danblick

Is "byzantine consensus" an appropriate term?

I think it's typically used when there's agreement on the list of nodes participating in the network. (The nodes can agree to change the list of participants, Lamport wrote about it in "Reconfiguring a State Machine".)*

With "blockchain" / proof of work, computing power substitutes for voting power: you pass state transitions by controlling a majority of the compute power rather than a majority of the voting power.

Have you seen "byzantine consensus" used in the second context (with proof of work) also?

(*) When I think of the Byzantine consensus problem, it's when:

- not every node has to vote in each round (so that the system can make progress even if some nodes fail);

- you can authenticate (e.g. with cryptography) that messages come from the appropriate sender (but not whether that sender is acting "honestly");

- the goal is to reach consensus, i.e., if any node concludes that some proposition (i.e. state transition) has passed, no nodes will ever agree on contradictory proposition.

I wonder if Uber's investors have an unusual perspective on women's issues:

https://www.crunchbase.com/funding-round/3561e0558d4fa07f0dc...

Just to share something I think is fun:

Modern German has separate formal and informal pronouns ("du bist" vs. "Sie sind") and verbs. English used to have them too ("thou art"/"you are"). Even though people assume "thou" is more formal, it's actually the informal/intimate version.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou

Apparently we (~Angles/Saxons) also used to have a separate tense for "a group of exactly two of you" and words like "both" (vs all) and "either" (vs any) are residual traces of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

Strangely, I was just reading about the costs of prison in California because I read an article about "the grave injustice of mandatory sentencing" [1] and was curious about the associated costs to taxpayers.

I don't feel personally affected by this issue, but I get the sense we are sentencing too many people for too long for non-violent drug offenses.

Anyway, the cost of the prison system in California is about $7.9 billion according to:

https://www.vera.org/publications/the-price-of-prisons-what-...

or (given 39 million people in California) about $200 per taxpayer (no, that's not the best metric).

If the cost per prisoner is going up because we're releasing people from prisons this year, that's probably a good thing.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/02/politics/mandatory-minimum-sen...

I have to say: I think Snowden is a hero, but based on what I know right now I'm not sympathetic to Reality Winner.

To me, it seems like this leak undermined several ongoing investigations and hurt our chances of getting to the truth. (With this information exposed, anyone being investigated will have their guard up now.)

I wonder: what was she thinking? I imagine she must have thought she was doing the right thing (rather than leaking for personal gain). Did she think this information would not reach the public for some reason? It's clear she didn't like Trump. Was this really just a reckless leak?

My concern is that in the long term you'll see more and more consolidation of mining power, because economic forces will tend to push things in that direction. (That's what the articles I linked to above are saying.)

At some point, it might not take "collusion" to manipulate the currency because somebody will be able to do it unilaterally.

What do you mean by that?

As long as we're speculating: I kind of dream that maybe we'll see programming environments that take advantage of VR.

Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?")

There's already the idea of "memory palaces" [1] suggesting you can take advantage of spatial memory for other purposes.

I wonder, what would it be like to learn or search a codebase by walking through it and looking around?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

The situation reminds me a little bit of the Keynesian beauty contest: what matters isn't what I think of bitcoin, it's what other people think.

Do I think the average person buying bitcoin today is even aware of these problems? Not a bit. Are they going to wise up soon? Probably not.

So maybe it makes sense to bet that Bitcoin will be popular and unaffected by these issues for a while. (I mean, you can still use it to buy heroin, right? Growth potential.)

On the other hand, ignoring the long-term problems feels a little like knowingly buying into a pyramid scheme.

The main reason I don't own any bitcoin is that I don't think the economics of mining make sense in the long term.

Specifically: bitcoin depends on distributed mining power in order to prevent individual miners from being able to manipulate the blockchain.

However, if you accept that (1) there are economies of scale in mining, and (2) miners are rational and will only mine when they can make a profit, then I see no reason to believe mining power should stay "distributed" rather than develop into a monopoly.

I realize this hasn't happened yet, but I don't think it makes sense to base a currency on such shaky foundations.

The basic argument is also made in the paper discussed here:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/declining-profitability-for-...

also:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05240

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7789434/

My thought: just because social attitudes change and something develops a stigma doesn't mean that thing won't still be commercially successful for a long, long time. Television, fast food and sugary drinks, over-sized cars, telemarketing...

It might be that in 5 years, Facebook will be as popular in the Bay Area as McDonald's is. I'm not sure that in that scenario Facebook won't still be a strong business.

Don't get me wrong: I think we're due for a cultural backlash against the kind of "information sugar" Facebook embodies. But I'm skeptical about how much such a backlash would really accomplish.

Maybe you'll see some kind of "up-market" services emerge that cater to new tastes (in this case: greater value placed on limited distraction/sustained attention). What is the Whole Foods Market in this area?

> So yes, it seems that all domestic stallions descend from just one ancestor stallion. That's amazing!

I once a class on population genetics in which the instructor commented that the "mitochondrial Eve" idea is kind of over-played. Basically, if you look at any genetic locus, you're going to find some most-recent common ancestor, but that most-recent common ancestor isn't going to be the same for all loci. (So yes, there might be a "mitochrondrial Eve", but there's also a "cytochrome Sam" and they're not necessarily the same person.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent_theory

"""Because of recombination, different gene loci follow different pathways of ancestry, resulting in different gene genealogies. The coalescent is also relevant to phylogenetics, as incomplete lineage sorting between speciation events results in conflict among gene-loci in phylogenetic relationships inferred among species."""

(I'm no expert, but sometimes I think population genetics has one of the most interesting mathematical structures of all the natural processes I know about.)

