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timq

138 karma · joined May 27, 2014

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timq··on Goldman Sachs Is Setting Up a Cryptocurrency Trading Desk
Let's give that a try, from what I understand, coins are generated once for all in the genesis account and then need to be sent to other accounts. Hence that's why you send free coins, right?

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timq··on Simplicity: A New Language for Blockchains [pdf]
Just for the reader awareness: this guy right here in Gregory Maxwell, a key person working for Blockstream. Nullc actively support 1Mb block to artificially cripple the blockchain and thus create artificial demand for their centralized and bank-like product: side chains and LN hubs.

That's said, Gavin was driven out of Bitcoin development at the time by you and your team blocking any block size increase with dumb arguments. The interested reader will search bitcointalk for such recurring discussion. He then created Bitcoin XT wich included a voting system for miners to vote for bigger blocks. XT nodes were the target of massive Ddos attacks, and some miners were as well. XT failed because of that, despite a growing support for big blocks. From that day Gavin and Mike gave up knowing that small blockers had taken control of Bitcoin, thanks to the $70'000'000 AXA and other investors put into Blockstream.

The whole Bitcoin foundation was a side project of him, and did not discredit itself. But since /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk was already controlled by people supporting small blocks, and very complaisant with Blockstream, you and Luke Jr and others used those channels to spread misinformation about this foundation run by people supporting big blocks. Today, such discussions channels are so censored that only remains (probably paid) trolls, small blockers and newcomers completely lost in this shitshow. Banned people created /r/btc and this sub is growing quite fast and sometime has more active users than /r/bitcoin does.

Fun fact about you: you used the same kind of practice when you were contributing to Wikipedia. Indeed, you were aggressively blanking user page because of supposed copyright violation no one but you cared about. After dozens of complaints you received a ban but in the meantime you automated the process using a sock puppet account. Hopefully at the end they got you out, the "toxic" and "insane" "gmaxwell".

Last but not least, comparing commit number does not highlight the role of each individual. Gavin was a project leader and could see the big picture. It's like saying Linus Torvalds is useless because he barely does non-merge commit. Gavin saw the small block shitshow coming from miles away, he saw the fee rising from miles away. Bitcoin is in a very poor state, blocks are full, the fee market makes no sense ans is quite unstable, sides chains were proven impractical to reach VISA level of transactions, and LN is no more than a take over of banks on Bitcoin. We are talking of fees bigger than a dollar for a classic transaction, already micro transactions are not possible anymore with Bitcoin. No wonders why Ethereum is taking the lead.

Anyway I will stop here, it's a pain to write comments on mobile phones. If this interests you, have a look to the sticky post in /r/btc, it contains sourced and well written links about the current Bitcoin situation and how we got there.

timq··on Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month
By design, miners control Bitcoin. Before Ethereum, miners were fine with Bitcoin core because they were still making tons of profits, and blocks weren't full. They were almost all following core and that's why core has a lot of power.

Now that Bitcoin hit a scaling ceiling and a competitor who can scale way beyond Bitcoin is rapidely taking the lead, they finally realize why Core/Blockstream strategy is bad for them, and bad for Bitcoin. Hence they came up with setwit2x, wich is a weak attempt to get ride of Blockstream (because its segwit first, then 2Mb blocks, then... not much), but a strong signal that something is changing.

timq··on Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month
The stupidity of not raising the block side and pushing for segwit and side chains (or LN) as a way of scaling has been debunked so many time that still believing in it is like believing the earth is still flat. Come on, even a newcomer seeing full blocks, skyrocketing fees, growing transactions backlog will understand how brain dead it is to not increase the block size...

I know there are still people believing in Blockstream because of the intense censure and (paid?) trolls in /r/bitcoin and bitcointalk.org. But this bullshit show is going for more than 3 years now, if you still can't see through that, I'm sorry, but you deserve to be called a "pro-Blockstream troll". If calling things the way they are is incivility, then I'm happy to be incivil!

timq··on Bitcoin Is Having a Civil War as It Enters a Critical Month
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Because what I see from my point of view is a dozen of Blockstream employees pushing for segwit, with barely no support from the community nor the miners. And on the other side I see a growing majority of miners, a growing majority of the community asking for a simple block size increase, wich is a matter of 10 lines modified, compared to 5 000 lines and a great bunch of complexity that segwit bring.

