Hacker News Reader

Adlaion The Software Engineer’s Guide to Negotiating a Raise

I'm feeling lucky:

  50 Cent Talks Bitcoin: 'All Money Is Money' | | Observer
  observer.com/2014/12/50-cent-talks-bitcoin-all-money-is-money/
  Dec 22, 2014 - 50 Cent is happy he took Bitcoin for his album
  Animal Instinct, because "all money is money."

Adlaion EFF and Eight Other Privacy Orgs Back Out of NTIA Face Recognition Talks

Does the "Right to be Forgotten" cover the datacenter neurologic?

Adlaion Projects the Hard Way – Coding Projects for Early Coders

[0a] http://fare.tunes.org/LispM.html

[0b] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=405

Adlaion Linguistic Anonymity on the Internet

This article should be titled "The Challenges of Gender-Neutral Language on the Internet". There's nothing in it about concealing any other kind of identity information.

Adlaion EFF and Eight Other Privacy Orgs Back Out of NTIA Face Recognition Talks

At what point do we stop trying to prevent unpreventable illegal activity, and try to put systems in place for dealing with its undeniable existence?

I'm not certain how such systems would look in this case (everybody wears Guy Fawkes masks in public?), but this debate reminds me of prohibition vs. harm reduction in the War on [People Using] Drugs.

Adlaion Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Conclusion: We did not find use of psychedelics to be an independent risk factor for mental health problems.

Adlaion Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction

The interactive tool[1] needs javascript. Don't try graphing secp256k1.

[1] https://cdn.rawgit.com/andreacorbellini/ecc/0939921/interact...

Adlaion About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

We're both wrong. One billion shares, half of which he can't sell:

  CL-USER> (* 1/2 (expt 10 9)
              (parse-float "0.00029087" :type 'rational))
  145435

Adlaion About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

crickets

Adlaion About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

His >50% MPOE[1] stake is at least 1.4 million coins (valuated by the last trade).

If you're skeptical of numbers on webpages (c.f. "EmptyGox"), MPEx's trivially traceable addresses[2] currently contain around five thousand coins; tracking down the rest is left as an exercise for the skeptical sleth.

[1] http://mpex.ws/?mpsic=S.MPOE

[2] https://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/MPEx.co

Adlaion About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

Wealth.

Most of the publicly known early adopters don't spend as much (or any) time trolling about (and getting trolled) on IRC.

http://search.bitcoin-assets.com/?q=from%3Amircea_popescu

Adlaion About the supposed factoring of a 4096 bit RSA key

It's worth noting that HN does adjust article rankings:

http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...

Compare the gradual slide from the peak of other articles from the same time as the one in question:

http://hnrankings.info/9560839,9561606,9561693,9561599,95619...

Moderated forums aren't censored, but they do get... moderated. What else did you expect?

Adlaion 4096 RSA key in the strongset factored?

From http://nosuchlabs.com/theory

An RSA public key consists of a modulus n and an exponent e. Modulus n is a product of two large primes, p and q. If one knows p or q, one can derive the private key corresponding to the given public key.

A typical GPG public key contains one or more RSA moduli, depending on the number of sub-keys.

Under certain conditions, a public key modulus will share a common factor with an existing modulus belonging to someone else. This may happen if both keys were generated on a system with a thoroughly-broken entropy source, or if a particular GPG implementation has been back-doored.

Adlaion What’s the difference between SSH and SSL?

Socket-Layer Security encrypts web traffic between a client and an existing web server. It's actually no longer used anymore, but the same abbreviation is frequently misused to refer to its successor protocol, Transport Layer Security.

Secure SHell is a protocol for logging into a remote server, and doing whatever you want on it. The server needs to run a daemon to support this, but once it does, you can do whatever your login user is able to do on that server, not just the actions supported by a web server.

Also, google/wikipedia/stackoverflow miss you dearly.

Adlaion Bitcoin Exchange Receives First License in New York State

At the rate agreed upon by the purchaser and insurance provider. The considerations are different than those of insuring gold or dollars, but to an actuary, they're all just probabilities.

