walexander

Yeah, kinda crazy.

I didn't even remember ICQ had numbers until I read the first comment in this thread posting theirs and most of the number immediately popped into my head, 10238* (cant remember last two).

Makes me wonder what other things in my brain are back in archive, just needing the right push to bring to surface.

My C Instructor assigned us this in college in 2005, during a brief period where the dotcom bubble was still felt and the social network hadn't come out yet. At the time, there was a lot of talk about how programming was a dead in job in the the US and that all those jobs would just be outsourced, anyway.

I've thought about it a lot over the years, and especially came back to it last year with the rise of ChatGPT.

And QQQ rose 47% this year. This does not seem surprising at all. The entire market went up in 2023.

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The most plausible theory I've heard is that the attackers used a BTC tumbler that was a honeypot controlled by feds.

But who knows, maybe the FBI has a quantum computer we don't know about.

"Self-replicating probes could exhaustively explore a galaxy the size of the Milky Way in as little as a million years" - Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox]

The possibility of these things being extraterrestrial in origin does not seem that farfetched, honestly. If you assume something like a Von Neumann probe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...] to be possible (and I totally think one day we would make those), then the idea that someone else has already made one an that they are sitting around watching us, is not something that should be so easily dismissed.

No telling what these are, but I think the people assuming that some how human visual confirmation, video confirmation, multiple radar confirmation (on ship and in air), as well as Infrared confirmation of the same should shut up the "it's a camera artifact" or "sailor spinning tales" folks. Anyone care to do the math on how such a byzantine fault tolerant system could fail in so many different distinct cases over the last decade?

Is this actually a serious question? Do you think there is no point to PayPal, or do you think your GitHub repo is an equivalent replacement? Is forwarding an email to a bunch of people equal to twitter?

The point of cryptocurrency and smart contracts from a technology perspective is that it is distributed, decentralized/p2p, and has immutable atomic operations. There were lots of early cryptocurrencies and lots of early ledgers. World of Worldcraft gold is a a digital currency if you want to call it one.

What bitcoin solved was decentralized atomic operations (double spend). That's pretty much it. Whether or not you need that is open for debate, but points like you're making are ridiculous.

You could do a similar style of hacking in Dark Forces 2, which had "cog files" that were controlled client side and let you change the projectile of any weapon. At first it was fun to replace your pistol bullets with rockets, or have your rocket launcher shoot light sabers.

Eventually we realized you could actually make structures like bridges and stairs shoot out of your weapon, so it created this minecraft/gary's mod meta game of building platforms and structures out of your weapons, a decade before those came out. Fun times and definitely helped me on my career towards software.

I don't know why people call Madoff's scheme or Enron bubbles. People acted quite rationally given they believed these companies were not completely fabricating their accounting.

Once it was found out what they were doing, the market acted rationally again, but dumping their value to zero.

The first nine months bitcoin was at a $10k and below level. They are making considerably more money since the boom took off after that.

I don't know if it will be 20x higher either. Just saying, this makes more sense than say, Zoom, which trades at $120B mcap.

I dont think the volumes will last, but if you look at volumes today and extrapolate further growth, then sure $100B makes sense.

Not sure what the operating costs look like for Coinbase, but here's some napkin math based on just the Coinbase Pro exchange .

They get roughly $200 per bitcoin trade. That's on both sides, so $400 per bitcoin transaction. Today was a slightly higher volume day but they did $1.6B in BTC-USD, so around ~30k bitcoin changed hands.

30k * 400 = $12Million

Bitcoin is 1/3 of their volume (they have a lot of other crypto currency pairs), so let's take 3x of that = $36 Million in trading fees today.

Bitcoin is a 24/7 market, so 365 days = $13.14 Billion per year.

This does not even count what used to be (still is?) their main business of just buying and holding bitcoin for people through DCA buys or on their app. They also are starting to have a bunch of other revenue streams through loans, debit cards, etc and invest in a number of early crypto projects.

I'm not sure what the multiple is going to be like since I don't know their expenses, but since most tech companies are valued from revenue and future growth expectations anyway, who knows.

There is no moral obligation for them to do so and yes they can choose not to enforce US IP law if they don't want to.

The US can also choose to place massive tariffs on any goods coming out of China, making them highly uncompetitive. Their choice, it looks like.

