skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In open source communities, impactful contributions yield influence. Here are the top 100 bitcoin contributors:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors

Guys like Wladimir, Pieter, Gavin, Cory Fields, Gregory Maxwell and Luke Jr have a voice because they’ve contributed many thousands of lines of code. (Lines of code are only a proxy for impact).

You may have noticed Mike Hearn isn’t in the top 100 contributors list. He is the primary author of the Java implementation of a bitcoin library:
https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj

He started it in 2011, definitely early. But a substantial amount of bitcoin core work had already set the path. There are also similar implementations in many different languages but they are not the primary reference implementation for full nodes.

According to Hearn’s blog post:
“I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV and BBC News. I have been repeatedly cited by the Economist as a Bitcoin expert and prominent developer. I have explained Bitcoin to the SEC, to bankers and to ordinary people I met at cafes.”

Being cited by journalists is not the same as being a primary contributor.

The disagreement between Hearn and the other developers isn’t about whether to increase capacity, it’s about how. Many of the primary full-node contributors believe a hard-blockchain-fork is a risky approach. Lots of work is being done to explore better options, like segregated witness (http://gavinandresen.ninja/segregated-witness-is-cool).

Mike Hearn tried to (very aggressively) push the idea of increasing the block size with a hard fork. In fact the patch allows node operators to vote and 75% adoption is needed. When it looked like that wasn’t going to pan out, he created Bitcoin XT where “Decisions are made through agreement between Mike and Gavin, with Mike making the final call if a serious dispute were to arise.”

So the claim that Hearn not being able to take over decision making power for the bitcoin community is evidence that bitcoin has failed seems to show something slightly different. It shows that open source software methodology of forking and adoption lets the best implementation win and prevents hostile takeovers.

Mike Hearn is not as impactful to bitcoin development as he or recent news would indicate. Mike leaving the bitcoin community has little impact on the future success or failure of bitcoin.
Hierarchy is part of human social interactions, switching to a completely flat organizational structure is just sweeping it under the rug.

Better to re-organize to try and match the organizational structure to the actual communication and power structure. If your organization has too many groups and tiers of communication, that is either a staffing problem, or you haven't properly separated business concerns.
The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of of the Lord, Apple.
As a Junior in college, I appreciate the nuance and perspective you've provided.

Do you have any advice for an undergrad trying to find his way in today's tech industry? You mentioned "competitive advantage" and learning the "right things" - could you elaborate on what you think that is today, especially for someone who'll be joining the workforce in about a year?
Talk about a strawman example.
I just shake my head when I read this article. Taking half your market rate in salary and then complaining about it is a ridiculous example. Equity is never a sure thing and everyone know that. If you take equity in lieu of pay you do so at your own peril.

I joined a start up because I didn't have the traditional experience needed to get hired at a big company. I was given a ton of responsibility and able to learn a lot in a short time. Yes, you still only have X number of years on your resume, but you can talk to people and show them the work you did, which is a lot more important than your resume IMO.
Can anyone post a précis/examples - apparently I do not have rights to see any spreadsheets at all.
The .io fork now lives here: http://popcorntime.ag

And here: https://github.com/PopcornTime-CE
There are examples of it being emergent phenomenon, yes, but when you look closely at how the cowrie shells moved around, you'll see the behavior of state actors. The vast majority of the shells were stored in a single dwelling in the settlement with thick walls and often below ground. These dwellings were guarded by warrior-class members of the societies, The dwellings were connected to a single family or even just a single person: a warlord or monarch. If it walks like a duck...
But the big thing that GitHub doesn't use GitHub for is interacting with the masses.

- GitHub doesn't use GitHub issues to take feature requests or bug reports.

- GitHub doesn't use Pull Requests to allow users to submit bug fixes

When all your issues and pull-request are being raised by a defined set of people who are (or ought to be) committed to the same collective goal (because they're employees of the same company) you can develop a culture and norms around how those things work.

If "Some Guy" at GitHub raises issues where the only description is "This feature doesn't work on Mac" or raises PRs where the only description is "this fixes a bug I found" the cultural pressure would teach him/her that's not how things are done, and if the lesson wasn't learned, then they wouldn't last at GitHub.

