wladimir

My first thought was "these are US or SK actions". On further thought it doesn't seem likely, but still, everyone can hide behind the Anonymous flag for plausible denyability.

cgdb looks promising. I really, really liked the Turbo Debugger in the 90's. No debugger has offered me the same experience since. It was fast, the text-based windowed interface allowed efficiently jumping to assembly as well as to the source, view registers, editable hex dumps of memory, view watchpoints etc.

gdb is super-powerful but was a bit of a setback interface-wise because everything has to be done on a plain command line. And the GUI-based wrappers around it don't appeal to me much (don't know why, the ones I tried felt somewhat clunky).

Worryingly, indeed. To me it appears that the "cloud" is the next bastion of centralization and "too big to fail"s. In this case, instead of providing services in a decentralized fashion that makes it hard to attack, they hide behind ever larger and stronger behemoths.

In the case of cloudflare there is no great data loss if they disappear, though they could intercept passwords and private data (can you trust them? who has access? what if they are hacked?). But when a service such as gmail (suddenly) disappears... it would be devastating to many people. Much like the failure of a bank.

In what sense are banks decentralized? Aren't those too-big-to-fail giants what we're trying to get away from in the first place? :-)

Agreed. Still, bitcoincharts is a centralized site too, and could be DDoSed, overloaded, blocked, etc.

Maybe ticker/trade data could be spread over a gossip network as well. That's not as trivial as it sounds, though, for example how to check that trades are real and not just spam/manipulation. Maybe some way of authenticating exchanges by signing the packets (but then -otc would be left out... maybe their reputation system could be integrated somehow).

I know that. But for some reason there is an extreme reliance on mtgox for price information. Even trades in -otc are usually based on the mtgox price. So maybe I worded it wrong, it's not so much trade that is centralized but the trade/price broadcasting.

One thing with Bitcoin that still needs to be decentralized is the exchanges. This shows again that mtgox is the achilles heel. Sure, there are many other exchanges and ways to sell/buy, but it's telling (and sad) that DDoSing mtgox is an effective price manipulation method.

As the stakes grow higher Bitcoin is turning into an interesting endeavor in building resilent systems and preventing Single Points of Failure.

Botnets are usually rented out. So there is an opportunity cost, when the nodes and their computational/network resources could be used for more profitable activities.

You are right. CPUs are already useless for mining. Currently, GPUs can still mine their share (but running a GPU miner on a botnet is a risk; computers become very noisy, hot and slow, which increases the detection rate). But as the first ASICs have started shipping (or have they?) this is expected to change very soon, and the only way to make a profit with mining will be with custom hardware. This rules out botnets pretty effectively.

Can we stop with the bitcoin topics that are solely about the price? Sure, if a company starts accepting it it's news, if something happens to bitcoin network it's news, but not this. This is getting crazy. This is not 'pimp your currency' news (yes, I say that as a bitcoin dev). I'm sure everyone one HN has made their mind about it by now anyway...

Indeed, it's surprising. I wonder if it has dedicated circuitry to do the verification, or that it somehow executes a verification program on the processor itself. I suppose it's the second because the first sounds really expensive.

It's an international currency, so it's interesting how all the "government will kill Bitcoin" hysteria is coming from the US. Is that a specific US thing, that people have a special distrust and fear of your government destroying everything?

That is the current state of affairs, but I don't see how any of those issues is fundamental, or should be extrapolated to 'ultimately'. Sure, BTC has a different risk profile from a bank account, or gold bars under your mattress, but if it keeps up the current pace, there will be dead-easy methods for cold storage and safe, hardware based wallets commonly available soon. People are working on those already (see for example http://bitcointrezor.com/)...

Even though they look a bit fake, I like these photos. The atmosphere reminds me of Alan Weisman's book "the world without us". The cities appear as ghost cities, everything dark, allowing natural light to be visible again. It's like the early stages after humans deserted it, before the forces of nature (combined with lack of maintenance) break through and crumble the buildings.

AFAIK that's already more than was lost in any of the bitcoin heists...

OpenGL ES 2.0 is still the safest bet, as it is what most mobile devices support. Though devices with GLES 3.0 are appearing, driver support is still subpar. I agree it may be time to look at bumping the API level.

In principle I agree with you. But the danger here is that, unlike with physical projectiles, it can be difficult or impossible to find out where a hack attack is originally coming from. I'm sure all of the world powers and quite a few smaller ones have their own international botnet by now.

Take for example the recent "cyber attacks" on South Korea. They first accused China, North Korea, before doing deeper investigation and finding that the attack originated from somewhere else. They could have very well killed the wrong people, starting a war with the wrong country.

And like the infamous "weapons of mass destruction" this can easily be used to attack a country under false pretenses.

IMHO much more resources should be spent on research and tools to make software intrinsically safer and more secure, instead of all the pooha about war and killing. It could lead to much more sustainable solutions that actually solve the problem of "we're much too vulnerable digitally".

E-ink sort of addresses the 'distracting' part for me. I find it much more pleasant to read than from LCD. No direct light shining into the eyes, and the low frame rate is also an advantage here as it means no annoying animations and 'real time' distractions.

Oh this fills me with a mix of nostalgia and dread. The first time I saw a 'flat' instruction set such as MIPS and ARM, with a large file of registers that are treated the same, was really refreshing.

Yes it could. I suppose especially on ARM/MIPS SoCs (which many consumer devices are based on). Linux is a one of the few valid choices once you stray from x86, especially as China govt has already said they want to reduce dependence on Google/Android. Maybe that's where Ubuntu comes in.

I'm not sure why the register article is the one being most voted up, instead of the official Canonical announcement: http://www.canonical.com/content/canonical-and-chinese-stand...

Open source dongles are good, everyone is welcome to fork our repos: http://www.github.com/imx6-dongle/

Indeed. For me as open source developer, the most frustrating issues are the ones that demand functionality without code attached. Especially if they are worded in a way that the creator is somehow entitled to have his issue solved (without offering any compensation).

Then again, I have never been in a project that got 75 new pull requests per day...

See http://walter-nest.deviantart.com/art/Homeworld-2-Space-Back...

Note that the backgrounds are meant to map over a sky sphere, so they look a bit distorted.

Please don't joke about this. Perception of ownership has changed so much over the last ~20 years, that I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually tried to jail people for improving hardware they bought, by claiming that you only 'license' the device instead of having bought it, or some other contorted reasoning (give it to the IP maximalists to come up with twisted lines of thought and sad analogy stories). Luckily NVidia isn't that sue-happy, but still...

Edit: see also this, currently on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5394928

Also the renderings that alternate from wireframe to solid fill. It just changes too quickly which is distracting when you try to read the text around it.

I'm sure they tried that. It is likely that the driver uses another "proprietary" way to read the ID as well and uses that as definitive answer.

Having said that, distinguishing in software would mean that open source drivers such as Nouveau won't see any difference between the cards and can advertise all the features always.

Using vertex colors with linear interpolation over triangles is an interesting way to compress low-frequency images such as backgrounds. I had no idea that they did this in HW2. It also looks surprisingly good.

The page is neigh-unreadable though, with all the moving stuff. Please add a pause button :)

It may be computation-bound (I'm not sure) but training deep networks generally does use a lot of memory, because of the giant training sets. You're right that GPUs are a good fit, for example libraries such a theano exploit this.

Now this is hacker news!

Wonder why it doesn't get upvoted more, while we have 2 friggin SimCity posts on the frontpage :(