Adlaion Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2015)

Please rephrase your future postings to include "local" or "on-site" instead of "no remote".

Adlaion BitTorrent's Maelstrom browser enters open beta

The case where this is relevant is in decentralized source control. The only project I know of that set out to tackle this is dead in the water:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/612530753/gitchain/post...

Adlaion Truecrypt report

Any electric anthill operator worth his salt knows that banana bread recipes aren't real secrets. A convincing dummy volume has a high-traffic mostly-empty bitcoin wallet, with enough coins remaining that the agents can claim it was recovered empty, and everybody goes home happy.

Adlaion Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

The CL reader by default[1] converts unescaped characters to uppercase, but only when parsing tokens. The CL printer by default[2] converts everything it prints to lowercase. CL people seem to adopt these conventions as well, although they have been known to :capitalize Lisp on occasion.

[1] http://l1sp.org/cl/2.2

[2] http://l1sp.org/cl/*print-case*

Adlaion Why Racket? Why Lisp? (2014)

It's spelled 'Lisp'. There has been zero overlap between people writing "LISP" and people writing lisp code for about half a century.

Adlaion Why Some Bankers Are Leaving Finance for Fintech Startups

Here's one that's barely turned six:

We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Adlaion BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions of mining bitcoin

http://www.coindesk.com/microscope-true-costs-gold-productio...

Adlaion BitcoinEmissions – A project to calculate CO2 emissions of mining bitcoin

Sadly, proof-of-stake has some fundamental flaws undermining its reliability as a consensus mechanism: https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

Adlaion The Subjectivity / Exploitability Tradeoff

This explanation doesn't cover how Bitcoin determines difficulty. I tried to come up with a rewrite that does, but the original example has the "password, which they've learned is a certain number of characters in length", and Bitcoin has no such fixed target; rather, it simply requires reaching consensus on transaction ordering, with the first-in-consensus transaction moving some funds being the only valid one (subsequent transactions are double-spends). This consensus is achieved through a game-theoretic setup, involving a PoW chain, which endeavors to:

1) make an attack as expensive as physically possible, and to

2) provide a rational actor with access to a given amount of computational power a stronger incentive to collaborate, than to attack

Evidence in favor of Bitcoin's setup achieving the second goal is that the system is still alive despite individuals repeatedly having access to sufficient power to perform double spends; in fact, they already have, yet the system as a whole keeps running:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321630.0

Adlaion Online Algorithms in High-Frequency Trading

Decentralized assets[1] (technically possible already today, but not yet used for any high-volume instrument) have a single trading venue, namely the blockchain(s) on which the assets live. If multiple chains are involved[2][3], each individual trade is still atomic, but there would be a more complex ordering of trades: you could have trades which take longer than others to occur, and failed trades would also be publicly visible.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Colored_Coins

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading

[3] https://github.com/TierNolan/bips/blob/bip4x/bip-atom.mediaw...

Adlaion Online Algorithms in High-Frequency Trading

An HFT firm doing that would get fooled by activity on one exchange which resembled part of a large order being filled, but didn't actually propagate to other exchanges. These firms are doing a sort of high-frequency gamble, whereas a broker acts on certain information to which only they are privy before its execution.

Adlaion Online Algorithms in High-Frequency Trading

Should we really be putting engineers to work designing more efficient techniques for punching plasma holes through sheet metal? They should instead work on improving sheet metal technology, as it is useful both for protecting both against natural disasters, and against those pesky hole-punchers.

Adlaion Online Algorithms in High-Frequency Trading

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology2.html https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.htm...

The second link specifically talks about social utility.

Adlaion Princeton Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies Online Course Now Open

Here's the Stellar team's blog post about this. While there's no attempt to conceal this, it's also not being spelled out clearly enough: the Ripple/Stellar "consensus" model is a centralized and does NOT provide the guarantees which Proof-of-Work does in Bitcoin.

https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_toler...

Adlaion Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust

The amount of bitcoins being spent is a function primarily of the amount of bitcoins earmarked for spending by the userbase, rather than the number of deals closed by a payment processor's sales team.