Hacker News Reader

freeworkon The Bitcoin Blocksize: A Summary

You are getting downvoted (you and the other green username) because hacker news is not a community that values posts that are purely personal insults. Try posting some ideas next time.

freeworkon Many Bitcoin wallets vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions

> This seems to be further confirmation that the ONLY safe way to use bitcoin is to use a full blockchain wallet such as Bitcoin Core

This statement is false. Not all lightweight wallets (wallets that function without needing to download the blockchain) are SPV wallets. Some lightweight wallets use blockchain APIs (and therefore are immune to this problem)

Downloading the full blockhain is not the only way to secure bitcoin.

freeworkon Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk

Usually when a marker "runs out" it just has all the ink drained to the back of the pen. If you hold the pen with the tip facing down, it'll drain the ink back to the tip and it will write again.

freeworkon Sidechains and Lightning, the New New Bitcoin

The Lightning network solves the wrong problem. The whole idea behind the lightning network is to reduce the growth of the blockchain. The blockchain growing is not going to be a factor that effects the operation of the network.

Instead I'd rather see people try to fix the problem of it being expensive to spend bitcoin sourced from many small inputs. This is a problem that the lightning network does not address.

So if the lightning network does get build, we'll all be able to use microtransaction channels which will slow the growth of the blockchain, but will still cost $20 in fees to send $100 worth of bitcoin sent in tiny UTXOs.

freeworkon Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction

I can't help but to point out the irony of a post complaining about grey text, being... in grey text (referring to the downvotes)

freeworkon Flask vs. Django: Worksheet to choose the right framework

I've been using django pretty much since 1.0 came out. Every project I start these days thats a web project, I use django.

The main reason why I use django is because o the ORM and the admin. If I were to do a project in Flask, I'd have to build mt own admin, and i'd have to use SQLAlchemy. I had to use SQLAlchemy once for a project and I hated it.The django ORM is much more straigh forward an easier to use, in my opinion. In my 10 years of using django ORM, I have had to "break out of the ORM" maybe once.

freeworkon A note on the argument about the 'morality' of adblockers

I say we abandon the concept of advertising completely. Everyone should switch to models where consumers pay the content creators directly. http://autotip.io

freeworkon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2015)

Location: Santa Barbara, CA Remote: yes Willing to relocate: yes Technologies: Python, Django, Javascript, frontend (css/html), Google Chrome extensions Résumé/CV: https://github.com/priestc Email: cp368202@ohiou.edu

I am a self taught programmer, I studied aviation in college but switched careers to working at startups since 2009. I do a lot of personal projects in my spare time (which you can find on my github). I've been at my current job for about 2 years.

freeworkon Stripe: Bitcoin

It costs 80 million dollars to buy all the hardware to mine a single block. It will probably costs 800 million dollars to amass enough computing power to mine 10 blocks. It only makes sense to double spend a transaction with a VERY large amount. No transaction going through stripe will qualify.

freeworkon Stripe: Bitcoin

its very easy to predict if a transaction will confirm.

freeworkon What was wrong with V-tail Bonanza pilots? (2012)

just remember to do gumps check everytime on short final

freeworkon Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down

its because bitcoin is irreversible. If a traditional bank gets hacked, they just rollback the database to before the attack. With bitcoin, there is no rolling back. All security lessons are learned the hard way.

freeworkon How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

The best example I've seen for putting together a team comes from my high school football team. Instead of tryouts, they let anyone play who wants to play. The best players excel from day one, but the crappy players quit after a few days. The coach never says to a player "we've decided you aren't good enough, so you're off the team". It was each players decision that they came to themselves to leave the team.

The guy in the article pretty takes the same approach. I've always felt the best way to interview engineers is to go over installing the company's development environment on their machine. In other words, there is no evaluation, just expectation of results.

freeworkon What most young programmers need to learn

I disagree with his last point. There was once a time when I was obsessive about not copying pasting code. Over time I eventually learned that sometimes it better to just copy+paste a code snippet a few places than being dogmatic by making sure that nothing is ever duplicated. My rul of thumb is that if there is branching then don't copy, if there is no branching, then you can copy+paste it.

This snippet should only live in one place:

    if (something) {
        for (blah blah) {
            something_else();
        }
        do_something();
    }

on the other hand, this code can be copy+pasted as much as you like:

    do_something();
    do_another_thing();
    another_call();

some dogmatic programmers will want to place those last three lines of code into a separate function and instead copy+paste that. But I've found that doing that sometimes makes the code more harder to read.

freeworkon Bitstamp Accounts Frozen

Can be your own bank, not "is and always be completely devoid of any kind of banking institute"

America is a free country, but not everyone in America is free (some are in prison, for instance).

freeworkon Show HN: Intentionally subtle headphone crossfeed filter

Here is an example song that would benefit from a plug in like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeIQvxSS2M8. The guitar riff that hard pans from left to right can sound jarring when listening with headphones without a crossfeed filter. With the filter, the sound is more natural.

I'm surprised apple hasn't added crossfeed functionality to any of their audio products. I remember discovering crossfeed back in the early 2000s. My audio player was foobar2000 which had a plugin to do crossfeed. When I switched to Mac in the late 2000s, I had to go back to listening to music without crossfeed. It still perplexes me that with the explosion of high end headphone popularity that this hasn't become a standard feature for audio players.

freeworkon Working with queue and stack people

I think your preference (stack or queue) is dependant on the nature of work you are doing.

