mistermumble

Joined 15 years ago

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Comment · 9 years ago

Worthwhile article. But please correct the typo in the HN headline. (Even though it is in the original, it grates).

Comment · 9 years ago

I have had a half-dozen gmail accounts over the past 10 years and all are active with no problem.

Comment · 9 years ago

I have many pleasant memories of living in France many years ago: great food, strong respect for ideas, great ambiance. And, no, I did not speak French and never encountered any bias from the Parisians, despite my California way of speaking.

Berlin and Stockholm sound good too, have never been. But I would respond first to the nation that is proactively reaching out.

I don't view it as "cashing in on the Trump situation" as much as throwing a lifeline to those of us who are drowning in a sea of hate and anti-science.

Comment · 9 years ago

Population control would have to begin with the US, which on a per-capita basis has more than double the emission than any other nation or region (China, European union, etc). More than 8 times the rate of populous nations like India and Indonesia.

How likely is that to happen, especially in Trump's America?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Comment · 9 years ago

See the section in the article with the heading "Dependency Injection". It talks about a specific scenario where there is one component that needs to show the state of the entire system (an activity light turned on, for example), where any component can trigger this, but the last component to become inactive turns the light off.

Comment · 9 years ago

I agree that Assad is "stomping on innocents". But so are the rebels he is fighting, namely ISIS and Al Qaeda and similar groups in a smorgasbord of terror. Shall we bomb them too (and thereby strengthen Assad)? Mideast politics are horrendously complicated and need to be untangled carefully, as one would untangle the wiring in a bomb. Unintended consequences are the norm, unfortunately.

Comment · 9 years ago

I think Kilo is a great little project, well-structured and very educational.

Another useful resource I've relied upon in the past, dates back to the 1990s: Freyja, which is Craig Finseth's emacs-like editor written in C.

Here is a list of features:

  * deletions are automatically saved into a "kill buffer" 
  * ability to edit up to 11 files at once 
  * ability to view two independent windows at once 
  * integrated help facility 
  * integrated menu facility, with help on all commands 
  * can record and play back keyboard macros 
  * supports file completion and limited directory operations 
  * includes a fully-integrated RPN type calculator

It was designed for MS-DOS with the Cygwin terminal library.

I found the architecture to be very clean, and it is well explained in Finseth's classic book ("The Craft of Text Editing"). The book is worth reading even if you never touch the code: http://www.finseth.com/craft/

It uses a multi-buffer architecture roughly similar to Walter Bright's text editor (see sibling posting). (I knew about Finseth's editor years ago, but was not aware of Bright's work until now, thanks Walter!)

The Freyja source can be downloaded from: http://www.finseth.com/parts/freyja.php

Look for the link to "freyja30.exe" which turns out to be freyja30.zip (not an executable).

Comment · 9 years ago

64 and still coding, although not full-time.

8 years ago I learned Objective-C and physics engines and published a number of mobile apps for IOS.

Nowadays I am learning Go, Solidity & Viper and writing blockchain-based dapps. Big fun.

Comment · 9 years ago

If one wanted to overthink this, one could say there is a "calculus of privilege" that depends upon context.

In many contexts (geographical and social contexts), being white, male and America adds up to maximum privilege.

But in other contexts, white and male usually add up to a positive -- but being American can subtract (which is why backpackers are returning to the habit of sewing the Canadian flag patch on their gear, even if they are from the US).

In the era of Trump, the attribute of being American has turned negative, in many places.

I suppose the bottom line is that if you are placing yourself in different contexts, don't assume that that calculus of privilege works the same way on the Russian border as it does in Virginia or Indiana.

And if you are a Sikh in the United States, that calculus, which was at best neutral, has now turned sharply negative, sad to say.

Comment · 9 years ago

Minor correction: it was Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) who said "Information wants to be free". Paul Graham may have quoted it -- along with a multitude of others, since it was first uttered in 1984.

Actually turns out the original quote attributed to Brand is not quite right. There is a qualifier ("Information almost wants to be free"), but that qualifier dropped off along the way.

See http://www.digitopoly.org/2015/10/25/information-wants-to-be...

Comment · 9 years ago

Solidity is the most widely adopted language, but there are other choices including Serpent (Python-like)and LLL (lisp-like).

A few developers I know use Serpent because it is simple and stable (meaning it has not been changed or updated for a while, unlike Solidity which they say is continually being tweaked in a manner that can be aggravating).

Interestingly, Vitalik's preferred language (say for prototyping Casper algorithms) is Python. He created Serpent and is now working on Viper, which sounds like a next-generation Serpent. Viper is being implemented in Python3.

You can see the work in progress at: https://github.com/ethereum/viper

Comment · 9 years ago

The article is sensationalist, especially with regard to the "fall" part of the "rise and fall of Ethereum".

The reality is that Ethereum as a platform has gained strength, credibility and market traction over the last six months. There have been 3 hard forks and 1 soft fork, partly in response to the system being under almost continuous attack (mostly denial of service). The effective response by Vitalik and company has increased trust, not decreased it. As the saying goes: "What does not kill you, makes you stronger."

More and more developers building applications on top of this platform. The MelonPort token sale ICO (on the Ethereum platform) sold out in 2.5 minutes yesterday.

It's not just independent Ramen-fueled startups, but "enterprise Ethereum" has become a thing. JP Morgan, Santander, Microsoft, Redhat, Cisco, Accenture, etc -- for better or worse -- are joining the Ethereum bandwagon.

I think it is still way early to call a winner in the blockchain platform wars. There are dozens of well-funded competitors trying to gain dominance over established platforms like the Bitcoin technology stack and the Ethereum platform -- including IBM-led Hyperledger Fabric and the bluechip banking consortium led by R3CEV.

But if there is one dog at the top of the blockchain platform heap right now, it is Ethereum.

See:

http://www.coindesk.com/jp-morgan-santander-said-join-enterp...

https://media.consensys.net/the-birth-of-enterprise-ethereum...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5u6uhb/melonport_...

Comment · 9 years ago

I created my yahoo account many years ago, using my real first name and lastname, and using my real birthday.

Now I know better, and never use any of my real information in my online accounts. Meaning not just birthday, but also a fake name for my first pet, for my first teacher, for my favorite food, and other challenge questions. Just in case.

The only problem is that some online services send me a Happy Birthday message on my fake birthday, which can be a surprise in my inbox.

Comment · 9 years ago

Thanks for the pointer to the video ("E to the Pi for Dummies" by Mathologer). It is definitely worth watching. Much more understandable, imho, than the one referenced at the top of this thread.

Your text summary of the video is accurate and likely makes sense to some people but not so much for others (namely, me).

Tour words are hard to grok until you see the visual depiction --- until you see the sequence of n transformations become a spiral arrangement of triangles that ends up approximating the (-1, 0i) point in the complex plane.

Comment · 9 years ago

There's a startup called Flywheel that has been selling shovels to taxi cab companies -- in the form of electronic dispatch, payments, navigation and GPS-based metering.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/flywheel-expands-uber-like...