When the people you're interacting with are infrequent contributors, it's a different scenario. They need guidance. They need to be pushed to go down the helpful path on their first attempt, because there are too many new contributors and they often don't stick around for long enough to change behaviours by osmosis and cultural pressure.
Maybe they'll bring them back in some new-and-improved form and generate renewed interest in the app--maybe it's a strategy.
> Focused. Can they possibly eschew Facebook, Twitter, IM, Hacker News, et al. for eight hours?

How about NO?
The DMCA's Chilling Effect on Research and Innovation
I love this summary, it really touches on all the core issues. However, even though bitcoin has such severe flaws, I think that cryptocurrency in general is still really promising. I've been particularly excited about ethereum for the past two years or so, and progress on that project definitely seems to be happened (although it's not a currency per se). The concept of the block chain still has massive potential.
Executive Orders. If they're going to abuse them for evil (my view; YMMV), then they might as well use them for some good too.

Executive may not be able to pass laws, but they do control the flow of $$ in the DOT.
Bitcoin forking is generally considered an Extremely Bad Thing To Happen.
> it just never seemed right to me to use other people's things in ways they did not want me to.

I think you let it go. You can't capture all the value you create. It's not how living in a society works. All our culture is based on taking someone else's work and changing it, combining with other works and sprinkling a little of your own insight. You can trace every movie ever made back through other movies, then through songs, performances and literature, pretty much back to earliest recorded history. This is partly because "nothing is new under the Sun", but mostly because works of art are enjoyed within a cultural context. If you quote Shakespeare in your movie, you don't do that just because the words feel kind of nice. You're both basing off Shakespeare's work, and - by doing so - you're purposefully making the audience evaluate your movie within the context of Shakespeare's writings, which you probably expect to bring them more enjoyment. And Shakespeare did the same by taking from the writings of his predecessors, etc.

I like the response to the letter that 'hotgoldminer linked. I appreciate the reality, that artists want to earn money too. Personally, I pretty much don't pirate stuff anymore, and I'm happy to financially support authors (and middlemen, though I'm not happy about supporting those who are just rent-seeking). But I disagree on the fundamental moral principle. I think that expecting to be paid per copy of an information that's copyable pretty much for free is not a moral right. It's at best a temporary privilege, though one that people got used to before we had digital technology.
Do employees have any opportunity to sell their ISOs on the secondary markets if they don't want to wait? No clue how any of that works so forgive me if that is a dumb question.
Are you claiming that "Wallets are strongly encouraged to upgrade but can continue to operate without modification as the deployment does not break backwards compatibility." is simply false?

edit: I just read the discussion https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015... about this, anyone waiting for a few confirmations is not really vulnerable.
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
VirusTotal is a good start if you're willing to fork out $$.

After that you can find companies who will sell you feeds.

After you've up and running on people's computers there are sample sharing agreements between AV companies, but you need to have something of your own to share before they're going to give you theirs.
The majority of people (myself included) are paying a company to provide the DNS service to by-pass the geolocking.

Surely it's as simple for Netflix as blacklisting the range of IPs that the company runs off. They're not going to catch 100% of people like me but I'd warrant they'll get >90%
Truck driver demographics don't line up with democratic voters.

Besides that, rural & poor always lose in any federal policy decision.
Swiss Surveillance Laws headed for nationwide referendum
You can get ClamAV's database files. Though most AVs are cloud based now. They store the hash database online and the clients just query it. Most integrate sandboxes with heuristics for malicious behavior (for unseen samples) and machine learning on previously malicious samples to create rules for new detections. Most will also monitor network traffic and have rules for detection there too.
Those problems can be solved without the ridiculous effort of creating self driving cars. People die mostly because of drunk driving accidents. More bus passes and free taxis can save people much cheaper. Plus, how many more die of cancer and heart disease? Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
The results are now available:

https://bjoernkw.com/2016/01/15/survey-for-it-freelancers-ho...

Thanks again to everybody for participating.
> Credit cards take 180 days for the transaction to confirm.

I've worked on batch settlement software and never heard of this. The payment processor has very strict timelines that must be followed for each phase (auth, submission, clearing, settlement). Funds usually appear in bulk the next business day after settlement.

> Cash can be counterfeited.

And easily spotted (in the US). This is more an issue for people than retailers because the banks will almost certainly notice it.

> Even some bank wires can be clawed back.

This is really fucking hard and easily mitigated by immediately wiring the money to another account at a different bank.
My company pays me to work on a fairly old-school free software project and we run our own git service. Our workflow is email based so we won't ever consider switching to GitHub.

