtering natively, because that's not how reddit it supposed to work. Ideally the mods would like you to downvote instead of hiding the post. A downvote on reddit is a form of distributed moderation... users vote by their taste, and then the "best" content rises to the top. That's the plan, anyway.

Hubski is completely different. There are no mods, there are no votes, you simply share what you like, ignore what you dislike. Filtering is a core part of the hubski experience... why not extend that control to domains in addition to users and tags? It just seems like the next logical step to me.

Perhaps wikipedia was not the best example. What if you really like the content a specific user posts, but simply dislike one blog that this users posts daily. You could ignore the user, but you'd be missing out on all of the other great things they have to share. You could use the community tag feature and give all of those blog posts a tag unique to that specific blog and then ignore that tag, but that is a lot of work and is essentially just ignoring domains the hard way. It would be so much easier to just plug "randomblog.com" into your domain ignore list and never have to worry about it again.

I read wikipedia all the time, just not when I'm browsing hubski or reddit. I prefer to see them in my google search results, not my hubski feed.

It's nothing personal, I love most of your submissions, and it was even an interesting article! My enmity towards wikipedia stems from years of constantly seeing them dominate the front page of the /r/TodayILearned subreddit, and hoping that the moderators would ban them and delegate them to /r/wikipedia where they belong. Alas, unfortunately, my wish was never granted.

However, that's a great example of how reddit's system of moderation is flawed, and hubski's system of personal filtering is so much better for the end user. If personal domain filtering is adopted here, rather than constantly being frustrated by a specific domain popping up on my front page like I was on reddit, I could simply filter it out of my feed. Much superior, imo, than trying to get the moderators to ban the domain for everyone, as commonly happens on reddit.

There is a show called Revolution that pretty much ripped off the general plot of Dies the Fire, but the characters & other details are completely different. The show is centered around a small group of 5-6 people, whereas the book series deals with entire communities, sometimes on different ends of the globe. There are also lots of massive battle scenes in the books, but the show is just a pretty standard hero/villain action flick. I watched it, and for what it's worth, I enjoyed it, but the books are better than the TV show by several orders of magnitude.

My personal favorite is Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling. It's the first of an ongoing series, so if you like it there are almost a dozen more to read afterwards. The book is centered around a small group of people near Portland, Oregon, who band together for survival after a mysterious event (a blinding, painful flash of light that is seen and felt by every human on the planet at the same time) wipes out all technology on the planet. Planes fall out of the sky, combustion engines and even steam power cease to function properly, gunpowder only fizzles and burns slowly instead of igniting in a powerful explosion. In short, the entire planet is thrust back into the Dark Ages overnight, and only those with the foresight to get out of the cities and into the country have any chance of surviving what is eventually known as "The Dying Time" once the food runs out.

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction, and this book delivers.

That wasn't exactly impossible 10 years ago. I had friends in Norway, Australia and Japan that I kept in touch with via instant messaging, forums and irc. It's certainly easier now with services like Facebook.

...and why not? I'd be one of the first ones to sign up for a recurring monthly donation. Let us enter a custom amount and that would be even better!

Gold has been used for centuries as a currency because those with wealth and power like to decorate themselves in shiny things. It will never become worthless, and I suspect even in a post-collapse society, gold bars and coins will be valuable in trade, if there is any sort of society left at all.

Gold is sounding less crazy every day.

I'm using it on my ipad right now, looks great!