sirclueless

I believe the comment you are responding is making a distinction between the public key cryptography used to authorize spending from a private wallet, and the act of including a cryptographic hash of the previous block in the current block creating a blockchain (which only requires a strong hash function, not asymmetric cryptography).

Blockchains as defined this way have existed long before there was a proof-of-work based consensus protocol to make Bitcoin a reality. In their more general form they are called "Merkel trees". Filesystems aren't generally structured this way but, for example, git repositories are Merkel trees.

No one is disagreeing that this is the technical process behind creating a pull request. It just turns out that a number of companies including Github and GitLab are willing to do all of these steps with a few button presses for free for anyone on behalf of any open source project.

Actually, this is basically how it is done in circuits, with some minor optimizations on top and without the explicit doubling operation.

It's about as simple as you can make a task like this. The grade school mechanism doesn't look so bad, when you consider that where multiplying by a digit 0-9 occasionally involves some carrying and non-trivial work but multiplying by a binary digit is a simple AND operation. The result is that with fixed operand size and no carrying, each digit you would write under the line using the grade school method can be determined directly as the AND of two bits of the input, and what's left is only a bunch of binary addition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_multiplier

There is certainly a lot of comfort in knowing the car will be exactly where you left it last night so you can load your kids up to go to school, go to the hospital, evacuate in an emergency etc.

Also, cars are status symbols. Everyone has a phone with a clock on it, but watches still haven't disappeared entirely. Going driverless won't suddenly convince everyone to stop liking their cars and prefer generic Uber vehicles.

There are certainly cases where going to another location will be impossible. If the passenger opens the door and does not exit, for example, there is no way to close the door or to move the vehicle.

But I agree with the overall point, while occasional incapacitated passengers or manual intervention may occur, these are not insurmountable problems.

I've certainly seen gambling sites around bitcoin, where there is an indelible audit trail if not an actual enforceable contract.

That's the title, but the main innovation was using a random number generator to choose from among more positions than symbols that the physical wheel possesses, thus allowing different odds for different symbols. The interesting bit comes from claim 8 and 9:

> a random number generator for selecting one number from a plurality of numbers each representing one of said different angular rotational positions, said plurality of numbers exceeding the number of rotational positions of said reel such that a plurality of numbers represents some of the reel positions; and

...

> assigning a different quantity of numbers to each position to obtain the win odds desired.

I like the copy. "Even if we get hacked, they can't read your ..." is a real claim. It means something concrete, and is an interesting hook for someone who's technically literate. Something more generic like "We keep your documents secure" means almost nothing nowadays -- literally every online document storage system will tell you that regardless of how seriously they take security. I'm sure Equifax will be happy to tell you how secure your data is with them.

TCO is classically a compiler/runtime optimization, but that's only because people didn't commonly implement fundamental control flow as libraries until relatively recently. Whether it is the runtime introspecting function calls to decide whether it can elide the current stack frame, or a futures library introspecting return values to decide whether the current future can delegate to the returned one, it's the same concept.

As for "weird universes", it is typically only functional programming languages that guarantee TCO as part of their standard. Most programmers live in a world where they can't rely on their implementation to optimize tail-calls, which is to say they don't make unbounded recursive calls. If they do, they end up with an insidious form of non-portable code.

It's not even a particularly unexpected leak. When you create unbounded recursion, you leak memory. This is true if you don't use Promises, and remains true when you do.

This is really just another complaint about lack of Tail-Call Optimization. This issue has come up for any number of languages and libraries. Often I think that the "O" in TCO is a misnomer. If it was really an "Optimization" it wouldn't affect correctness of the program, but there are many cases where a program is correct if TCO is happening but undefined if not. It's more akin to lazy/strict evaluation: equivalent in simple cases, a major correctness issue in more complex ones.

Not really a solution. It works for repeat visits to sites users visit often, it doesn't really work at scale. Users want sane defaults; most of them will never change them. A world where sites are by default as malicious as users allow them to be is not a world where the internet is a friendly and powerful resource for everyone.

I don't understand this argument. They are the owners of the patents in question. That gives them a limited monopoly on the rights to use those patents, and can create any number of products using the patents, and offer them to you under any number of licenses.

Facebook re-licensing React doesn't create prior art, any more than an inventor manufacturing a new product using a patent they own would create prior art.

That's still a better status quo than passively having access to all of it.

I believe that number is purely the water used converting pulp into paper, not water consumed growing trees. I've heard it's 400 parts water and one part pulp, not sure how accurate that is.[1]

[1]: http://www.alternet.org/environment/whats-better-environment...

Well, somebody better know the structure of the metals in use, or else you get turbine disks shattering jet engines and landing 1,000 yards away [1]. Just because it's not important to know every day doesn't mean you won't find challenging and important applications of undergraduate-level algorithm design.

[1]: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/dramat...

There's a difference between "I know how to do this but it would be a buggy mess and require a week or two of effort, therefore I shall use a library," and "I don't know how to do this but this library seems roughly applicable so maybe it will work."

The former is a healthy and pragmatic use of your most valuable resource -- time. The latter is a cop-out. If no one actually understands what is going on at a deep level in the library, the result is likely to be an over-engineered mess. It might be that you're doing the most efficacious and appropriate thing for the task, but it might not. And with many such decisions made over the course of a project, some of them are bound to be wrong unless someone can reason about them and explain their purpose.

