emin_gun_sirer

7 ms·

1.
by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Very interesting autopsy. But there are many uses for a virtual notary besides those times when "sh#t hits the fan." Open source distributions, for instance, are currently distributed along with a hash, supposedly for protection,
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Yes, quite possibly, if there is sufficient interest.
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Great idea. We'll add this to the to-do list.
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
A git factoid plugin is a great idea. What exactly is the attestation that you have in mind? You provide the name of a repo plus a tag, and the VN issues a certificate of the hash?
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Introducing Virtual Notary(hackingdistributed.com)
9 points by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago|8 comments
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
It's an API-compatible drop in replacement for LevelDB, so anyone else who currently uses LevelDB should be able to switch fairly easily.
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
This article would have been stronger if it had contained a bit of introspection. Why did it require a UK paper to uncover this operation?
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
I can answer the opposite question: we intend to keep in sync with upstream. Since HyperLevelDB is a drop-in replacement for LevelDB, it should be fairly easy for LevelDB users to pick it up.
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Those of you interested in cache conscious algorithm design should check out Anthony LaMarca's thesis from 1996: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~lamarca/pubs/lamarca-thesis.... The article only cites papers from 1961 and 1964, and complai
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Because each coin transaction entails a 40KB zero knowledge proof. So a Satoshi will require 40*10^8 KB transferred for a 1BTC transaction.
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by emin_gun_sirer 13y ago
Technically, this is very cool work. But one thing the paper overlooks is divisibility. How does one make change with zerocoin? It appears that the trapdoors allow only a whole coin to be spent, with no recourse for spending a partial coin.
12.
by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Don't forget that the short squeeze also feeds the runaway price of BTC and props it even higher.
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
>Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party. This is false. Karma was a p2p currency that did this in 2004, 5 years before Bitcoin: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Peop
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
For the record: not Oakleys, not at a beach, but yes, looking to the side. If we're done picking on looks and personal issues, something I tried to avoid very carefully in the article, perhaps we can focus on content and ideas?
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
It's funny what a few days of teaching Operating Systems will do to a man.
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Do you know which president I had in mind? I lived through quite a few 8 year terms, and yes, that includes Reagan. If your response is "but everyone knows which president you were referring to," then surely it's fair game to refer to whoev
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
That kind of language will bring the discussion to an end.
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
My post ends on this note: Wouldn't it be much better to channel all this energy towards something more productive? Like, say, writing a few thousand lines of Rails or Django or Node JS or Clojure or whatever code you like to impl
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Here's some straight-up satire: Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391119 It's Lake W
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Agreed, contributing to OSS is much better than rolling one's own from scratch. From the vehemence of the "bring-back-Reader" posts, I assumed that there were absolutely no OSS projects that were suitable, and wrote the post for the worst c
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
>Fuck you Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Thanks, I appreciate this. In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the Internet Archive to perform this archival task? At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled", given that
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
There is some confusion here between RSS and Reader. RSS isn't being canceled. Anyone can download any feed any time they like. You did need a Google account to use Reader, which made it not so anonymous and not so private. Once again, RSS
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Can you please describe what was so dishonest about Google's representation? What did they get anyone to do that cannot be undone with a click?
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Stop Whining About Google Reader(hackingdistributed.com)
102 points by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago|55 comments
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Right, everything is a filesystem in Plan 9. It's really elegant. Many people think Unix is elegant, which it is, but then they realize there is a higher plane of elegance in interface design when they encounter Plan 9. In case anyone is wo
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
Plan 9 is "Unix done right." Think of everything everyone loves about Unix, especially its ability to connect components together via pipes and plain text files, and take it to the limit, and you'll get Plan 9. Because everything was a fil
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
All I can say is "some of my best friends have worked on RDBMSs." I don't hold it against them. ;-) More seriously: Al, Johannes, and many other notable researchers in the DB space have complex, nuanced opinions on NoSQL systems. And these
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by emin_gun_sirer 14y ago
>NoSQL is almost always less powerful abstractly but easier to scale. This is no longer true. We now have second-generation NoSQL data stores that provide strong consistency, fault-tolerance and ACID transactions, based on the sharded N

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