markburns

Well I've not looked into it myself yet, but apparently payments are a nightmare to implement in Japan. As they were in the US/Europe before Stripe/Braintree etc came along.

My opinion of what Stripe brings to the table in general is not so much that it is way better for the customer, but that it is way better for the retailer/developer.

I have never heard people focusing on the customer side for payment providers etc. In that regard you are right, which customer cares about who/what is behind a payment form?

But startups do care about simple painless payment integrations.

I'd advise anyone trying to learn by implementing ECC to be careful using this article as an introduction. It's written as if you can follow along, but there are some omissions (see the comments section).

James D'Angelo has some good videos that go into some of the detail too

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgo7FCCPuylVk4luP3JAgVw

Anonymity and lack of susceptibility to a certain class of quantum computing attacks

> Does anybody believe you when you say those things in a job interview, though? I wouldn't. A job interview is fundamentally a competition against other candidates.

I think you are being a bit negative. Why not believe the interviewer? It seems pointless to trick candidates by suggesting they are safe to look things up, then secretly judging them worse than other candidates. I would judge more harshly someone who didn't ask if they could look something up, or assumed they couldn't. Particularly so if they had been told they could but then proceeded to struggle and not look something up or ask the interviewer. I'd rather someone I may work with have a relaxed attitude and inherent curiosity rather than a paralyzing fear of failure.

Also viewing it as fundamentally a competition is focusing a lot on the negative perspective from your side. An interview is about finding a good match between a company and an employee. It can be just as much about you finding somewhere you want to work as it can about them comparing you to other candidates.

There may not even be other candidates, and they could be trying to make you comfortable and give you an idea of what it would be like to work together. Maybe suggesting that they do understand the cognitive dissonance and they do understand that interviews are stressful and hence no need to add additional pressure.

I was quite intrigued by this position, but if it's a repost of yours I'm probably as confused as you are about what is going on.

Did you stop pursuing that venture? E.g. it's someone you worked/were going to work with?

Certainly makes me less excited about replying to the repost.

Yeah it's an obvious bootstrapping/critical mass problem. It will be interesting watching to see if it does cross that line. If the usability is never there I can imagine it never quite taking off, and something slightly better/more usable/with the right timing winning out.

But you could have said the same thing about email/the web in the past.

A global communication network and protocol without anyone using it is pointless. The same for a global value transfer protocol. It seems obvious _a_ protocol, probably blockchain based, will gain mass adoption eventually.

That's true whilst it is treated as effectively a foreign currency. It may start to become irrelevant if bitcoin spreads and is generally held and used as a currency for earning income in, paying for labour/goods/services etc.

A fascinating thought, thanks.

> I'm sure Sapporo have pretty deep pockets, which the author rightly took advantage of, but that doesn't make it any less superficial.

Seems a bit unfair as a comparison. He is talking about a simple trick to save time and money and you compare it to a different expensive mistake.

The visual results may be the same, but it's not necessarily the case that he rightly took advantage of anyone.

I agree that because of the lack of controls it will be more volatile than other currencies, but I think volatility will at least reduce to something like gold once the majority is mined. It's volatility is partly due to the difficulty increase and reward halving part of the protocol. I.e. the part designed to reward early adopters. Which was necessary to bootstrap it.

It's a speculative game for the first maybe decade or two. As the bitcoins gradually leave the early adopters as they cave in to whatever price is worth it for them there are bubble cycles. Once there is more general adoption, it will settle down though. As people gradually start to think less in e.g. Euros and consider not changing directly into local currency, but just to hold some for their day-to-day transactions because they are particularly useful in certain circumstances.

Once it's passed a tipping point they will be more useful in more and more situations, to the point that it's easier to just have your smart phone and cursing cash or credit card only places. I'm sure there will be retro hipster bars that take cash only in the future.

Anyway, as for the remaining volatility, it may just be that bitcoins serve as gold and another somehow regulated cryptocurrency serves as ordinary money.

There is an incentive for miners to not have confidence in bitcoin damaged. It's a bit of an interesting Nash equilibrium kind of game. In general, I think these things will balance out assuming rational actors.

