Hacker News Reader

sillysaurus2on Silk Road 2 Hacked, All Bitcoins Stolen

If SR was re-issuing coins automatically, it's because they were being intentionally stupid.

MtGox was re-issuing coins automatically. Due to this, Gox has lost money. Possibly a huge amount. Were they being intentionally stupid, or just stupid?

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7222690

This transaction malleability flaw is certainly a convenient excuse. But if these people implemented their wallet software in the same manner as Gox, then they would've suffered the same fate: a loss of thousands of coins, which is exactly what they claim happened.

sillysaurus2on Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

Names which offend people the most are those which are also true. It's still name calling, and it's also irrelevant to your argument in this case.

I suppose my question is, do you care more about expressing yourself than convincing others? If so, then that's detrimental to a message board.

sillysaurus2on Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

Why call your opponent names and become emotional? It's not effective.

In what world does personal expected value versus expected cost of breaking the law ever become a good way to make moral decisions?

There are at least two counterarguments to this.

1) The law is written for precisely this reason. Most people do live by a cost vs benefit mindset, and the penalties of laws are generally tuned until people stop committing the crime. I wouldn't want to live in a world where the penalty for murder was only a week in prison.

2) Anyone who uses the law as a way to guide their own moral compass probably isn't very moral, because throughout history every society has had laws which are later agreed to be evil.

sillysaurus2on Massively multiplayer online Flappy Bird

http://96.126.121.68/ works for me.

sillysaurus2on Scientists Say Their Giant Laser Has Produced Nuclear Fusion

Why not let the mods say what should or shouldn't be on HN? No need to speak for them.

sillysaurus2on The Book of Graham

May I ask, after you were acquired, how long did you end up working for them? How did you feel about it? Was it a jarring experience trying to transition back into more of a "traditional 9-5 mindset," or were you expected to work as hard as before? I've always wondered what that type of situation is like.

sillysaurus2on Update on Transaction Malleability

You'll note that mtgox had funds taken from it

Source, please? How much did mtgox lose?

sillysaurus2on John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar

Doughnuts, one of my favorite foods, can be part of a healthy diet

Can they?

sillysaurus2on Bitcoin withdrawal processing suspended

You should consider moving your coins out right now, since there's no benefit to keeping them in Coinbase unless you're trading. (This is always true regardless of the current problems.)

sillysaurus2on Flappy Bird Typing Tutor

I kept it open in case you wanted to debug it. Here's a current screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/qfgkNRi.png

When I click on the bird and press 'd', nothing happens. Nothing more is output to the console, either.

Is there anything in particular you'd like me to type into the console to help you debug this?

My Chrome version is "Version 32.0.1700.107 m".

sillysaurus2on Why Mt. Gox is full of shit

One interesting aspect of this whole ordeal is the fact that, thus far, exchanges' prices have depended on each other. That is, a huge sell order on Bitstamp will more or less immediately affect the price on BTC-E, MtGox, etc. (The exception seems to be Coinbase, which seems to use some kind of exponential weighted averaging, but even Coinbase will get dragged down if the price drop is dramatic enough.)

If people lose all confidence in Gox, but still retain faith in other exchanges, then that means we're going to witness MtGox's price drop while the other exchanges' prices rise. However, this becomes an economic opportunity for anyone who wants to do arbitrage between exchanges. Therefore it seems like the prices won't ever diverge too much.

The conclusion, it seems, is that no matter how bad one exchange is, it will simply drag the overall price of Bitcoin down across all exchanges rather than suffer punishment as an individual company. The fact that arbitrage is doable seems to give MtGox some insulation from consumer outrage.

This poses a question: Is it true that as long as an exchange keeps functioning, then it's "here to stay" no matter how badly they behave? Is there any way that an exchange could go out of business from nothing more than consumers losing faith that one exchange?

sillysaurus2on Flappy Bird Typing Tutor

Kids who are learning to type probably won't be able to read your font. They'll likely get frustrated and put it down rather quickly. Is it meant to be a typing tutor for kids?

sillysaurus2on Flappy Bird Typing Tutor

I encountered a bug using Chrome. After dying a few times, I encountered this screen, which I can't get past: http://i.imgur.com/yWbm8bq.png

It may frustrate some users and drive them away. I'll leave the tab open if you need me to run some javascript code to tell you the current state of the program. Let me know.

EDIT: Pretty fun. After a few attempts, my high score is 34: http://i.imgur.com/YNaIWI6.png ... It's more of a spelling tutor than a typing tutor, because remembering how to spell words is a huge advantage compared to staring at the words.

Something I should mention: The letter forms are extremely difficult to read. V's look like U's, A's look like R's, and Z's look like 2's.

I think this is a wonderful educational tool. Thank you for creating it.

sillysaurus2on When Random Isn't Random Enough: Lessons from an Online Poker Exploit

tptacek has addressed this concern many times before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author:tptacek%20urandom#!/comment...

The summary is that it's a myth.

sillysaurus2on Addressing Transaction Malleability

Thank you for your insight. How do you decide when to sell? I had four opportunities and let them all pass by, because I was hoping "this time I'll recover my initial investment." That's greed, of course, but how do you make a plan and stick to it in these circumstances? Do you decide ahead of time that you're willing to walk away with a 20% loss, rather than wait a year and see what happens?

sillysaurus2on Addressing Transaction Malleability

Indeed. I was young and dumb, as so many before me. Lesson learned.

sillysaurus2on Addressing Transaction Malleability

MtGox made the right decision in shutting off withdraws and not implementing hacks. It's important for this problem to be solved once and for all.

