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ZeroCoin

130 karma · joined April 14, 2013

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ZeroCoin··on FBI conducts search by disrupting Internet service, posing as repairmen [pdf]
I read through the entire affidavit when it originally came out as I have an interest in online gambling... but I couldn't figure out what exactly the FBI was after these asian gamblers for... the only thing it said was that they had multiple tvs and internet connections going into one suite and when the FBI saw what they were doing, it looked like they were only betting on World Cup matches over the internet.

There has to be more to it... I know online gambling is illegal in the USA, but why get the FBI involved because some foreigners are betting big online?

ZeroCoin··on To make Lemmon Cakes (1670)
If not heavy cream then straight butter is fairly common in north america, yes.
ZeroCoin··on Ravens Offensive Lineman Publishes Math Paper
I found it rather fitting.
ZeroCoin··on PHP7 Gains Scalar Type Hints
I love PHP.

I think of it as the English language of programming. Picking and choosing all of the best bits from every other language, and bastardizing them into it's own everyday use.

ZeroCoin··on Americans should drink more coffee
>it's unlikely to do anything other than make you more alert and awake.

I find that extremely hard to believe.

If I drink 5 cups of coffee per day I get heart palpitations, an upset stomach, and am extremely irritable in general. The same goes for my significant other.

I actually went to a heart specialist and wore a heart monitor for 48 hours last year because I was having an irregular heartbeat and would black-out occasionally after jumping up out of a chair. The diagnosis? I'm fine. I just need to ingest less caffeine.

I think I'll stick with my one cup per day, below average amount.

It's just enough to wake up me, keep me alert, without any of the negative effects that caffeine brings with it.

ZeroCoin··on Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?
>Can you imagine where half the SaaS startups will be without recurring credit card subscriptions?

I have done quite well opting not to use recurring credit card subscriptions for my SaaS, imho.

If you make a good product, customers will come back to use it again and again. They won't just forget about a product that worked wonders for them.

If you can't succeed without recurring billing then your product probably isn't good enough to succeed anyways.

ZeroCoin··on Microsoft's new foldable keyboard
>probably a pretty mediocre typing experience.

It's obviously no mechanical keyboard, but it's a full sized keyboard none the less, and it allows you to enter large amounts of text into your smartphone much easier than what was previously offered.

I would call that a major improvement in the keyboard arena, not a mediocre typing experience.

The limited rate of data entry was what pulled me away from owning a smartphone. I have a dumbphone and I use my laptop for all my serious work. It's nearly impossible to write code on any smartphone out there as of yesterday. But today I would consider getting a smartphone to actually work on. Probably with an HDMI output on it, too. Just in case.

ZeroCoin··on I Had a Stroke at 33
>The paranoia around opiates has to end. Lack of access to pain medication is a huge problem globally.

I agree 100%.

I passed kidney stones without any pain medication because the "care workers" thought I was a junkie looking for a fix... Even though I had been into their ER a few weeks earlier and was white as a sheet due to incredible pain.

You can't even fake that type of pain afaik.

ZeroCoin··on Apple’s dangerous game
>The first question is whether the government can lawfully compel the telephone’s owner to divulge the passcode. I believe the answer is that yes, a person can in fact face punishment for refusal to enter in the password to decrypt his own phone. If the government obtains a subpoena ordering the person to enter in the passcode, and the person refuses or falsely claims not to know the passcode, a person can be held in contempt for failure to comply.

I thought the exact opposite was true?

That no judge or any court can force you to disclose your password?

ie self incriminating your own person.

Apparently it varies from country to country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

ZeroCoin··on I Had a Stroke at 33
>The treatment is: Take B12 every day for the rest of my life.

Every human being on earth that I know of needs this. It's not just vegetarians.

What foods were you eating while homeless?

I imagine it's fairly tough to come by nutritional yeast and other B-complex rich foods whilst living on the street.

My girlfriend is a strict vegetarian, gets her blood checked regularly, and is apparently fine. We assume because she supplements all of the necessary nutrients that she lacks in her food. Mainly iron and the b complex vitamins I believe.

ZeroCoin··on I Had a Stroke at 33
>I hate being treated like I'm a criminal!!

