skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course Bitcoin is not anonymous. The moment you make a purchase that contains some personal information about you (whether your name, IP, address, etc.) with your current wallet, any future purchases can be mapped back to you using your purchase graph. Difficult, yes, but the frequent intent with security is not to stop things cold in its tracks, but to make it such a chore to thwart all but the most dedicated intruders.

But that's not the point of Bitcoin's anonymous capabilities. The relative ease which you can create multiple wallets and keep your questionable Silk Road and Wikileaks donation purchases separate, as opposed to creating multiple offshore bank accounts in Switzerland, can establish a high degree of anonymity. Almost like how drug dealers use prepaid cell phones and discard them for new ones the moment they suspect something is compromised.
Some have suggested adding trace amounts of lithium to drinking water in order to reduce depression and suicide. I don't think that's necessarily a good idea, but there is a scientific basis for it.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/194/5/464.abstract
G+ circles does allow overlap - both in people that are in circles, and when you share things you can choose to share it with multiple circles.
Yes it is dependent on the programming mind in question..my asusmption is that programming minds are similar and would react similarly to the same stimuli!!

I agree that getting into the right frame of find is important..what I am trying to do is trying to find ways to get my brain into the right frame
The one that I haven't released yet.
Those are great questions.

1) We made a decision that the purpose of this specific work was to illustrate anonymity pitfalls, for the benefit of users generally, and not to de-anonymise any individual users.

As such, we haven't dug deep to try and identify the thief. We've just examined the theft as a case study, to show that specific flows can be followed in practice.

We think that law enforcement would have, at the least, some leads to follow, if they used similar analysis techniques - we could also have looked deeper into this incident, but didn't.

We can't speculate on whether there's enough information to identify the thief - a lot would depend on whether the leads panned out, and on what sort of assumptions the thief made about trying to hide their identity - outside the scope of this work.

2) I think that some of our analysis would be possible to foil.
Its probably possible for client software to avoid a lot of the account 'linking' that is due to transactions inputs being merged, perhaps by breaking the connected components formed, by putting merged Bitcoins through intermediate accounts, or perhaps by supporting mixing of some form.

There are other leakages, of off-network information, such as the Bitcoin Faucet displaying IPs, that could trivially be turned off.

But as to whether this would render Bitcoin anonymous overall, it is very hard to say.
It is extremely difficult to get anonymity into your system, unless it has been an explicit design goal; and it would be possible to take this kind of analysis much further than we did.

Thanks for the tip about the paper - we should probably reference it.
That was nice work - it occurred to me it was possible to use such a strategy when the competition was announced, and when we saw the results, we knew someone had!
How to use SSH on your Chromebook
hahah...yeah tht holds true for me too!!...especially in presence of people i know!!
I think part of the problem with Google's hiring process is the attitude you're demonstrating here, where somehow even just interviewing with them is some sort of "privilege". Yes, I know they have to deal with a stupendous number of applications, and much of their process is a direct result of that sheer volume, but so long as people walk around with that kind of attitude towards them, they're given all the excuse they need to be imperious about it, to boot.
This is of a kind with several other very successful de-anonymization efforts in the past few years.

There's probably some clever way to express the general problem in information theory terms and prove that any set of data with certain characteristics must be de-anonymizable to some given extent. 6 billion people in the world is still just about 33 bits to uniquely identify an individual (and of course generally we're not talking global population), and so even a very small number of bits that can be correlated back to the real world in arbitrarily clever ways will reveal real-world identities in a putatively anonymous data set. It wouldn't take much to clean that up into a mathematically rigorous statement; no matter how you slice it, low tens of bits will tend to identify people and that's a low threshold.
Besides anonymity, liquidity and the freedom from control by a government, particularly the US Treasury.
> In Postgresql the query in question ran in about 4 seconds,

For someone accustomed to the response times and behaviors of things like MongoDB and Riak, the fact that you consider this a high mark of your comparison is borderline comical and really only proves my point.

JOINs, when used prolifically as they tend to be with RDBMS, are an abstraction that doesn't work in a distributed environment without aggressive data locality and eventual consistency. The model is broken for a range of needs, regardless of whatever quibbling the SQL fans want to do over their pet database.
while i admire Musk, lets look soberly at the things, credit due where credit due. SpaceX and Scaled Composites did nothing technologically new. They took old (50 years old) well developed approaches and reimplemented them efficiently. This is exactly what business is good at - to take a developed (at great expense, usually on huge government dime) solution to a complex problem and productize it, cost efficiently and thus making it widely available (coincidentally a thing that government isn't good at, and it is only logical that NASA was able to develop such complex, pioneering design like Shuttle - huge success in that regard and wasn't able to make it useful anywhere close to commercial scale - huge and not surprising failure in that regard)
Government funded programs in the US and Russia took care of a lot of the basic science companies like SpaceX rely upon. It is unlikely that a commercial venture would have been able to attract or afford the depth of engineering talent that got the Russians the MIR Space Station or the Americans the moon landing. They are treading the path blazed by government funded research. That said, there is no reason a hybrid model (government + private sector) could not work well.
Is there any chance MacPorts would get the Terminal proxy icon to work with the fish shell?
Hey look, another logical fallacy: The strawman.

