topynate

21 ms·

241.
by topynate 12y ago
You can chain microtransactions atomically, so with a star graph of payment channels you can route micropayments through a central processor without introducing trust - taking the number of channels from O(N^2) to O(N) in the number of part
242.
by topynate 12y ago
If Twitter killed the API that would put Twitpic out of business - but how is that worse than shutting it down? They might as well call Twitter's bluff, if the alternative is just as bad.
243.
by topynate 12y ago
Users sent bitcoins to SR to hold for them, in return for a promise to return them on demand. So SR's assets and liabilities both increased with each deposit. Then USG seized SR's assets (under what right? That SR was an illegal e
244.
by topynate 13y ago
It's not obvious that you need to verify your identity to withdraw. It would be very easy for someone to see a deposit address and assume withdrawals would be just as friction-less.
245.
by topynate 13y ago
> Allocation of capital is a useful function; the problem is that the allocators are helping themselves to a far larger cut of the proceedings than the value they produce Yeah, I find this (that financial actors are acting in a hostile m
246.
by topynate 13y ago
> He knows many things. He has no priors. So what is Leon Wieseltier saying here about Nate Silver, exactly? That Silver considers himself to have no priors? That he, Wieseltier, thinks that Silver has no priors? Both interpretations see
247.
by topynate 13y ago
It sounds like he's 'on the spectrum' - very strong commitment to the literal truth goes with the territory. As does desire for privacy, tendency to work alone obsessively on unusual projects, lack of interest in money (or
248.
by topynate 13y ago
Why couldn't you attract decent candidates? That was the root cause of your bad hire, not a weak filter.
249.
by topynate 13y ago
Not the case, actually. It's safe to assume that the FBI is very big on backups, probably paper backups, to prevent people doing just that. But stealing the bitcoin from the FBI wouldn't require deleting anything, just access to t
250.
by topynate 13y ago
That's probably the reason for the discount but I don't think it's a very good one. Suppose that MtGox has all its users' dollars but only half the BTC. Are the BTC holders going to accept a haircut of 50%? No, they&#x27
251.
by topynate 13y ago
"I have two mangoes, Jill has three mangoes. How many mangoes do we both have?" http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=I+have+two+mangoes%2C+J... Doesn't work, even though Wolfram Alpha knows what mangoes
252.
by topynate 13y ago
As a goal, I'm sure they're thinking about it. Unfriendly AI is part of pop-culture, after all. As a hard mathematical problem, not so much (I was following Ben Goertzel's OpenCog project for quite some time, and he seems to
253.
by topynate 13y ago
That's not quite it - people hold these currencies based in part on what they think about other participants, so you end up with a situation resembling the blue eyes puzzle described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#x2
254.
by topynate 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thitu_Island It's an inhabited island with a military base and an airstrip; I don't see the Philippines just walking away. Moreover, both Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims on t
255.
by topynate 13y ago
I can tell you the book that got me excited about quantum computing: The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch. It ranges over a much, much wider field than just QC, but if you want to understand how one of the best theoreticians thinks then
256.
by topynate 13y ago
I don't know of any research into this area, but it's conceivable that you could have an encryption algorithm that is polynomial time (given the key!) on a quantum computer but exponential time classically, and that has some bet
257.
by topynate 13y ago
Both NSA and GCHQ have quite the history of co-opting smart mathematicians to create secret theoretical advances in cryptography and cryptanalysis, which could well be relevant given a quantum computer with the following three properties:
258.
by topynate 13y ago
SEEKING WORK - Remote OK - British developer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. I love working in Haskell and Scala, and I also have experience with Django. I've done some data analysis work in Python and as a maths student I became a dab hand
259.
by topynate 13y ago
No. Group C was done in by Max Mosley and Bernie Ecclestone because it was threatening Formula One. The costs became prohibitive not because of competition between teams, but because of new rules that favoured the manufacturers by making F1
260.
by topynate 13y ago
Arielle Schlesinger just unintentionally became the most successful troll in recent memory. Who gets so exercised by a grad student's idea for a thesis that they create a functioning and exhaustively documented programming language? Th
261.
by topynate 13y ago
I don't know, but I can speculate with the best of them: Someone posted on a bitcoin forum that they were doing this, showing how they were bidding on spot prices etc. A bunch of people raced to get in on some free money ASAP, of whom
262.
by topynate 13y ago
Well, their 'project of the week' was "FUCK GOOGLE". It's right there on the article page. So, you know, political art. Performance art plus politics, aka propaganda of the deed. Cutting cyclists off in the name of
263.
by topynate 13y ago
This is of a kind with the guy who decided to pretend to be an arsehole Google employee at a demonstration against their buses. It goes right against the points they're trying to make: why pretend to be on the 'other side'? O
264.
by topynate 13y ago
I'm confident that the paper is indeed flawed. However, a Turing machine can neither write to nor read from an exponential number of locations in polynomial time, so the flaw will be something else.
265.
by topynate 13y ago
The attitude of Newport council - everyone, really - seems pretty nuts to me. $7 million is about 185 kilos of gold. Imagine what would happen if someone lost that in a rubbish tip!
266.
by topynate 13y ago
Provably Prune-able Outputs! See https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290 . The idea is to support adding a little bit (80 bytes) of extra data to a transaction, while signalling to people who don't need to know a
267.
by topynate 13y ago
You could require all scripting to be done in a language supporting total functional programming, like Epigram. That would be fairly hilarious (also counterproductive, because the increased script size would cause blockchain bloat).
268.
by topynate 13y ago
Could someone explain what the utility of bubble sort is? I've read that even in cases where an O(nlogn) sort is impractical, insertion or selection sort is preferred.
269.
by topynate 13y ago
Yes, good points. I was thinking of Bitcoin as an asset and not the numéraire, which to my mind changes the situation a bit - the problem suggested is that some 'undesirable' people will end up with too many Bitcoins and use them
270.
by topynate 13y ago
The Coase theorem says that the initial allocation doesn't matter if transaction costs are low enough. Transaction costs are exceptionally low in the case of bitcoin.

More ›