skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What nerd doesn't love the idea of virtual currency?

But, it seems like all of the exchanges have closed or are temporarily closed to new registrations. This seems problematic, and means the only realistic way in or out is dealing directly with other people and businesses who believe in this particular currency. I spent some time reading the list of people and companies accepting Bitcoin payments, and was extremely underwhelmed. Lots of pyramid schemes, random low-rent affiliate crap like phone cards, etc. No actually useful goods or services. And, a lot of the websites that are talking about this stuff have a definite "get rich quick" vibe about them.

Basically, it's all extremely flaky seeming stuff. This brings me to the thing that makes me worry more: Who developed the code for Bitcoins? How do I know it is secure? The people that seem to be most involved in Bitcoin discussions seem to be...well, kinda dumb. I don't trust dumb people to build strong encryption (I don't even trust smart people to build strong encryption, unless they're talking it over with lots of other smart people). Reading the FAQ at Bitcoin.org doesn't do much to alleviate my concerns. There's another FAQ in the wiki that mentions SHA and a few other reassuring things, but I'm not having much luck finding the real meat of the thing, and names of people responsible for the security of the system.

In short, if this is a serious virtual currency implementation by people who understand the security implications of such, I'm unable to find strong evidence of that fact. And, so, I worry about dealing with it.
UK2 is a reseller of SoftLayer. SoftLayer have been pretty reputable up to this point and many large companies use them. SoftLayer also offers unlimited bandwidth but charges an extra $2,000 for it. It appears UK2/100TB are the shady ones here, although SoftLayer may have had a hand in shutting them down due to the competitive nature of their product.
Microsoft Kinect meets the Minority Report thanks to MIT
Yeah. I'm not denying those kinds of experiences can happen on Facebook, but Facebook the company doesn't seem to care about making its users happier so much as it cares about keeping them on the site. Like network television or any other ad-supported medium, it doesn't need to be really good, it just needs to be minimally diverting. It's about generating addiction and not fulfillment.
It is illegal under the US law for an employee to pay money to his Employer. As this could be a backdoor for slavery and actually is regulated by anti-slavery laws in the US. I know this from my attorney when I asked if I should be worried about $5k I was supposed to pay back to my company as I quit before 12 months project ended. I quit, nothing happened. It was over 5 years ago and this company still exists and does business in Northern Virginia area and I know that they still require their prospect employees to sign this. Signature on this has no legal value whatsoever.
Generation Why? How Facebook is changing us
generic you. Story of my life, haha.

I agree with your point completely. Outside of the present day situation, perhaps startups can do more for their campus & recruiting presence by incenting their engineers to host technology sessions and exposing students to topics not covered in their curriculum. This would be a huge benefit for smaller companies that find it hard to compete for mindshare with large, established organizations during campus job fairs. Even companies outside of the boutique category just completely rule out great schools with talented engineers because they can't justify the recruiting budget spend considering the amount of competition for talent during those career fairs.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1997230

No upvotes, no discussion.
In December, 2008, the Exim team accepted a bug fix for "memory corruption in string_format code", noting "string_format() will happily overwrite beyond allocated memory"; the CVS commit message was "Buffer overrun fix. fixes: bug #787".

Apparently, nobody thought this was worth alarming end-users over.

http://bugs.exim.org/show_bug.cgi?id=787
According to the FAQ it takes about a year to generate 50 bitcoins, and at the current exchange rate they'll be worth about $12.50 USD. That's very little value for a year's worth of computation, and they're still quite rare. As more are created the exchange rate is going to drop unless they become very widely accepted, but there probably won't be enough of them to support a large economy.
Here's a link to the patent, which I believe was most recently updated in 2007 (to defend against numerous claims of prior art):

http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?...

The patent was upheld in Canada (where I live) because the courts ruled that 1-click produced a "physical effect".
I hate them all.

And I cringe every time people mention Visual Studio as "the best". I intend to make my own at some point, because I have yet to find a single one that meets even 1/2 of my primary desirables. Eclipse comes close, if you count plugins and can find them, but it's the epitome of bloat.