I was not just talking of government contracts. When large companies contract with other companies they don't quote overhead rates, but internal to any company I've ever heard of, the standard overhead to account in a bid is 2-4x the cost of resources.

Second, your completely illogical reasoning ignores a basic fact that universities are a proven model of getting research done at a much lower rate than companies (e.g. national labs, contractors and so on), and that model includes having some portion of science grants ending up helping subsidize other parts of the university.
Still un-released tamagatchi engine that will probably never make a cent!
This looks promising, thanks for the tip.

I didn't know you could use $ in macros. Does the C preprocessor accept any other special characters?
www.drunkenweb.com - Didn't intend to make money off it (project for fun to learn python and play with css3/html5), but I hooked up amazon associates w/ targeted ads. Made ~$6 in 11 months :-)
thanks for the response....what kind of places do you go to .....starbucks?....i agree that most corporate offices are not very good for programming at all!!
Even if it is necessarily, the only governmental organizations I'd hate to see go more are probably NPS and the USFS. NASA is iconic, and I spent much of my childhood dreaming about them.
Quit using the privacy BS excuse. THE USER IN QUESTION HAS NO CLUE WHY HIS ACCOUNT WAS CLOSED. TELL HIM.
80% of my Asian friends took this extra math class as kids: any other ideas?
that is true. we were talking about a party where two circles can have more potential to become one. if g+ plus does do that, i'll be sure to keep checking out functions on it.
It also looks like all the other sites follow the exact same HTML conventions and styling. Some are done in PHP and some in ASP (...) Since you found "birdrating.com" on themeforest, and since they all follow similar conventions, it's plausible that the others come from themeforest as well.

http://www.theoldcheesefactory.com/

http://birdrating.com/

http://www.demilles.co.uk/

http://buildingdispute.com/

http://altek-al.com/
Indeed.

Some academic with too much time on his hands wrote an entire Ph.D thesis on that very idea [hint: me :-)] http://33bits.org/about/
I've strongly believed that formal education should involve "reinventing the wheel" with some knowledge before hand, but to push creativity, inspiration, and adaptation when further knowledge is gained. It's how I've taught myself so much, and I think it can work for a lot of kids/people.
No, so long as it's science with solid economics and business sense behind it. [/tongue in cheek]
All transactions are public.

It is one of the central ideas behind bitcoin and leaves no doubt about the anonymity of the transactions.

It is a well publicised idea and it is even mentioned on the main page of the bitcoin wiki (http://bitcoin.it).
But if you ever transfer money from your secret wallet to your identifiable wallet, the anonymity gets a lot weaker.
> and the most brilliant people are generally the most humble

So he’s not one of the most brilliant; he’s just good. You can also be humble and rubbish.
Any chance of being able to distill concrete reasons why other environments are better?
That's pretty common for dual American/Israeli citizenship. Lots of Jews have two names: A Hebrew name and an English name.

Sometimes they are transliterations of each other, sometimes translations, and sometimes no relationship between them at all.
I am disappointed by how software developers continuously reinvent the wheel badly. There have been comprehensive data models for human names available for years. For example see the HL7 V3 EntityName data type.
http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes_r2...
Any Entity can have multiple names, each of which is tagged with zero or more use codes such as "official", "pseudonym", "maiden", "tribal", etc. Each EntityName has one or more ordered parts which can optionally be tagged with a type: prefix, suffix, family name, given name. This data model isn't fully complete since it's missing some naming concepts such as patronymics but at least it's a better start than the mess that Google came up with.
> I can at least conceive of situations in which I might care about the benefits that come with using Objective-C et al than I care about how verbose dictionary initialization is.

Fair enough. I'm interested to hear more about what these situations are.

For what it's worth, my point isn't limited to dictionary initialization. That example, though, does represent a lot of what makes Objective-C painful for me. That list also includes its extreme verbosity; the need to box and unbox native types when storing them in containers (or passing them to performSelector: and friends, and other uses); the necessity of separating header and implementation files; requiring forward declarations of methods to avoid compiler warnings; simply adding an ivar as a property requires touching code in a minimum of 3 different locations, and potentially across 2 files (@property statement, @synthesize statement, call to release in dealloc (until ARC), and, pre-iOS 4.0, actually declaring the ivar in the class definition); and, of course, manual memory management, which includes worrying about fairly esoteric edge cases like retain cycles.

