These Guys Made $3 Million In Four Days From The Bitcoin Craze

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/guys-made-3m-from-bitcoin-craze-2013-11

Say what you want about the long-term viability of Bitcoin, the digital currency that's been going crazy lately.

Bitcoin has been incredibly lucrative for Sam Cole, Marcus Erlandssona and Andreas Kennemer.

Because of Bitcoin, they made $3 million in just four days.

Their company, KnCMiner, doesn't own Bitcoins or trade them. They make the special computers that allow people to "mine" Bitcoins from cyberspace.

From November 7 to 10, 2013, while Bitcoin prices were climbing wildly, Stockholm-based KnCMiner sold out of its newest Bitcoin computer, selling 5,000 units. These computers cost $7.000 a piece (and yes, they take Bitcoin as payment).

At one point, the computers were selling so fast that KnCMiner generated $600,000 in less than five minutes, it said.

That's because there's basically three ways to get a hold of a Bitcoin. You can buy them. You can take them as payment for products or services. You can go out into cyberspace and create them, otherwise called "mining."

Mining a Bitcoin is hard for a typical computer to do. A computer has to solve a series of difficult cryptography problems and most computers don't have the computational power to do that.

So companies like KnCMiner developed special Bitcoin computers using custom computer chips. (Such chips are called ASICs which stands for "Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.") These computers do only one job: mine Bitcoins.

We asked cofounder Andreas Kennemer about the business of Bitcoin computers.

Business Insider: How is a Bitcoin "mined"?

Andreas Kennemer: Bitcoins are built from cal! culating an algorithm (or encryption problems) called SHA-256. By using the processing power from your ASICs or graphic cards, you try to solve the algorithm (called "solving a block") to create new Bitcoins. If you succeed in solving the algorithm, your result is verified by the other processing “computers” in the Bitcoin network.

If you are the lucky first to solve a block you get rewarded with Bitcoins, currently 25 per block. The algorithm also keeps track of how many Bitcoins are allowed to be created. If the creation exceeds more than 3600 Bitcoins a day, the difficulty to create Bitcoins increases. This means that it gets harder for the computers to solve a block and the amount of Bitcoins that can be created remains the same.

BI: What's different about a Bitcoin computer from a regular PC, like a high-end MacBook pro? Or a "supercomputer"?

AK: A Bitcoin computer has an ASIC chip specifically designed for calculation of the Bitcoin algorithm (SHA-256). This computer has only one task and can only perform that task. Because it is specifically designed for that purpose, it can calculate the Bitcoin algorithm extremely fast compared to a [regular computer] CPU or a graphic card.

We have spoken to Chinese engineers running the world’s strongest supercomputer  in China. If that supercomputer were to calculate the Bitcoin algorithm, it would be the equivalent of 40 of our Jupiter models [550 gigahashes per second, gh/s, or 550 billion computations per second] to be equal in performance. 

BI: How fast can one of your top computer mine bitcoins?

AK: Current average mining speed of our fastest model (Jupiter) is 0.6 coins a day per device.

BI: Are serious Bitcoin minors also using supercomputers to mine?

AK: No, those computers can’t compete with our devices. The ASICs are specifically designed for calculation of the SHA-256 ! algorith m and the cost-per-Gigahash (calculation power) is much lower.

SEE ALSO: Researchers Say 'Bitcoin Is Broken' And Could Collapse

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Pinterest's APIs let developers embed pins directly on their websites (updated)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/14/pinterest-embed-pins-search-api/

A lot of people use Pinterest to keep track of stuff they'd like to buy, places they want to go and food they want to eat, but there's always been separation between Pinterest and the actual sources of those desires -- you only had the option to click a Pinterest button on a site to pin the content in question to your board of choice. No longer.

Pinterest has taken another step to strengthen its partnerships with third-party websites with the release of its APIs today. The tools allow web developers to embed recent, trending and most-clicked pins (that update regularly according to what folks are pinning), and even implement a Pinterest search surface that surfaces pins of items from your domain surface custom search results on their pages, too. Folks will also now be able to pin stuff directly from websites, so as to not interrupt the retail experience with a detour to Pinterest proper. To illustrate these newly bestowed powers, Pinterest has partnered up with a slew of well-known sites, including Zappos, Target, Walmart, BuzzFeed, and Better Homes And Garden -- and if you'd like the full list and further description of how to use the new APIs, hit the source below.