For instance, at my current job, I've been here for 2 years. I know the codebase pretty well. If an issue comes up, I can almost always get it resolved in a few hours or less. For this reason, I am currently a stack person.

On the other hand, when I first started this job, I didn't know the codebase very well, so it usually took me at least a week to complete a typical issue. Back in those days I was a queue person.

freeworkon Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt [pdf]

This paper's conclusion (I only read the abstract) jives with my experience. Whenever I've tried to make something "intelligent" it always ends up in headaches. Now-a-days when building code, I try to stay away from having the computer make decisions. I've found its much easier to build stuff in a way that put a real human in charge of making all decisions.

freeworkon ChangeTip must die

Most tips I see are not "fractions of a penny" but rather the standard seems to be 1000 bits which is like 32 cents. I often see people tip a dollar or more.

Secondly, I can never understand why some people get so offended by someone giving them a small amount of money. When you go to the coffee shop to buy a $2.40 coffee and are given $0.60 in change are you insulted by the cashier for thinking you needed that 60 cents?

freeworkon Taming a Wild, Testless Code Beast

This post makes the mistake of thinking that writing a bunch of tests will make everything better. In my experience, the only thing that will help you when it comes to expanding/fixing an existing codebase is knowin what the code is doing. When the app crashes and you look at the traceback, you need your brain to be able to understand why the program crashed. No matter how many tests fail or how many email alerts you get from travis-ci, your primary task is to understand what the code is doing.

freeworkon OpenFlights

Another source for aviation data: http://ourairports.com/data/

freeworkon A Formula for the Number of Days in Each Month

    def days_in_month(month_num):
        if month_num in [1, 3, 5, 7]:
            return 31
        elif month_num in [4, 6, 9, 11]:
           return 30
        return 28

freeworkon Backups suck (2013)

The problem is that backing up data is fundamentally a management task. It requires skills to actually do right. People view backing up their computer in the same way they view changing the oil in their car. Just like there is no button you press inside the car that says "change oil", there is never going to be a backup solution that is easy to use for the regular user. At least not one that does a complete job is backing everything up.

Here is how I handle 'backups': I never do it. If the data is important, I make sure I store it on a device that is already redundant. If I take a photo that I really want to keep, I'll send it to dropdox or google drive or gmail or some place like that. Neither my macbook, nor my iphone, nor my linux laptop is the canonical living place of anything important. If any of those devices were to disappear, I will lose stuff, but nothing important. This system I've sort of subconsciously migrated towards over the past decade or so of hard drive failures and lost phones.

freeworkon Some REST best practices

As an experienced developer who as had to implement dozens of API's over my career, therre are two things that I care about:

1. Documentation - If I have to spend the next month doing trial+error to get your API working, thats no good. The best APIs have a page that describes how get up and running quickly.

2. Good error messages - When something goes wrong I want to know what went wrong. The error message being in a consistent format isn't that important, as long as there is a description of what happened. "Oops, an error occurred, try again later" is not a good error message.

Most of the stuff in this article is superficial stuff that I don't think matters.

freeworkon The Future of Payments and Open Source Support

I don't understand this whole controversy. The the amount of money donate to you is so small (like under a dollar over the course of a year) then you don't need to declare it on any tax forms. If a random person on the street gives you a quarter, you on't need to report that on taxes, nor do you have to report a 0.00017 BTC donation.

On the other hand, if the donation is big (say in the thousands USD), I can see why someone could decide to not accept the donation because they don't wan to report it on their taxes. An easy solution to this problem is to NOT TAKE THE DONATION. If you don't take the money, you don't have to report anything. The tip4commit site supposedly states if a developer doesn't accept a donation the money goes back to the 'project pool' where it will get donated to another developer on that project.

freeworkon Trends in the Silk Road 2.0

A few months ago I had the idea of creating a project to scrape Silk Road. The idea was to parse all listings, determine the quantity, divide by the price, and then average it through the entire site. The end result would be an average price for weed/lsd/mdma,etc. Sort of like the Winkdex, except for drugs prices. Shortly after I got it running, Silk Road 1.0 got shut down. Then the darknet market "scene" became really fragmented into like 10 different sites. Writing scraping code is tedious, so I abandoned the project. The code is here: https://github.com/priestc/weedprices

freeworkon [dead]

I think the biggest story here is the fact that the bug was fixed and ready to be installed via a single apt-get command within hours. To me, this is an immense success.

On the other hand, if its 2 months later and a fix still has not been issued, then it is safe to make the argument that the web is broken.

freeworkon Don't Use an RDBMS for Messaging

My rule of thumb is: First build it with a database, then break things off using NoSQL/Queues/Memfs/etc. after scale increases to a point where it becomes a pain. Its never a good idea to start something built in the most optimized way possible (in terms of performance). In my experience 99% of the time, actual performance numbers are way less than what you expected anyways.

freeworkon Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?

Thats what I've been doing. My resume lists the dozens of projects I've completed. Out of every 50 resume's I send out, I get maybe one interview. I don't think anyone even looks at my github. As soon as they see I don't have a degree, they throw my resume out.

freeworkon Server Migration with Zero Downtime

In my experience, any kind of DB replication is a bitch to set up. Definitely not worth the time for a one time thing.