HN user

barisser

367 karma

@abarisser

Bitcoiner, Ex-physicist, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/barisser; my proof: https://keybase.io/barisser/sigs/CWax4YgajAULxm34f_nBQGkBLLy6ueSA_33s-LC39iM ]

Posts60
Comments38
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medium.com 6y ago

Building Infrastructure in Space: The Lunar Mass Driver

barisser
4pts1
medium.com 7y ago

Blockchain Scalability Idea: Private Sparse Merkle Trees

barisser
2pts0
medium.com 7y ago

Blockchain Scalability with Sparse Merkle Trees and Bloom Filters

barisser
2pts0
medium.com 8y ago

A Proposal to Solve Blockchain Scalability

barisser
3pts1
medium.com 8y ago

Wrestling with Blockchain Scalability

barisser
3pts0
medium.com 8y ago

Sell Your Bitcoins Right Away

barisser
3pts0
medium.com 9y ago

Bitcoiners Buying Up Lunar Real Estate, Anticipating Moon

barisser
1pts0
github.com 9y ago

Show HN: SYFR – AES/RSA Hybrid Encryption in Python.. For Humans

barisser
2pts0
optionista.com 9y ago

Show HN: Stock Options Info and Visualizer

barisser
3pts1
medium.com 9y ago

Stoicism: The Lost Art

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 9y ago

The Ascent of Authoritarianism

barisser
4pts0
medium.com 9y ago

The AI Singularity Is Not Nigh

barisser
5pts0
medium.com 9y ago

The Nuclear Lesson

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 9y ago

The Nuclear Lesson

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 9y ago

Why Altcoins are Doomed

barisser
1pts0
scikit-learn.org 9y ago

Regression in Python

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 9y ago

The Meaning of Low Interest Rates

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 9y ago

When Principles Are Trumped by Expedience

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Why Brexit Was Not a Mistake

barisser
30pts57
optionista.com 10y ago

Visualizing Options Premiums and Implied Probabilities

barisser
2pts0
optionista.com 10y ago

Show HN: Visualizing Options' Premiums and Probabilities

barisser
3pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Democracy versus Technology

barisser
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Building a Decentralized Webpage

barisser
4pts1
medium.com 10y ago

A Decentralized Website Anchored in the Blockchain

barisser
2pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Our Obsession with ISIS Is Unhealthy

barisser
6pts0
medium.com 10y ago

The Capitalist Case for Leaner Finance

barisser
4pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Making Finance Simpler and More Data-Driven for the Amateur Majority

barisser
3pts0
www.impliedprofit.com 10y ago

Turning Market Opinions into Specific Portfolios

barisser
1pts0
barisser.com 10y ago

Proving Identity Trustlessly

barisser
16pts10
medium.com 10y ago

How Our Nature Obscures Modern Perception

barisser
1pts0

They are precisely incompatible because Blockchains are all about programmatic, self-enforcing arbitration. In a correctly-functioning Blockchain, there is no entry-point for non-permissioned humans to meddle with outcomes. This is not a bug but a feature.

Ethereum keeps hard-forking and has thereby undermined its legitimacy. The premise that code is law is central to Blockchains. The necessary corollary is that human-law is irrelevant within the space of outcomes on the Blockchain.

In Bitcoin, no human court can prohibit a transaction from going through, or being valid. Bitcoins cannot be confiscated by fiat. Full stop. Blockchains were designed to create a purer, more mechanical and reliable arbitration than the courts can give.

Cython is really fantastic. It makes you realize that there is often not a huge reason to leave Python if that's what you are comfortable with. The community has simply produced so much.

Log is often used because it makes linear proportional returns. It makes the most sense when gains are considered derived from the principal, ie proportional returns from capital. See an example below.

As others have mentioned, maximizing log is equivalent to maximizing the underlying.

But when considering returns on accruing capital, a 20% loss is much worse than a 20% gain is good, and similarly a 100% gain is much less good than a 100% loss is bad. This is correctly captured by taking the log. In the case where money is simply accrued from some external source, and their is no proportional return, log isn't necessary.

Whatever your opinion on Brexit, it would be a miscarriage of democracy to ignore the referendum's result, even if it is not strictly legally binding.

If Leave can win now, it will garner more support if the public's will is neglected.

Also the comment takes it as a foregone conclusion that triggering Article 50 would spell the political demise of the sitting Prime Minister. Isn't this a dubious assumption? We're seeing short-term market reactions today, but it is a very different thing to assert that the long-term impacts are as suicidal as is commonly believed.

Ethereum is Doomed 10 years ago

Software is almost always flawed to a certain extent.

The problem with Ethereum is that you can't push a fix to your contract.

I found this article really frustrating.

The US government forces American tech companies to spy on users, so US companies are to blame?

These services are so useful and well-liked around the world that they should be considered a threat?

The author is amazingly willing to accord French bureaucrats the right to regulate the cultural consumption of Frenchmen. How is this defensible? Should we knock Netflix because it makes it harder for French social engineers to impose their preferences on their own citizens?

Companies like this don't come out of Europe for a reason.

Hi, core team here from Squall. I'd be happy to answer any questions/comments.

Squall is a community-built product on Assembly. So each contributor gets some fraction of ownership, commensurate with their contribution to the product.

I'd highly suggest writing a Squall post. It's an easy way to say more on Twitter.

This is spectacular.

Redstone circuitry is an excellent exercise in the operation of digital circuits. I learned a ton about digital logic by trying to recreate stuff like this (albeit much more modest incarnations).

Building sophistication yourself out of base elements is the ultimate educational experience.

You're right about normalizing the user preference vector: not strictly necessary. Still if we're normalizing bounty vectors, it feels right to normalize everything :).

Another variation that I was considering is to generate 'user clusters'. In Mark Vector Space, divide user vectors into N groups such that the net variance across all clusters is minimized. Then when a user, for which there is sparse data, needs contextual information from other users, I could simply ask how correlated he is to the different clusters. If each cluster's 'center of mass' is a vector, the dot product between a new user and the different cluster vectors could be informative in reconstructing suggestions: the idea being to infer from similar users what a particular user might want.

I was also wondering whether adding a stochastic component to each user-vector would be interesting.

Thanks for the feedback.

How are 'millions of separate blockchains' supposed to be secure? We have enough trouble securing one Blockchain.

Also it seems redundant to include the fruits of computations in a blockchain, for all time, when SNARK-based proofs can accomplish the same goal with much less overhead.

Correct me if I'm missing something.

The team is in a great superposition to collapse into a winning eigenstate. Its interference pattern is constructive. The phase they're in is totally coherent. Their offense has got this great duality going, that you simply can't measure without screwing up. They've got this non-classical strategy that I don't understand. However I'm not going to comment on their position at this time; I don't want to alter the team's momentum going into the game.