Update: Our earlier version of this story mistakenly indicated that the new APIs enabled searching Pinterest on third party sites. In fact, the APIs only allow devs to create a custom keyword search and embed those search results on a webpage.

Filed under: Internet

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Source: Pinterest blog

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Wolfram working on a 'symbolic' programing language, will be its 'most important' project yet

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/14/wolfram-language/

What Wolfram has accomplished with Alpha is nothing short of stunning. Sure, it can't help you find videos of cats dressed as sharks riding Roombas, but the company's goals were always much loftier. Using the technological foundation it built with Alpha and Mathematica, it's now working on bring its natural language, knowledge-based computational prowess to programming languages. Many of the details are still quite vague but, according to founder Stephen Wolfram, it will be a general purpose programming language, like C++, except it will be largely self contained. That means no (or at least less) pointing to external libraries to accomplish complex tasks. Those other languages focus mostly on structure and leave the difficult task of graphing or processing images to extensions, while Wolfram Language will have at its heart a "giant web of algorithms" to perform many operations. As you'd expect, it integrates quite tightly with Wolfram Alpha, so stock prices, tide times or images of adorable pit bull puppies are easily pulled up in whatever app you're building.

Perhaps most importantly, though, because it uses the natural language approach pioneered with Alpha, even the least tech savvy among you should be able to start programming in no time. While we'll clearly have to reserve final judgement for when Wolfram language is available to the public, it sounds like an ideal tool for a child to learn programming on. With its forgiving syntax and deep database, students could quickly and easily whip up simple, but surprisingly functional programs while still leaning the necessary procedure and structure for more advanced languages like Python or Dart. If you're itching for more details, hit up the source for Stephen Wolfram very, very long post on its development.

Filed under: Misc

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Via: The Verge

Source: Stephen Wolfram

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The Next Big Superfruit: The Buffaloberry

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/buffaloberry-is-the-new-superfruit-2013-11

A relatively unknown fruit, called the buffaloberry, could be the world's next big superfruit, according to a new study published in the Journal of Food Science.

Researchers who collected wild buffaloberries in North and South Dakota found the tiny red, slightly sour fruits are rich in lycopene, an antioxidant that appears to lower the risk of certain types of cancers, as well as an acidic compound called methyl-lycopenoate that can be used as a natural food colorant. They are a type of pigment called carotenoids that give fruits and vegetables like tomatoes and carrots their red or orange colors.

The fruits are also a good source of other phenolic antioxidants, the compounds responsible for their tartness and generally thought to play a role in preventing cancer and slowing cellular aging.

According to the study, the lycopene content of buffaloberries tends to be "high in comparison to tomatoes and other commercially available fruit."

The shrub on which the edible berries grow is native to North America and is found growing on many Indian reservations, land that's unsuitable for most other crops. The hardy shrubs can grow pretty much anywhere, even in dry environments with poor soil quality.

These berries have traditionally been eaten by Native American people, but the new findings suggest that it could be a valuable food crop, especially for regions in need of economic development. 

Buffaloberries are high enough in sugar to taste good as a fresh or dried fruit (they have the consistency of a raisin when dried) and its acidity makes it desirable f! or wine makers.

Although commercial production of these fruits is currently very limited, researchers believe that the "potential for growing, consuming, and marketing buffaloberry fruit on and around Midwestern Native American Reservations provides both and economic and nutritional opportunity that should be exploited."

QUIZ: Which Food Has More Calories?

SEE ALSO: Man Goes On 60-Day Juice Fast To Save His Life

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Google's homegrown Dart web programming language emerges from beta

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/14/googles-dart-1-0-sdk-released-out-of-beta-to-web-programmers/

While Google giveth and taketh away end-user apps, it's generally been good to developers -- all the better to get new tools into the wild. One of those pet projects, Dart, is now out of beta and into a "production ready" version 1.0 SDK, according to Mountain View. In a nutshell, it's a programming language that aims to simplify, speed up and (it hopes) one day replace Javascript as the app of choice for web developers. Though no browser actually supports Dart natively (except its own Dartium browser), the SDK comes with a Javascript translator that Google claims produces faster and tighter code. It's also added code completion, debugging and more, while adding that Adobe and others have started supporting it. Though the idea of learning another programming language makes us tear up, if you're game, hit! the sou rce.

Filed under: Software, Google

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Source: Google Developers Blog

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