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sks | 8 years ago | on: Exactly-once Semantics: How Kafka Does it

Providing API for building applications that have transactions and help with idempotent producing is really exciting. This will help lower a lot of pains associated with building stream processing systems. Doing it with very little performance overhead is amazing.

I do feel that calling it "Exactly-once delivery with kafka" is slightly misleading as this requires the applications to be written in a certain way. The title makes is sound too general and borders on claiming something that is close to impossible. I dont want to be too critical here as the author was very honest with what this means in the blog post. Regardless of the title this is an amazing feature.

sks | 12 years ago | on: ‘Location tracking’ of every Indian mobile user by 2014

I think even those who are not worried about their next meal are not going to protest this. India has seen so many terror attacks labeled as intelligence failure that any move to beef up the intelligence infrastructure may even be welcomed. The sad thing is that the probability of this data being misused for political reasons is so much higher in India than in the USA.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Bitcoin's Wild Ride Shows It's Not Real Money

I dont know if bitcoins will ever stabilize or go down to zero but I also believe that no one can be so sure about how a free market is going to behave to just write it off at this moment.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Bitcoin's Wild Ride Shows It's Not Real Money

Bitcoins slipped into speculative realm a couple of weeks ago and probably after the crash the speculators will exit the market. A stable bitcoin can easily serve the three functions you listed above. As I said in my first comment this volatility raises questions about longvity of bitcoins but they have not ceased to be real money, at least for now.

It is just a 3-4 year old technology lets wait and watch how this plays out before writing it off completely.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Bitcoin's Wild Ride Shows It's Not Real Money

If we get down to the basics I think anything that is a medium of exchange is a currency. So in some circles cigarettes and Tide work as currency. Though these "currencies" are not legal tender.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Bitcoin's Wild Ride Shows It's Not Real Money

Given the volatility you may doubt the longevity of bitcoin as a currency, but since you can exchange it for some goods and services it looks like Real Money to me (at least right now).

sks | 13 years ago | on: Mtgox stops trading for 12 hours

I think the volume/unit time during the crash is generally higher than during the bubble phase. This can be seen in the steeper slope of price-time graph during declining phase compared to the rising phase of most bubbles. I guess fear is a quicker call to action than greed in financial markets.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Why Did Yahoo Buy Summly?

Maybe they got an exclusive license when yahoo wasn't event remotely interested in the tech. Just a guess.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Building a Better Bitcoin

I agree that Bitcoins were designed as an instrument to facilitate transfer of value and not as store of wealth. But the example of a transaction you just gave in your post is not how people spend currency. No one converts a currency (100$) to another currency (0.478 Bitcoins) for immediate spending in the real world. People generally minimize number of currency conversions (to save transaction costs) and store the currency (wallets or banks) for some time before spending it, and storing volatile currencies carries huge risk.

The current price explosion is not good for bitcoin if you look at it as a currency. People who believe this is a bubble will just cash out of bitcoins anticipating a fall and the (apparently) greater number of people thinking the value will rise will just hold on to the coins. The only way this price explosion can be helpful is in providing media exposure to bitcoins and cryto-currencies. Only after we have sustained period of stable prices we can hope of bitcoins becoming a major facilitator of transaction.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Ex-Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher dies, aged 87

I dont know a lot about Thatcher but when Indira Gandhi's election was overturned by the courts on ground of election fraud she proceeded to suspend elections and civil liberties. I hope that you are correct and we would never see anyone like Indira Gandhi, no nation deserves to be ruled by a tyrant like her.

sks | 13 years ago | on: How Japanese Kids Learn To Multiply

This is exactly the same algorithm as the standard one we use : Multiply all possible combinations of digits and appropriately combine the results. This is just the graphical version of writing down numbers.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Jonathan James

I read an article today which pointed out how Feynman went around cracking safes during the Manhattan Project. Something fundamental has changed in the society ... Imagine the present if people like Jobs/Woz would have been locked up for phone phreaking.

sks | 13 years ago | on: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

As a society we do agree to follow the law and punish those who break them. But remember that the law of the land is not some God given set of laws. Several people broke segregation laws during the civil rights movement and in my view they should not have paid up (I think you may also agree with this). Turing paid up because he broke the law but now I guess there is almost unanimous consent that him paying up was not the right outcome. So paying up for breaking the law is not as black and white as it sometimes seems. Lets reserve our judgements for some time.

Edit : Also as Udo points out lets stop this line of argument for a bit. Some members of the community either knew Aaron or were affected by his work, lets not subject them to this argument right now.

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