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A collection of 194 posts

Technical

Bitcoin's Lightning Network routing challenges (2016)

The bitcoin community has been discussing the concept of the Lightning Network for a year now. It is often cited in scalability debates as a solution to bitcoin's limited transaction throughput capabilities. However, it's a complicated concept and several parts of the implementation are still theoretical

Technical

Bitcoin Shamir's Secret Sharing vs multisig

Despite closely following the news about Bitcoin, I learned something about it quite recently. It's about splitting the secret key in multiple pieces, so that at least several of those pieces are required to be able to spend the funds. For instance, a 3 of 5 wallet will

Business & Economy

Smart companies try to commoditize their product's complements (Joel Spolsky)

If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more. When IBM designed the PC architecture, they used off-the-shelf parts instead of custom parts, and they carefully documented the interfaces between the parts in the (revolutionary) IBM-PC Technical

Culture

Architecture fails: McMansion Hell

McMansionHell is a bi-weekly blog that aims to educate the masses about architectural concepts, urban planning, environmentalism and history by making examples out of the places we love to hate the most: the suburbs. By alternating comedy-oriented takedowns of individual houses with weekly informative essays about architecture, urbanism, sociology, and

Culture

Wadsworth Constant: the first 30% of videos can be safely skipped

The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information. For EVERY youtube video, I always open the video and then immediately punch the slider bar to about 30 percent. For example, in this

Society

Political correctness in the US has silenced discussions society needs to have (Cato Institute)

The Cato 2017 Free Speech and Tolerance Survey, a new national poll of 2,300 U.S. adults, finds that 71% Americans believe that political correctness has silenced important discussions our society needs to have. The consequences are personal—58% of Americans believe the political climate prevents them from sharing

Technical

Bitcoin roller coaster

[The authors] made a Bitcoin Roller Coaster Mover Prototype using a Raspberry Pi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/76c8v2/we_made_a_bitcoin_roller_coaster_mover_prototype/

Culture

If You Drive Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “America the Beautiful” (Open Culture)

If you find yourself in New Mexico, traveling down a stretch of Route 66, you can drive over a quarter mile-long rumble strip and your car's tires will play "America the Beautiful."  That's assuming you're driving at the speed limit, 45 miles

Technical

Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds your new music (Hacker Noon)

(...) Back in the 2000s, Songza kicked off the online music curation scene using manual curation to create playlists for users. “Manual curation” meant that some team of “music experts” or other curators would put together playlists by hand that they thought sounded good, and then listeners would just listen to

Science

The zero-watt CPU may never exist: Landauer's principle

Landauer's principle is a physical principle pertaining to the lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation. It holds that "any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy

Business & Economy

How Brendan Eich plans to flip the online ad model and fix the web (Digiday)

Brendan Eich knows how the web works — and how to fix it. The inventor of JavaScript while at Netscape is now occupied with growing a new browser, Brave, which promises to be far faster than entrenched leaders like Google Chrome. The trick: Brave blocks data-hogging ads and flips the web’

Culture

Laputa / Castle in the Sky (Miniature Calendar)

A Japanese artist, Tatsuya Tanaka, creates miniature scenes using small figurines and vegetables. Here, a scene inspired by Miyazaki's movie Laputa, "Castle in the sky". http://miniature-calendar.com/170929/

Science

A spying bug that passively transmits your voice.

The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices (or "bugs") to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador to

Comics

About negative feelings... (Owlturd)

http://owlturd.com/post/164720304404

Comics

I can smash anything !! (Owlturd)

http://owlturd.com/post/163910609709

Society

This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit (Medium)

Every time you open your phone or your computer, your brain is walking onto a battleground. The aggressors are the architects of your digital world, and their weapons are the apps, news feeds, and notifications in your field of view every time you look at a screen. They are all

Science

Light-based neural network does simple speech recognition (Ars Technica)

While there are lots of things that artificial intelligence can't do yet—science being one of them—neural networks are proving themselves increasingly adept at a huge variety of pattern recognition tasks. These tasks can range anywhere from recognizing specific faces in photos to identifying specific patterns of

Society

The Library of Utility (Kevin Kelly, 2011)

I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop

Advertising

Be Careful Celebrating Google’s New Ad Blocker. Here’s What’s Really Going On (The Intercept)

Google, a data mining and extraction company that sells personal information to advertisers, has hit upon a neat idea to consolidate its already-dominant business: block competitors from appearing on its platforms. The company announced that it would establish an ad blocker for the Chrome web browser, which has become the

Science

Will Quantum Mechanics Swallow Relativity? (Corey S. Powell)

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn. It is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates:

Technical

Most new printers print nearly invisible yellow dots for offline tracking

[Yesterday], The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted

Society

A laptop ban would be a disruptive privacy risk

Computing on the road may be about to get more complicated, expensive, and risky. For this you can thank people who want to blow airplanes out of the sky — and US officials who see genuine danger and/or an opportunity to engage in “just shut up and do as you’

Business & Economy

Why don't more open-source projects monetize? (Ask HN)

Because monetizing your open-source project means you take on a second job. Here are your choices: * Turn your OSS project into a company (Docker). The pro is that you can capture a lot of the value, the con is that you're splitting your project into CE/EE and

Technical

Messaging app Signal circumvents current ban in Egypt with the "domain fronting" technique

If I understood correctly, the privacy messaging app Signal  configured itself to be reached after a HTTP redirection from Google  servers, encapsulated in HTTPS traffic. This is a nice workaround. So Egypt, to enforce the ban of Signal, should now either ban Google or Man-In-The-Middle Google's traffic in

Society

On Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport)

People are sometimes confused about my personal relationship with digital communication technologies. On the one hand, I’m a computer scientist who studies and  improves these tools. As you might therefore expect, I’m incredibly  optimistic about the role of computing and networks in our future. On the other hand,