kirillseva

The browser with its plethora of extensions is arguably even worse than an operating system, and yet people keep using online banking and don't get hacked 24/7. Software can be reasonably secure and is basically as vulnerable as the human that's using it.

If you insist that one should err on the side of being paranoid when handling money, you can argue that hardware wallets are secure iff you manufacture your own hardware.

Want true security without going into hardware manufacturing?

Pick a private key and write it down on a piece of paper (ideally you'd do it in your head) along with the corresponding public key. Then send bitcoin to an address that's controlled by the keypair you just created. If you did all the calculations in your head while wearing a tin-foil hat your bitcoin should be reasonably secure.

Be careful when posting unpopular opinions on internet forums! You might get downvoted and get no constructive criticism in return

Thanks for the blog series, Jack! When is your ICO?

Well supposedly you'd use native data.frame's if you're using a faster R implementation.

However, I would agree with you that at this point in time it's fair to assume that R is no longer a language in and of itself - it's more akin to a collection of APIs around years of optimized C++ code, somewhat separated into a few universes (bioinformatics, time series analysis with xtz, data.table aficionados and tidyverse acolytes).

And thus making a faster R alternative should focus on 100% package compatibility along with speeding up native R code. Renjin, pqR [1], et. al. all seem to be compromises that work for some workflows but not all of them.

The project that I'm excited for is fastR [2] - bringing R, C, C++ and FORTRAN code together into one Truffle/Graal environment would be absolutely huge for this ecosystem.

However, I've tested fastR on my employer's [3] workflows and it does not work yet.

[1] http://www.pqr-project.org/ [2] https://github.com/graalvm/fastr [3] http://syberia.io/

that's a fairly toxic and silly attitude towards a free software project. Don't like it - don't use it.

I personally think it's great that there are people who are working on making R faster/better/popular, even though I may disagree with the methods they've chosen to achieve those goals.

umm, generating a block whose hash starts with N consecutive zeroes (e.g. 000000009A8C3...) seems to be exactly that - an NP hard problem that's trivial to verify in polynomial time.

If you're only using a "stable whitelist" of websites on the internet then you're not the target audience

ICO

Didn't know about MLK blackmail. Reminds me of what happened to Hemingway. [1] Sometimes when you have paranoia it doesn't mean that you're crazy.

[1] - https://stevehuff.net/2015/07/02/ernest-hemingways-justified...

"decentralized" wikipedia with a flat UI that requires 1.5Mb .js just for the landing page and running either a full eth node or a half-assed chrome extension (and hence isn't available on mobile).

As Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says, "If everyone reading this donated $20, we would only have to fundraise for one day a year". Sounds like that would be a better way to spend money rather than on a vaporware pre-alpha token

Ethereum has pretty much delivered on both the technical promise and financial return

who controls the rest of the money? Could be the same people, just indirectly, via friends or shell companies incorporated in Switzerland

correct, if we sample without replacement here https://gist.github.com/kirillseva/961fa1f5b5d64254e0117caf1...

then we'd indeed have a balanced situation where everybody keeps their initial balance. However, we do sample with replacement, and at some point a lucky winner is going to start hoarding cash. Until such time when no one has cash to pay the winner, and he's ultrawealthy... on paper

without any cap it doesn't look fun for the unlucky person. Take a look at my other comments on this thread, there's a link to a gist that generates an animation with the same starting conditions as OP, but forcing the person with $0 to borrow and introducing an interest rate of 10%. At some point the system destabilizes and the debt of the unlucky person goes out of control.

TIL what an economic crisis is and how it happens

with the following parameters:

  NUM_PEOPLE    = 45
  INITIAL_BANK  = 45   # everyone gets 45 dollars
  INTEREST_RATE = 0.1  # 10% per turn that you didn't pay
  ROUNDS        = 5000
  RENT          = 1    # how much to pay each round

everybody's cash goes to zero on step 1008. From that point on all trades are debt manipulations only

edit(formatting)

Modified the problem from this post to also include debt. If someone doesn't have the funds to pay during the turn, they have to borrow money from the person they should be giving it to, and pay back with interest.

Check out the source and the produced animation here: https://gist.github.com/kirillseva/961fa1f5b5d64254e0117caf1...

Not wrong, just not what you're used to. Oh, and not to mention the `1`-based indexing! Such heresy!

R excels at two things: statistical packages and generating reports/papers (the rmarkdown ecosystem is simply fantastic at this). If either of those two things are the key features of your product it makes sense to use R for the rest of the glue code. I write R daily and I'm very productive with the language (having built a small ecosystem of tools to aid me with the mundane stuff).

If you're willing to give R a chance I highly recommend you check out syberia.io - it's a framework like rails/django for creating statistical models in R and packaging them into API containers.

disclosure: I work with robertk at Avant, where we've developed syberia and lockbox specifically to have reproducible model builds and to turn R model objects into API servers in a deterministic way. Lockbox is closely modelled after ruby's bundler, and syberia is like rails for data science. I've you've ever written a ruby-on-rails or a django app you'll feel like at home using lockbox. I encourage you to give it a try, and let us know in github issues if you are having any trouble using it

It's a wrapper around https://github.com/rstudio/httpuv

I'm pretty sure it's blocking though, R doesn't really have good concurrency primitives. However, you can launch multiple R processes behind nginx and be able to serve N requests concurrently. Running this in an autoscaling group on AWS provides enough resilience in practice

This is not REST API per se, but it's something that we've used in production for a couple years now and it's working like a charm

https://github.com/robertzk/microserver https://github.com/kirillseva/rain

This way our rails app can communicate with R prediction backend and we end up using the right tool for each task