Giszmo

don't blame this startup for trying. i don't know how big a cut the telcos take and yes, a phone should not be that expensive but we'll see where the price goes. for a start, higher prices are completely normal and later hopefully some competition will bring the price to more reasonable levels. ultimately anonymous would it only be if wallmart started buying them in bulk and people could grab one at the counter paying with cash.

I hope you fail with CC and let the public know bitcoin's strength rather than see sneak in some paragraph in the small print of your TOS that allows you to keep the CC data for half a year just in case.

I am 100% sure that automatically landing a pizza in your front yard will be technically feasible long before the theft rate of these neat gadgets would drop to an acceptable rate. Maybe the first copters will parachute the pizzas :)

I disagree!!! Facebook is great from the sender side and so is G+ but both suck at the receiving side. What we need is not a way to select who we spam as that is a feature that would be ignored by the loud mouths. We need a feature to select what we receive. There are "friends" I easily want to read all ten messages per day but there are others that I just want to be on my friend list cause it publicly shows my appreciation but that are too noisy to actually read their updates about their cat pooping again.

I am well connected in 3 communities that are not mutually compatible, so I don't share everything I would share if I were only in community #2 because I spam-filter on the sending side what I send to all 3 communities. This sucks for my community #2 friends cause they miss out on #2 stuff and it sucks for those that really are not interested in #2. If #1 and #3 people could black list buzz words from my #2 community (bitcoin for example), I could share much more with the peace of mind not to annoy my other "friends".

All anecdotal. Wish they would gps-tag a dog and proof it's commuting between a small set of stations regularly visiting the same stations. I mean, using the train to just get away from where you are would already be cool, but that's not the author's claim.

Oh great! ;) So I can order a pizza to my GPS coordinates paid with bitcoin from my Android on the beach? That's cool!

Only problem with an anonymous order (hey, of course it should be anonymous!) is that people might want to take the drone instead of the pizza so maybe they will have to parachute the pizza from some altitude :) … oh I love this idea :)

… ok so maybe the drone would not operate 100% automated and the pilot would drop the pizza only some meters away from any person that might want to snatch the drone?

Am I the only one who read "crap genius"?

I searched for variance and apparently nobody mentioned this before: They talk of Mean request time: 306ms Median request time: 46ms Which indicates a very high variance, so don't take for granted that an x50 increase of performance would result from intelligent routing. The problem is that the fast tasks suffer from being queued after the slow tasks, so each such fast task takes an extra latency. If the variance is lower, the random routing will be favorable at some point as the delay of getting the task from the router queue to the dyno is not zero neither. In the case of no variance, "intelligent routing" would always add that delay as soon as all dynos are at their limit. Before that, the router would simply keep a list of idle dynos and send work there without delay.

Sure if you never hit 100% load, intelligent routing is cheap and comes at no delay. Imagine 40ms jobs getting all dynos to 100% load. Now the dynos would be idle for the duration of the ping that it takes to report being idle. let that be 4ms. That is 10% less throughput than with items queuing up on the dyno.

The router being the bottleneck would therefore justify to make it stateless and give the dynos a chance to use these last 10% of processing power as well, ultimately increasing the throughput by 10%. Sure, a serious project would not run its servers at 120% load hoping to eventually get back to 100% within time, so all this being said I would always favor intelligent routing to get responsive servers, add dynos in rush hours and only opt for dyno-queuing for stuff that may come with a delay (scientific number crunching, …)

A shop charging 20% to shop for you is not the bitcoin break through that would change the rate within hours. Look at the trade volume in $$. It increased faster than the exchange rate, so my guess is that speculators parted from their coins too fast and the rally will continue for some time and has nothing to do with very recent events. I consider all this the aftermath of the reward split, wordpress.com and the slowly materializing ASICS.

thanx for the TLDR.

Normally when I ask people to review a draft, I put it into an etherpad. Etherpad also features version control to the letter, concurrent editing, tagging of versions, editor colors.

