bwood

11 ms·

61.
by bwood 11y ago
It might be a little far-fetched, but there's a thought experiment called the "paperclip maximizer" that illustrates how even a well-designed, non-malicious AI could be an existential threat. See here: http://wiki.
62.
by bwood 12y ago
Paywalls are frustrating, especially when the content is available elsewhere for free. Here's the paper on arXiv.org: http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.4088v1
63.
by bwood 12y ago
Thanks zeeshanm! We actually have a lot of parsers that do just that, we just haven't yet made them available on the engine. We're also looking at ways to let people create their own and make it available to other users, since we
64.
by bwood 12y ago
The main reason we think there needs to be a platform for crawling and structuring data is that it's a huge hassle to reinvent the wheel every time. If you have experience writing crawlers and have been able to afford the time to learn
65.
by bwood 12y ago
> Lastly, lightweight containers are the real-deal for small development tasks (not for production!). I've come across this sentiment a few times in the last month, but I haven't yet heard an explanation other than "VMs ar
66.
by bwood 12y ago
The APIs only have a single interface, and that is HTTP. All the examples are just different ways of making an HTTP request, whether through the curl command or a full-blown language. Hitting this API has only one requirement: something c
67.
by bwood 12y ago
I think the idea is that if you have a useful script, you can set it up here just once and it's automatically wrapped with an HTTP-based interface so you can use it like an API. Now you can use that script from any Internet-connected
68.
by bwood 12y ago
Email share just worked fine for me.
69.
by bwood 12y ago
That's interesting, what sort of communication issues have you run into with threading? I've always found it to be mostly a non-issue since you can use global variables or just pass along a reference.
70.
by bwood 12y ago
Using multiprocessing in Python is more complicated because each process has a separate memory space and interprocess communication can be quite expensive. If you don't carefully design your communication patterns, any performance you
71.
by bwood 12y ago
The author is Rhett Allain, who is apparently an associate professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. I don't know about his background in numerical work, but I suspect he knows more about it than a typical Wired author who is no
72.
by bwood 12y ago
Why would it matter to an institution what the minimum is? If they want to purchase 1000 BTC instead of 25, would SecondMarket actually force them to make forty 25 BTC purchases?
73.
by bwood 13y ago
Note that the author is only assuming that bitcoin/altcoin mining was the intended goal of the attack.
74.
by bwood 13y ago
Clearly this would be faster than using the requests library to scrape pages in serial, but would it also be faster than using the requests library in several threads at once? Besides the simplified syntax, what is the advantage of asyncio
75.
by bwood 13y ago
I found the guide "A Hacker's Replacement for Gmail" [1] extremely helpful in setting up my own email server. I run mine on a VPS which still makes me liable to 3rd party screw-ups or snooping, but it's a nice compromis
76.
by bwood 13y ago
The largest indicator of bullshit (as I've commented below) is that based on their model, ALL infections of this type go to zero. They could have modeled Apple, Google, Christianity, or Bitcoin and reach the same conclusion (albeit wi
77.
by bwood 13y ago
For such a bold claim, I'm not really impressed with the model. Basically, the authors take the well-known SIR model [1] (susceptible -> infectious -> removed) for simple modeling of infectious diseases and modify its removal te
78.
by bwood 13y ago
I should probably mention that I have put quite a bit of work into developing a similar system myself. I even prototyped and pitched it a couple years ago, but basically got shut down by judges who were offended by the kinds of data I sugg
79.
by bwood 13y ago
I don't think it is necessary to require users to run their own nodes, but simply allow the option and encourage a community to form around doing so. Basically, set up a scenario where the startup is service-oriented and must stay hone
80.
by bwood 13y ago
I feel that the most important part of this is having clear data ownership rules to assure users that they actually own their data. That is, they can take it in a machine-readable format whenever they wish, and with it remove the right of
81.
by bwood 13y ago
I've been considering building this as a personal project, because I never got to know my grandparents very well and sometimes I have conversations or experience things that I wish I could relive. I highly doubt anyone would ever both
82.
by bwood 13y ago
I suppose one could argue that it could just as easily be used to prove innocence as guilt. Pretty much the ultimate alibi, assuming you didn't actually do it.
83.
Ask HN: If you could record your entire life from now going forward, would you?
4 points by bwood 13y ago|10 comments
84.
by bwood 14y ago
Bitcoin Charts [1] keeps history for dozens of exchanges (which all float at slightly different values) and has a free API to let you request any period of interest. Beyond just market price, I think you can get records of every individual
85.
by bwood 14y ago
I can't give you any numbers to support or refute your suspicions. However, if you genuinely believe that there is a need for something like Bitcoin, honest individuals using Bitcoin will help legitimize the currency and hopefully drive do
86.
by bwood 14y ago
As a vegetarian, iron is something I haven't had a problem with (I know this from the blood iron levels they measure when you give blood). I cook with cast iron, which apparently increases the amount of iron in cooked foods [1]. [1] http:
87.
by bwood 14y ago
> I believe this is wrong, because anyone who wants to do that believes that its own interests are for some reason better than what the market values. It's good and all, do whatever you fancy, but not on my dime - not on public money. G
88.
by bwood 14y ago
> I was very excited about Tent.io, and wrote a small app for it, but after a few months began to see serious problems with its design. Can you be more specific? I've been thinking about using the Tent protocol as a foundation for my f
89.
by bwood 14y ago
Here's a relevant paper called Why Johnny Can't Encrypt[1], which does an excellent job of defining understanding and usability problems with encryption. It's certainly dated, but I find that its main points are still very true today. [1]
90.
by bwood 14y ago
If ants had the ability to turn you off or otherwise harm you at will, then I suspect you might develop a desire to control or destroy ants.

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