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bachbackon Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices

Bitcoin does not require "identity management". That is why it works. Ripple/Stellar requires explicit trust - money gets created through obligations. That is also how the fiat money system works. In Bitcoin there is no central authority making press releases.

bachbackon Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices

Stellar is not decentralized. If problems like this occur, there is the Stellar organization /corporation, to enforce consenus. Whenever there is a legal entity behind it, it's not de-central. Bitcoin has solved all these problems. Ripple was invented before Bitcoin. Stellar is a Ripple fork.

bachbackon Safety, liveness and fault tolerance—the consensus choices

The Ripple / Stellar protocol is bad, so this is not a surprise. Ripple was invented before Bitcoin. Ripple/Stellar requires explicit trust, where Bitcoin does not. Also the distribution was widely known to be gameable (I know many people involved who managed to get free stellar). The only surprising thing is that Stripe and Ravikant invested in a technology which is obviously inferior to Bitcoin. Prof. Mazieré and JedMcCaleb have no significant background in economic research and it shows.

bachbackon Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

Yes, quite. Look at this chart[1] and animation [2]. You will find that there are almost no IPO's below 1B$ in the 2010's. What used to be the default option, became: stay private as long as you can. If Stripe is worth 3B$ now, what stops them from going public? Same for AirBnb (13B$ est) and Dropbox(10B$ est).

[1] http://cdn.ientry.com/sites/webpronews/article_pics/tech_ipo...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealb...

bachbackon Stripe raises $70M at $3.5B valuation, double that of January

IPO certainly not - it's extremely unattractive in the current regulatory regime (death of the IPO [1]). I wonder what their long-term strategy looks like given their margins can't be very high as a front-end for credit card companies.

[1] http://www.vox.com/2014/6/26/5837638/the-ipo-is-dying-marc-a...

bachbackon John Carmack on shadow volumes (2000)

"Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection. Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better." - John Carmack

bachbackon How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/digitalphysics.html

bachbackon How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

Time to correct the record: the World's first electronic, programmable computer was build by a German by the name of Konrad Zuse in May 1941 [1] called Z3 [2]. He designed a language for it called Plankalkül [3].

Eniac was announced in 1946. Incidentally Turing wanted to be build one in 1945, called Electronic Brain. His paper "on computable numbers" was published in 1936.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_%28computer%29 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

bachbackon Light Table 0.7.0

Good news! I'm going to switch from Emacs some of the time, and hopefully 100% eventually. The thing that bugged me was how uneven the way editor would react in some cases. For me it didn't have the reliability I need. I was interested in the fundamentals and found underneath is code-mirror. I thought eventually all code-editing should move into a browser, but isn't quite there yet. Hopefully this will move to 1.0 and be a full emacs replacement.

bachbackon What can I only do in Erlang?

HN is just mean and boring for downvoting this. Gotta leave this place.

bachbackon What can I only do in Erlang?

Examples can be found here http://zeromq.org/docs:labs AFAIK Twitter storm uses ZMQ under the hood.

bachbackon What can I only do in Erlang?

Better yet: ZeroMQ is not even a language. What ZMQ does it lets your write extremely performant and reliable distributed systems in any language. It is a layer over sockets. Any complex system will have to interact with other complex systems, which are written in other languages. Say you develop a service and a lot of people want to use it. What API are you going to expose? One that is only based on Erlang primitives? Certainly not, because then you have limited your user-base to a small number of people.

bachbackon What can I only do in Erlang?

Tell that people who are trying to build scalable network applications. Saltstack uses ZeroMQ under the hood and the biggest cloud computing operations in the world use it. That article reads like from a past age, where you didn't have startups scaling to millions of users based on cloud computing. HTTP was invented for retrieving hypertext documents. Not for connecting millions of nodes.

bachbackon What can I only do in Erlang?

ZeroMQ gives you the same but better: messaging in any language. That means you can interface to any component you want written in any language you want. Also hiding native sockets, which means networking is not 1:1 but based on scalability patterns. At some point people will realize what a big deal that is.

bachbackon Facebook's Top Open Data Problems

true - Facebook scales linearly. If you're interested in really hard problems in distributed systems & blockchains let me know. Facebook should not own social data. the future will be end-to-end encrypted and de-centralised.

bachbackon The Domain Market is a Mess

DNS is a mess - it's like politicians and marketing guys designing the web.

bachbackon Minimum Viable Block Chain

proof of stake was first proposed in 2011 on bitcointalk, the go-to reference for everything bitcoin/altcoin.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake

http://wiki.nxtcrypto.org/

http://bitshares.org/security/delegated-proof-of-stake.php

If any coins make it you can see at watching the marketcap of the coins at http://coinmarketcap.com

bachbackon Minimum Viable Block Chain

that part of the problem is partially solved. not every node has to "mine" all blocks. in fact in PoS there's no mining at all. the big problem is that you create all coins at genesis. there are a bunch of proposals and work in this direction.

bachbackon Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson – Starts at 9:30AM PDT

how sad that this doesn't even the front page of HN. he's the inventor of hypertext.

I recently wrote to Mr. Nelson and he is still working on his grand dream.

bachbackon Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson – Starts at 9:30AM PDT

hmm, interesting, fascinating and sad. the article mentions Mark Miller. He has done very interesting work (works at google).

http://research.google.com/pubs/author35958.html

bachbackon Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson – Starts at 9:30AM PDT

this is a Ted Nelon tribute event. so the title should name him first!

some lectures of his here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

bachbackon To don't (2012)

TODO:

* write an AI which writes the todo list

* follow AI's todo list

bachbackon I wish I could read Wikipedia like this

welcome to Ted Nelson's original idea of hypertext. further information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hypertext

bachbackon Practical Cryptography With Go

thanks. but why has crypto to be equivalent to "heart surgery"? if I would describe the state of the art of Internet security I wouldn't apply that term.

bachbackon Bret Victor's favourite books

he would likely enjoy Lawvere's conceptual mathematics.

bachbackon Ethereum: the Yellow Paper [pdf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

"The problem with an informal fallacy often stems from a flaw in reasoning that renders the conclusion unpersuasive. In contrast to a formal fallacy of deduction, the error is not merely a flaw in logic."

bachbackon Drop Dropbox

agreed. perhaps crowdfunded open security is the only way to go.

bachbackon Drop Dropbox

I'd suggest the alternative http://mega.co.nz

bachbackon Condoleezza Rice Joins Dropbox’s Board As It Names New CFO, COO

"sudo apt-get remove dropbox", never to return. it seems obvious that most US tech companies have not at all realized that they are a global business, and the implications of the Snowden summer.

bachbackon Ethereum White Paper

I believe a solution would look more like what Hal Finney called transparent servers [1]. This would be a way to solve the issue of scaling (and getting rid of mining oligarchs), but also dealing with the necessary privacy issues of contracts. Also DNS is not really a contract between 2 parties, but N parties, and there is a relationship between DNS and contracts (more on that per PM by request).

[1] http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/security.html