TophWells

Originally, yes, but it's been two decades since Alpha. I think by now they have a pretty good idea of what they're doing and why it works.

Fascinating post.

The title of this submission is incorrect: it should be "What is the shortest string length that requires a delete to create most efficiently?". That is, find X such that the shortest sequence of operations that produces a string of length X must include a delete.

Which is a bit of a shame, because I think finding strings that require a delete to create efficiently is a more interesting problem.

An average person can't write "hello world" in an average web page, because to an average person that sort of technical ability is the province of mysterious web nerds. I'm assuming you mean "an average web designer" or some such.

Could you understand those setups in 3 minutes? No. But installing them is just a matter of copy-pasting a few lines of code from the creator's website. You can do that easily enough.

I just tried both of those. 3 minutes sounds about right to me, if you don't bother with any of the customisations.

>This will potentially preserve the information for millions of years.

Not true. Outside the body, DNA has a half-life of about 500 years. If you want your writing to last for millions of years, carve some stone tablets.

How does Tineye make money at the moment? I'm sure there's a business model somewhere that would work.

And by interested, you mean lazy.

Thanks!

I red it as satirizing Facebook, not least because some of the messages are over Twitter's character limit.

I can understand if he loses the bitcoins because he doesn't qualify for seller protection. Terms and Conditions are annoying like that. But what's the story with Paypal saying he owes them £1500? What is that supposed to pay for? Is he somehow being held liable for the users whose accounts were hacked?

>One bought two bitcoins (4 x 0.5)

Yes, thank you Guardian, we know how much two is.

Sometimes, yes. Not always - it depends on how the transactions inside the wallet are organised, which is not usually displayed unless you go looking for it.

Not that it matters - if 100BTC go into a wallet, and an hour later 100BTC comes out of that wallet, it's fairly irrelevant whether or not they're the same coins.

I've done that!

You're right. Firefox's "View Source" button doesn't do what I thought it did. Curl gives a page with a "Please wait" message and a pile of Javascript.

I learned something today.

Wait, I refreshed the page a few times, and once, I got:

  <html>
	<head>
		<title>MtGox.com</title>

  <script type="text/javascript">
    var AKSB=AKSB||{};AKSB.q=[];AKSB.mark=function(b,a){AKSB.q.push(["mark",b,a||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.measure=function(b,a,c){AKSB.q.push(["measure",b,a,c||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.done=function(b){AKSB.q.push(["done",b])};AKSB.mark("firstbyte",(new Date).getTime());
    AKSB.prof={custid:"223233",ustr:"",originlat:0,clientrtt:19,ghostip:"23.51.248.44",ipv6:false,pct:10,xhrtest:false,clientip:"130.223.174.194"};
    (function(b){var a=document.createElement("iframe");a.src="javascript:false";(a.frameElement||a).style.cssText="width: 0; height: 0; border: 0; display: none";var c=document.getElementsByTagName("script"),c=c[c.length-1];c.parentNode.insertBefore(a,c);a=a.contentWindow.document;a.open().write("<body onload=\"var js = document.createElement('script');js.id = 'aksb-ifr';js.src = '"+b+"';document.body.appendChild(js);\">");a.close()})(("https:"===document.location.protocol?"https:":"http:")+"//aksb-a.akamaihd.net/146060/aksb-a/aksb.min.js");
    </script>
    </head>
	<body>
		<p><img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/></p>
		<p>Dear MtGox Customers,</p>
		<p>In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox&#39;s operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.</p>
	<p>Best regards,<br/>
	MtGox Team</p>
	</body>
  </html>

This is very odd behaviour.

It's fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, so I'm not going to post my elaborate speculation here. I'll just summarise it as "there are several people working at Mt. Gox and they're probably not very good at talking to one another".

Probably not. But don't give up hope yet.

I don't see anything like that. Here's the page source for me:

<html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <p><img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/></p> <p>Dear MtGox Customers,</p> <p>In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox&#39;s operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.</p> <p>Best regards,<br/> MtGox Team</p> </body> </html>

Processing power is cheaper than programmer time. If it were really as easy as coding the desired result instead of coding the desired process, we'd already be doing it. And in some specialised cases, we already are: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_set_programming

Simulated copies of the programmer would probably speed up the process a lot, though.

