sysk

> They don't calculate the difficulty correctly?

Yes. It's possible to create a long chain at low difficulty and the original bitcoin client protects against that by computing the total "work" that has gone in a chain. However, Electrum just assumes that the longest chain will be the one which has most "work" in it which is wrong.

Also, Electrum wallet and friends don't do proof of work validation, they merely check which is the longest chain.

Pretty disappointed by the derisive comments in this thread. For a bunch of startup enthusiasts and innovators, we sure do seem to like status quo. Or maybe it's just a contrarian signalling thing? Sorry for going meta.

I have a very limited understanding of how distributions work so this is probably a stupid question but why don't RHEL/CentOS update the Linux kernel they ship with their 6.x OS? Isn't the kernel supposed to never break user space apps?

When there will be a better alternative.

I'm not a sysadmin but recently started using CoreOS to deploy small web apps. Could anyone explain to me like I'm 5 what's the difference between those cluster schedulers and something like CoreOS' fleet (https://github.com/coreos/fleet)?

Ah, interesting question. I had never implemented a chat server before and initially read the IRC/XMPP specifications but Slack felt like a "superset" of both (federation/p2p wasn't a priority for me) and I was more familiar with web protocols.

The stack is Node.js and PostgreSQL (I probably reinvented some kind of message queue). There is a "dumb" websocket server that just receives/sends events from/to the backend server. Both the websocket and backend servers can scale horizontally.

I haven't written any XMPP/IRC gateways for now though I suppose it wouldn't be that difficult to do.

Depressing indeed. Are there any other open source projects that are API compatible with a proprietary product/service? Is it ethical? I feel like it is but would be interested to hear HN's opinion.

Some variant of this comment is also constantly being made in "X written in Y" threads and it's getting a bit annoying. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8907143, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751303, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6160293, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5436736, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9061312, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8163537, etc.)

What is the best way to reach you?

I've been working on a Bitcoin related web-based/mobile software for the past few months and have a working MVP (Node.js, PostgreSQL, Angular stack although I'm flexible about using other technologies in the future - Go and React come to mind). I haven't publicly launched it yet (no traction :/) but I'm fairly certain there is a market for it and there are a few obvious paths to monetisation. The idea is novel, it's a white market (no direct competition at the moment) and the barrier to entry is reasonably high (mostly due to technical complexity and potential network effect).

I'm not sure if in its current incarnation the idea could scale to become more than a "lifestyle" business but I have some ideas. I've been thinking about the possibility of getting a co-founder and funding lately. One problem I'm facing right now is that on one hand, I want to give my potential co-founder a large chunk of equity (30-50%) so that (s)he feels motivated but on the other hand, I'd feel a bit uncomfortable about just "giving away" a few months worth of labor and expenses. Having a co-founder who is willing to throw in a small investment would solve that problem.

If you think you might be interested, shoot me an email at seekingcofounder@tempmail.de

Have you considered freelancing or running a small consulting business?

I admit that if I was faced with the opportunity of hiring someone a lot older and experienced than me I'd have two immediate thoughts: "This guy would be a great asset, we need him" and "I think I'd be way too intimidated and nervous being his boss, can't do it".

Doing consulting work solves the second question since it changes the boss-employee dynamic to a more business-to-business like one.

Now, I am not in a position to hire anyone so take my introspection with a grain of salt.

I was hoping there would be an obvious answer. I guess I could rephrase the question this way: "is it common for people who make ~120k/year to drive a Porsche?" or "if you'd have a median income of all Porsche owners, what would it be?". I just want to get a general idea.

I'm actually wondering about the "Porsche or a civic" question now. Can you afford a Porsche on ~$120k a year in the US? (I'm not a car guy)

Do you actually have 167 servers running in your home or do you rent them on e.g. EC2 when you need them? If it's the former case, is it because it makes financial sense (I'd be surprised) or is it for the experience/fun?

What I really meant by "easily accessible" was "publicly available".

