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Our inability to understand the Exponential function
I was reminded of this quote, due to the discussions triggered by the Bitcoin private key database troll website about the feasibility of brute-force searching for the private key of a Bitcoin address. The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. – Albert Allen Bartlett A reddit user made some…
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Pseudorandom
Google developers have confirmed a cryptographic vulnerability in the Android operating system that researchers say could generate serious security glitches on hundreds of thousands of end user apps, many of them used to make Bitcoin transactions. (via Ars Technica) The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. – Robert Coveyou,…
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The state of sending money to a friend in 2013
Basically, in 2013, it is still exceptionally difficult to send money to a friend and this is leading to a customer revolution. – Jaron Lukasiewicz, Coinsetter CEO at Inside Bitcoins NYC (via)
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Bitcoin for Small Payments
Everyone should walk around with 1-2 bitcoins that they can use for small transactions only. If enough people are doing that, then the volality of currency goes down and the value of the currency increases. – Vinny Lingham, CEO of gyft (via) BitPay employees pay each other back when someone makes a food run, by…
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Security risk in Chrome with HTTPS Everywhere combined with Incognito
I recently noticed that when I log in to two Twitter accounts, one from Google Chrome’s main window and one from an Incognito one, the session would sometimes mysteriously “leak” to the main window. I suspected this may be caused by a faulty extension, and it seems I was right. The faulty extension is, ironically,…
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Paul Graham: Do Things that Don’t Scale
I really enjoyed reading Paul Graham‘s essay “Do Things that Don’t Scale” in which he gives counterintuitive advice, encouraging entrepreneurs to invest time in manual labor at the “larval” stage of a their startup’s life. Here are several highlights I found interesting (could also serve as a tl;dr summary for the lazy, although I recommend…
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Now You Have Two Problems
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. – jwz (via) However, if you really have to, use Grant Skinner‘s very useful RegExr tool.
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Forcing Google Analytics to use SSL
The documentation is somewhat incomplete on how to force Google Analytics to use SSL when working with the ga.js tracker (using asynchronous syntax). When using analytics.js, a simple call to set forceSSL is sufficient. The correct syntax is _gaq.push([‘_gat._forceSSL’]);
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We don’t have the technology
One thing humans don’t know how to do is shut down peer to peer networks. We don’t have the technology. – Peter Vessenes, founder and CEO of Bitcoin exchange CoinLab (via)