I dream of Satoshi Nakamoto
Filed Under Programming, Security
“Satoshi Nakamoto” is the alias of the anonymous person who invented and published the protocol for Bitcoin. So far, no one knows for sure who it is, although attempts have been made to unmask the person (or people) by an analysis of their writing style and similar indicators. Now, in a blogpost, Sergio Demian Lerner has found a way to recognize coins mined by the same computer and has picked out the distinctive pattern of a certain individual who began mining almost from block one and continued mining at a consistent rate with regular restarts for a long time, without spending any of those coins.
This, he says, is Satoshi, and I applaud Sergio for this clever way to recognize an individual miner. Like Sergio, I am pleased that Satoshi’s fortune in Bitcoins is now apparently worth around $100 million USD. But Sergio also suggests that he expects this will lead to the unmasking of Satoshi once others track this to a Bitcoin somewhere which HAS been spent. (Bitcoin has many advantages, but it is NOT fully anonymous: in fact, anyone can track a payment back to see which (anonymous) account it came from previously.)
I hope he is wrong about the unmasking. I prefer to imagine that Satoshi Nakamoto is living and working a normal job, still haunting cryptography boards in the evenings and on weekends, and occasionally checking the news to see how that Bitcoin thing is progressing. I imagine that someday, many years from now, when she dies her husband will open that envelope she left in the safe-deposit-box and it will contain a hard drive and stack of papers labeled “Now that I am gone, please publish this for the world to read.”
Okay, it’s just a romantic dream, but I’m hanging onto it as long as I can.
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Story Points Aren’t Accurate – That’s Why They’re Good
Filed Under Programming
Ben Northrop wrote to complain that story points are not accurate. They don’t (always) map linearly to hours spent, so adding up story points over a large project won’t accurately give hours for the project. In the spirit of expressing controversial opinions, I will agree, and explain why I think that’s a good thing.
I believe that story points serve as a “rough” estimate. In the teams I work with, story point estimates are made quickly (a few minutes to be sure we understand the story, then quickly discuss and reach a consensus estimate). They are quantized (must round off to some Fibonacci number) which means that any given estimate is necessarily imperfect.
As such, they provide a cheap (didn’t take long to generate) but rough (not perfectly accurate) estimate, and they have to be respected as such. Story point estimates would not be useful to answer questions like “Will this project deliver in October or November?”, but they ARE useful for questions like “Would this be a 3-month project or a 1 year project?” For some purposes, a more precise estimate is needed, and then it may be necessary to invest a few hours to a few weeks to perform detailed work to generate a more precise estimate. However, I think that such situations are rare: people *want* perfect estimates ahead of time but rarely *need* them. Also I think that people are usually fooling themselves: most (usually waterfall) projects with precise up-front estimates later discover that those estimates are not accurate.
One of the strengths of story points is that everyone (including the customer) REALIZES that they are rough and don’t correspond to a precise delivery date — something that can be difficult to explain for estimates expressed in hours.
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Constant Crawl Design – Part 4
Filed Under Programming
Suppose you wanted to build a tool for anonymously capturing the websites that a user visited and keeping a record of the public sites while keeping the users completely anonymous so their browsing history could not be determined. One of the most difficult challenges would be finding a way to decide whether a site was “public” and to do so without keeping any record (not even on the user’s own machine) of the sites visited or even tying together the different sites by one ID (even an anonymous one). Read more
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Constant Crawl Design – Part 3
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Suppose you were building a tool integrated with web browsers to anonymously capture the (public) websites that a user visited and store them to a P2P network shared by the users of this tool. What would the requirements be for this storage P2P network? Read more
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Constant Crawl Design – Part 2
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Suppose you were building a tool for anonymously capture the (public) websites that a user visited. What would the UI requirements be? Read more
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Constant Crawl Design – Part 1
Filed Under Programming
Do you remember Google Web Accelerator? The idea was that you downloaded all your pages through Google’s servers. For content that was static, Google could just load it once, then cache it and serve up the same page to every user. The advantage to the user was that they got the page faster, and more reliably; the advantage to Google was that they got to crawl the web “as the user sees it” instead of just what Googlebot gets… and that they got to see every single page you viewed, thus feeding even more into the giant maw of information that is Google.
Well, Google eventually dropped Google Web Accelerator (I wonder why?), but the idea is interesting. Suppose you wanted to build a similar tool that would capture the web viewing experience of thousands of users (or more). For users it could provide a reliable source for sites that go down or that get hit with the “slashdot” effect. For the Internet Archive or someone a smaller search engine like Duck Duck Go, it would provide a means of performing a massive web crawl. For someone like the EFF or human-rights groups it would provide a way to monitor whether some users (such as those in China) are being “secretly” served different content. But unlike Google Web Accelerator, a community-driven project would have to solve one very hard problem: how do this while keeping the user’s browsing history secret — the exact opposite of what Google’s project did. Read more
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Host Error 2
Filed Under Programming
Another posting on how to understand Profile errors. Read more
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Namespace for a valid SOAP message
Filed Under Programming
A brief hint: if you see an error message like this:
InputStream does not represent a valid SOAP 1.1 Message
check the namespace of the SOAP envelope
SOAP 1.1: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/
SOAP 1.2: http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope/
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Binary Backward Compatibility
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I saw this interesting article about a weakness in the Scala language. The weakness applies not just to Scala, but to pretty much any language: the community using the language cannot grow past a certain point until it somehow solves the problem of libraries depending on other libraries in a large (deep) tree. Read more
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Story Points
Filed Under Programming
If you have complete and accurate requirements for your project which won’t change, and your development team is spot-on in estimating and highly consistent in their development pace. and there are no surprises, then you can produce highly accurate project timeline estimates up front. Such accurate estimates are (or, more accurately, would be) quite useful and well worth the effort it takes to produce them because of how nicely you can schedule everything. But how about the rest of us, for which none of this is true? Read more
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