One of the points of the E2E security model used here is so that you don't have to trust Cisco.

Cisco Spark: www.ciscospark.com

It provides end to end encryption with customer owned keys.

High level data on the security model: https://www.ciscospark.com/content/dam/ciscospark/eopi/count...

Draft of the KMS technology behind it: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abiggs-saag-key-management...

Don't forget the MPAA and RIAA.

And the Bill and Melinda Gates building @ UT Austin.

I'm guessing there are even more?

I think he's implying that they awarded it to blue LEDs in order to promote low power consumption/green tech.

A crosswalk that is parallel to you (i.e., pedestrians traveling in the same direction across the intersection as the drivers) will have a "walk" signal that is synched with the traffic light. In this case, a green light would be analogous to "walk" and a yellow light would be analogous to "3..2..1..".

It is likely that once the cross walk reaches zero, a yellow light will appear on the traffic signal. Anyone reading the walk signal in front of them will have an early warning about the traffic light and may try to speed up to get through.

If you're a block away from the light and you see a "4", what do you do?

Not trying to sound cute, but The Elements of Programming Style by Kernighan and Plaugher (1974). Just read this last week during a day of plane travel.

It's all PLI and Fortran, with lots of GOTO being harmful examples, but surprisingly much of it is still relevant. It's a quick read and interesting look at some of the problems they had back then (and some that we still create plenty of today).

Just FYI, Cisco doesn't own Linksys anymore. They sold it to Belkin in January 2013.

It seems like a lot of flame wars could be prevented without a pending comment feature, or at least a watered down one.

If a comment is particularly offensive/offtopic, it is already downvoted, eventually greyingout. To prevent flame wars, the reply button could simply be disabled on those comments, or in comment threads with high vote volatility (high numbers of up and down votes on parent comment). Vote volatility could indicate a flamebait worthy topic, and the reply depth could be limited based on the volatility.

Similarly the reply button could be pulled when two users are chaining long reply threads alone.

Perhaps with higher levels of karma, the reply thread depth is relaxed for those particular users.

Modifying reply access should prevent flame wars, but if there is still a desire to police the content more, then I think a "flag" button is more effective. If enough people flag your post (regardless of your karma), it could be placed in a type of quarantine area and then be pending until someone with the karma privileges decides to moderate it back in or not. I believe this is what reddit does, though the comments must be approved by mods rather than users.

Basic cable runs over clear QAM and can't be blocked per FCC rules. It gets broadcast over the line unfiltered if you have Internet. So if you are paying for it, stop.

As a start, you could read this article (or the book, I guess), exploring elite athletes (like Usain Bolt) and comparing their stories to what Malcolm Gladwell suggests in Outliers: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/media/books/H...

I don't know if the convergence will happen, but they certainly need to fix WebView in Android to at least allow migration. It's still using the old Android Browser and is severely outdated (no WebSockets, etc).

My guess is that Chrome Packaged apps will be the replacement for WebViews on Android.

Anyone who wants a stop gap though, should check this out: https://github.com/pwnall/chromeview

>Emacs is next to worthless without all those userspace utilities

GNU/Emacs?

There's nothing particularly unexpected by this, is there?

You see a big spike for "NSA" and "Prism" initially, then "Snowden" gradually takes over.

People consuming information about the NSA leak learned everything available during the first week. There is nothing new to be learned there.

Snowden's whereabouts are, however, an ongoing saga. As a result, I, like many others interested in this, are searching for Snowden news which is constantly changing.

It's encouraging so many are searching for Snowden. No one would be interested if they didn't already understand the context.

> there's absolutely nothing we can do at a technical level to stop the component working

My solution, which I'm not particularly proud of, but have found necessary, is to ensure it's possible to stop the component from working until I've received payment.

Typically, I do this by having an obfuscated statement embedded somewhere in the client's code which does a quick phone home to my web server. When they pay, I remove it.

I've never had to wait more than an hour after pulling the kill switch to get a response.

I stayed at my first AirBnB last week, in Cancun, MX. It was $29/night for an entire apartment. I spent the last day of the trip at a resort for $120 (equal to my entire stay at the ABnB) and found it lacking comparatively.

I'm sure the experiences can be hit or miss, but I'm definitely hooked.