MtGox made a very bad decision in its choice of wording in this press release. It shouldn't have framed this as a "design flaw." The only reason this happened was because of MtGox's custom software. No one else was affected. By definition, that's not a design flaw.

sillysaurus2on Addressing Transaction Malleability

Can I catch a break?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6926472

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7195024

http://i.imgur.com/5TAwopR.png

There are few times in my adult life I've felt like crying actual tears, but this is one of them.

Four times since that first comment, the bitcoin price has recovered to $1,000, then dipped back down again. Four times I didn't sell.

The silver lining is that Gox's explanation is correct on a technical level. There is every reason to believe this explanation to be true. This isn't (just) me being hopeful; this is because if you investigate whether it's true, you'll find out it is true.) For further details see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203544

Since I've only been able to withdraw 3.4 bitcoin, I'm at the mercy of Gox. It's entirely possible that I'll wind up with less than $1,000, from $11,000. An expensive life lesson, but at least it's recoverable.

EDIT: I apologize if this comment didn't contribute anything. I sometimes use HN for moral support. I'm just shocked at what's happened.

EDIT2: This surely shouldn't be the top comment... it's important to get information out to people in a crisis situation like this. This was just me being sad and gathering information from those more experienced. Thank you though.

sillysaurus2on Godot Engine open sourced

I get frustrated with people who think they can and should rewrite the scripting language.

I actually have my OWN game engine (based on LuaJIT, thank you ;)

This comment would be better if it wasn't snubbing everyone who dared try to shake up the status quo of programming languages. People two hundred years from now won't be using LuaJIT. Therefore why wait two hundred years to invent the future? We could have it within our lifetime, if we remain supportive.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

This is a great comment and has changed my perspective somewhat. Thank you.

sillysaurus2on When Random Isn't Random Enough: Lessons from an Online Poker Exploit

The random number generators used by these sites are hardware systems that use micro fluctuations in ambient temperature (for example) as a source of entropy and they are very careful to use enough bits of entropy for every card shuffled.

It's amusing to realize that they could just read from dev/urandom with zero risk. They're probably not running Linux, but still.

So, for anyone who's wondering if you need this, or if this adds any extra security: probably not. There's no reason not to use the extremely well-tested and well-understood /dev/urandom.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

Since we're on the topic of unpopular-but-true, I'll go ahead and post another: It's not about whether we can program so much as what we can accomplish by learning to program while we're young. You and I may make fine and capable employees, but some want more than that. It takes more than just ambition: it takes positioning and luck. I hope it won't be too controversial to say that younger people can take more risks due to the fact that they're young. Therefore they will take advantage of the lion's share of the luck.

In other words, if we were willing to sacrifice our dependents to take more shots at the type of success which attracts people to YC, then we'd be in the same position as someone who was young. But we aren't willing, so we're not in that position.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.

You'll be excluded by 22 if you haven't started early. Excluded by whom? By nature. It was no accident that Zuck developed Facebook only after years of being a hacker, and that he also developed it while he was relatively young. By 22 you start to take on responsibilities which hinder your ability to learn as efficiently as possible. It's perhaps an unpopular opinion, but nevertheless it seems true from the evidence.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

Actually, it's not inherently about fame. It has to do with whether the hackers are skilled. Pg goes into why it's difficult to compare hacker skill in one of his essays, though I forget which. But the summary is that nobody knows who the most talented hackers are, because you have to work with them to know how talented they are. Therefore fame is the only metric that makes sense in this case to derive hard evidence. Fame is a proxy for many people having recognized their talent, and the original question was about talent.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

Indeed! This is a great example, thanks.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

To clarify, I asked for an example, not touted myself as the arbiter of worldly experiences.

I also asked for an example of a programmer on the level of Woz. This is an important distinguishing quality, because otherwise there's no way to know how good a hacker actually is. Every story would be anecdotal instead of resembling factual.

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together? I think it's possible.

Sure, Jobs did. On the other hand, Woz was the tech genius, not Jobs.

I've never heard of a tech genius who also cared much about the qualities you mention. This seems more than a coincidence. If it were, then there'd probably be at least one counterexample. Is there someone who is at the level of Woz or Blackwell who also cares about popularity, beauty, and fitting in?

sillysaurus2on Girls and Software

This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.

Same here. Emphasis on "vast quantities," "unsupervised," and "unfiltered." All three were required.

sillysaurus2on High-Speed Trading Isn't About Efficiency—It's About Cheating

To put things into perspective, the company I worked for responded to bug reports by hiring a team of people whose role was to manually alter the database any time a customer reported a data problem. Dozens of times per day. In other words, instead of fixing the software, it somehow became a reasonable idea to dedicate employees to fixing the symptoms by hand. It made sense in hindsight: they were making so much money that they took the path of least resistance. Paying employees to fix the problem immediately was quicker than trying to hunt down a competent programmer to try to fix the problem without causing more problems.

The change would be traumatic no matter how long they are given to plan for it.

Oh, here's another reason I forgot to mention: You can capture huge profits by exploiting the opening and closing few seconds of the market. A huge portion of all daily trades happen within the first few and last few seconds of the day. So there's a financial incentive to leave things as they are.

sillysaurus2on High-Speed Trading Isn't About Efficiency—It's About Cheating

I worked in the industry for a little while.

At this point, some companies depend on having that daily downtime. Their whole development is based around the fact that they will have guaranteed downtime. It's built right into their software stack.

Trying to fiddle with this expected downtime would throw (parts of) the industry into turmoil.

It's just a historical quirk, but it's probably here to stay.