paulhodge

And as a hedge against a BTC price crash, or a huge jump in mining difficulty, or etc. If you're doing nothing but mining then you've got all your eggs in one basket.

Github.com is protected by the DMCA. If they get a takedown notice then they have to comply, until then they aren't liable. One of the whole points of the DMCA is to prevent hosting companies like Github from being held liable when their users upload infringing content.

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

Definitely a long term bull but I agree that my execution could use some refining :) I like your strategy suggestion.

Zero.. I recently owned 10 but sold them all when the price jumped to $200. I guess I was too quick on the trigger, but what can you do. Will be buying again in about a month when this hype cycle dies off.

Would C-- be a good choice for JIT machine code generation, or is it mostly for static compilation?

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." - Gibson.

First hitch I've noticed with 10.9: "gdb" seems to be missing. Gcc is still there. I've looked around to see if there's another optional download that I'm missing (like a Command Line Tools for Mavericks), but I don't see one.

Looks like Xcode is using lldb for debugging, and I can use lldb on the command line. I guess lldb is now the standard 1st-party debugger? Guess I will be figuring out how to install gdb manually..

For "average" users, mining has been prohibitively difficult for a while now. CPU mining has been worthless for years. GPU mining has also been mostly worthless, unless you picked (or happened to already have) one of the few cards that perform well.

So anyway, I think we're at a point where the mining difficulty has little impact on the price. Newcomers are going to buy coins, not mine them.

Yeah, I'm one of those people. I was hesitant to click on the link after the bad impression that Myst V and Uru left. But when they played the old intro I got a little chill. I can't stay mad at you Cyan!

I think you might be right. I listened to the NPR piece - there's a part where the interviewer asks a kid to show him the hack. As the kid is doing it he says, "you just go to Settings, then General, then ... oh it looks like someone already did it". In other words the whole "hack" was done just by messing around in Settings.

Join a kickball league (like through WAKA). You get all the fun & camaraderie of team sports, but no one is too serious about it, and very little skill is required. If you can hold a beer while kicking a ball then you're good.

Somehow, and I don't know how this is still possible in 2013, but I don't consider remote collaboration tools to be a "solved" problem. I say this because at our shop, we have blocking issues with remote conferencing on a pretty regular basis. The most common problem is when one person turns on their speaker and creates feedback/echo, and then we have to spend an annoying 5 minutes just tracking it down. Maybe we're on the wrong tech (we use WebEx and Lync), or maybe it's a training problem. But I suspect we're not alone..

If there actually was a seamless audio/video conferencing technology that still worked perfectly even when subjected to the dumbness of office people, then I think I would have a different opinion of remote work.

But as it is, I think the productivity tax is significant enough to be worth worrying about. Especially since the tax is not just inflicted on the people working remotely, but also on everyone in the office that interacts with them.

I'm not sure if you fully get the idea of freedom of speech. Some dudes can do a presentation at a hackathon and say whatever they want. Other folks can get on Hacker News comments and say whatever they want (about the first dudes).

And anyway, "freedom of speech" only exists as a law when applied to Congress. For the rest of us it's just a guideline.

I'd believe that noise universally causes more stress, but that doesn't mean that more noise is always bad. An interesting thing about stress is that we're most productive with some stress; not too much or too little. (Sorry I don't have a citation for that). So it could be that Von Neumann used that noise to reach the sweet spot of stress.

I remember when it was good, but I don't really remember a time that there wasn't a fanatical vibe to it. The content there has always been strongly pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft. There was a time where people actually used the phrase, "Year of the Linux Desktop" without being sarcastic. Oh and writing "Micro$oft" was popular too. And there was always stuff about open source and GNU and GPL and etc.

The thing that made it good was the camaraderie, the general helpfulness, and the quality of posters. You used to be able to find some really intelligent content in the Slashdot comments, since some the smartest people related to that particular topic were probably Slashdot users themselves.

Little flakey (running on Chrome Mac). I type in an answer, press Submit, and nothing happens. When I reload it finally updates and shows the next question.

We probably couldn't, but I don't think there is any way to be 100% sure of the authorship of something, unless you are physically sitting next to the author.

So, trusting the authenticity of a document is a probability game. If he had signed it with a public key, then the probability of a fake would be less.