That said, we do sometimes consider setting up an official mirror on GitHub. Ideology aside (some team members might think we shouldn't promote a propriety solution for free software project), the main thing that puts us off is that there is no way to disable pull requests. Closing all pull requests by hand is not appealing; leaving all pull requests open is not desirable. We can probably write a bot to close pull requests, but that is just yet another administrative burden.

Not sure if GitHub will ever consider allowing users to disable pull requests though. That seems to go against GitHub's core interest.
Well Burr's no George Carlin, that's for sure.
Yeah, and if we're discussing unethical things people justify to themselves, let's not forget that we do rationalize advertising. Which is doubly relevant here, because it's the heavy-handed advertising that makes our culture so tightly connected to commercial works of art.
I like insideevs, but the loading times, page design ux are crazy (with lot of ads and analytics) and you do have more forum participation, but for clear content hybridcars(dot)com, is the a much much better place asthetically, but participation is a bit muted, but the content quality is great.
Nocturne in red mode is far better for sleep conservation. I started using it over flux because many moons ago I developed an obsession for preserving night vision while standing watch on the bridges of ships, and can attest that you can pass out cold while editing a document with Nocturne in red mode.
>You're either clueless or lying here.

Surely, before claiming I could be lying you at least googled credit card chargebacks?

This is an example from Discover:

"If you have found a charge you believe is incorrect, you may request billing assistance. You have 120 days from the date of the transaction to open a dispute online. For disputes older than 120 days, please contact 1-800-DISCOVER. Most transactions can be disputed once the charge posts to your account, however, please wait until your first monthly statement after the transaction to report a missing transaction."

https://www.discover.com/credit-cards/help-center/statements...
I am under the understanding that if you don't want your code to be used in proprietary projects then you should not post it on SO. I could be wrong though. I also think you could get around this by link to your code hosted elsewhere but I believe this is frowned upon.
While they are spending time fighting on Apple's platform, I wish they'd spend a bit more time on Linux (Ubuntu) and android platforms. There are large number of users on those platforms. Their Ubuntu version works OK (not sure about other Linux variants), but there is no android version.
> It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self-contained bits of code.

What happens if I scrape SO so I can print and sell a book?
Excellent post.

And those who want to understand Mike better should read this: https://lobste.rs/s/82pz7r/curated_links_to_understand_dange...
What problem will it remove? Commuting boredom? It might have no effect on congestion or pollution; it might make them worse. Maybe in the future it will reduce accidents, but its likely it will cause more on the interim. This is a solution without a problem.
'Assassin' supernova discovered that is 570bn times brighter than sun
"The Ascent of Money" by Niall Ferguson is my favorite introduction to the subject. It may or may not support parent's claims.
Are you using the term "desugaring" to describe the AST to HIR translation? Or do you have different jargon?
Amazon?
$250k is certainly not a given. I think that includes equity compensation like the other post mentions. My experience is that Google and Microsoft pay around $170-200k to start base compensation for a Sr. Engineer so it's generally a little higher than the $150-160k you'd expect at a regular bay area company or the $130k or so you can reasonably expect in Seattle. The higher end of that I'd expect in the bay area and the lower end in Seattle.
I remember one day I was walking through london with multiple hours to kill; and there was a massive line. Without anything else to do, I just stood in it. Approx 45 minutes later, I got to the front: turns out it was a sale for a clothing store. I didn't really need any clothing, but the discounts were good; so I purchased a jacket. This was 6 years ago and it's still my favourite jacket....
This is Mike Hearn.

https://lobste.rs/s/82pz7r/curated_links_to_understand_dange...
It's good to draw attention on baseband processors, but there are technical assertions in this post that are probably not accurate (lack of auditing and the notion that you can assess the security of a whole phone system by whether or not there's an IOMMU).

The systems security of modern phones is surprisingly complex. Google and Apple both care very deeply about these problems, and both have extremely capable engineers working on them. Without getting too far into the weeds: they haven't ignored the baseband.
The Intelligence Community Continues to Pretend Ignorance of 702 Spying
Paging 'DannyBee.
2 ways to ensure success
The Bitcoin Blockchain is still processing transactions right?

What part of the technology has failed?
The Web Privacy Problem Is a Transparency Problem: The OpenWPM Measurement Tool
Pretty sure that is just RHEL being unintelligent as usual.
LXC is not really related to Ubuntu in any real way other than they are looking to write a persistent daemon for it called LXD.
This is what you said:

> Credit cards take 180 days for the transaction to confirm.