All except an old, free version of TacoEdit, which has since gone paid. The free one is bad, has inaccurate highlighting, no autocomplete, really squat for JS code, but it's fast and lightweight, and runs code as you type it. Utterly fantastic for rapid prototyping. I boggle when I realize I have yet to see any other web-oriented IDE do this, and don't bother pointing out Komodo; its live updating is cool, but buggy, and you can't break the preview window out.

To step away from IDEs a bit, TextMate is a phenomenal editor, and I end up using it more than any IDE when I'm not doing .NET coding / in Windows.
Audio Newspaper - listen to the news on the go
I second the idea that learning real math will help, but there is a purpose to using "logic puzzles" also - math doesn't help much with learning to recognize various "difficulties" - cognitive biases, like framing issues, and common fallacies, like ad hominems. Besides practicing logic puzzles, you need a good overview book, Robyn Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, is the single best volume I have found.
Deflation seems to be happening at a tremendous pace (for a unit of exchange). So, that 21 million bitcoins will, if things continue, be "worth" dramatically more in the future. I suppose this is built-in to the system as a means to encourage early adopters.

But, given that there are very few means to cash out into other currencies, and the products one can buy with bitcoins are extremely limited and generally virtual goods, it's still wildly speculative that they have any longterm value.
Try http://www.2checkout.com/

This is one of the most FAQ on HN. Spend some time searching and you will find more useful answers - http://searchyc.com.
The paragraph starting "As each object in this category..." made no sense to me. I can explain the what a monoid in the category of endofunctors is, how it relates to a Haskell monad and maybe you can explain what you meant.

OK, a monoid in the category of endofunctors is an endofunctor F together with a natural transformation (the multiplication of the monoid) from F composed with F to F, and another natural transformation from id to F (called the unit). In Haskell F is the type constructor of the monad, the unit is called return and the multiplication is usually called join (and in the case of the list monad is also known as concat).

(Note that the definition of monoid needed here is not that of a set with associative binary operation, but the more general "monoid object in a monoidal category". Instead of a set S and a multiplication S x S->S, where x denotes cartesian product, we want a functor F and a multiplication F o F->F where o denotes composition. This is an instance of the general sort of monoid since the category of endofunctors is monoidal with respect to composition.)
Social Bookmarks und Tags - TagMarks.de
I'll give it "more secure than BIND", but the security history page for MaraDNS does not inspire great confidence; note that several of these are memory corruption flaws, meaning you're kind of taking Trenholme's word for it on "denial of service". He does seem pretty smart, though.

http://www.maradns.org/security.html#history
Generally anyone who likes working there is fairly senior management. As in, they’re in the middle two tiers between CEO and grunt.

With all the OSS projects going on, I can’t believe anyone serious about development wouldn’t just use that for experience.
I don't think you're seeing the longer game Amazon is playing here. Yes they could make a small amount of money licensing 1-click to you so you could use such a system with your user info.

But if they only offer the service through the Amazon Payment program than they get your users to use their identity system, they get a much bigger cut of each payment and they get to add info of the sale to their already massive database of user preferences.

Which is probably why they offer 1-click via Amazon Payments and no where else. (I'm not saying it's honest or that I agree but it does make sense from a profit point of view)
This, to me, seems to be the dilemma. The more features like this there are, filtering the input so we only see the "good stuff", the fewer eyes there are on the new submissions, and so the greater the chance that really some excellent submissions will never be seen.