Sure, for anything that requires formatting, it would fail but "draft" has yet to proof it is a full-bloated … uhm … featured word processor.

maybe they store a hash along your strongly encrypted file. this way they could go after copy-righted files accross the system once reported at the cost of quasi-decrypting some of your files. your really unique files would still be save although you might not want them to be able to timestamp proof your possession of these neither.

If you happen to plan on making yet another mobile OS, make sure it runs Android apps. Anything that is a burden to the developers will not fly easily.

Bada OS? It's fast, so what? People slowly get that "smart phone with touch screen and facebook" is not really a selling point and start to look for Google if not iPhone.

Muting … can only be the first step.

I don't want to mute Aaron Swartz because I'm sick of hearing about him but I want to tell my computer that I know of the fact that he died. I also read his wikipedia article.

My computer now should know what facts I know to not bother me with them or even better gray out paragraphs in longer articles when these paragraphs only contain stuff I know.

To teach a computer about what I know, I guess, some TLDR-interface would be needed, where users can tag paragraphs and whole articles (or videos?) with facts discussed in that article. Interested users could have edit wars about the appropriate facts but I would just have to confirm if I read and understood an article with some minimum interaction (slowly scrolling to the end of the article or not clicking a headline link for example).

Better than with some temporary hype like CES, such a system could help to dig deep into some more complex topic. I follow every news about my favorite subject but it gets so annoying to read the same introductions to my subject over and over again. I want to skip that part without missing the news. I want to skip the old news without missing the twist they found on that old news. A tool that could help with that would save the majority of users a lot of time. Of course people that profit from such a system would also have a high incentive to tag paragraphs, too, which should not cost too much time neither. Some day hopefully computers can do the tagging part.

Uhm, I hover to not trigger outbound traffic and check the actual url of the link before I click. Wouldn't want my browser to try and render a page that I didn't even click.

Demurrage's value is equal to miners' reward. This greatly limits Freicoin to not set a too high percentage. Imagine 50% of the existing money reserve going into bookkeeping of Freicoin transactions. To put 5% into perspective consider exchange rate changes between well established currencies. 5% per year is nothing.

Ok, so I am a Bitcoin fan and I am a demurrage fan but I couldn't figure out how you could combine these two.

5% of all coins disappear per year. (BTW: Gesell's Wörgl had a much much higher demurrage.) I read this would be equal to the block reward which I guess is the asymptotic value and not the truth from day one (constant block reward as opposed to halfing block reward like bitcoin with 5% demurrage will lead to an equilibrium).

Proof of work: Approximately the amount of money goes into mining that newly mined coins are worth. If the client shows me that I have less in my wallet every day, the block reward is simply worth more. The proposed system means that 5% of the freicoin's money reserve is spent on mining per year. Today's banks most likely burn the same order of magnitude of world's money supply. Hmm, might work but it's a waste of resources to burn 5% of the world economy to keep book of transactions.

Proof of stake: As mining might get excessively expensive if the value of Ƀ rises faster than the reward halves, proof of stake is an option to bring this waste of resources to an end. In Freicoin this would directly reverse the demurrage.

I assume the developers of Freicoin picked 5% exactly because of these issues. Else 25% would be much more reasonable. 5% is the average weekly volatility of bitcoin and was the average daily volatility last year. $ vs € have this volatility yearly. Calling this demurrage is a joke.

[My approach was to have - high - demurrage be cashed out evenly to people as a basic income. Only problem is that you would have to qualify as a natural person to get such a cash-out address which would lead to very very schizophrenic scammers or to total control if governments pick up the idea.]

Who is "you"? You, adrianwaj could make it more appealing to bitcoiners by offering some cool features. I programmed a bitcoin wallet for facebook (and never put it live as I fear handling other people's money) but of course, that's a cool feature. The users within one server could transfer coins outside the block chain at no transaction costs. Do it yourself or make a bounty for it.

Thanks for the link. It has some good tips but I guess it's indicative of how hard it can be to give direct negative feedback that even your book on the subject doesn't provide one example of how to give negative feedback. I'm not sure if talking with that person is an option. My picture of him is a narcissistic person that is not susceptible to criticism. My friend will try to get a recording ("for the minutes") of the next meeting. Without proof, talking to the manager could also back-fire.