neilk

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781.
by neilk 14y ago
Counterpoint, from an information security researcher who actually lived through the lockdown: > I know we in infosec are paid to be paranoid but thinking that this was a "dry run” for some sort of coup is a little over the top even for
782.
by neilk 14y ago
I wondered if there might be a market for an Excel correctness checker. If billions are on the line, it might be worth a few bucks. But apparently Excel can advise you of common problems like these already. http://office.microsoft.com/en-u
783.
How You Can Help Save Upcoming.org, Posterous, and More(waxy.org)
31 points by neilk 14y ago|11 comments
784.
by neilk 14y ago
No, that is emphatically not the case. The Wikipedias for each language are completely separate, and maintained by different volunteer communities, sometimes with substantially different practices. EDIT: I don't see any record that there wa
785.
by neilk 14y ago
I was surprised you didn't have one. You still have one in the German Wikipedia.
786.
by neilk 14y ago
Disclosure: 1st non-founding employee at Upcoming. Neither Eventful nor Zvents plugs into a social network to tell you stuff your friends are going to, or thinking of going to. They are just sites that list events. Facebook's events app is
787.
by neilk 14y ago
FYI, the parent poster is Paul Lutus, author of the first word processor for the Apple II, and a lot of other ground-breaking programs.
788.
by neilk 14y ago
Five ? Is there some connection - the same industry, or the same company?
789.
by neilk 14y ago
Wouldn't Satoshi have spent at least some Bitcoins? Testing the system, or encouraging early economic activity? Although maybe this entity represents just one of the mining machines controlled by Satoshi.
790.
by neilk 14y ago
Just commenting to say I will not read any article with a hook like "The one thing you should X or you are a bad Y." I'm pretty sure there is more than one lesson to learn about, well, anything.
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by neilk 14y ago
I wrote a blog post about the algorithm over here: http://neilk.net/blog/2013/04/16/letterpwn-a-nodejs-based-le... Maybe the concurrency techniques for a computation-heavy service in Node.JS are of more general interest, but I'm still wor
792.
Show HN: my side project, a Letterpress solver in Node.js(letterpwn.neilk.net)
4 points by neilk 14y ago|1 comments
793.
by neilk 14y ago
I wasn't clear - the point is that in the 21st century, you are working in a multi-language paradigm no matter what, tying together disparate services with neutral protocols like HTTP. Nobody knows or cares what language a server is running
794.
by neilk 14y ago
Most of the things on HN are reasonably relevant to my life. The upvote/downvote system actually is better than editors picking and choosing. But we have our emotional triggers. I think they are more about our collective fears of missing ou
795.
by neilk 14y ago
Keunwoo Lee (aka cog) made a very similar argument back in 2010, "languages ride platforms to popularity". http://abstractfactory.blogspot.ca/2010/05/how-to-design-pop... But I'm not sure this argument applies in the 21st century. Languag
796.
by neilk 14y ago
Hang on a minute. Writing toy kernels for an OS is an exercise that grad students do. The other Unix OS for PCs at the time, Minix, was the work of a single individual, Andrew Tanenbaum. There are plenty of other examples. I don't really kn
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by neilk 14y ago
The creators of Bitcoin were very critical of central governments. The entire project rests on the notion that fiat money is a bad idea. Like a lot of libertarian activists, or indeed activists in general, they may have overestimated how mu
798.
by neilk 14y ago
Are we overestimating how much crypto is involved? I'm not a crypto guy, but as I understand it, the crypto in Bitcoin is relatively simple and well-understood. The genius idea was how to verify transactions using proof-of-work in a peer sy
799.
by neilk 14y ago
Please. MintChip is not even remotely similar. It's a stored value card with some crypto for signing transactions.
800.
by neilk 14y ago
I think it's explained on the Addepar site: https://addepar.com/technology/ Looks like graph theory to analyze investments as a set of relationships, rather than bar charts just showing aggregate stats.
801.
by neilk 14y ago
Free-market believers assume there must be somebody in the system with the incentives to help those less sophisticated investors. Or that the market will eliminate con artists, because their investments must be weak. That's how you get Al
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by neilk 14y ago
This is a fair point. I actually can't stand that too.
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by neilk 14y ago
I don't think your test is meaningful. There are already lots of items which cost much less than a penny. Individual squares of toilet paper, use of a cafe wi-fi for a few minutes, that sort of thing. You just buy these items in bulk or mak
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by neilk 14y ago
Oh, absolutely. As a Canadian, I live in hope that the US will invade and replace our system of government.
805.
by neilk 14y ago
Unlike most other language designers today, Rust's designer was more concerned about getting the concepts right than the syntax. So the syntax came late in the process, and as far as I know they did get inspiration from various sources. Pos
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by neilk 14y ago
For tech people, status is achieved more by what you've done or can do, than what you own or have. If the high art world wants to cater to the richer tech people, they should focus on exclusive participatory experiences rather than objects.
807.
by neilk 14y ago
> Empirically Citation needed. There are studies out there showing that productivity is proportional to days spent on the problem, not hours. It's likely that for a knowledge worker, sustained schedules with long workdays actually reduc
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by neilk 14y ago
I'm not much of a security person, just thinking out loud. Cap'n Proto looks great though. I am also looking forward to saying "Cap'n Proto" in a work context.
809.
by neilk 14y ago
My first question was: whoa, security? But you answer it in the docs, a bit. http://kentonv.github.com/capnproto/encoding.html (at the end) How do we know that cycles/deep-nesting are the only possible attacks? Maybe I'm overreacting - wh
810.
by neilk 14y ago
The word "meritocracy" comes from a satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy . It would be as if people were using the word "doublethink" like it was a great idea. The author's point is that social class is now guarded through education, and th

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