Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
I believe it’s a sort of satellite-mounted weapon, and not extricable in any way from full surveillance a la smartphone location or - even worse, multiple exploited access points thus triangulating location.

I think it’s most logically a geo-stationary satellite, so wherever launches those might have more information about who might have a radio transmitter or two up there.

Comment · 9 years ago
Note: the code to extract this data has not been released to the public alongside the paper.
Comment · 9 years ago
Yeah, I actually would like to see a modern HN / Craigslist blend. One thing both sites do well is having a simple quick-loading site which works without JavaScript.
Comment · 9 years ago
Network effect, reliability, free, anonymous, ability to run without JavaScript.

If Craigslist decided to modernize today, they could potentially disrupt the state of things on the internet. Facebook is trying to move in on their territory for sure. Unfortunately, I don't think they will. If a new-kid-on-the-block could offer anonymity, reliability, and free regional market based transactions, with preferably integration with Monero, it would be a killer app for the crypto industry.

Comment · 10 years ago
When somebody quits, their non-city troops should be abandoned. Otherwise there is too much volatility in the game: say I am about to capture somebody's king and they quit instead: now I don't get their land and troops, rather I have to fight against them. Enough of these types of swings, and the game is swung towards the lucky ones in a volatile way.
Comment · 10 years ago
Such a genius move, surprising nobody saw it coming. Just think: he will already have access to a large base of customer's roofs (which SolarCity effectively owns) --- 1 million by 2018.

Then, it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to an on-demand, fully-cached, mesh network. They're probably not far from being able to provide internet service to all SolarCity customers, just a bit of a modification to the contract.

Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Agda is a programming language where "each program in it must terminate and all possible patterns must be matched. Without this feature, the logic behind the language becomes inconsistent, and it becomes possible to prove arbitrary statements."

Since all programs terminate, reasoning about arbitrary properties about said programs becomes decidable.

Comment · 10 years ago
For example, a typical C program to compute the sum of a list of numbers includes three kinds of parentheses and three kinds of assignment operators in five lines of code

Let me take the opportunity to plug a new language which I have spent the last 5 months designing: github.com/jbodeen/ava

An ava solution -- 9 lines of code, and 1 set of parentheses -- would look like this:

  let rec sum list = 
    let are_we_at_the_end = 0 in
    let take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list n list =
      add n ( sum list )
    in
    list 
      are_we_at_the_end
      take_a_number_and_the_rest_of_the_list 
    in
Maybe we need to zoom out of ancient languages into more intuitive paradigms if programming is to become easier for more people to access
Comment · 10 years ago
Ethereum could quickly outdate itself by defining a fixed language. How will the language adapt? Very slowly by consensus if Ethereum hopes to become a large market player.

Bitcoin could be easily made Turing complete. If each transaction can store 80 bytes of information, then one could use 48 bytes to store code and the remaining 32 bytes to refer to another transaction storing the next block of code and thus chain together code. Unless I am missing something, a new currency is simply unnecessary, and will always be at a second-mover disadvantage.

Soon, I am sure a prototype of what I described will be released on bitcoin thus obscuring Ethereum. A solid use-case for distributed computing would be distributed HTTP delivery. If ethereum could offer a product for decentralized web-hosting, then I would buy into their product, but until then the whole situation is just vaporware to me.

Comment · 11 years ago
What are the chances that somebody would do LAX to Santa Barbara ?
Comment · 11 years ago
Tesla is most certainly valued correctly, with a P/E ratios similar to that of Amazon, and a valuation just slightly above the likes of Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Seems to be a reasonable estimation to me.
Comment · 11 years ago
The Basic Income ship has not sailed. Social networks of the future will divulge a percentage of their profits back to active users. I know because I am building one as we speak. Now that you know my platform's secret, you can race me to zero.
Comment · 11 years ago
Could you please elaborate? I came here to mention that the Soviets built the earliest "balanced Ternary" computers, which is like binary but with a negative digit, which can be much better in high precision arithmetic.

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