That's exactly how I felt when I called in for a refill of my pain medication after just having met with multiple doctors in the ER just a few weeks prior.

Do they really think I intentionally got kidney stones (which they saw themselves on xray) just to get an extra refill of pain meds a few weeks later?

No, the lady on the phone probably got intense amount of pleasure by telling me off verbally and hanging up. At least that's one of the only reasons I can think she didn't even bother to listen to me.

I was upset and confused, but too proud to call back and have myself humiliated again. So I just grinned and bore it and screamed like a baby when the stones actually passed a few days later.

A funny side note to this story... I can laugh at it all now seeing as it's ten years in the past. In my long walk to the hospital (I was a poor student at the time, unable to even afford the bus) me and my girlfriend passed a band of elderly ladies who took one look at me and within seconds said "Oh no, look at him. You must have stones, don't you laddy?".

I wasn't sure what was wrong with me at the time and I just replied something like "haha, I hope that's it!" and continued on to the hospital.

6 hours and an xray later... the doctors confirmed the very same thing.

ZeroCoin··on [dead]
>The man I paid was in his forties, and he spoke to me in the most patronizing tone, as if I were some silly little girl who did not have the right to question his work, despite the fact that I was paying for it.

I'm not surprised in the slightest because as a young male this has happened to myself numerous times in the past before I got sick of it and decided to learn programming myself.

Generally programmers who you hire for a one-off programming job and don't really have any connection to will berate you if you call their work sub par.

In a way, I almost agree with their attitude. Because what do you honestly know? If you knew the best way to program what you think you wanted, why didn't you code it yourself?

In hindsight, the things I thought the programs I paid for should or could have done better were actually impossible and I appreciate now the bluntness of the programmers I paid to tell it to me straight.

ZeroCoin··on I Had a Stroke at 33
>I wandered outside the boundaries of telemetry. They lost my heartbeat. When I returned, they scolded me.

The audacity of health care industry workers (those who should know what a certain disease entails) who place blame on their patients for acting normally is infuriating.

I had kidney stones once at a young age. I remember barely walking into the emergency room one night after they became too painful.

As soon as I arrived, white as a sheet of paper, they asked me a few questions... doped me up on morphine... and managed to "lose" me on a gurney in a hallway somewhere for a few hours until my girlfriend at the time came and found me.

They took xrays I believe and I was free to go with some more painkillers in hand.

Apparently the hospital told me that I was supposed to call them by X date if I wanted any more painkillers.

I called them back about a week after that date had passed, asked for a refill, and was scolded like I was some drug addict just looking for a fix. I think they even hung up on me. How could I be so stupid as to have forgotten a date they told me when I was high as a kite by their own doing? Right.

I ended up passing them without any painkillers which as many of you have probably heard is unbelievably painful.

I understand that it can get monotonous working in a hospital, but with the amount of money they're paid to work there you would hope that they would be required to operate with a little compassion. Considering the fact that many people in a hospital are leaving this world.

What if the author's last memory was that of a person she didn't know berating her for something she wasn't sure she even did?

ZeroCoin··on Linode Manager Two-Step Authentication
Why can't they just use a second email address?
ZeroCoin··on How porn links and Ben Bernanke snuck into Bitcoin's code
Well then all of the worries about this child-porn being in the blockchain are warrantless.

You could create a link to child-porn from this very comment I just posted using the right cipher. I am sure of it.

ZeroCoin··on An Introduction to the Mechanics of Bitcoin
He doesn't do a lot of the new videos. It's lovely to hear his voice when he does, though. Makes you feel just a bit more special.

Perhaps Sal doesn't have a great understanding of cryptography? He doesn't do a single cryptography video on khanacademy as far as I know.

ZeroCoin··on How porn links and Ben Bernanke snuck into Bitcoin's code
Come on guys, this is HN. Not Reddit.
ZeroCoin··on How porn links and Ben Bernanke snuck into Bitcoin's code
re: "is there a deterministic way[?]"

I would assume so.

Perhaps adding a word-checker to bitcoin clients that looks for recognizable words (or attempts to validate a URL found inside the most recent block).

If block contains words or URLs, disregard it. If not, accept it.