None of these things are hard, including memory management. But it is code that has to be written, and more code means more bugs. In almost all other mainstream web languages, the computer takes care of these things for you, as it should.

Tack onto all of that the fact that if you're running Objective-C/Cocoa as a web app, you're probably on your own in terms of finding solutions to problems from the community online -- at least compared to mainstream languages -- and it feels to me like it's hard to justify the tradeoff unless you have a very specific need.
Sim Farm (Maxis)
Prayag,

Thanks. I tend to think that people's names are actually quite meaningful. There wouldn't be so many people who insist on using pseudonyms if this weren't the case.

The definition of withholding is not providing something, and Facebook did not provide documents that it had in both the Winklevoss' case and mine, as I've said. That's not a claim, it's a fact. They had the documents during our respective discovery phases of litigation, they knew they had the documents, and they did not respond to formal requests for documents with the documents they knew they had.

There's confusion around the story to this day, and there will continue to be probably forever, because so many people have gained so much from it. Mark, and by extension everyone who depends (or once depended) upon Facebook for a living, has something to hide. Ben Mezrich needed to sell books. Sony needed to sell movie tickets. The Winklevosses and Eduardo needed to prevail in their litigation. None of these people have had at any point an incentive to provide full disclosure because the facts do not work in their favor. Consequently none of these people have posted documents on-line for the public to see as I have. The facts work in my favor, and that's why the documents are on my web site.

Aaron
I have a tendency of not monetizing weekend projects. Perhaps I should?

http://colorblendy.com/ I did during a SHDH meetup with @limedaring, then couple months later during another weekend I released v2 with colorpickers on the Google Chrome store for free too: http://bit.ly/chrome-colorblendy

Another weekend I dug up an old game I wrote in an afternoon at school in Python called pytron. My roommates and I spent hours playing it—turned out it was quite fun with multiple players. I ported the game in an couple afternoons to JavaScript, called it LineRage: http://bit.ly/linerage-chrome

I still have "monetize this" on the TODO list for both of these. Was thinking of releasing a "pro" version of Colorblendy with CSS parsing and a saving feature. Also a campaign version with a bunch of levels of LineRage for $1.99 or somesuch. Someday.
hmm. I might have to give it another try and see if it feels better after a few days then. Thanks.
I had a similar experience writing a retroactive trip journal after a few weeks through central Europe. In the month after returning home, I'd spend at least 30 minutes (sometimes an hour or more) late at night just brain-dumping everything I remembered from the trip in chronological order. I deliberately wrote stream-of-consciousness style, in the dark, eyes closed, and I was astounded at the level of detail recall I could achieve--not only minute-by-minute, inch-by-inch recollection of events and places, but in slow motion (if I so chose, replayed any number of times), allowing me to re-live the entire trip.

Deliberately plunging my brain back into the places and situations I'd been in recreated the super-stimulated "traveling brain" state. I think the act of reliving and reinforcing the memories made them even more vivid now several years later than they otherwise would have been.

I believe the key aspects of the process were both the deliberate memory churning and the typing--the physical transfer of the brain activity. Maybe my ~80 WPM typing speed happened to be a good match/governor for my recall rate, too.

Now this wouldn't be at all practical on a day-to-day basis since day-to-day life details are so repetitive, but I could for sure see the benefits of picking some out of the ordinary event or encounter and drilling back through it to discover what else your brain has to offer. I can also see the potential in trying it for a known future event for planning purposes.
What to Do When My Website Rank Drops?
The common factor is programming. They're looking for web designers with programming experience, sysadmins with programming experience, managers with programming experience.
It sounds like they're doing it right to me. It's not the be-all and end-all but it is a differentiator.
Anyone else not surprised?
> So if you're a tester or a UI interface person or a sysadmin whose work shouldn't really mean worrying about the big O order of algorithms - should these people also be asked questions about algorithms?

Let's address each individually:

- UI design person: we have UI/UX people, which is essentially a non-engineering discipline so won't have the same requirements. There are FE (front end) engineers who will be expected to have the same theoretical foundation as any other engineer;

- the guy says he interviewed as a tester. Google's definition of a tester is different to that of most company. We have SETs (System Engineers in Test), who are expected to have a solid theoretical foundation. This makes more sense once you understand that most of our testing is automated rather than, say, writing and executing manual test scripts.