More and more we're suggesting that people look at the "newest" page instead of just the "news" page to try to make sure that good submissions get their chance, and bad submissions get flagged, and yet here's another facility to take people away from the "newest" page.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is a great facility, and I'm pretty sure I'll be using it on occasion, but I'll also hang out on the "newest" page, because that's where the genuinely interesting stuff appears, often getting no upvotes, because it was never seen.
Align things on a page only using divs (no tables). I'm still trying.
I think it helps. Being introduced at least, could make a difference. For example, I was a computer kid, but I didn't really know that programming existed. Had I been introduced to it in my teens, I likely would've at least toyed around in my spare time. Alas, I learned too late, and am trying to play catch up.
Employees should meet companies halfway and learn a bit of programming on their own. Of course learning early on is better, but attempting a pass through something like http://learnpythonthehardway.org should be mandatory for any unemployed person. Shows initiative. A company's apprenticeship program could take the company the rest of the way. A bonus: there are government programs that can help with the cost of this training.
What flavor?
While this is a really, really tempting front page, won't this just encourage groupthink? HN doesn't suffer from this as much it might, but it has its share. In addition, interesting stories languish unnoticed on /newest all the time, and if enough people switch to an >100 front page, articles with just 5-10 points have an even smaller chance of being noticed.

pg, I'm sure you considered this problem; could you talk a bit about your thinking behind this filter?
Particle simulation : Metrodome collapsing under weight of snow
Their low cash-value is probably almost wholly due the difficulty in getting cash for them.

Deflation of bitcoins can effectively be infinite, but should slow significantly if/when a significant amount of people get in on it and start using them.
Interesting, but seems kind of limited. How can I add different things to listen too?
Quality of life depends on what you value.

If you value living space, you'll be happiest out of NYC.

But if you value meeting a lot of cool people, great things to see and do, great mass transit, etc then NYC is great even at a lesser overall level of purchasing power.
I’m guessing they used it on a large element. Something like this is definitely meant for a sub-300px element, where the eye would get tricked into thinking there was a page curl.
You can implement it, but you're inviting patent litigation.
I remember and search. My memory's pretty good, and my search-fu is also usually pretty good, although not always.

I'm currently looking at automating some of the process, but I do find that searching for stuff I think I remember occasionally turns up a gem I missed, and so I'm reluctant to automate it fully unless they still get found.

That's why I'm starting to feed items into a Bayesian classifier to find good stuff - by my standards and according to my interests. I continue to experiment.
Agreed. It’s one of the simplest guides to adding subtle texture to widgets out there, with the added bonus of being concise.
Here's Brendan Eich (creator of JS) talking about something even simpler, a bytecode standard for JS in browsers,

http://www.aminutewithbrendan.com/pages/20101122

and here is him talking on HN about JS vs Python, Lua etc. in browsers,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155
You can't introduce s-exprs into an ordinary language - it would cease to be an ordinary language and become a Lisp dialect instead.
Power Comes In Different Forms
I think it is time we get a Noide movement, ahh darn it got my casing all mixed-up; I meant NoIDE of-course. I have been developing on the .Net platform since the first beta’s where released and have been using Visual Studio.Net since it got first released as well (my first .Net coding was actually done in EditPlus). And the one thing that has been a constant during these last 10 years…
I'm probably a little late on this, but I had no idea it was going on. I put my application in today, we'll see what happens.
Exactly what I feel. I miss the integrated debugger and trace facilities the most. You can see exactly what your code is doing in lisp.
What happened 10 years ago was the dot.com craze and the demand for Java programmers went through the roof.
I am now trying to get back into Lisp maybe through Clojure too.
The hello world of web design would be along the lines of:

<html>

<h1>Hello World!</h1>

<p>Just Saying.</p>

</html>
"Lorem Ipsum"?
http://twitter.com/#!/charlesju/status/10722704009199617

High School dropouts are 15.7% unemployed. College grads are at 5.1%, basically full employment given job changes. http://bit.ly/3FWnbX
I'll vouch for that. We had no issues at all. Ran a lot of transactions throughout the period as well.
Oh thanks, I didn't realize they were different. I wonder if Opera will try submitting Opera Mobile to the App Store. It seems like they just submitted Mini to make a point and didn't expect it to be accepted.
The idea behind it is that they're (nigh-) infinitely divisible. One bitcoin in existence, forever, would be enough; 21 million just makes the numbers nicer to look at. The ability to generate more offers the ability to make up for lost coins, and slightly mitigate deflation, and not much else.
Maybe "front-page-with-100-points" is the sort of place newbies should be encouraged to check, and mainly more established users should be encouraged to check "newest".
I don't know about broadband, but as far as I can tell, you are absolutely getting screwed on mobile phone and internet rates. They're so much cheaper in much of Europe, and probably even more so in Asia. Competition is so fierce that calls here tend to be cheaper than the termination fees the network operators pay each other for routing the calls to one another. And they're still making massive profits.