Yes there could be a crisis of confidence but I can't see it spinning out to completely cancel out its utility e.g. usefulness in international remittances. At the very least it will replace or significantly threaten the Western Union business model.

Where I think there may be cause for concern might be the irrational actors. People or organizations prepared to invest and lose money with the aim of bringing bitcoin down.

It gets a bit tinfoil hat to suggest that e.g. the Federal Reserve or world governments would want to spend billions on killing bitcoin, but it's at least an interesting thought experiment. I'd love to hear a defence from a strong bitcoin proponent against the 'irrational' actors. Irrational meaning not obviously acting in the interests of their own holdings. I've raise it before but not heard convincing arguments of how bitcoin would be safe against 51% attacks like that.

The short-term market price doesn't have a lot to do with it's long-term viability. Liquidity is relatively tiny hence shocking volatility.

Anyone's bitcoins only represent a loss on a particular day if they actually choose to sell them or spend them. Same goes for people gloating when the price is up.

There's 3,600 bitcoins per day being generated creating a significant downward pressure on the price. But reward halving is ETA July 2016, marking a significant change in supply and probably the day-to-day price.

I can understand the schadenfreude for anyone who has watched people become very wealthy and watched other presumably greedy people subsequently 'lose' tons of money.

The majority of my holding will be likely to sit for 10 years or so and I will admit I was wrong if I've made a significant loss and I probably will sell them off. People can have their schadenfreude then. In return, I'll agree not to gloat if the price sky rockets.

Interesting point from the retraction article.

> He says the account was randomly assigned to him by the Mt. Gox exchange

So the suggestion that DPR is not Satoshi relates to evidence from Mt Gox.

It's not that far off. It is the busiest day of the year for them and the company president or CEO, (not sure which) chips in to make the food.

However, whilst it does happen, I've seen KFCs without snaking lines.

This kind of discrepancy seems more like a penalty for being poor _and_ breaking the law.

I made a mistake by bringing Japanese into it - see my other comment. It's the language we speak at home so the one I use to talk to our son. The emphasis was supposed to be on baby-talk not foreign languages.

Obviously you can find tons of examples of words that are different in different languages. I probably confused the situation by bringing Japanese in. My son is Japanese so we talk in Japanese to a baby. I wasn't trying to compare languages. I was trying to talk about baby words.

Yeah it falls apart at any level of complexity.

I just think there are certain cases in often used words and words that babies say or hear a lot at first. Like the mama/haha/papa/baba words. I'm talking about a 'language' in the same way the article talks about an animal language. Like a few often used words linked to emotional states.

I don't mind if you disagree I just happen to believe oishii may be one of these words.

There is some non-arbitrariness to language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

I guess it gets arbitrary at complex enough levels though.

I'd hazard a guess that hok and krak have some component of instinctual/physical nature to them. I personally think that certain sounds are related to physical experiences or expressions of emotions. Obvious ones are surprise of "Oh!" with an open mouth.

"Hmmm" whilst thinking or concentrating, frowning and closing your mouth.

I'm currently watching my son learn to speak and his verbalizing seems pretty closely tied to his emotions at the moment.

"Oishii" means delicious in Japanese and it seems something that makes sense to say whilst you are smiling at enjoying your food. The long "ii" vowel to rhyme with the "e" of "she" in English.

This is his homepage http://www.cazuc.info/

I've not used trailblazer myself but I've utilised some of the concepts or similar ones on existing projects and green field projects.

I think the answer to 1. would be hard to express without getting deep into a specific complex application and most people don't want to open source their business applications, especially not as an example of bad code. It would be awesome if someone refactored a typical problematic large Rails app in the open using these concepts. But it's a lot of work/risk just for the greater good.

2. I'd suggest that the newer devs are going to find it easier navigating a clean codebase (with architectural complexity) than a well established Rails app with a lot of the code smells and complexity that come with going The Rails Way.

I would guess the demand would be created to a certain extent. A single data point, but I travelled to Tokyo from another part of Japan to visit the only BTC ATM in Japan, so there may be a novelty factor involved for other people too.

They are looking at using a crypto-currency backed by the shares.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2hwpmm/fundraising_fo...

Whenever I see "Natural Language Parser" mentioned anywhere I get excited then a little disappointed because it implies something much more profound.

