skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I thought that Bitcoin's major technical feat was precisely that it showed that you could solve the Byzantine Generals' problem (which is a generalization of the Two Generals' problem).

This sort of thing is extremely sensitive to the definition of the problem you are solving, and the system model you are solving it under. Impossibility results like Lynch and Gilbert's CAP result and the FLP result prove that certain problems are impossible to deterministically solve in finite time in some kinds of system models. Change those system models only slightly, and you get things like Ben-Or's algorithm (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=806707) which depend on a random oracle that is not available in FLP's system model.

So it is with Bitcoin. Not only is the definition of consensus different (uniform consensus vs. probability-one convergence on consensus among non-failed processes), but the system model is different. As I understand the bitcoin protocol, a random Oracle is needed, and liveness is only guaranteed against some forms of byzantine behavior (but I may be wrong about that, I'm not an expert in this area).

> As a sidenote I'd say that writing about either the two generals' or the Byzantine Generals' problem in 2013 without mentioning Bitcoin even once is a bit weird.

I don't think Bitcoin was a substantial advance in distributed systems theory. It's got a lot of interesting properties for sure, but I'm not aware that there's anything theoretically new there.
Bitcoins: A Tulip by any Other Name
For the described technique, no. However, it would be easy enough for one request to have a different length hostname than the rest which contained a checksum, and if then try different combinations of the rest until it matched the checksum, which it would only need to do if it were out of order. And if that happened, you could increase the time between requests, to compensate.
We're talking about the profits generated by the business.

The worker sells their labor. There's no reasonable way of valuing what their labor "costs" to them, as it's ultimately the opportunity cost of being able to do anything else, so it's not really sensible to talk about selling your time as "profit" or not.

You can approximate what it's worth to them by the market, in which case the only people who clearly can be said to profit from their labor are those who are being paid above market rate. I suggest to you, that's relatively rare (note if you're outsourcing out your work at market and then doing some sort of QA, the delta between market and what you're paid is probably around market for the QA, else the employer would have outsourced the work themselves).

The profit I'm referring to is revenue minus costs for the corporation. All wages and salaries here fall under operating costs. The profit goes to the corporation, which is owned by the shareholders, not the employees.

It's misleading to re-characterize wages as profits, because the wages are what's purchasing the labor which is used to create the revenue. If I charge someone $10 (assume that's market rate) for a car wash and in turn pay someone $10 to wash the car, I have paid $10 in wages, have $10 in revenue, and have no profit. The person who washed the car sold a service worth $10 for $10, so they have broken even. Note that if what I'm doing is finding customers, I am adding my labor as well, and can and should earn a wage for that. If I'm doing nothing but letting the business run itself, I am not selling any of my labor, but I am still legally entitled to the delta between revenue and costs.
edit whoops, hit the reply link under the wrong comment. This was supposed to be a comment under "This is a prime example of a covert communication channel."

If anyone is interested in having more fun with this kind of stuff, take a look at Tor's pluggable transports[1], for example. A taste specimen of 'covert channels':

* various 'have everything appear to be random TCP with no other marks' transports (+/- padded packet lengths, time intervals, etc.)

* skype-look-alike transport

* various-stuff-over-http-look-alike (html, etc) transport

* a transport that imitates git's push/pull

* a transport that, given enough 'permitted'/non-censored data, learns to imitate arbitrary protocols (learns and encodes them as regular expressions; some interesting and crazy CA madness)

* etc.

[1]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en and https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableT...
Just to drive this home a little more: a lot of your users will use the exact same e-mail address and password on your site that they use for their bank. And while they shouldn't do that, they will, and that's why you should use best practices to protect your users' credentials even if their account on your site is completely unimportant.
overall the infrastructure they have built has put this country in a position to achieve dominant superpower status

the claim that infrastructure spending leads to economic prosperity/dominance sounds pretty extraordinary to me.
I have a bridge to sell. Would you be interested?
>>internal consumption is still moribund
Do you ever go to the supermarkets? Every time I go to eat outside in the evening at the mall, I have to wait a line of at least 5 numbers to get a table, and I live in the suburbs, very far from downtown.
Warning to all females experiencing nausea gravidarum (morning sickness), and their cohabitants: be VERY careful about where you rent your DVDs from. Or, at the very least, keep a bucket to hand.
Mt. Gox CEO's blog goes blank after alleged hack
There are millions of web page changes on the Internet every day. How would a Google engineer know to look at one particular page to update the index?
I'm surprised they went to those measures to get the user's phone number, it seems like there would be much simpler and more inconspicuous ways to do so on Android.
> the claim that infrastructure spending leads to economic prosperity/dominance sounds pretty extraordinary to me.

