semiel

9 ms·

31.
by semiel 11y ago
I'm moderately familiar and comfortable with postmodernism, and Cryptome still seems bizarre to me. It's not word salad, like some people in this thread imply, but it's not clear to me that we're supposed to take it as s
32.
by semiel 11y ago
When buying something online, I make a habit of reading a couple of the negative reviews. Sometimes they're, "I meant to buy a toaster, and misclicked on this television instead. Makes poor toast. 2/5." But sometimes the
33.
Programmable Blockchains in Context(medium.com)
2 points by semiel 11y ago|0 comments
34.
by semiel 11y ago
It's not the _trappings_ of an organization that are important, it's the fact that they have lots of working code. The Ethereum network does exactly what it claims to do, and does it well.
35.
by semiel 11y ago
The "sepia" is actually true color. New Horizon's high resolution camera takes black and white photos, but NASA sometimes releases them supplemented with color information from other sensors.
36.
by semiel 12y ago
I suspect that you are conflating "I'm turned off" and "many will be turned off". I seriously doubt it will make any difference either way to the hacker news demographic.
37.
by semiel 12y ago
I think there are a lot of practical problems with Assembly's model, but it feels to me like an imperfect glimpse into what will someday be a really valuable model. I love the idea of being able to contribute to a project with minimal
38.
by semiel 12y ago
I don't think C++ is anywhere near the state of the art in terms of usability. I wonder what he would do with something like Python + PyGame.
39.
by semiel 12y ago
On the Bitcoin blockchain, you can't fit a magnet link in the very small amount of data you're allowed to include in a transaction. You could split them across multiple transactions, but that leads into the second problem: It&#x27
40.
by semiel 12y ago
Real deep learning[0] is a very particular type of machine learning that has recently been shown to be quite useful for certain specific tasks. But as often happens with technical terms, it's been regularly abused once it started getti
41.
by semiel 12y ago
There isn't any "sidecoin" here. One of the slogans for sidechains is "altchains without altcoins". The idea is that you are in some sense still using bitcoin tokens, even though you're doing so in an unorthodo
42.
by semiel 12y ago
I don't think you are. The idea seems to be that you don't have alternative tokens at all, really. Instead you would use an alternative blockchain using what are for most intents and purposes still bitcoin tokens. It's not re
43.
by semiel 12y ago
I've started reading the book, and it's an interesting read. I'm very, very interested in cryptocurrency, but he hits a lot of skeptical notes that resonate with thoughts I've had. Bitcoin is an awesome technology, and i
44.
by semiel 12y ago
I don't think the incentive structure of mining is fundamentally tied to a "currency", per se. A tradable asset of some sort, yes. But that's arguably a much lower bar to reach. (For instance, a Starbucks gift card makes
45.
by semiel 12y ago
What I've always found so interesting about this story is how singular a moment this was, where humans and machines could play a meaningful game of chess. For millennia before, a chess-playing machine was nonsense. Today, chess compute
46.
by semiel 12y ago
Really interesting article. I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible with crowdsourcing. To me, the author's failure seems to be a straightforward one of design. The system allowed attackers to ruin
47.
by semiel 12y ago
Oops, you seem to be right. Some of the early reporting implied otherwise[1], but that seems to have been in error[2]. Sorry for spreading misinformation! [1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2014/09&#x2F
48.
by semiel 12y ago
I came here to comment on the deeply amusing spin of "more than half again the cost". SpaceX came in second on the evaluation process, and was awarded less money than first-place Boeing as a result. They're not somehow being
49.
by semiel 12y ago
Personally, this is why I find Ethereum so fun. I don't think anyone expects Ethereum to suddenly take over the world, but it's a really interesting testing ground for a lot of fascinating ideas. If we were trying to identify a sp
50.
by semiel 12y ago
I've been following development pretty closely, and I'm reasonably convinced that they will launch in the first half of 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if they missed their target ("before March 21st") by a month or t
51.
by semiel 12y ago
This finally has really hit home for me while getting neck-deep in the crypto-currency world, and in particular the realms of "smart contracts" and "DACs". In that world, even the most straightforward things have yet to
52.
by semiel 12y ago
The constraints will definitely make finding a solution more difficult. If not, Bitcoin hash difficulty would be totally broken. The question is what the _rate_ of difficulty increase is like, compared to the brute force approach.
53.
by semiel 12y ago
This might be the single thing I find most absurd and frustrating about our current society. We've somehow arranged the incentives so that it's a very bad thing to reduce the amount of work we need to do to maintain our standard o
54.
by semiel 12y ago
I spent a couple months working at a company that had almost that exact business model. We just used normal, cheap, thermal receipt printers attached to a Raspberry Pi.
55.
by semiel 12y ago
These are some really interesting results. As someone who has almost completely converted to digital books, I would be really interested to see these results used to inspire better UI design on the part of people like Kindle. I mostly use t
56.
by semiel 12y ago
I actually think it's unfortunate that a "pure" currency was the first application of the blockchain. Bitcoin's problems are around mindshare and social acceptance, because it's useless without it. Something like Fi
57.
by semiel 12y ago
The key technology of cryptocurrency is the blockchain, which essentially allows for many sorts of centralized verification to be replaced with math. Most of the application ideas floating around the cryptocurrency world aren't fundame
58.
by semiel 12y ago
The author working for D-Wave is a very illuminating fact, given the high probability that D-Wave's products are pseudoscience.
59.
by semiel 12y ago
I generally agree with this perspective, but a two-sided marketplace is one of the business models that really does need to grow fast. No one would install the Uber app if it didn't have any drivers, and no one would apply to be a driv
60.
by semiel 13y ago
> This submission should have a more attention grabbing headline! Funnily enough, it looks like the mods changed the title to something more attention-grabbing. I left it with the original title because of HN's policies on titles, b

More ›