But I'm probably wasting my time with you, looking at your comment history you seems to be a typical pro-Blockstream troll.

timq··on Poll Finds 70% of Bitcoin Users Prefer Segwit for Scaling
bitcoin users != coinjournal.net readers
timq··on Bitcoin's ASICBOOST Problem Explained [pdf]
I hope people on Hacker news doesn't get duped by all the toxic people dismissing BU and promoting Core. The facts are that r/Bitcoin and bitcointalk.org, both owned by theymos and a handful of other people, are paid by Blockstream to censor any dissident opinions. About the ongoing censorship, have a look to this article [1], which is a compilation of facts, it's very depressing. Up to a point where a second subreddit /r/btc full of banned people have almost half of the active user of /r/bitcoin, despite its relative young age.

Bitcoin core also organize troll campaigns [2], push for a radical, unwanted change of Bitcoin with SegWit, coordinate attack on nodes when a vulnerability is discovered [3], and spread FUD everyday, sometimes technical nonsens like this very non-issue that is ASICBOOST. Those people work fulltime to stole bitcoin from the community, thanks to the huge bank account of Blockstream, the company behind all this shit show.

At least this proove that Bitcoin rely on a very solid basis, because despite having 75 million in bank, blockstream opted to corrupt core developpers and community managers instead of competing for hashrate. But still, the situation is pretty bad right now.

[1]: https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-history-censorship-bitcoin/

[2]: http://telegra.ph/Inside-the-Dragons-Den-Bitcoin-Cores-Troll...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5zgefe/this_was_an_orc...

timq··on Bitcoin's ASICBOOST Problem Explained [pdf]
> - Segwit actualy block harmful form of ASICBOOST

It's - of course - not the only solution to this "problem", but somehow this paper doesn't propose anything else other than segwit, and his conclusion is a typical Bitcoin Core propaganda.

> by "growing majority" you mean handful of chinese miners and 2% of nodes (http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...)

You aren't without knowing that in Bitcoin, miners establish consensus by voting with their hashrate. Nodes count doesn't prove anything because its really easy to host a node. The point is: there is more miners supporting BU than Segwit [1].

[1]: http://xtnodes.com/#bitcoin_classic_blocks

timq··on Bitcoin's ASICBOOST Problem Explained [pdf]
Just to point out that SegWit is everything but "already adopted in the industry". It turns out that SegWit is the solution promoted by the developers of bitcoin core to allow for bigger blocks, and solve some issues like transactions maleability. It's more than 10 000 lines of code highly controversial because they require... A soft fork, and will change bitcoin in a fundamental ways.

Not to add that a company called "Blockstream" have paid almost every developers of bitcoin core to push Segwit without a clear consensus from the community. Worse, this company actually support the huge censorship happening in bitcointalk and r/bitcoin. Blockstream received more than 75 millions from AXA, for obscure reasons.

The paper only focus on Segwit, without mentioning that Segwit has nothing to do with ASICBOOST. The community and a growing majority of miners is actually switching to bitcoin unlimited, a fork of bitcoin core.

Sorry for the little off topic comment but I love Bitcoin and I hate that a few dishonest people took control of it and try to destroy it.

timq··on EmDrive study officially published
> the test really needed to be performed inside of a vaccuum

If I'm not mistaken they did, and the thrust was almost the same than the one in air. No perfect vacuum here, but still.

"Vacuum conditions are provided by two roughing pumps and two high-speed turbopumps, and all vacuum tests are performed at or below 8×10^−6 torr"

"The vacuum test data collected show a consistent performance of 1.2±0.1 mN/kW, which is very close to the average impulsive performance measured in air (also 1.2 mN/kW)"

timq··on Everything makes sense if David Kleiman was Satoshi Nakamoto. Here’s why
satoshin@gmx.com expired somewhere in 2011~2012 (gmx remove account within one year of inactivity), and someone immediately took it, and then used it to take control of Satoshi's account on p2pfoundation and bitcointalk.

But even without knowing that, Satoshi had no reasons at the time to came back just to say that one particular guy was not him, just on p2pfoundation and without any kind of proof.

timq··on Files Are Hard
There is an easy way to write data without corruption. First copy your file-to-be-changed as a temporary file or create a temporary file. Then modify the temporary file and write whatever you want in it. Finally, use rename() to atomically replace the old file by the temporary one.

The same logic also apply to directories, although you will have to use links or symlinks to have something really atomic.

