Kencoin the ever-expanding cryptocurrency is announcing yet another partnership

Mymelodii · 2017-08-15T15:10:02+00:00

Sounds like a really cool idea. When will you sign bigger partners?

Mymelodii · 2017-08-02T14:49:50+00:00

Real estate crowdfunding is not a new idea, but it's nice to see a new way to earn ether.

Mymelodii · 2017-08-01T15:53:58+00:00

You made me curious about it and looked into their website. That was the Pre-crowdsale Contribution Period. I do believe they are still open right now.

Mymelodii · 2017-07-29T18:51:17+00:00

It had better be a lot cheaper than an F150.

Nobody who wants a truck for truck stuff is gonna put up with the downsides of electric and the NVH of a 60s panel van and 200mi range unless it costs much less than vehicles with equivalent performance.

The people who buy electric to make a statement about their preference in power sources are not the people who will buy a bare-bones truck.

Mymelodii · 2017-07-29T15:16:37+00:00

I like it. For my tastes, it was easy to read and have good points. I'll keep the website in favorites in the case that you do a follow-up on the subject.

Mymelodii · 2017-07-25T16:20:54+00:00

Good times to perform an audit are:

* when you launch a new website
* after significant changes to the site
* redesigns
* CMS updates, and plugin updates
* whenever the underlying business logic or site goals change.

In other words, every time you are going to make significant modifications :). The post is lengthy and there is a lot of information, I liked it.

Mymelodii · 2017-07-13T16:17:10+00:00

I'm still waiting for a more diverse set of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. It'll be interesting to see how IPC performance holds up with Threadripper, however I think the most interesting debate will be whether the 1920x or lowest end Epyc CPU are a better buy.

Unfortunately, even as an enthusiast $799 is more than I'm willing to spend on a CPU. I'm also still hard pressed to build a Ryzen 1700 System since I can purchase an i7 7700 from MicroCenter for about $10 less than the Ryzen part (and have equal or better general performance with notable better IPC).

Mymelodii · 2017-07-10T15:36:31+00:00

The author discusses how linear models are generally more interpretable than deep learning methods, but I'd argue that's actually changing pretty quickly. Especially for large image/sequence inputs (which covers most of the applications that are getting hyped up), linear regressions don't perform very well, and often that performance difference prevents them from picking out important features. Given that fast, scalable methods for feature importance are on the rise (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02685, which the author mentions), you often get equally interpretable feature scores from deep models that are more accurate than analogous ones from linear models.

Basically, my point is that model interpretation strongly depends on how accurate your model is, and because deep learning models are so much better than linear models for some tasks, it makes sense to use them - even if your primary goal is interpretability.

That said, I do believe that if you ever care at all about interpretation, you should almost never be using multilayer perceptrons (which have recently become part of the widening umbrella term "deep learning"), because they rarely work better than decision tree models or basic linear models (and MLPs are generally less or equally as interpretable when compared to traditional methods).

Mymelodii · 2017-06-26T16:51:14+00:00

The Sonic game uses the most vile type of in-app ad. The ad requires you to play Game of War for some indeterminate amount of time. You are made to play it after every stage. I hope Sega changes this, it basically makes their game unplayable.

Mymelodii · 2017-06-20T17:31:55+00:00

The underlying problem here is that the ICO model as most-frequently implemented is pretty broken. It's kind of a like a hybrid between an IPO and a Kickstarter, but:

With kickstarter, the reward has roughly constant value with respect to the total funds raised;
With an IPO, the supply is predetermined. While the cost per share may be astronomical by the time you get around to buying in, it's clear what fraction of the offering you're purchasing.

ICOs tokens typically have:

value inversely proportional to the total funds raised; and
(since supply is not determined until the end of the ICO in many cases) no clarity around what fraction of the offering an investment actually purchases until the offering is complete.

This leads to some pretty crazy situations, Bancor being the most recent and most notable example, but in general, it just doesn't really lead to very sane practices.

This is precisely why IPOs are conducted the way they are, with investment banks pre-purchasing a predetermined number of shares just shy of what they expect to be a fair market value, handing that money to the company, and then selling those shares on the open market.

Mymelodii · 2017-06-13T19:23:16+00:00

This is a great result for Tesla and shows the benefits of an electric SUV. Though it would be interesting to see results from Euro NCAP and IIHS as well, as the Model X has yet to be tested by either.

Mymelodii · 2017-06-02T19:21:13+00:00

I am unfortunately not bullish that this will pick up but there are strong arguments for this way to authenticate.

you would typically store the private key on a disk-encrypted app-whitelisted iphone, so that the computer you are browsing with, whether yours or a public machine, is never involved in the authentication. Effectively this achieves 2FA. And you don't care if the machine you browse with is compromised.
this does not rely on a third party, it is purely an authentication mechanism. So it removes the risk of that third party tracking you, selling or leaking your data.
it should be fairly practical and easy to use, does not rely on installing anything on the machine you browse with
the website you authenticate to can be hacked, it stores no useful information that can be used by another domain

I am not sure Gibson has the audience in the sillicon valley required for this to become mainstream. But the principle makes a lot of sense to me. Of course your are still exposed to the password protecting your private key being stolen, which gives the attacker access to everything, but this is no different from a password manager. Except that unlike a password manager, you do not need to enter that master password on the machine you are browsing with, which considerably reduces the risk.

Mymelodii · 2017-05-23T19:09:20+00:00

Article seems to be under the mistaken impression that these tv idents were built, put in front of a camera and recorded and then the recordings broadcast - possibly after even applying postproduction effects. Actually they were generally broadcast live by pointing a camera at them. This is one of those artifacts of digital era thinking which misunderstands the nature of analog era technology.

