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bitcointicker

40 karma · joined July 17, 2015

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bitcointicker··on SEC Rejects Rule Change for Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund [pdf]
Thanks for recommending the site.

You can also use telnet to watch the price via:

  telnet ticker.bitcointicker.co 10080
bitcointicker··on Moving Beyond the OOP Obsession
Another good article expressing a similar opinion which some might not have seen http://blog.codinghorror.com/your-code-oop-or-poo/
bitcointicker··on Dimple: An object-oriented API for business analytics powered by D3
As someone who has also played around with d3 to create hand cranked charts, which you can see here http://bitcointicker.co/bitstamp/ ..... (it can be quite tedious)

I fully appreciate nvd3, which can be used to quickly make pretty charts like these http://charts.bitcointicker.co/

bitcointicker··on Unix History Repository
Last page starts here:

https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/commits/mast...

Fascinating!

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
If this is indeed the way it does play out, and what you have said all sounds very plausible, it's going to raise all sorts of difficult questions for future generations.

Who will decide how many of these AI's can be created? Will AI's ultimately be able to create their own offspring? We already have limited resources, this will only increase the demand :-) I see trouble ahead... as well huge opportunities for advancing our understanding of the Universe.

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
I'm not sure it's just about computational power. Currently we mainly deal with digital computers that process information in a very discrete way. This is a nice article with regards to the human brain being analogue or digital-

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-human-brain-analog-or-digital

The development of quantum computers could offer a huge leap forward with the development of AI.

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
Indeed, it's perhaps one of the most fundamental questions in life, at least in my view. I only wish I could somehow peer into the distant future to see how things pan out.

It's likely that eventually the boundaries between humans and AI will blur. I guess at some point there will be cognitive augmentation, but imagine the debate that will generate. Look how we view physical enhancement by drugs today in sport.

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
Eventually I'm pretty sure this will be an important question. Hundreds, or thousands of years into the future. It will matter one day. Will these artificial life forms have the same rights as humans? If there is no difference between simulated or human conciousness, then the answer is yes, they should have the same rights.

But will people accept this?

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
These seem plausible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness#Aspec...

Awareness, memory, leaning, anticipation and subjective experience.

Empathy is a good example, will a computer ever "feel" empathy? Or will it be simulated empathy? Is there actually a distinction? I'm not sure.

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
Personally, I'm not sure, which is one of the reasons I posed the question. But I seem to be being down voted for even raising it...
bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
So you don't believe there is any distinction between being "alive" and running software? Providing of course the software is complex enough to display human traits such as thought, emotions, creativity and so forth?

Just to be clear, I hold no solid viewpoint on this, I'm just interested as to what other folk here think.

bitcointicker··on Google achieves AI 'breakthrough' by beating Go champion
This is a good place as any to ask this. Do hackernews readers think that computers will eventually have a "mind" and "consciousness" ? Or will it just be simulated?

As described in the chinese room thought experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

bitcointicker··on Breakup, as captured by my fitbit
8 hours sleep seems like bliss to me. Even if I actually get to bed giving me enough time to have 8 hours sleep, I usually have trouble drifting off and then when I do, I'll wake a few hours later, and repeat.

I find that there is so much stimulation throughout the day, so many things I want to read about, experiment with and work related problems to solve, I really struggle to switch off at the end of the day. I try to console myself with this - http://www.wsj.com/articles/sleep-experts-close-in-on-the-op... 7 hours is better than 8 :-)

bitcointicker··on Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments
Surprised to see Permutation City in that list. Given that the book is written in 1994, Gregg displays admirable prescience about how computing would develop. Honestly you would think it was written in the last 5 years or so. His vision of cloud computing is absolutely outstanding. It blew me away when I checked when the book was written after reading the first few chapters.

I'd read Schild's Ladder prior to reading Permutation city, which is also a good read. It does seem to get bogged down in the technical and descriptive side of things at times, however, it's a fantastic idea for a story. The main premise of the film would make a great movie.

Whilst I'm on the subject of good "Hard sci-fi" novels, Tau Zero is also worth reading.

Edit - I'll also throw this in: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0814703259

Magic :-)

bitcointicker··on Why Always Docker?
You can use chef and docker together, if you really want to. Containers do provide some benefits as others have mentioned in this thread ( Packaging, avoiding conflicts, maybe even as a chroot on steroids for isolation purposes).

You could have a server managed by chef which installs docker, pulls down a number of containers and then launches them, hooking them together if required. If random ports are used, chef can capture these and then hook into a load balancer to register the containers.

You can even have chef build containers from a Dockerfile, to make sure they have the latest updates, tag the image and then launch them.

So many options it often makes your head spin :-)

bitcointicker··on Why Always Docker?
This is a nice article which describes how it is used in detail and the general workflow:

http://dustinrcollins.com/chef-integration-testing-with-serv...

If you use it in a pipeline and it reports no errors, you can then upload your cookbook changes to chef server and bump the version. Obviously it relies on cookbook writers being disciplined, to make sure they add tests for new features they have added, but even a simple test to make sure a service is up and running and listening on a port can be enough to make sure a commit has not broken a cookbook.

Opscode recently announced chef compliance which appears to build on serverspec, it is more geared towards auditing and security.

https://www.chef.io/solutions/audit-compliance/

bitcointicker··on Why Always Docker?
Personally the best use case for docker I have at the moment is for the testing of chef cookbooks with the Chef Test Kitchen Docker driver - https://github.com/portertech/kitchen-docker

I can write my cookbooks and almost instantly test them inside a container. You can even test on multiple platforms at the same time (Debian,Rhel etc) in parallel. You can perform integration testing using serverspec once the container has converged to the required state - http://serverspec.org/

bitcointicker··on The Hadoop Ecosystem Table
My recommendations...

For automated cluster building - https://ambari.apache.org/

For analysing your data, dynamically building queries and sharing this with other people in your company - https://zeppelin.incubator.apache.org/

And coming soon - https://www.zeppelinhub.com/

bitcointicker··on The Development of the C Language (1993)
I love C. Perhaps this is because it's the first language I was taught. It fascinated me. It was complex, it allowed you to do dangerous things, but once it clicks, its like an epiphany :-)

I hardly use it much these days, it's much faster to get things done in python, ruby or perl. Unless you need performance. I guess its like an old song, listening to it brings back memories of what was going on in your life when you first heard it. Reminiscing about writing my first C programs brings back the same kind of memories.

Do other people have the same feeling about the first language they learnt? Or is C really special? :)

bitcointicker··on The Loading Screen Game Patent Finally Expires
Never knew invade-a-load was mainly a feature of UK games..

It mostly appeared in games sold in the United Kingdom, as, by the time it was written, the Commodore market in the United States had mostly switched to floppy disk media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invade-a-Load

Loading games on the C64 was a nightmare.... At least with the 3 cassette loaders I owned. The first 1 broke, the second one was returned due to not loading some games and with the 3rd I experimented with adjusting the tape head alignment. Most games would load, but sometimes they would randomly fail. When loading took a up 30 mins (max capacity, most games much less), it would become infuriating! Much finger crossing was done during loading.

This was the tape loader...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64_peripherals#Tape_...