wsxcde

27 ms·

241.
by wsxcde 12y ago
This is a very nice primer but I felt like it glossed over the issue of transaction fee incentives and why grouping transactions into a block is sufficient to ensure security. Thinking out loud here, how does a transaction fee that is less
242.
by wsxcde 12y ago
I started writing a long reply to this and realized I was rambling a little bit. I think there are two key insights. Sometimes if you're really good at what you do, you might get stuck in a local maximum. And the only way to break out
243.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Boy, this makes me feel old because I first read this when I was a wee undergrad. Great advice and it applies to a lot of things in life besides your career. I would say even happiness and satisfaction in life are much more dependent on the
244.
by wsxcde 12y ago
The Bitpay numbers are very impressive. I do think that 50% growth in a year, especially when it is not that clear-cut that it really is 50%, isn't that impressive by itself. Perhaps there's a lot more growth in off-chain activity
245.
by wsxcde 12y ago
I think looking at transactions is a reasonable metric. In fact, even this metric may be overstating things. Tim Swanson has analyzed transactions excluding popular addresses (apparently this excludes things like SatoshiDice) to identify tr
246.
by wsxcde 12y ago
I explained what fees I am referring to in my comment.
247.
by wsxcde 12y ago
From Jan'13 to now, which is when most of this merchant adoption has occurred, I can see an increase from around 40,000 transactions to about 60,000 transactions, which is rather modest and one can easily cherry pick points which show
248.
by wsxcde 12y ago
We know that number of blockchain transactions has been more or less constant for a while and in the range of several tens of thousands per day. This means either merchants aren't seeing too many bitcoin sales OR a lot of these sales a
249.
by wsxcde 12y ago
It's obvious that weather is a huge factor and if you think this is just a "shoulda-woulda-coulda game", then maybe you need to take a step back and admit you have no domain knowledge? Also, if you're doing statistical a
250.
by wsxcde 12y ago
These statistical analyses never work well for football and this one is another example of that happening. For example, except for Spain in South Africa, no European country has ever won the world cup outside of Europe. Why is this? A large
251.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Christensen has either inadvertently fallen into the DH4 [1] trap or is deliberately trying to cloud the central issue. What I would like him to do is address the key point that Jill Lepore made, which is that his theory of disruption doesn
252.
by wsxcde 12y ago
I definitely agree it depends on the person and it gets harder with age. While I kinda agree that the grocery store isn't the best place to make friends, the point I was trying to make was that in India sometimes these people unintenti
253.
by wsxcde 12y ago
It's certainly easier to make friends in India. I used to do it effortlessly when I was there and I never felt lonely at all. Here it just seems harder to make friends. Part of it might just be that there are fewer people so you'r
254.
by wsxcde 12y ago
> BTW, they're university-educated CS majors Not true, see jukay's comment downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7631440
255.
by wsxcde 12y ago
> A more recent improvement has been to unwind loops a bound number of times, encoding the whole program as a logical statement that is only satisfied by input that will trigger an assertion error. The technical term for this is bound
256.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Ah, but finding equivalence classes of states is quite tricky! Obviously the naive approach of enumerating states and assigning them to equivalence classes is dead on arrival. You might be hinting at examining control flow predicates with y
257.
by wsxcde 12y ago
It's not just about whether it is possible in theory though. I'm sure it is, but if it's too complicated, it won't see adoption. The point I was making is that expressibility isn't just important in your programming
258.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Model checking deals with two kinds of properties - safety and liveness. Safety properties effectively say nothing bad ever happens while liveness properties say that something good will eventually happen. For example, "my program will
259.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Coq is an interactive theorem-prover, which is exactly what it sounds like. You prove your theorems more or less by typing out the proofs and the system mechanically verifies that each step in your proof is sound. I've used Coq and I&#
260.
by wsxcde 12y ago
Honest question, what's the point being made here? Are you attempting to imply that because Stalin presided over a terrible famine his political ideals must be flawed? Churchill and friends presided over the Bengal famine of the 1940s.
261.
by wsxcde 13y ago
A lot of these analyses seem to wish away the agency of graduate students. These people seem to think that we're all being tricked into joining graduate programs by professors making us false promises of unattainable faculty positions.
262.
by wsxcde 13y ago
People cheat because Gain(cheating) * P(not getting caught) > Cost(cheating) * (1 - P(not getting caught)). I would say this is true for everyone everywhere regardless of society, culture or race. India is trying to reduce P(not getting
263.
by wsxcde 13y ago
This ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb... ) is one of the classic papers on PIMs.
264.
by wsxcde 13y ago
If you find a flaw in a published paper, the normal course of action is to e-mail the authors letting them know what you think is wrong. If authors think this is a devastating flaw, they will retract their paper. Even if they don't, yo
265.
by wsxcde 13y ago
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn
266.
by wsxcde 13y ago
A much more "standard" example is the PC industry. When Intel started selling its microprocessors, their products were much slower than the high-end mainframe processors that the likes of DEC used to manufacture. DEC weren't
267.
by wsxcde 13y ago
Cheers, those are some good points and I am indeed conflating fraud and theft. So the key point you're making about the Amazon/Target scenario is that a criminal who breaks into one of these systems has the ability to launch trans
268.
by wsxcde 13y ago
> Yes, the risk of fraudulent creation of bitcoins or of double spending of a well-confirmed bitcoin are essentially zero (assuming no major flaw in the current science of cryptography.) This is a pretty narrow definition of fraud. Cre
269.
by wsxcde 13y ago
Maybe this is an issue for you, but I don't see this as compelling advantage.
270.
by wsxcde 13y ago
How much of the 2.5% credit card fees goes towards combating fraud and enabling reversibility of transactions? I assume it's a significant fraction because you get a better rate if you use services like "verified by visa", no

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