It may not work on strangely configured systems, like if your files are spread over different devices over the network (or maybe with NFS). But in those cases you will be able to detect it if you catch errors of rename() and co (and you should catch them of course). So no silver bullet here, but still a good shot.

timq··on The Debate Around “Do We Even Need CSS Anymore?”
> The performance differences, between CSS styles applied from a JS file and a CSS file are very small on modern browsers, with JS being faster sometime.

False, JS have to be interpreted and you have issue with document not being fully loaded. And CSS is easy to parse, faster to parse and "run" than JS. No, saying that JS is faster than CSS is just false.

> JS files are cached.

CSS too, and even can be prerendered. And CSS works when JS is disabled.

> Preprocessors are not fine, they complicate and slow down the development process.

That's not an argument at all because with the right tool its just like using a compiler. See "make" for example. Also you have to see how much you gain with the preprocessor, maybe loosing 0.01ms per "make" is worse it since you write code 1.2 times faster...

> Inlining CSS is not stupid, OP discusses the numerous advantages it brings...

And do not highlight the obvious disadvantages.

timq··on The Debate Around “Do We Even Need CSS Anymore?”
CSS preprocessors are fine. Processors only understand binary but noone programs in binary today. If CSS become the binary of tomorrow, it's fine.

Inlining CSS is stupid, it makes your page bigger, less flexible, doesn't use browser caching technics, and didn't solve the problem at all (or make it worse...).

CSS with Javascript is even worse, as it will be slow as fuck, hard to maintain, and equivalent to directly write CSS by hand anyway.

flex-boxes, box-model, table display, and more... solve most of problems you will ever had.

timq··on French Constitutional Council Widely Approves Surveillance Law
> And maybe prepare for physical violence. This may get ugly in a few years.

French here too... This law is sad but keep in mind that our justice is still the only place where they makes sense. Overall, our country is still a great place to live.

timq··on Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
Thank you, this is indeed what I wanted to say! (I'm still learning english ;) )
timq··on Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
> In France, that depends mostly of your shade of skin.

Well, it mostly depend if you live in a sensible district or not. It happens that mostly Arab and black people live in sensible district because they are poorer than the normal average french people. And (relative) poverty is the source of a lot of social problems.

I don't say there is no racism in France too, there is. But it is more indirect, like people trying to avoid looking at black people, or people who prefer helping the white guy instead the black one at school is another example.

timq··on The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers
One reason to keep reading man pages is because you will likely discover new thing you did not expected. Also reading man pages help you to understand the tool philosophy/workflow, if the man page is well writen (which is often the case). This hold for any kind of documentation as well.

When I google something, I usually do not remember the answer to my question, the only thing I remember is the keyword to put in my futur query to get the same answer. You will get your answer quicker, but you wont learn much. So personally, I prefer reading man pages (when I can) than use google.

timq··on How I cracked NQ Vault's “encryption”
That's the famous one-time-pad :)
timq··on Ask HN: The purest skills needed to become a programmer?
Jiro would practice and be _simply_ pragmatic.
timq··on Violating randomization standards
It's in fact half of a feature, because the generation method is not specified. So you can't use it for terrain generation in portable code, for example.
timq··on Systemd redux: The end of Linux
Hey, pulseaudio still does not work for me and when it rarely manage to get out some sound, my CPU is over 10%.
timq··on Googlebot's recent improvements might revolutionize web development
I can't believe that single page webapp are easier to write than true old website. Maybe you can gain some performance improvement but if you use a framework you will loose this very little gain. Those who claims that developpement is easier with framework on a single page have too learn programming, because for most case, the "old" way works very well and is incredibly faster than a bloated javascript page.

I really, really dislike this approache of doing website, it make the code and the design hard to understand and cost a lot of problem when comes the time to debug or made major changes.

There are no magic when using javascript, it will slow down the client, and manipulating DOM is very slow. Doing things server side cost nothing compared to javascript. Remember that loading a webpage is very fast when you have only a CSS and html code, because it very easy to put it in cache and doing some pretty nice optimizations on it.

With frameworks, making "webapp" become a huge nigthmare, things becomes overly complex and bloated, the request as to pass trough a lot of layers before end up somewhere, and the developpement is not faster than have a custom code. Good framework don't make good programmer.

When the article say "put the CSS inside a <style> tag on the page - and the JS inside a <script> tag", it's just horrible, fuck it.

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