Isn't it what the US has been claiming all the time? With the FDR New Deal theory ?
Funny, I read Software Objects, after Blindsight. Is there some kinda speculative fiction digraph that we're all following? My reading graph was build via Goodreads.
Could you point out or give examples of some of these crazy ideas? For the sake of us who assume we know nothing, and wouldn't know how to tell a crazy idea from an unconventional-yet-reasonable one. No sarcasm intended and I'm sure an exhaustive list is a bit much to ask, but I would be interested to read even a few examples and/or explanations.
On a retina screen, it reports the wrong resolution. Not sure if you can get density from the browser, but just thought I would let you know!
Auto shopping site Cars.com put up for sale
> All of our efforts to get what I had assumed was just boring public data were met with suspicion and resistance. That was pretty weird.

I guess your children learned something. I am just not sure whether you want them to become so cynical so soon.
Stanford's new major integrates humanities, computer science
Billions, really? Excluding the equipment used to send the rover to Mars?
Wow, ingenious! This is cool, but will my DVD cover go back to Argo once it cools down? If not...all the DVD covers will be pizzas.. We won't be able to differentiate them anymore.
Everything is crowded in China, what does that prove? That consumption of food happens is of no doubt, but you have to save like crazy for everything else. I have a few years of salary saved up in the bank since there is absolutely nothing to buy except overpriced real estate and cars (but then I'd have to join the lottery for a plate).
You may be interested in looking into some of the research that has been done in other areas on Byzantine consensus. Depending on the system model, solutions that are much more efficient than the Bitcoin block chain (but have other tradeoffs) exist. For example, check out Castro and Liskov (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.127....). Personally, I think some people in the Bitcoin community have been a bit dishonest in claiming that bitcoin's protocol solves a consensus problem which wasn't solvable before.

Lower bounds on Byzantine consensus in any practical system model exist which makes it very attractive, for efficiency reasons, to solve a subset of that problem for things like database replication in trusted systems. Lower bounds for consensus vary from f+1 (for f faults) to 2f+1 to 3f+1 depending on what kinds of faults you admit. Still it's very interesting to think about.
>>and the investments are limited to some shady financial products and...real estate. This is in Beijing , or Hebei, Henan and the 3 northern provinces. At the Pearl River Delta and the Shanghai-Zhejiang-Jiangsu triangle the investment is in production.
Instagram Lands Its First Big Ad Deal
It truly is shame that the aviation industry keeps itself at a pace of in ovation once a decade.
> In Bitcoin, though the system itself is "trustless", participants trust that they are all treated equally according to the protocol & open source code.

But Bitcoin participants do not have to act on "trust" because they can inspect the protocol and open source code to verify equal treatment. In Naval's system, if the premise for participation (eg equal treatment) is equally verifiable by inspection of the protocol and open source code, is there any material difference between the two? It is true that there is nothing to "stop the network from invalidating the pre-mined amount at will", but participants will only participate in the network if it is easily verifiable that the network gives effect to the premise for participation.

> I just don't see how you can add a founder-controlled, for-profit startup to the other players in a crypto currency ecosystem (the miners, the non-profit developer foundation and the coin owners) and get something that works.

I think I agree with that statement, but only because of the words "founder-controlled". If a network like this is to succeed, the founders must forfeit control to the network. Given that it is the founders who write the protocol, they should be happy to do that, and then set it free. I don't think it would work if the founders made some attempt in the protocol to reserve to themselves a power to intervene in the operation of the network.

Can I offer another interesting hypothetical:

Is it possible for a network to incorporate some kind of mechanism for democratically amending its own protocol according to some objective characteristic (or subjective vote) of the participants? If participants are mining 'shares' in the 'company', should they have the power to act as 'shareholders' and to exercise control accordingly?

(Assume that some aspect of the protocol means that the controlling majority is always held by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, which I think is meant to be the case with Bitcoin.)
I remember the Economist had a lengthy special report on rail freight in the US a while ago.
Tutorial on how to convert AVI to m2ts
This is a video tutorial on how to convert AVI to m2ts with DVDFab video converter.DVDFab Video Converter can help users to handle all kinds of video conversion issues with ease. Learn more about the video converter at:http://www.dvdfab.com/video-converter.htm
Kill the congress. We are tired of incompetency.
This promotion is of course targeted toward writers but how amazing would it be to have 2-5 focused days to hack while on the train? Perhaps mobile connectivity would be an issue in some locations but the upside of the focus-time would probably be greatly productive. A train hack-a-thon.
Examining the file requests made by the top 100 Alexa sites
You can lose your savings from a bank default, this happened to some weak banks in the US. You go to withdraw your money it is not there.