Well, he wouldn't have gotten more than any other early adopter. And nobody accuses them of being scammers - just taking a heck of a gamble and it paying off.

Edit: Apologies, I did more research after posting this comment. Apparently Satoshi did mine quite a lot in the early days, but the addresses he used are well-known (one of the advantages of a public ledger - go to blockchain.info and look at any block with an index less than 20,000), and if anyone tried to spend them, it would be in the news.

Clarification: MTGOX was intended to stand for that, but the card exchange was never finished, probably for lack of interest.

Playing with the settings on the left is a good way to frighten small children.

The residents of the googoolplexth universe would like to know what they're supposed to do when the number is too big to fit on the screen of the people below them.

I don't think that's right. Nothing outside Earth(2014)'s past light-cone can affect anything inside it, nor can anything outside Earth(2015)'s past light-cone affect anything inside it. Expanding the light-cone into the intervening year doesn't require you to simulate anything further out - well, you need to go outside Earth(2014)'s light-cone to simulate Earth(2015), but that's hardly worth mentioning.

I think you're picturing a sphere of 13Gly radius (or whatever) centred on present-day Earth, expanding at lightspeed to encompass new stars and galaxies. But while new matter enters our light-cone, it is not doing so as stars and galaxies. Those all have pasts within the light-cone - you don't need to go outside our past light-cone to find all the things that can affect them. Any matter that only entered our observable universe in the last year doesn't have a past, because it only just came through the Big Bang. It's primordial chaos, not fully-formed stars; you don't need to work out millenia of its past to know what's there. Unless for some reason the simulation needs to calculate pre-Big Bang conditions, which is possible, but then the definition of "light-cone" needs to be amended.

I don't know any high-profile cases, but this random Reddit user did:

https://pay.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1r88vl/need_advice...

Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPRA0W1kECg

Only more colourful and interactive.

>if I own a device, No-one should legally be allowed control over it?

Then tech companies might start leasing out their devices: you technically don't own it, so you're not allowed to do what you want to it.

Not that the Right to Root wouldn't be nice, but the change in attitude has to come first. And we need to somehow convince the likes of Apple that their DRM is bad for business.

I wish I'd known about Branch And Bound when I was a student - it would have probably come in handy a few times.

Here's the application I thought was immediately obvious: memory palaces.

Based on the old mnemonic trick of taking a real physical location that you know well, and associating memories with objects in that space. The digital version of this would be having files and data stored in a "physical" place - although they're not solid, they'd be tied to a single location.

Harder to organise, but I know several people who have completely filled their computer's desktop with shortcuts, because they don't like futzing around with folders. The folder metaphor isn't the be-all and end-all, there are times when it's appropriate and times when it's not. The metaphor of icons that are dragged around the screen is limited by available screen space - Project Tango gives you a house-sized (or even just room-sized) 3D space to play with, more than enough for all the files you could need to be immediately visible.

The main risk is that my virtual room could end up as messy as my real room.

I don't know how anyone could make money from this, but it would be really damn cool.

Probably. I doubt it's possible to look at a piece of code and evaluate whether it's worth feeding it the equivalent of ten years of basic education. If we ever write a program that exhibits "creativity, or desire, or whatever you want to call it" on a basic level after however many months the researcher can afford to run it for, then it'll suddenly get a lot of funding and time and potential for growth.

For all we know, we already have the Algorithm and all we need to do is run it for years on the best computer available "just to see what happens".

>“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

Perhaps the restart time is necessary to update the shared state. Take the mind out of the universe, review its acquired experiences and integrate them into the combined soul, then reboot the mind and send it on its way.

Odd that he should be conscious for this part though. I suppose the afterlife state is equivalent to dreaming: the brain has to review and absorb the day's memories, and semi-conscious hallucinations are an interesting side-effect.

The Open Knowledge Foundation has been around for 10 years already, working in the same field and trying to achieve the same thing.

The trouble with unifying many different data sources like that is that you're trying to solve the problem of too many disparate sources for data by creating more sources for data. The entire field has xkcd.com/927 problems.