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arst

Re:LulzSecurity Down on Tuesday June 21, 2011 @05:47PM (#2680576)
Works for me.
You can include a transaction bounty (traditionally 0.01 BTC) with your payment which the verifiers receive if they're the first to verify your payment. Effectively, this puts your transaction at the top of the priority queue. When you're connected to a healthy number of peers, this can bring down the verification time down to seconds.

Isn't transaction verification tied to block generation, and isn't block generation limited to about 1 every 10 minutes?

In fact, if the statistics are accurate, my country has a higher murder rate (5 per 100K) than the "libertarian paradise" of Somalia (3.2 per 100K) (2) who have no central government (3).

There have been over 4,200 civilians killed in the fighting in Mogadishu in just the last 2 years (1). Even if that were the extent of violent crime in Somalia it would amount to an annual rate of ~23 per 100k. By all accounts, however, violent crime remains extraordinarily high throughout the entire country, we just can't put numbers to it because there are no authorities to report to. Here's some more context: over 1.5 million Somalis have been internally displaced by the violence, and over 600,000 have fled to other countries (2).

That number on Wikipedia is so low because it came from a 2004 WHO report which was compiled using data from national authorities - the vast majority of violent crime in Somalia never gets reported to any authority.

1) http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article782458.ece/4200-Som... 2) http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e483ad6.html

Re:An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping on Tuesday April 19, 2011 @05:32PM (#2464317)
That link is wrong. Python does ship with a robotparser module in the standard library that parses robots.txt files, but urllib2 does not use it out of the box. This can be easily confirmed using Wireshark or a quick glance at the source: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/08b5e2c9112c/Lib/urllib2.p....
Re:Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @02:17PM (#2388450)
Yes they did, it just shows up as Wyandotte County. Kansas City and Wyandotte County share a unified government.
Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not tuned into the Rails community, but what is going on here? Someone submitted a favicon to an open source project, and now it's on Hacker News?
As someone who's never heard of Qbix I came away from this post with the knowledge that you make "tools to accomplish things with" that represent "a leap in social communication." Oh, and that you're out to change the world. Before clicking around the site I actually thought it was a parody.
Re:Google's Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue on Thursday March 17, 2011 @11:05PM (#2339143)
Those conditions don't apply because Google is accused of distributing a derived work. If Google is distributing a work derived from GPL'd code then they can only distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. There's a lot of debate over whether what Google's distributing can actually be considered a derived work, but that's a separate question entirely.
Re:How to raise your profile on Github on Thursday March 17, 2011 @07:56PM (#2338696)
He now has a post on his blog explaining the situation http://devinsheaven.com/im-the-first-to-admit/
Re:Google's Android faces a serious Linux copyright issue on Thursday March 17, 2011 @01:44PM (#2337102)
If I copy GPL-licensed code into my BSD-licensed library, none of my code has to be relicensed.

Yes it does, that's a pretty central feature of the GPL. See section 2.b. of the GPL (v2):

b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

Re:Live from Apple's iPad 2 event on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @03:38PM (#2281182)
Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, original iPads aren't going to become useless on March 11.
Re:Hiding Nobel prizes in plain sight on Tuesday March 01, 2011 @05:14PM (#2277438)
as a german I'm a bit disturbed they didn't call it Nazi-Germany in the text.

Why do you find this disturbing?

Re:Apple’s iPad Still Has No Competition on Saturday February 26, 2011 @08:04PM (#2267010)
Considering the iPad doesn't come on contract it would probably make more sense to compare it to the $799 contractless Xoom
Re:Steve Jobs Is Receiving Cancer Treatment at a Clinic in Stanford on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @06:44PM (#2228897)
We know he has cancer, and we know he is taking a medical leave of absence. How is it news that he is receiving cancer treatment?
Re:Show HN: three.io = available 3 letter .io domains on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @06:00PM (#2228743)
Looks like it has already been registered, but it's worth noting that the .io TOS includes:

No .IO domain may be used, directly or indirectly, for any purpose that is sexual or pornographic or that is against the statutory laws of any Nation.

Re:Greplin’s (YC W10) Social Search Opens Its Doors To All on Wednesday February 16, 2011 @05:53PM (#2228710)
A locally-hosted Greplin-like service is an idea I've been kicking around for a while and slowly prototyping -- my angle is more on the archival side, but once you have the data search is a natural step. Another interesting attempt down these lines is the (just recently announced) Locker project https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker (being written by the guy who created XMPP).
There's also a difference between trusting various bits and pieces of your data to exist on a variety of online services, and trusting a single service to aggregate all of your data from everywhere.

A local version of Greplin would be more interesting to me; I think the Locker project https://github.com/quartzjer/Locker might make that possible someday.

Re:Michelle Obama Doesn't Want Her Kids Using Facebook on Wednesday February 09, 2011 @11:20AM (#2197959)
It won't be a moot point for long; Malia turns 13 in July.
Re:CouchOne + Membase merge on Tuesday February 08, 2011 @01:24AM (#2192187)
I think people are tainted on Map/Reduce because they see how it is done with other NoSQL DBs like MongoDB where it doesn't store the indexes

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by stored indexes, but MongoDB supports indexes (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Indexes), it just doesn't require them so you can perform exploratory ad-hoc queries when you need to.

Re:Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate on Thursday February 03, 2011 @06:14PM (#2177430)
Those other entities can opt-out of being indexed.
Re:Mixpanel buys a billboard, declares page views are dead. on Wednesday February 02, 2011 @10:03PM (#2173361)
While HN's reaction to DDG's 'war on Google' has been mixed, their search traffic doubled in January (according to Gabriel's newsletter, not sure if there's a linkable source on this), so I'm not prepared to consider the strategy a failure.
Re:Tools never die ... never on Tuesday February 01, 2011 @04:28PM (#2167493)
Re:Predictions for the World in 2030 on Sunday January 30, 2011 @03:54PM (#2159144)
Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe

How does that follow? Do you expect China to surpass the US and Europe not just in absolute terms but also in per capita income by 2030?

Is the video available somewhere that doesn't require both registration and Windows Media Player?
If the site can provide value to people interested in the 5 launch states, why is it premature for them to release a beta?
Re:Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics on Saturday December 04, 2010 @07:22AM (#1969101)
Discussion from three days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1957433
Micros (which are what you get on the free tier) are only available as EBS-backed instances.
Re:Aol clones Groupon with Wow.com on Tuesday November 16, 2010 @11:51AM (#1910665)
Indeed. In the Scoble interview posted a few days ago, pg mentioned the surge of groupon clones applying (and being rejected) to YC this round.
Re:EFF Begins Accepting Anonymous Donations via Bitcoin on Monday November 15, 2010 @07:15AM (#1906004)
Roughly, bitcoins are generated by hashing some metadata about the state of previous transactions together with an incrementing nonce until you find a hash below a certain target value. If other users verify the hash and you were the first person to find one this round then you get some bitcoins.

As the computational power of the bitcoin swarm increases, the hash target is automatically decreased, leading to a roughly constant rate of generation.

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