Now Namecoin on the other hand...

ZeroCoin··on 60W equivalent LED bulb uses 9.5W and costs $13
I should take a picture of my Local home depot's light bulb "selection", it truly is humorous.

I picked up my two cree bulbs in an "end cap"-esque box today, however it was not at the end of any aisle, rather hidden away in the lamp section.

ZeroCoin··on Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain
I wonder when they'll switch to thepiratebay.bit ?

To help make that happen, take a look at Namecoins and the dot-bit.org project.

ZeroCoin··on Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain
re: "The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment."

.bit domains do expire approximately every 9 months I believe, unless you spend more namecoins to re-register them using your private key in which case you re-register said domain for 9 more months.

Abandonment happens if you no longer own the private key used to register the domain and/or you no longer make payments into the network.

ZeroCoin··on Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain
Most definitely. You are talking about the dot-bit DNS project in particular. See here for more details: http://dot-bit.org
ZeroCoin··on 60W equivalent LED bulb uses 9.5W and costs $13
I just bought a 5k and 2.7k versions from Home Depot here in Canada for $15.97 CAD each.

My only gripe is the ~22% markup over the US pricing when the Canadian Dollar is worth ~2% more than the American (and has been for some time now).

I found it funny the way they had their lights laid out in my local store. There has always only ever been one aisle dedicated to twist-in bulbs.

When I entered the store today, and walked straight to that aisle. All I could find were phillips LED bulbs. Rashes of them. Almost every shelf in the aisle featured a Phillips LED bulb of some sort, for twice the price of the Crees. There were even Phillips LED comparison kisosks where consumers could turn on and off all of Phillips' LED bulbs. It was really quite a spectacle.

I broke down and finally asked a sales rep, only to be told the Cree bulbs were in the "fancy/expensive" lighting section of the store. The one where they sell all of the chandeliers and lamps, and you have never been able to find twist-ins for sale.

My gut feeling is that Phillips is scared they're going to lose market share over this, and are using their massive Home Depot contracts to negotiate poor placement for the Crees (and possibly poor pricing?). FYI 90%+ of the bulbs sold in Home Depots are Phillips.

ZeroCoin··on Machine Learning and Link Spam: My Brush With Insanity
"doesn't immediately qualify it as spam", no. That's correct.

It does however make it very difficult to gauge who is a legitimate linker and who is not.

All I'm really saying is if you're starting now with all of the years of random linkspam backscatter is that you are in for a rough ride.

ZeroCoin··on Machine Learning and Link Spam: My Brush With Insanity
The problem now is that (imho) 99% of the links posted on the internet are spam.

Unless you have a baseline of "what was here first" and "exactly when every website went live with what links" like Google does (because they have been indexing websites since the dawn of time as far as the internet and linking is concerned. Heck, there wasn't even backlink spamming prior to Google because Google was the first search engine to rank by number of backlinks!)... you're going to have a really tough time determining what spam is and what it isn't.

Which 1% do you decide to focus in on?

ZeroCoin··on Two Bitcoin services "hacked" in the last two days. The common denominator? OVH
I made a post about slush's bitcoin pool being hacked here last night to no avail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5599329
ZeroCoin··on Self-proclaimed LulzSec leader arrested
I thought "self-proclaimed LulzSec leader" was an oxymoron?
ZeroCoin··on Have all OVH VPS' been compromised? Just like Linode was recently?
Here is a response from "Slush" in that same thread... Slush is the owner and operator of the Slush Bitcoin Mining Pool, is very well respected in the community, and these are his exact words: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1976.msg1925708#msg1...

"I cross-checked my mailbox setup and no forwarding is configured here. For now I fully blame OVH for this issue." -Slush

ZeroCoin··on OVH implicated in attack against Bitcoin mining pool
Is this similar to what just happened at Linode? Has OVH allowed full access of their databases to attackers?

Looks like the only answer to be truly secure is to colocate your own box?

ZeroCoin··on Why aren’t younger Americans driving anymore?
"More younger people are living in transit-oriented areas."

I presume this fact, along with "The recession" are the two most important deciding factors when it comes to the reasoning behind OPs question.

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