teebs

Another bottleneck is that peers cannot be accessed directly through IP addresses and ports. Instead, some broker (the tracker) must send the connection offer from one peer to the other, and then send the response from the second peer to the first. This doesn't make it impossible by any means, but it does make the protocol more complicated than it is for pure BitTorrent.

I don't work there, but I think it is still around. When I was considering whether to accept an offer there, everyone I asked said they had 20% time, although people used it different ways, and some people just did normal work in their 20% time. Can a Googler confirm?

Bitcoin could be stable. I think it will have a hard time being stable because of the deflationary pressures, but it could theoretically be a stable currency someday when there's a significant economy of people using Bitcoins.

What I haven't seen anyone say these past two months of growth is that the value of Bitcoins must necessarily increase before it becomes a real currency. In order for people to use and exchange Bitcoins, they must buy them. This will increase the value. If, at some point, Bitcoin becomes a mainstream currency, this kind of extreme growth must happen. In fact, we should expect that Bitcoins will be worth orders of magnitude more than they are now if they come to represent any significant fraction of the world economy. Today, Bitcoins are only worth about $1.3 billion, which is tiny. This particular price hike might be a bubble, but it could also be the start of a real Bitcoin economy.

What do you mean "higher quality"? Almost everything everyone buys is something they don't need. I would guess that almost everyone using Hacker News produces things people don't need. No one needs Google or Amazon or whatever your favorite tech company is.... The economy is built on things people don't need.

The problem is that if I won't buy it for $100 today because I can buy it for $50 tomorrow, I won't buy it for $50 tomorrow because I can buy it for $25 the next day, so you NEVER buy an iPhone

This is part of the issue. The other part is that no one has any incentive to spend money, which can cause a recession. You can either 100 units of something today, or buy 110 units of it tomorrow. This gives you a very strong incentive to wait and not spend money. This means that no one buys anything, so no one needs to make or manufacture anything. People lose their jobs, so they don't have money, so they can't buy things... and so on.

Of course, inflation can be very bad, too.

I think the relationship between PBR and hipsters is not that hipsters like PBR, but rather that dive bars sell PBR, and hipsters like dive bars (because they're cheap, "real," and not mainstream).

As someone from Portland, OR that went to college on the East Coast, I drink a lot more PBR in college than in bars at home. At home, Hamm's, Old German, Rainier, and other beers are common, cooler, and just as cheap. PBR is just cheap.

I think Google search is close to a monopoly, and so was Google Reader. Search is pretty much synonymous with Google. Apparently Google has 67% market share, but I'd guess that most people not using Google just use Bing or Yahoo! because that's the default in whatever browser they have. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2244472/Google-Once-Aga...

His argument is not that it costs more to run Google Reader than there is benefit, so we need the government to run it. His argument is that the benefit to society of Google Reader is greater than the cost to society of Google Reader. Outside of a free market, it is better for society to have Google Reader. Unfortunately, there is no price structure that allows Google Reader to exist as a for-profit service. The market is inefficient, and the government should step in to fix this inefficiency. Therefore, it might be useful to run some services like Google Reader as government services.

I think that Google Reader should not be government-run, but he raises a larger point. There could be some internet services that would be better run by the government, and we don't really have any today. I don't think we can dismiss that possibility. I can't think of any sites like that right now, though.

Do we know why the block was only accepted by 0.8 clients? Were 0.8 clients wrong in accepting it, or were 0.7 clients wrong in rejecting it?

Having gone through a handful of whiteboard-style interviews recently, I found that the opposite is true. If you can't remember the interface for hash tables in Java, for example, they usually let you make one up that you think makes sense. If you can't remember that "=" means assignment or that for loops need curly braces around them, you'll be in trouble, of course, but they'll help you with the details.

When it comes to REPL and the code-run-debug cycle, they usually ask you to explain how to code would run to them step-by-step, which simulates having a computer run it. They do the same and pipe up if you miss something. So it's not the same as running the code, but it's similar enough and it also shows how well you understand the code you're writing.

I do think that the major flaw of whiteboard interviews is that it does not show a programmer's ability to organize large amounts of code. In most programming, you won't be solving logic puzzles as much as organizing several parts and sticking them together. The organization is far more important in the long run than the individual code itself, especially since the code will likely be changed later on (which is made easier if it is well organized).

Although I think that sharing quotes is not bad, and few people share quotes to show that they're better than someone else, I think there is one basic message worth remembering from this article. If I may quote it:

"This epidemic, if you allow me to be hyperbolic, is getting so bad that we don't even seem to care if quotes are real anymore."

Or, quotes are sometimes fake. This is because of two issues. First, people don't fact check. Mostly, this is because the cost isn't worth the reward. If you find out the truth and you tell people, your reward is often looking like a know-it-all. There is a gap here for someone to make a better fact checking platform that reduces this cost through the magic of natural language processing.