Not really. You know there was a time when people didn't wear glasses or sunglasses at all, then people started doing it, and now it's normal.

I tried Feedly but I didn't like how slick & clever it is. It seems to decide (based on popularity) which new posts to show me, when all I really want is a categorized listing of everything that's new. I like a good old-fashioned list where some things are 'unread' and some things are 'read', but in Feedly this seems to be fuzzy concept.

After trying a few other services and apps, I switched to NetNewsWire, which is a client-side Mac app that does what I want. Pretty happy so far.

That's where he lost me as well, I've written a few parsers and seen a lot of compiler implementations, and almost never is a regex library a part of the equation.

Regexes aren't powerful enough for a full language, so you'll have to write your own lexer/parser anyway (or use a parser generator). And once you're going down that road, it's pretty awkward and unnecessary to try to jam in a regex library to only parse subsections.

Yep, yep. Stackless doesn't support parallelism either, it only enables cooperative multitasking.

This article is relatively old (2006) and pretty outdated. I can't find the link now, but I remember reading that Stackless is no longer recommended, because modern Python can now provide the same functionality (using generators).

If you can stick with regular Python then I highly recommend it; Stackless requires a different Python binary with is a PITA for deployment/production.

> but the iPhone users tweet 50x more

That still doesn't provide an explanation for why the data is so segregated by location.

Anyway I agree that the article's conclusion is a little overreaching, but it's still very interesting that they were able to find such a strong correlation with the data they had. Makes you wonder what other unexpected correlations can be divined from the firehose.

There's still a decent correlation between a restaurant's location and the wealth of its customers. People who live in Manhattan aren't typically going to go to a club in Newark or vice versa.

Anyway you can see on the map that tweets come from a huge number of locations; there's not that many restaurants and clubs.

On that subject, here's my favorite interview question to ask:

"What is something that's broken in the world that you want to fix?"

It's very open-ended so it tends to be a good conversation starter. Good candidates will have some answer, it could be about anything. Not so good candidates will have some kind of waffling answer.

I can help with that:

"Workers in open-plan offices get sick more often" - Only supported by one study done in Denmark. Not enough research.

"Open-plan offices are less productive" - Supported by a study which only identified some of the negative effects of a open-office plan (such as the effect of irrelevant speech). That study didn't attempt to measure the benefits of an open office, or attempt to exhaustively list all of the effects of an open office, so it doesn't speak to the overall effect on efficiency.

All the other claims were either focused on employee opinions or were about things other than an open office plan.

You can guess what my opinion here is. At my previous company, the floor plan had both offices and a wide open area, so we could choose where to sit. I picked the open area and loved it. Being able to eavesdrop on the status of other teams, or having really easy group communication (as easy as yelling across the room) was incredibly valuable. I think the open office is especially nice in our industry since we really tend to suffer from under-communication and a lack of cross-team networking.

Anyway some folks at our company chose small offices and I think they enjoyed it. The ideal floor plan would have a mix of both I think. But I don't think Facebook's new one-giant-open-area building is nearly as awful as people make it out to be.

Oops, should say "infinite set of discrete possibilities"

I don't think this is true. Are we assuming that every universe has an infinite number of civilizations? It's impossible to have uniform probability across an infinite set of discrete probabilities, because every outcome would have a probability of 0.

So with no other knowledge, it's slightly more likely that we are the first civilization than the 5 millionth.

Of course it's tricky to talk about the "first" civilization in the face of relativistic time, but I'm assuming that there is some way to have an ordering of all civilizations.

Sure, so I'm not sure which "output" you mean. The output of the computationally-intensive part is really just a magic number that solves a puzzle. Once a miner finds that magic number, they publish a block that has the most recent transactions (which are all verified separately), as well as the special transaction where the miner grants themselves the current mining reward. Other miners see it and verify that all that stuff was correctly computed.

So that whole block (which is maybe what you're calling the "output"), does contain the puzzle solution as well as all the latest transactions. But the actual specifics of the puzzle (which is currently brute-force SHA1 reversing), aren't super important. It could always be swapped out for some other task.

They are doing a make-work exercise which only needs to be time consuming, in order to prevent cheaters. It's mostly throw-away work. The actual computation that needs to happen is pretty trivial. I think it would be possible to fix Bitcoin so that "proof of work" is something that doesn't consume all that electricity, but I'm not sure what it would be.