Not to belittle the tremendous effort, but most projects I have seen are "English Language Parser"s.

Are there any actual generic language parsing projects out there?

That don't try to overfit to English but actually attempt to do a job of whatever quality in whatever language?

Like I'm a native English speaker, I can understand English say 100%, Japanese 80-90%, I can understand a bit of a few European languages and I can identify a bunch of other languages.

It would be wonderful if there were software with this design in mind.

That sounds like a fair question but could equally be disingenuous.

Is the rate of lack of use of bank accounts ever likely to be public knowledge? There's zero incentive on the banks' side to publicise that kind of information.

If it's not publicly available then your question sounds quite loaded.

Inefficient on an individual level, but the adaptability and robustness is more on a species level. It's probably pretty efficient in that regard.

A high risk, high reward strategy that works out well for humans that survive and end up with large brains, but terrible for certain individuals for the reasons previously outlined.

xorcist choosing to question a comment on a website does not necessarily put him in the same category as people wishing to start a bitcoin startup handling others money

I think this is just about in-groups and out-groups. If you're reasonably liberal-minded, you probably count the human race as a large in-group. They are favoured over animals, and then even more so over plants. A lot of people probably have groups that go family > friends > group/organisation > race > human race > pets > animals > plants.

I put 'race' in here. It's a hard to define concept, and I don't necessarily agree that it exists, but don't have time for that level of discussion right now. However, it's a useful generalization. A lot of people do have a tendency to group together according to race. For most people that's probably a lot to do with familiarity and commonality though than any strong racist feelings.

The only difference with the intentionally racist groups, is where on this spectrum they consider their out-group to lie. Put in these terms, I think it's easier to conceptualize. Personally, and I don't want to get political about this, but as a vegetarian, I feel my boundary includes animals. I don't want this to sound like a holier-than-thou argument, it's hopefully an objective judgement.

I find it difficult to conceptualize including pets in the in-group, but excluding animals we use as food. It makes no sense to me, and just feels like a hard-wired level of compassion that I have. I cannot on an emotional level process the concept of desiring killing animals. But on a logical level, I can see people that do think like that, and I respect people's choices. Now in my ideal world, people would naturally want to think like me, but I have no desire to waste my time trying to convince people otherwise.

Now, if you take a view that just humans are separate from animals and that we don't have a spectrum of care towards living things around us, then it's very difficult to conceptualize racist attitudes as rational or at all fair in any way.

I'm not entirely convinced of his argument that there are not necessarily economic factors in this. I can afford to be a vegetarian, (financially, socially, etc) and I'm not in a position of desperate need, or war or any situation where I need to reconsider my position. I do know for sure though that in times of crisis, this in-group is bound to shrink.

I think the general tendency of liberal thinking to be about sharing with society as a whole, vs more right-wing tendencies to look after your own is also just about where you fall on this spectrum of care to those around you.

If you're anxious or under stress or impoverished, or in any other situation that would make you feel under attack or that you have to protect your own, then I think you are pretty likely to tighten your in-group to a smaller circle.

Yeah, I'm familiar with tweeting in Japanese, and how much more information you can get across in a tweet, which made me question the number. However, I'm still not sure why (in an imaginary world where twitter doesn't encode in UTF-8), it might be 6-bits. 7 or 8 I can understand. I'm just curious of what your thinking was, not trying to do any one-upmanship.

What is the number 840?

Short-term pragmatism and long-term pragmatism. Excellent concepts that I've never thought to quite express.

It seems you can always 'win' an argument in software engineering or TDD by talking about taking the 'pragmatic' solution, or the 'proper' solution. It often seems rather arbitrary whether to build something properly now, or introduce some short-term technical debt.

It's easy to accuse people of being cowboy coders, or architecture astronauts, and it unfortunately seems to fall into these dichotomies. Admittedly there are people like that, but mostly through lack of experience. The progression is maybe commonly cowboy coder-> architecture astronaut -> balanced software craftsman.

There's probably a bunch of steps missing on the way and it's not a clear linear path either, but I do like the term of having different durations of pragmatism, than a one-size fits all, "We'll cut corners to be pragmatic, because we're not architecture astronauts".