Now you're going on about chargebacks. Of course the window for a chargeback is going to have a lengthy period of time. Chargebacks involve a manual process where someone has to identify a payment that they wish to dispute.

You're comparing apples and oranges here.
A simple explanation of how the 2 through sqrt of n prime number test works
Okay, so money follows a power law distribution (like many natural phenomena), where wealth tends to concentrate. And early people who used money needed a bank (safe/guarded place) to store it in. Your argument seems tautological, "The state uses money, therefore money is an artifact of the state". This feels like a "Wet sidewalk causes rain" situation.
I do not really mind if someone copies my code from SO and uses it in a proprietary project - though I certainly don't want to give that person a legal leg to stand on. I know it will happen inevitably, but saying "This code is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 or later" will set alarms sounding in any developer paying attention.

I don't know if by submitting an answer (containing code) I am transferring the copyright to SO, or if I can stand in the way of this by saying "Copyright <my name>" in the answer.
"Information is an artifact of the state; always has been, always will." - people before the Internet
Mike's resolution was apparently to join up with a consortium of banks back in November:

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/30-top-banks-and-mike-hearn-hav...

Read the article, he was clearly laying the groundwork for this move back in Thanksgiving.

“The current Bitcoin system, I mean the system we actually use today with the block chain, isn't going to change the world at all due to the 1mb limit. … So if I have a choice between helping the existing financial system build something better than what they have today that resembles Bitcoin, or helping the Bitcoin community build something worse than what they have today that resembles banking, then I may as well go where the users are and work with the banks."
How do you characterize your normal mode of development? Just curious if you would mention a brief overview of how you do things
Adding 'Beauty and Joy' to Obama's Push for Computer Science Teaching
Challenge.gov might be about as close as you can get to a list of government problems with money attached to them. The government has lots of ways it supports small businesses, but 18F doesn't have a specific incubator.
They had mice... but they were actual mice.
What makes you think there weren't governments in the Americas guaranteeing the value of wampum prior to the invasion from Europe?

Here's an article from what remains of one such pre-colonial state detailing how wampum formed the basis of their international treaty laws: http://www.onondaganation.org/culture/wampum/
Shipped on LCD TVs from multiple manufacturers in 2008, too: "new TVs automatically tweak their on-screen colors to complement say, the orange glow of incandescent lights in the evening or the bluish tint of midday sunshine." Six months before F.lux shipped.

http://www.popsci.com/tested/article/2008-06/tuner-tv
Hello,

I entered medical school in 2011 on the traditional path (very much full-time). During my third year, after I had passed the Step 1 board exams and had started treating patients, I became familiar with the benefits and limitations of our patient management and diagnostic software.

At that time I put in for my first leave of absence, while I remained an enrolled student. I moved to San Francisco and began exploring the technology development. I planned to return for the completion of my medical degree, however with the recent success of Medal, I've opted to remain in San Francisco.

During my time away, I collaborated with the business school and other in-degree and cross curriculum programs; my program shuffled my electives so that I was completing them part-time while away. Core medical rotations cannot be completed part time, and I still had four left.

Hope this answers your question.

Warmly,
Lonnie
Excluding North Korea is a bit different than excluding a sixth of the world (China), though.
Free software is a hack on a legal system to provide something that should work this way by default. And commercial software could get away with being based on that idea because they could enforce it, and only as long as they could.

Which is why at first it worked, then it stopped thanks to the Internet, and now it's working again, because everyone's moving to SaaS model. Which, by the way, is a step backwards in progress.
To be clear, Mike Hearn's unilateral fork doesn't switch over to the new rules when 75% adoption is achieved, or even when 75% of mining is done by supporters - it switches when 75% of the last 1000 blocks indicate support, which can quite easily happen with less than 75% support just by random chance. This is an astonishingly aggressive threshold, and if he succeeded it's almost certain that Bitcoin would fork into two different, conflicting versions of the transaction history for a substantial length of time.
David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 years page 49-50. He has a bunch of citations in that manuscript which are fascinating as well.
Apple has quite a history of prosecuting devs who say anything critical about the company or its products

For example?
You don't mind it but you want it to be completely illegal? Why?
How many KW/h of electricity is that in your first month? Which EV do you have?