You can lose your saving from currency devaluation. In order to pay off debt, a government can issue new currency (debt denominated in its own currency; in Eurozone countries they can only raise taxes and cut spending to pay off debt.) Your savings don't matter because there is so much more money. An old unit of currency is equal to new units.

We can't be certain of Chinese banks' liabilities but it is something you can keep an eye on in the Western press, if blocked locally ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-14/china-banks-bad-loa... )

If I was Chinese, I would not be too concerned as long as I did not have liabilities for my business or money deposited in a bad bank. If yes to either of these, you are at risk of losing everything.
It detects Web (Epiphany) as Chrome: http://whatsmybrowser.org/b/ZB74XW4

Midori as Safari: http://whatsmybrowser.org/b/PMWKUJZ

Chromium as chrome: http://whatsmybrowser.org/b/21ULSXJ

And you might want to be more specific on Dooble and Konqueror: http://whatsmybrowser.org/b/W3CJIKO http://whatsmybrowser.org/b/IHEV8VN

Konqueror has been at major version 4 for the past 7 years or so. Also, these operating systems are called "FreeBSD" and "Linux". "amd64" or "x86_64" is the arch they're running on here.
Well obviously you could spend wastefully, but try being economically dominant without infrastructure.
Chinadaily often runs editorials directly translated from Chinese. They are quite bizarre and often just diatribes. My wife is a Chinese but has no respect for the press, so doesn't even bother reading those articles anymore (most young Chinese are the same).

I've been in China for 6+ years now, I have expat friends who have been here for 10+ (which is an old hand these days). We aren't incredibly divergent in our thinking. Chinese have different viewpoints, but this is primarily cultural rather than linguistic.

But if you truly want an unbiased view of China, read a Taiwanese newspaper :)
The entire page is very professional, good CTAs, easy to understand. I'm even more impressed now that you say you did it yourself and don't have a design background.
I backed "Hadean Lands: Interactive Fiction for the iPhone" [1] in 2010. The project promised a text adventure game for iOS and open-source game framework. The game would become the author's "day job" and "might take six months; might take more." Based on the cool concept and the author's ludography of interactive fiction games, the $8,000 project was funded to $31,000.

Fast-forward four years and the author posts occasional Kickstarter updates about unrelated iOS games he's published and that the promised game is now "11% complete". His explanation is that the fine print of his Kickstarter proposal included "other IF work", but reading backers' comments [2] as early as 2011, you can tell that people felt mislead.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter...
Amazingly people still use Python 2.3. With source downloads you can't tell what platforms use, but you can with binary downloads. One of my projects is a Python wrapper for SQLite (APSW) for which I also provide compiled Windows binaries for every Python version from 2.3 to the latest, and 64 bit for some of them too. It is very amusing to me that some people want the latest SQLite while using a positively ancient Python version.

Google code shows download counts so you can get an idea of popularity of each release for Windows developers:

https://code.google.com/p/apsw/downloads/list?can=1&q=&colsp...

I've since moved the project to github which doesn't show the download counts for releases.

https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releases
Be careful period - The continual vomitting from dawn till dusk caused me to leave the lights off to let my wife rest while I got dressed one AM. I bent over, eye butted the cupboard door, broke my lower orbital floor and bled into my sinus for about 2 weeks. I was 100% sure at the time that I popped my eyeball. Luckily I was wrong.
10 Equations Used In Our Daily Lives
OK I see, thanks. That does sound useful.
>> The value in a crypto-currency is determined by how much the "nodes" trust the network.

Could someone explain it clearer?
For those of you who like me didn't know about this, operators <<= and >>= exist, can be overloaded, and do "bitwise shift assignment".

|a <<= b| is the same as |a = a << b|
This is what Japan has been doing since their dominance in the 1980's fizzled out. In both the US/FDR case and Japan's, I believe the infrastructure spending was seen as a way to re-ignite growth while also creating something long lasting.

There certainly is some truth to the long lasting piece. A country with poor infrastructure will have a very difficult time growing. What is controversial is building things either few people use or are far more expensive than they should be. On the flip side, infrastructure has to be serviced to remain viable. In addition to using money that is "borrowed" one way or the other, the maintenance cost is created as well. Easy to get carried away.
"The Last Of At" – A Fanfictional Tribute Survival Roguelike in 1K of JS
Getty Release 35Million images for free use.
I don't know about you, but my employer owns my work product via an intellectual property assignment agreement, that I signed as a condition of employment. In addition, our operation requires very expensive datacenters, which they clearly own, not any of the employees. Or even all of the employees, taken together.

