pash

22 ms·

121.
by pash 11y ago
Yes, you're right, but again only in a formalistic sense. It is the semantics of the rules that matter, not their form. And the semantics can be changed arbitrarily in the way I described. I don't think my point is pedantic. Seg
122.
by pash 11y ago
Old nodes continue to work only in a trivial sense: after a soft-fork, they can no longer properly interpret the meaning of data in the blockchain, so their ability to validate new transactions has been destroyed. If Bitcoin Core's sof
123.
by pash 11y ago
> It's a free market. It's a broken market, one in which the supply of space in the blockchain is unresponsive to increases in price induced by higher demand. This impasse over block sizes and Bitcoin's governance would
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by pash 11y ago
Your understanding of soft forks is incorrect. Changes to the consensus rules implemented by soft forks are in no way optional, nor are they backwards-compatible [0]. Nor are soft-forking changes meaningfully more limited in scope than hard
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by pash 11y ago
Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, wrote a blog post [0] today that gives a very different take on things. He criticized Bitcoin Core's development team for their poor communication with the community, for their inhospitality to new
126.
by pash 11y ago
"The Use of Knowledge in Society" [0], Hayek's famous essay on the subject, is an enjoyable 12-page read. I first read it as an undergraduate economics major, and it remains one of my favorite economics papers for its clear a
127.
by pash 11y ago
If you want the hard sell, watch Charlie Rose's interview last Friday with Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, and Jon Miller, the NYPD's head of counterterrorism [0]. You will hear a lot of ugly words and phrases like &
128.
by pash 11y ago
It's often called an indicator function. (The Kronecker delta is a special case of the more generally defined set-indicator function [0], the notation for which is also more obvious. The Kronecker delta can be described in this notatio
129.
by pash 11y ago
> “Bitcoin is not having a crisis. It’s having an election,” says Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, a very well funded startup based in San Francisco. “The [prevailing] mental model for what’s going on is a split, a divide in the co
130.
by pash 11y ago
Economists have been investigating these concerns for decades. There is work dating from the late 1960s on the computability of general equilibria under uncertainty, and concerns about computability have played a role in the influential li
131.
by pash 11y ago
What's unprecedented to an even greater degree is the scale at which mundane communications are now recorded. In the past, the bulk of private communications were opaque to the government, even with a warrant , because people exchange
132.
by pash 11y ago
They each measure the same thing, more or less, but it's easier to work analytically with squares than absolute values. Similarly, we tend to work with the variance rather than with expected absolute deviations, we calculate sums of sq
133.
by pash 11y ago
Has anybody put together a project to build a "distributed observatory" to coordinate the efforts of a great number of amateur astronomers, each with a small telescope?
134.
by pash 11y ago
The Bitcoin community is rapidly coalescing around an effort to increase the maximum allowed blocksize to 2MB as soon as possible. This increase is being implemented in a new client, Bitcoin Classic [0], which is a fork of Bitcoin Core that
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Bitcoin Classic(bitcoinclassic.com)
2 points by pash 11y ago|0 comments
136.
by pash 11y ago
Yes, there are Chinese bitcoin miners paying even less than that for power. China has a quarter of the world's hydroelectric generating capacity, but its utilization rate is low, far lower than in places like the Unites States, Canada,
137.
by pash 11y ago
China is the place where the marginal cost of mining is lowest. It's the only place in the world where a command economy has hybridized with crony capitalism to offer you as much electricity as you want at below-market prices; if the
138.
by pash 11y ago
What is the black king in chess? This is a strange question, and the most satisfactory way to deal with it seems to be to sidestep it slightly. What more can one do than point to a chessboard and explain the rules of the game, perhaps payi
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by pash 11y ago
It is intuitively obvious that requiring probabilities to sum to 1 is rather arbitrary (any other number would seem to do as well), and this is confirmed by many of the alternatives to Kolmogorov's axiomatization of probability theory.
140.
by pash 11y ago
The big problem with ScopedTypeVariables is that it changes the meaning of existing code by unifying type variables that are not unified today in standardized Haskell. It's one of those things that you'd probably do if you were st
141.
by pash 11y ago
The Wired headline is less misleading than your comment. Information about transfers of ownership will be recorded on a private ledger, and a hash of that information will be inserted into Bitcoin's blockchain, one hash inserted for ea
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by pash 11y ago
This is the latest interactive article from the Times. It's their first attempt, I think, at tailoring the story's text and graphics to the reader's location, contextualing local information within the national narrative.
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The Experts Were Wrong About the Best Places for Better and Cheaper Health Care(nytimes.com)
2 points by pash 11y ago|2 comments
144.
by pash 11y ago
The author's goal for this design seems to be to increase mining decentralization, but there's another big advantage to a blockless graphical ledger over a blockchain. By attaching proof-of-work to each transaction rather than to
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by pash 11y ago
The situation is complicated by induced demand [0], the phenomenon in which providing more roadway capacity tends to raise demand for it by reducing the cost of travel. What typically happens when a new roadway opens or a congested route is
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by pash 11y ago
Yes, I recognize that the definition you gave is far and away the most common one, even among policy wonks. The original definition seems still to have currency mostly among economists. But the definition I gave is indeed the original one,
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by pash 11y ago
> If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population. Although
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by pash 11y ago
Here [0] are the numbers from the most recent five-year estimates of the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, aggregated over the census tracts within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District: Total populati
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by pash 11y ago
I mostly agree, but there are far more white people living within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public School District than you realize. It's difficult to find numbers, but I guesstimate that at least 30% and probably more like 40–
150.
by pash 11y ago
A few dazzling lines on wanderlust from Invisible Cities : ... Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. ... And Marco's answer to that: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the littl

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