Hacker News Reader

jbaudanzaon Show HN: Automatically create QA environments for your GitHub pull requests

This looks awesome. I love the auto screenshot feature.

It is difficult to withdraw USD from MtGox. There are large fees for bank transfers and it can take weeks for mtgox to process. For this reason, there are fewer sellers on MtGox which means the price is inflated.

jbaudanzaon How are you voting in tomorrow's San Francisco Municipal Election?

I threw together this endorsement app yesterday. LMK what you think. I plan on adding more features for the next election.

jbaudanzaon Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong – lies typographers tell about history

You've escalated a conversation about spaces into a personal attack. I think you should reconsider this.

I'm not sure what specific meaning you've assigned to the word hate. In my mind, hating an idea is not a fatal personality flaw.

jbaudanzaon Show HN: Warming up a cold memcached cluster in production with Ruby.

Heroku recently deprecated their memcached addon offering. Existing users need to migrate to Memcachier by Oct 31. I published this code to help with that migration.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

Very interesting. Thank you!

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

AFIAK the only way is to do this is to encode data so that it looks like bitcoin receive addresses. This will burn BTC in the process.

This transaction is embedding a message inside of a non-standard output script, which shouldn't be possible.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

But regardless, it's still an interesting transaction.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

No. So take it with a big grain of salt.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

You're not supposed to be able to embed messages inside of bitcoin transactions. But this person who claims to be Satoshi did just that. He/she/them embedded a git commit that fixes a bug in the Electrum server. This bug is perhaps what allowed the non-standard transaction to slip through.

Hope this helps.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

That's very interesting. But is that enough to get the tx mined into the blockchain? Isn't it still a non-standard tx?

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

I'm very curious as to how this non-standard transaction made it into the blockchain. I have two guesses:

1) Whoever did this has access to enough hashing power to mine their own non-standard transactions into blocks.

2) $0.43 is unusually high for a transaction fee. Perhaps this is high enough to incentivize miners to include the tx in a block.

jbaudanzaon Git commit allegedly from Satoshi embedded inside a Bitcoin transaction

Here is the text of the commit:

    From a3a61fef43309b9fb23225df7910b03afc5465b9 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
    From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshin@gmx.com>
    Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 02:28:02 -0200
    Subject: [PATCH] Remove (SINGLE|DOUBLE)BYTE

    I removed this from Bitcoin in f1e1fb4bdef878c8fc1564fa418d44e7541a7e83
    in Sept 7 2010, almost three years ago. Be warned that I have not
    actually tested this patch.
    ---
     backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py |    8 +-------
     1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 7 deletions(-)

    diff --git a/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py b/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py
    index 6620583..89b9b1b 100644
    --- a/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py
    +++ b/backends/bitcoind/deserialize.py
    @@ -280,10 +280,8 @@ opcodes = Enumeration("Opcodes", [
         "OP_WITHIN", "OP_RIPEMD160", "OP_SHA1", "OP_SHA256", "OP_HASH160",
         "OP_HASH256", "OP_CODESEPARATOR", "OP_CHECKSIG", "OP_CHECKSIGVERIFY", "OP_CHECKMULTISIG",
         "OP_CHECKMULTISIGVERIFY",
    -    ("OP_SINGLEBYTE_END", 0xF0),
    -    ("OP_DOUBLEBYTE_BEGIN", 0xF000),
         "OP_PUBKEY", "OP_PUBKEYHASH",
    -    ("OP_INVALIDOPCODE", 0xFFFF),
    +    ("OP_INVALIDOPCODE", 0xFF),
     ])


    @@ -293,10 +291,6 @@ def script_GetOp(bytes):
             vch = None
             opcode = ord(bytes[i])
             i += 1
    -        if opcode >= opcodes.OP_SINGLEBYTE_END and i < len(bytes):
    -            opcode <<= 8
    -            opcode |= ord(bytes[i])
    -            i += 1

             if opcode <= opcodes.OP_PUSHDATA4:
                 nSize = opcode
    -- 
    1.7.9.4

jbaudanzaon I/O Ventures VC Paul Bragiel Goes On Hiatus To Train For The Winter Olympics

Paul's beard is legendary. Here's a link from Ke$ha's blog:

http://putyourbeardinmymouth.tumblr.com/post/14184840145/uhh...

jbaudanzaon Build it with me: Bitcoin wallet for Mac

Maybe throw the code up on github?

jbaudanzaon Show HN: The Hacker News Button

I've been using this HN button on my blog posts for a while..

https://github.com/igrigorik/hackernews-button

This new one seems more extensible though. I may give it a try next time I update my blog.

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

Thanks gusgordan! Can you e-mail me at jon@jonb.org?

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

I like that. If you flag a photo as suspicious, that flag doesn't necessarily have to be publicly visible.

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

The general feedback so far seems to be "Good idea, but could result in mob justice."

How can we prevent this? Some ideas so far:

- Moderation

- Give people specific tasks: "Find this duffle bag" (thanks shocks)

What else?

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

Even if it's not admissible, it may provide helpful leads.

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

If you want to volunteer to help build this, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail. jon@jonb.org

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

Yes I think this would be a place for people to voluntarily upload their photos. I don't think the FBI can hand over any evidence.

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: Can we help the police sort through the photos of the Boston Marathon?

Yes that would be unfortunate. I would like this to be a "crowdsource" tool, not a "mobsource" tool. I'm open to ideas on how to prevent that. Maybe moderation?

jbaudanzaon 1600% faster app requests with Rails on Heroku

How do you check for the status of the job? Do you hold the client connection open and block the process while you wait? Or do you notify the client through some other mechanism (polling, websocket, etc).

The advantage of evented I/O is that you don't have to do either of these things.

jbaudanzaon How to Improve Rails Application Performance on Heroku

Does anyone know how copy-on-write forking plays into the 512MB limit on Heroku?

If your app takes up 256MB, does that mean you can only fit 2 workers? Shouldn't there be some savings due to copy-on-write?

jbaudanzaon 1600% faster app requests with Rails on Heroku

As a best practice, you're right. IO should be either 100% evented or 100% blocking.

But in this case, as long as you expect your database requests to be fast and reliable, it's fine to mix in the standard blocking pg driver.

jbaudanzaon 1600% faster app requests with Rails on Heroku

I use this technique on Heroku for my oauth requests and it works well. One downside is that your responses have to interface directly with Rack, and you lose out on all the functionality in Rails and the middleware stack.

To account for this, I created a controller mixin to recreate the middleware stack for responses:

http://www.jonb.org/2013/01/25/async-rails.html

jbaudanzaon This Man Thinks He Never Has to Eat Again

I read a textbook on physiological chemistry and took to the internet to see if I could find every known essential nutrient.

The danger is that there are far more essential nutrients that we don't know about, than nutrients that we do. And the only way to get these nutrients is to eat a well balanced diet.

That being said, this would be amazing if it works and I applaud him for trying.

jbaudanzaon Ask HN: What to do when your technical boss is just plain wrong

I don't understand your example. You spent your entire weekend on what?

jbaudanzaon The Pragmatics of TDD

A unit's dependency is part of that unit. If a unit test mocks out all the dependencies, that test is running in a fantasy world.