> Minimum wage was an antiracism policy aimed at forcing the Deep South

Could you offer some support for this claim? There is a recent book called "Illiberal Reformers" that seems to suggest exactly the opposite: that minimum wage policies were put in place with the intent of putting minorities out of work (rather than raising their standard of living).

See some of the quotations here:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/12/thomas_leonard.html

""" The low-standard or undercutting-of-wages part of the theory, got its start with the violent activism of white Americans against Chinese immigrant workers. The title of a pamphlet published by the American Federation of Labor trenchantly captured the heart of the claim: Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? If wages were determined by living standards rather than by productivity, then the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon could not compete with the Chinese worker accustomed to eating rice.

Professor Woodrow Wilson, in his popular History of the American People, preferred the same theory of low-standard races undercutting American wages, adding a fillip of racism to cement the notion that race explained the low standards. White laborers, unable to "live upon a handful of rice for a pittance," could not compete with the Chinese, "who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather." """

If you're talking about small (last-mile) deliveries, there's a big difference between manned and unmanned delivery: if your package is ~1 kg and your pilot is ~80 kg then an unmanned craft can be ~1% the size of a manned one. On the other hand if it's ~900 kg vs ~980 kg then it seems to make less of a difference whether or not there's a pilot.

Well, if your craft is unmanned then it can be very small, which makes the idea appealing for the last mile and less appealing as you start moving cargos the size of a human anyway.

I doubt these would be multi-rotors as opposed to helicopters or planes. If you read a little about "actuator disk theory" it shows that small rotors are much less efficient than large ones, and if you're lifting heavy weights that becomes even more important.

http://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes/...

If you're interested in this topic, I would highly recommend Neil Postman's book, "Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business".

I agree with claims that Postman predicted Trump's rise back in 1985:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...

The book is written about television, but the main ideas are still applicable to online newsfeeds and social media.

The book unpacks the phrase: "the ideas that are convenient to express become the content of a culture". If the most convenient form of communication is long-form writing in newspapers or pamphlets, people will get their information from (long-form writing in) newspapers or pamphlets. If it's television, they will get information from (visual, snappy, "entertaining") video. If it's Twitter, people will end up talking about ideas that can be conveniently expressed in 140 characters or less.

As a kid I remember learning that the atomic bombs contributed to Japan's surrender in WW2, but as a grown-up I also learned that Russia (a neighboring country) declared war on Japan two days after the first bomb was dropped, and I wonder which made more of a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War_(1...

The US government did a lot of things to affect the way communism was viewed in the US, so I suspect there may have been some official spin involved here.

Strikes me as a Sokal-style joke about bad writing in philosophy.

"A glut is a proposition that is both true and false. The rule for assigning gluts is the mirror image of the rule for assigning gaps: A statement is true exactly if it comes out true on at least one precisification."

This is a joke, right?

Why does Safari struggle to open files in common and free formats?

I agree that's something we should be concerned about. I don't think minimum wage laws address that issue though.

If you want to help improve standards of living around the world, reduce immigration restrictions so that people can move from countries with few economic opportunities to other countries where there are more opportunities.

Personally I agree with most of what Bryan Caplan has written on the topic.

https://vimeo.com/15000835

The term "information good" is from economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_good

An information good is one for which it's very cheap to produce additional units. Unfortunately, I'm probably abusing the term, since books are listed as an example of information goods. The idea is that most of the cost of producing the book goes into the content (writing, editing, etc.) and actually printing one additional book is cheap. (When I said books are "imperfect" information goods I meant that they still require paper and shipping and retailing and such, but it's probably just a bad use of the term.)

There's a fantastic book about the economics of information goods called "Information Rules" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X ). Software is an information good so this covers some topics relevant to the digital economy. My favorite part is the chapter on lock-in. In particular the discussion around the equation:

profits from a customer = quality advantage + switching costs

which puts "(marginal) goodness of your product" on equal footing with "pain you can inflict on your customer for leaving".

I don't feel that strongly about artificial sweeteners. Just responding to this comment:

"that's what science IS. Providing the ability to answer any and all questions about our nature."

I'm glad you're questioning that assertion, but I don't think your counter-argument is very convincing. The economics of the printing press were different than the economics facing Google. For example: Google search benefits from network effects (clicks are used to improve future search results). Google mostly provides information goods (zero marginal cost of production), but books aren't really a perfect information good.

Google is darn near close to a monopoly on search (at least, Peter Thiel made that the premise of Zero to One), which isn't to say they're also a monopolist in every other field they're in.

"But, probably the most important channel of adjustment is through reductions in labor turnover, which yield significant cost savings to employers."

If this is the case, you'd think employers would have an incentive to raise wages on their own without requiring a law.

Doesn't your argument basically assume the first company will always be able to hire workers? If wages are so bad, workers would seek other options, like developing a skill or taking a job in a different industry.

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/02/25/remedial-eco...

Just in case anyone was unsure, that's not the libertarian argument.

(It's maybe the Malthusian argument, and Malthus failed to account for technological development and declining birth rates.)

This kind of reminds me of the Econtalk episode on "why the law is so perverse". There's a sense that people can't make rational decisions under conditions of extreme stress.

"I think part of the reason is we worry that there could be at lack of judgment there, perhaps. Someone under that unattractive choice. It's related to Mike Munger's concept of euvoluntary. It's a person who is clearly under duress no matter what: even if they enter into it freely, it's such an unattractive option, to call it a free choice seems somehow perverse in itself."

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/08/leo_katz_on_why.htm...

I'm less certain than you are that good online education resources for K-12 would also mean the end of teacher jobs.

The anecdote about bank teller jobs and ATMs comes to mind - https://www.aei.org/publication/what-atms-bank-tellers-rise-...

Not saying that teacher jobs are likely to increase, just that I'm not sure they'd go away altogether, either.