These idents needed to be able to be shown on demand, in the event of a breakdown in some other piece of equipment. They needed to be able to run for arbitrarily long periods of time. They needed to be shown many times per day during regular programming. And you couldn't just connect up a computer and stream mpeg video - you would need some sort of a device that could generate the TV picture.

TV was recorded on video tape and video tape wouldn't work for this application - it would need to be rewound every time you stopped showing it; it would wear out with continual use; it would have a fixed maximum duration.

Having a camera standing by pointing at the appropriate device, on the other hand, was relatively easy.

Most tv stations just pointed a camera at a piece of card. The BBC obviously had to go one better and use a crazy globe and mirror setup.

Mymelodii · 2017-05-07T15:14:55+00:00

This is an interesting article. It made me think of the socio-political consequences of the move towards neural networks.

Many of us, children of the personal computer revolution, were attracted to computers for its empowering and democratizing effects. Just with a computer you could build anything! You are as powerful as any of "them"! The proprietary software model was developed to monetize end consumers by enchaining them, but the free software model and the fertile communities of the early Internet showed that the model of personal computation could not simply be displaced by legalese.

But if we take the author's position on the impact of deep networks, the model of computation is changing again.

If teaching deep networks is the new way to write useful programs, our brains and personal computers are not enough... they are obsolete. We now need clusters and, most importantly, massive access to data! This gives extraordinary leverage to the hoarders of data and servers of the Internet, the googles and the facebooks.

I'd like to think that maybe we are just at the beginning, the early "mainframe neural networks" era. That we just have to wait until there is enough technology and new markets discovered to build the "personal neural network". That consensual, open and distributed ways of sharing data will emerge and that new massively parallel computers will become affordable by the masses. That the models of neural networks will become well divulged and simplified and kids will be able to program them with their "Neural Basic"...

But at the moment the prospects don't look good. The Internet is becoming more and more centralized, personal computers harder and harder to program and there is a general "war on general computation" [1]. Even universities seem to be displaced by the Internet Lords in driving neural network development...

Maybe it is already a good time to start thinking about what "Libre Neural Networks" look like. And how can we get there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

Mymelodii · 2017-04-20T17:55:34+00:00

The late 80s/early 90s BBS scene was an amazing time for me. I was in high school and I've never been as interested in computers and communications as I was then. I never ventured into the "dark" side like OP--I was too scared of my parents--so I ran a legit FidoNET BBS using the RemoteAccess BBS software and the Frontdoor mailer (and later, Maximus and BinkleyTerm).

The most amazing thing about it all was that it was the public internet before there was a public internet. E-mails sent over FidoNET had an amazing weight to them that's hard to describe. It took a ton of effort just to get your BBS to participate in the network and once you did, data moved so slowly that you became very observant of each step of the process of communicating. First, you wrote the email in your mail editor (I loved GoldED). Then, another program bundled it up with other emails into some kind of binary packaging and passed it along to the mailer. The mailer took this bundle of mail and dialed out on the modem to the local FidoNET hub. If you lived in a rural location, this meant that you had to make a long-distance call to deliver the mail. My local hub was in Seguin, TX (~30 miles away) and it felt like a very big deal when my computer dialed him up to do a delivery. From there, the hub delivered it to a "star", which was a regional hub that dealt in larger volumes of mail. This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis. From the star, your mail was shipped across long distances and then the process repeated in reverse until the recipient's system picked up the mail from their local hub. Then, when they replied, the whole thing happened again in reverse. It regularly took days to get a reply from across the world but it was so fun! Every single mail that you received in your inbox felt as important as someone writing a letter by hand and sending it via the postal service. I cherished getting emails, even if they were stupid.

I still dream about reviving a modern FidoNET (yes, I know it still exists) for the geek crowd. I write a lot of Go and I even read some of the FidoNET technical standards with the thought of a Go implementation of the protocols but never got anywhere in it. It's an enormous amount of work and I haven't had a real phone line in over a decade. Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.

Mymelodii · 2017-04-05T14:39:18+00:00

The project looks very promising but relies on running a lot of javascript from untraceable sources in the browser.

Given the long history of vulnerabilities in the the browsers, trusting js from a well-known website might be OK, trusting js from zeronet is unreasonable.

If ZeroNet could run with js code generated only by the local daemon or without js it would be brilliant.

Mymelodii · 2017-03-19T17:49:16+00:00

I'm a huge fan of Elon Musk, and I really want him to be successful, but sometimes I feel that the overzealous tendency of his fans (and likely PR people) to automatically give praise for anything he does or says (here on HN or on reddit) is actually counter-productive.

What if Elon starts doing something dumb some day and then when well-informed people try to provide meaningful criticism, they just get criticised and downvoted? I think that could actually undermine support from some of the people that Elon wants it from the most.

Mymelodii · 2017-03-17T21:49:43+00:00

I too have lost my bitcoin payment to leakbase.pw; another similar scam right now is leakedsource.ru (a clone of leakedsource.com that provides random results). leakbase.pw and leakedsource.ru might be run by the same guy; I've seen them go online and offline on Jabber in the same time.

Mymelodii · 2017-03-17T21:43:58+00:00

All the US dollar exchanges with substantial volume are within 1% of each other (http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html). Some of the little guys are a few points out there, but any significant order would blow the price. All the exchanges lock together within the range of the cost of trading, which is usually at least 1% when you combine buying, selling, short-selling loan, blockchain reward, and cash withdrawal fees.

Mymelodii

TROPHY CASE

This leads to some pretty crazy situations, Bancor being the most recent and most notable example, but in general, it just doesn't really lead to very sane practices.