lavrov

5 ms·

1.
by lavrov 6y ago
What do you think happened in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc
2.
by lavrov 6y ago
Didn’t read the entire post but I think the characterization of PCP’s is a bit off - some SNARK constructions and STARKs both use PCP’s - using a linear PCP vs a PCP doesn’t impact transparency or proof size, that’s more a function of the c
3.
by lavrov 8y ago
It seems like a VRF might be a more natural choice than a commitment scheme for verifiable randomness, since it doesn't require any honesty assumption for participants, and Keybase already manages keys (though maybe it would be a probl
4.
by lavrov 8y ago
I thought that the post was fairly unclear, but for me, it seems like the main argument against 538 is that it makes unfalsifiable claims about the probability of individual elections - picking a winner is a falsifiable claim, but assigning
5.
by lavrov 8y ago
Not a pilot, and not trying to be an armchair pilot, but why would he have ascended all the way to 36000 feet? Isn't there a real risk of depressurization with hull damage?
6.
by lavrov 8y ago
You misread my comment - I'm saying that the argument is not that the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy, but that the sudden divergence over
7.
by lavrov 8y ago
I don't agree that using the OECD employment rate is bullshit. The argument is not that at a single point, the fact that this other measure of unemployment is much higher than the standard measure shows that the economy is not healthy,
8.
by lavrov 8y ago
Why not? Determining how we measure the health of our economy, and implicitly, what we want to optimize for, is a political process, not simply an objective, scientific one.
9.
by lavrov 8y ago
The point that he's making is not that individual observation should trump objective measures, but the epistemic claim that if what we perceive contradicts those measures, it's worth interrogating the validity of those measures. I
10.
by lavrov 8y ago
The emphasis on humor in Mozart and Beethoven is interesting, particularly since it seems almost absent in the later Sonatas. I remember hearing Martha Argerich note that it's present in early Beethoven, and then disappears in Chopin a
11.
by lavrov 8y ago
Verifiable computation is an active and developed area of research in cryptography, and the validation method of having every node run every step of every computation is the most naive approach. There are plenty of ways to prove to you that
12.
by lavrov 8y ago
Sure, I'm assuming that most of the transactions are trading/speculation, given that 60% of ETH is held on exchanges, and if the question is how we should value ETH, a measure that depends on the current market value of ETH seems
13.
by lavrov 8y ago
That position isn't supported by volatile transaction fee data - excepting spikes for spam or high traffic, the transaction fee denominated in dollars generally tracks the price of ETH. Probably because the overwhelming majority of ETH
14.
by lavrov 8y ago
Forks aren't as simple as you might think - who gets to determine what the "original chain" is in the event of a fork? Suppose that ETH forked and one version changed some consensus rules to increase the supply of currency, a
15.
by lavrov 8y ago
For example, if the market cap were 1/100 of its current value, then the transaction fees per year, denominated in dollars, would be $1800000, yielding the same "P/E" multiple, and justifying the valuation at 1/100
16.
by lavrov 8y ago
When discussing how crypto-assets should be valued: > In that case, you can take the simple model and say a cryptocurrency’s valuation is the net present value of the transaction fees that it’s getting. This, by itself, surprisingly does
17.
by lavrov 8y ago
Maybe I'm just being cynical (or jealous!), but when I read "Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum", I think it's worth asking
18.
by lavrov 8y ago
The security proof for SNARKs requires constant-depth compliance predicates, otherwise the proof doesn’t follow because the extractor size could blow up. I would have to read the coda whitepaper to see what their assumptions are for their s
19.
by lavrov 8y ago
I’m not sure why there is a misunderstanding here, especially given that you work for a wallet provider. The attack is as described: an attacker forks, mines invalid blocks, which are caught by full nodes, since they validate the contents o
20.
by lavrov 8y ago
Yes, I agree that the top-level SNARK will obviously have a high level of security wrt soundness, but suppose that I have a SNARK recursively computing 2^128 SNARKs, you’re claiming that the lowest level SNARK would have the same knowledge
21.
by lavrov 8y ago
No, my point is that light wallets don’t validate the content of blocks...so an attacker could create a long chain of invalid blocks and fool light clients. That’s a significant issue.
22.
by lavrov 8y ago
Ordinarily, light wallets compromise on validating blocks, so that’s one benefit.
23.
by lavrov 8y ago
Coda seems interesting, but I don’t understand how a single feature (fast light client syncing) can be enough of an advantage to launch a new chain - what prevents a new chain from incorporating recursive snarks as well as some new X in the
24.
Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union(twitter.com)
315 points by lavrov 8y ago|236 comments
25.
by lavrov 8y ago
The article is a review of the book written by the journalist that first broke the Theranos story (John Carreyrou).
26.
by lavrov 9y ago
The argument that "if the US goes socialized, you will see almost a complete halt to medical innovation over time," and therefore that private funding of research is preferred, is a bad one. It rests on the premise that the profit
27.
by lavrov 10y ago
I would speculate that the decrease in "good ideas" is at least correlated with, and probably causally related to, the decrease in government spending on research (2% of GDP in the 1970's to 0.78% of GDP in 2014[1]). Consider
28.
by lavrov 10y ago
I think that this depends on the definition of "messing up" - he missed a financial aid window in 6th grade, and something as trivial as filing a form late had a tangible impact on a year of his life. I think that his point is tha
29.
by lavrov 10y ago
One easy way to see this: if d is a factor of n, then n/d is a factor of n (since d divides n evenly). So, for any integer, we have pairs of factors (d and n/d) and thus an even number of factors, except in the case when d and n&#