So, I write programs, but I neither own them nor the systems that are required to run them. Taken collectively, the employees at my job have created a very profitable machine, in that it brings in revenue that greatly exceeds the market cost of building the machine. This profit goes to shareholders, not employees, and an employee by virtue of an employee will not receive any share of the revenue created by their work after they leave their company.

Yes, I am partially paid in stock, and this means I am at times part-owner. But this can be seen as a coincidence and doesn't really significantly alter the power dynamic. I say this because it is ultimately part of our compensation, and the fact that they choose to pay us some shares (and correspondingly less cash) is more of an accounting trick then a fundamental shift in the employee-employer relation.
This is awesome. It would be even awesomer if it came with some practice problems after each section!
Here's one: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1735103142/conquest

Lots of pretty graphics from an unknown team that hasn't been tested.

From my experience, the difference between teams like this that failed and the other newcomer teams that succeeded are that the teams that eventually delivered had a working demo or prototype that was downloadable.
Can't be worse than Beijing. Shangrila is very nice.
China is in fact buried in a massive pile of debt, from corporate to muni to personal, that they will never be able to climb out from under. And they've had to pile on ever larger amounts of debt just to keep faking the 'growth.' The notion of China being the land of savings and low debt is completely a myth.

"Meet China's Housing Debt Slaves"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-19/china-housing-slave...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-02-20/meet-chinas-housing...

"In the meantime, some investors are increasingly alarmed by the speed at which local governments are piling on debt to pay for public works. China's state auditor said in its report on Monday that local governments had total outstanding debt of 17.9 trillion yuan ($2.96 trillion), including contingent liabilities and debt guarantees, at the end of June."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/31/us-china-debt-anal...

"A report by Nomura said Thursday that Chinese municipal debt, a focal point of major concern about the country’s economy, had grown at an alarming 39 percent clip in recent years."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/business/global/report-war...

"China's overall debt-to-GDP ratio has sprung to over 200% from about 120% in five years. Most of this is from local governments and state-supported companies."

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230455400...

China's corporations are drowning in debt, at 151% debt to GDP ratio, the highest basically in the major industrial world. Twice as high as America's ratio.

http://i.imgur.com/t8bIpfS.jpg
New Deal built stuff people needed, not just statues of shopping malls.
Your assumptions are not very accurate at all. The job I just left we had moved to haskell precisely for growth. We had no problems hiring haskellers, or having our existing PHP devs learn haskell. The new job I took is getting tons of applications from experienced haskellers. There's tons of people who know haskell and don't get to use it at work. They are generally quite eager to fix that problem.
And typically such people are also the ones who take the risk and invest in the machines. Every such investment is a risk and there is no saying which turn the economy will take (someone else may make a cheaper/better machine).
Essay introducing the game (from its author's blog): http://www.kesiev.com/?open=454
How do I market-test subscription pricing?
For the author: I've learned regex for a while, for years, I always come back to them and I'm always annoyed to forget about them if I don't use them for a long time.

I use mostly cheat sheets now,

but still, your tutorial was the best I ever read and I actually read it. It reads better than a "learnXinYminutes.com" and I actually learned some new stuff.

Notes:

validating email adresses: most MVC have a function that does that. I know that PHP has that natively as well.
You're knee-jerking in response to an incident that we literally know almost nothing about.

Aviation is a field where every major incident, and many minor ones are investigated and root cause is determined. The FAA and NTSB does fault tree analysis of crashes and publishes lots of material and bulletins to prevent similar issues.
I don't want to be flattered/lied to. Do your job/be professional and I will help you out if I can or remember you when I'm looking for my next job.

Its a business relationship. Don't waste my time. Get your ducks in a row before making contact. If you email me with a job which indicates that you did not make the smallest effort to know my skills I will be polite but remember not to work with you in the future.
"Whenever I go the a conference and I discover that there will be a presentation about Byzantine fault tolerance, I always feel an immediate, unshakeable sadness, kind of like when you realize that bad things happen to good people, or that Keanu Reeves will almost certainly make more money than you over arbitrary time scales."

-- James Mickens

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thesaddes...
I should have specified free-lance programming or programming in a startup, where you're a founder or an early employee. You're right that programming in a lot of companies doesn't have the same ownership structure.

I also agree with your remarks about being "paid" in stock instead of cash. I worked for a company (not an IT company) that "paid" us in stock options, and insisted that the "cash value" was equivalent, which was of course their excuse for not just giving us the cash. Of course, those options turned out to be worthless when the company's stock tanked. So yes, it was just an accounting trick.
Outdated packages matter insofar as that you must maintain a working 2.x install alongside your 3.x if you use tools that need 2.x.

Hopefully these start disappearing, as Ubuntu and Arch have already moved to 3.x.