Could you link to some concrete examples? If I find a bug, I will always use Github's issue tracker. I also usually ask questions directly on Github for the less popular libraries and only use SO for more popular languages/libraries/frameworks. I don't think there's a big overlap in my usage pattern.

The next philosophical question would be: Is it meaningfully there if we don't notice its presence? :)

> They did grasshopper landing without them right?

As someone who doesn't know the slightest bit about space technology, I was a bit confused about the fact that they successfully landed another rocket. If that's the case why is the landing of Flacon 9 so significant? Is it like a bigger rocket or something?

It's crazy how some people in this thread get so emotional and negative about a new tool. If you don't like it, just don't use it. Yes, we know that CGI is slow and that you don't like Javascript.

My current web app is composed of 10 database hosts and 11 REST APIs. 21 VMs would blow my laptop's resources away while 21 containers run just fine. For me, that makes Docker a lot more attractive for local development. Also, Docker removes the need for a CM if you are into stateless deployments.

I thought creating a BOSH release would be too much work but I will try that. What would be nice is if BOSH could abstract a cluster of VMs as a single Docker host and let me operate on containers instead of VMs (I'm not sure if that's possible at the moment without significant work).

For what it's worth, I tried to run the CloudFoundry release on my local BOSH installation and it froze my Macbook. I'm sure it's very useful in cloud environments or on beefier machines, but it's not very useable for local development vs something like Docker which doesn't require a bunch of VMs.

I don't enjoy solitary activities when I drink so no. That being said, I do comment on HN under the influence sometimes.

This debate has been done to death on HN but the short version is that people who use ad blockers are essentially freeloading on people who don't block them. For many websites, no ads = no revenue = no content/service.

It's not clear to me how SSH differs from SSL/TLS conceptually. It seems to me both achieve similar goals (encrypted tunnel, client/server authentication). Perhaps we should take the best bits of both protocols and create a new one? But then, I am reminded of http://xkcd.com/927/.

I think the term you are looking for is "hosted database" or "database as a service". Database management service is a bit vague.

If you are comfortable around a Linux command line shell, I suggest getting a VPS (AWS EC2, Linode, etc.) and simply installing MongoDB using your distribution's package manager.

But it sounds you are looking for a more managed service and don't really want to bother with system administration (which is perfectly fine). In that case, I would recommend going with a PaaS provider like Heroku which offers a number of out of the box hosted services including (but not limited to) MongoDB.

I love hating on VCs as much as the other guy, but I must admit I'm envious of the ability of Fred Wilson (and VCs in general) to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I wonder if that's a skill that can be learned/taught.

I think you are getting down voted because you voiced a very controversial opinion without much explanation to to back it. Still, I think there is some merit to it (although I wouldn't go as far as saying we're ready for the "one language to rule them all" yet).

The paradox of choice and duplication of effort are very real problems. Let's take web app development for example. We have PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, C#, etc. Each language has their own set of libraries/frameworks and it takes a lot of time and effort for a programmer to learn all of them. I've been developing web apps for 10 years and yet, I couldn't contribute to a web app written in Java. What if instead of having X libraries in Y languages, we had X*Y libraries for a single language or X libraries of Y higher quality for a single language?

Standardisation has lots of benefits.

The web standardised on HTTP/HTML/CSS/Javascript and it enabled the creation of a massive ecosystem of tools, libraries and pool of developers. Front-end developers can easily switch jobs and contribute to other projects. I personally dislike languages that compile to HTML/CSS/Javascript because I think standardisation trumps their benefits. C is a de facto standard in the embedded world.

In my opinion, sometimes the hammers are so similar (e.g. Python/Ruby) that we should just collectively agree to only use one.

I'm a bit confused. Is this supposed to apply to software development in general or just package management / software repository systems? The author is describing his ideas at a high level of abstraction but I can't seem to make a concrete connection. For example, how would one design a web app in a cathedralesque way?