I find this is most important when refactoring or updating code. Some junior engineer down the line will encounter some code he doesn't understand, and track down the guy who wrote it, and at this point there is a world of difference between that guy saying, "Yeah, we needed a data structure that does X and Y so we used that library," and "Uhhh, not sure why we used that library, does anything break if you remove it?"

Huh? Electric bill is the #1 useful metric for any workload at scale. If you're small, maybe human administration costs dominate that, but otherwise it's virtually guaranteed to be the primary operating cost.

I don't agree. Any input string that violates the strcpy invariants (must be a valid null-terminated string with length <= destination buffer size) will also violate the strncpy invariants if you subsequently treat the destination buffer as a string.

Since treating the destination buffer as a string is very tempting to do given that it came from a function named "str*cpy()", you've basically added another "Gotcha" to strcpy() without gaining any safety. You're basically trading one form of undefined behavior that's explicit in strcpy for another form of undefined behavior when a developer mishandles the return value of strncpy.

I'm not so sure. Step 1 is making sure people want a toilet. If you give someone a toilet without their understanding its purpose, it is going to be neglected and considered pointless.

If people want toilets, they can spend some free time to dig a big pit in a nearby yard, and it will be more sanitary than their current situation. Ultimately the two go hand in hand (toilets and education) but education without toilets is a problem that solves itself, while toilets without education is doomed to fail.

I think the actual argument is the converse: "We had this awesome idea! We tested it and we were right!" (In this context "violations" are the desired experimental result.)

It rests on whether bi-locality is an empirically interesting property. And as it turns out there are some well-cited theoretical physics papers on the interest in this property for quantum networks [1], so it is likely that I am not the right audience for this press release, and a physicist might find this significantly more interesting.

[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=bilocality+bell%27s+ine...

To someone who doesn't actually know many of the terms here, it sounds like they didn't accomplish much. They defined a stronger form of locality called "bi-locality" and found a way to violate it.

The structure of the argument is, "We stood up a strawman and knocked it down," which sounds pretty weak. Is bi-locality an inherently interesting property? Does all classical computation follow it? I don't know enough to know if I care, but press releases tend to oversell so my default stance has to be "No, I don't really care."

You're misreading the blog post. Choosing React because it's a well-engineered solution to a specific type of problem that plagues front-ends is fine. Choosing React because it's currently the most talked-about and blogged-about platform for front-end development is not, and is likely to lead to issues.

Similarly micro-services. If you cannot see the tradeoffs you are making when you choose to use them, you will blindly lose man-years of productivity when you inevitably encounter their rough edges. Prepare for them, and work around problem areas like monitoring and interface complexity, and it may be the right choice.

The number of confounding factors is enormous.

1. The man may be more likely to acquiesce to the wedding if they have a stable income and can support a family.

2. The interested parties on the bride's side may be more interested in pursuing a shotgun wedding if the man has a stable income.

3. The same reasons that lead women to pursue marriage with high-income men may also lead them to pursue pre-marital unprotected sex with those men.

I'm sure you can think of more. This seems like a very suspect way to segment a population.

I wouldn't say assuming infinite density of black holes involves an absence of evidence. It is a hypothesis made in advance of evidence, and it leads to specific predictions that should be falsifiable, and in that sense it's considered scientifically sound.

As for implications that can't be falsified, for example ones that (to butcher Douglas Adams) "rather involve being on the other side of the event horizon," scientists can and do feel free to disregard those. Contradictory assumptions by scientists do not imply that one of them is "wrong" unless their theories imply contradictory observable phenomena. In which case there is probably a fruitful experiment to be done.

Filing motions is not their main business. Their main business is putting down competitors. In fact the only reason it works is that they have enough revenue that they can retain lawyers (expensive) to do these things without affecting their bottom line much. Lawyers aren't cheap for Acushnet either, they just have the cash to throw around.

Adding fees just hurts small players more. This sounds like a "solution" that makes the problem worse.

One reason to be so nonchalant would be that the guy did in fact copy someone's patents wholesale, and was just waiting for the day someone would notice. If you know the lawsuit is unwinnable and not frivolous, no point complaining about it.

In a sense it is manipulative to consciously direct someone else's behavior in a way that benefits you. But interacting with people is rarely a zero-sum game. Whatever benefit you derive, warm feelings and enjoying the person they are talking to are both things that the other person probably wants from the conversation as well.

If you go into a conversation and the result is that the other person thinks you are uninteresting and they don't have anything to say, it is negative for everyone involved. Productive conversations are usually productive for both people, it's not likely that you are somehow sapping away something that belonged to another person, rather that you are turning time spent by both parties into something of value to both of you instead of wasting it.

There's an argument to be made the other way too. If you're using an unusual default rounding direction and you care which direction your PI constant is rounded, you might prefer it if PI rounded in the same rounding direction as the rest of your floating point math. In that case you'd want a constant that is equivalent to PI under all rounding modes.

"I took VC" probably parses out to "I took venture capital" in this same context, but it's a strange phrase and less common than "I took VC money."

I think this is because "VC" is only one type of investment, and for other similar forms of investment the phrase is nonsensical. For example, PE means "Private Equity" but you can't say "I took PE." (Equity means ownership, and taking money from an investor means giving up ownership, not taking it.) "I took VC" is basically abusing the dual meaning of "Capital" as the thing an investor provides in exchange for equity and the thing a business uses to operate.

The point being that the AGPL licensing of RethinkDB caused problems selling SMC to customers. So why invite those same problems again by replacing it with other GPL'ed software?