Second, people pay too much attention to arguments by appeal to authority. Just because someone was respected does not mean that everything they said was correct. In fact, for many particularly talkative people, you can probably find arguments they've made on both sides of many issues.

That makes sense for weed, but they probably have a larger supply chain if they're dealing on a day to day basis. Also, the post mentions "flipping" LSD - they buy it for a lower price and sell it for a higher price. Someone has to sell it to them.

It's fascinating that these kids are the opposite of the usual drug dealer stereotype. Based on my limited knowledge, drugs (in particular marijuana) trace back to either small individual growers, medical marijuana patients, or a gang or cartel. (As far as I know, LSD is very difficult to produce because of its highly regulated precursors. Only a few people in the world produce LSD, and they probably sell it to gangs to distribute.) Individual growers and patients aren't so bad, but for areas of the country where this is rare, gangs probably supply most of the marijuana. Gangs/cartels are known for having basically the opposite of the values of these "street kids." I wonder if these two demographics often come into contact for business purposes, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels"-style.

Does anyone have any better, more specific information about the distribution chains for marijuana or LSD?

EDIT: clarifying first sentence

This isn't a complete, up-to-date answer, but Nicolas Christin estimated in August 2012 that 1.2 million USD worth of transactions are made every month. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1207.7139v2.pdf I imagine that number has grown, but odds are that the vast majority of Bitcoin usage still isn't on the Silk Road.

Also, buyers on the Silk Road have to be careful about which services they use to buy Bitcoin. If CoinBase isn't anonymous (and I'd guess it's not, since it uses bank transfers), Silk Road transactions could be tracked back to the purchaser's bank account.

Just based on the Wikipedia article, I don't think you're right that fiat implies manipulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency

So, based on that definition, it is true that Bitcoin is not a fiat currency because it is not given value by law or government. However, although it technically does not have a centralized issuing authority that can arbitrarily create Bitcoins, Satoshi Nakamoto did hard code a creation rate for Bitcoin. In a sense, he is the original issuing authority. The only difference between Bitcoin and fiat currencies, when it comes to currency manipulation, is that Nakamoto committed early on to a specific plan for issuing currency. The government (or the Fed) not only does not make that commitment, but it is unable to make such a strong, unbreakable commitment, although it verbally makes similar commitments all the time.

In fact, they have a good incentive not to do sinister things. If they do, and other cryptographers find out, they will lose a lot of standing in the academic community.

Oregon is similar in that voters can specify things for the state to spend money on. However, I think the root of it is that California is a lot (more than 10x) bigger than Oregon. Any independent group that wants some money earmarked gets a much larger payoff in California than in Oregon. On the opposite side of the same coin, an overzealous reform group gets more bang for their buck getting a bill passed in California, too. Oregon has had its share of bad bills too, but as far as I understand it we just have far fewer than California.

I actually got used to it fairly quickly. After a day or two I instinctively used reverse (or "natural") scrolling, and I can switch back pretty easily when I'm using other people's computers. It does seem like almost no one else switched though.

I enjoyed this article and I agree with most of the prediction on this timescale. I'm surprised, though, that he didn't mention one issue in particular: the continued development of human-computer interaction and its impact on the world's socioeconomic makeup.

Over the past 20-30 years, computers have completely changed the way people interact with the world. Most highly-educated people's lives center around their iPhones, laptops, iPads, etc. As time goes on, automation will likely continue to advance. As computers surpass humans in efficiency for more and more jobs, what role will the uneducated play? Clearly, wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of fewer and fewer highly educated individuals. Will the rich exploit the poor, or will the need for consumers cause the wealthy to redistribute wealth just so that people have money to buy their goods? Will ordinary people end up like the passengers of the spaceship in WALL-E? Let's go a step further: if the so-called singularity occurs, what is the need for people in general?

Pardon my ignorance, but why is it so horrible to use a photo manipulated by the source--especially if you know exactly how and why it was manipulated, and you still have access to the original? This manipulation seems rather benign, too. Why must it be "removed from your photo archives"?

I was under the impression that games could run at 2880x1800 natively, but this only shows a few games. Can anyone confirm whether other games are supported?

The only game I've played so far on my new rMBP was Civ V, which supports Retina in that its buttons and controls are blocky and double size and the map itself is rendered at full resolution.

Even Bloomberg is almost a serial entrepreneur. Effective, memorable politicians must be to some extent entrepreneurial--you have to believe in your own ability to create change and to unify people behind your cause.

This is exactly the sort of thing I'm interested in--software for civic engagement.

A few friends and I are working on an app and website that lists corporations' political contributions. The mobile feature that makes it interesting is that you can scan barcodes to find out the political contributions from those products right away--inspired by Boycott SOPA https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.boycottsop...

I'd really appreciate it if we could talk some time about publishing an iPhone app. I'm still in college, so I don't have much experience with iPhone App publishing and would really appreciate some advice, especially for a non-profit app dealing with politics.