- Sysadmins (SREs; Site Reliability Engineers) fall into two different categories: those with a more programming bent and those with a more sysadmin bent. The first lot will be asked algorithm questions. The second are more likely to be asked questions about networking, Linux administration and so on (the first will get these too but probably less).

As for Google Wave, my personal opinion is that it was a solution in search of a problem so I wouldn't look at it as a failing of "softer" disciplines.

Google+, as an example, seems to have been received very well, including on the UI/UX front, which would seem to fall in the same "softer" category. The early G+ successes and positive reaction IMHO stem from a more solid design that delivers value to users, something I don't think Wave ever did.

One last thing I'll add is that Google's career ladders don't necessarily match up exactly to what you'd expect and those ladders are constantly re-evaluated. New ones come into being. Some disappear entirely.
Great essay, thanks. "And we must remember that space is called space for a reason - there is nothing in it, at least not where the Shuttle goes, save for a few fast-moving pieces of junk from the last few times we went up there, forty years ago. The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972."
Oh, I don't doubt that it would be possible to do it. I'm just saying that it's pretty much one of the canonical "Bad Ideas" (tm) from modern fiction.

It ranks right up there with "stop talking about sharks, you're scaring away the tourists" and "lets split up so we can cover more ground".
The reason it's a fbook app and not a standalone website (at least to start) is that we can piggyback on social networks of friends that facebook has already created. This would make the 'Friends Recommendations' section hard to duplicate on a regular site. A standalone site is definitely a possibility in the future though.
This is how adults communicate with one another. You are longing for some era of erudite euphemism that never was and never will be.

Blogging is vernacular. Just because you see it in print doesn't mean we have to judge it like an essay from the Saturday Evening Post.

If Zawodny's piece was only snark, you might have a point, but he backs it up with solid argumentation. If you paid more attention to his vinegary interjections than the main point, it says more about you than it does him.
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded... too bad.
I agree. Thanks for pointing this out!
DocPad: static website generator in CoffeeScript and Node.js
Any of a number of un-monetizable blogs :)
60%? Darn. I was hoping for better after the hype earlier in the article. Don't large steam plants approach 99%?

150,000 US Homes

Is that a lot? I hate to (continue to) be a cynic, but it doesn't sound like a lot.
It's Me, In an Ad, On Facebook. Is This Legal? Allowed? Who Knows?
A couple of things here that suggest that there may be more going on than your simplistic explanation (but no i don't have numbers):

1. Humanities (e.g. arts programs) along with sports are large generators of alumni donations. These are certainly large chunks of money that aren't even considered "science funding saves the world" type thinking.

2. Humanities and other non-science programs contribute to the overall prestige of a school. Whether or not this is deserved is different from the truth of it -- a good reputation is good for all forms of grants.

3. A simple thought analysis on how much overhead a humanities professor really needs compared to his science counterparts shows there is a huge lack of cost from the humanities groups: no equipment to house and power, no labs (but books, galleries etc, i don't know where more money would be needed: a good lab building or a good library), fewer RAships (but roughly equal numbers of TAships), no need for extra infrastructure to be built (cooling towers for compute clusters, etc), no need for special legal teams to cover the risks, no need for special accounting to sate the governments crazy reporting needs, no need for non-academic staff (programmers, lab specialists, etc). Im sure there are others.

Basically, from the universities I've worked at, the vast majority of overhead goes to general building/grounds maintenance, specialized services for the groups bringing grants, student programs, general infrastructure, and sure, some to the humanities, why not -- all those LAS majors probably don't pay tuition at all.
I'd be intimidated to work with him (due to the snarky attitude) if I weren't comfortable with technology stuff. But otherwise he might be entertaining to hire.
"2) I think that some of our analysis would be possible to foil. Its probably possible for client software to avoid a lot of the account 'linking' that is due to transactions inputs being merged,"

I already did some work on this:

http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin...
I hadn't made a website in years so to get back into it I built two client-aide only sites with jquery. I'm a terrible designer so, bear with me :)

- http://www.drinkpacer.com - select your target level of drunkenness and track your drinking. It keeps you on pace using very estimated math.

- http://www.draw140.com - this was to be like Paint but for twitter. Unfortunately Unicode rendering differences between clients and platforms makes what you see not usually match what your followers see.

I don't consider either of these a failure though, I learnt a lot.. In the case of Unicode, a lot more than I ever wanted to :)
I don't think I had more leverage than most (I came in off a failed startup, plus two years of work experience before that and a pretty mediocre GPA), and they gave me my choice of teams. I was allocated to Search, but the recruiter made it clear that if I had a problem with that, there were other teams - GMail, Docs, etc. - that wanted me and I could go there.