I don't know why this is, by the way. A big problem is that the frequency bands are a finite resource which rarely makes it back onto the market once sold. The other issue is that a network with limited geographical coverage isn't as competitive; these two facts caused the "land grabs" when the GSM and 3G frequencies were being sold in various European countries. New players haven't joined the fray outside those periods; LTE doesn't seem to have introduced any new players, probably because the markets are now oversaturated and well served. The infrastructure investment would be immense. There are new resellers who rent access to the big networks, though.

Still, most countries seem to have 3-5 national operators, and competition among them is alive and well in many cases. No idea why it's stagnated in the US. You'd think one of the operators would slash prices to try and eat away market share from the others.
This patent is stupid, as they didn't invent this technology... I can't believe how it was granted...

Sorry if this is off-topic..
Isn't that the opposite to what you should do? If you are interested in curbing 'bad' stories you should probably vote for more stories, effectively 'downvoting' what you don't vote for.
any reference on how he "fanned the flames"?
No evidence of time before Big Bang
NASA solar sail lost in space
* The price of everything does not trend towards $0.

I think you'd have to agree that any time you apply technology to a particular "problem", the cost of solving that problem goes down. As technology progresses, the problems become cheaper and easier to solve. And now I can go to Walmart and buy a chair for $5 instead of fashioning one out of oak. Or I can buy a $12 electric stand-up lamp, instead of burning whale-oil in a hand lamp.

So, although oak and whale-oil is never going to be free, the cost of sitting down and having light at nighttime, is essentially free at this point.

* A good example is personal servants.

This is not an example of technology. But alas, these days we do not require a servant when I can pop a TV dinner in a microwave and eat a meal in 5 minutes.

* A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment

Ever visit http://www.khanacademy.org/ ?
engage in purposeful discourse on something you disagree with or know little about.
I think there is also an alignment problem between what the purpose of higher education is supposed to be and what employers are expecting from entry level employees.

College is not job training, it is a place where you learn how to learn stuff. The reason people believe otherwise is because college is really expensive, so it has to be viewed as an investment that will get you a job and deliver appropriate training.

Learning how to learn is important, it lets you move forward in whatever you take on. College as it is, is not a trade school, which seems to be what employers are expecting.

A degree in engineering or CS will churn out someone who has a strong analytical mind and the ability to learn more. Places that are hiring may need to adjust and accept that this is what the market is at the entry level, instead of complaining that the skills are not available at the price that they're offering. Companies might be better off offering less and expecting less (at the start, you might not get someone who can start churning on your application immediately) and growing talent in the process.

Also I've started seeing a lot of companies acting like the work they're doing is on the level of Google, when it's not and interviewing like they are and that's what they need.

Basically, it seems like a lot of employers have expectations that are way off the mark.
It's amazing how similar the graphic on the front cover is to the Kindle screen saver.
I've got this exact concept (sans the monetization strategy) scrawled in my list somewhere. Idea was to scrape eBay's completed listings data, but I never got round to implementing it.

Interested in throwing something together?
Demand growing for open access science texts and tools
Toshiba's new glasses-free 3D display tilts images and viewing angles your way
You are right, but I still find this imperfect analogy the best way to 'explain' why the FSF would attach the adjective 'free' to 'software'.

I also wonder what the FSF's response would be if such "within one's organization" use ever would become the predominant way some commercial entity used some GPL software package. I think they would classify that as a hole that needs fixing.

Edit: of course, I may be overlooking that such cases already exist, or that the FSF discussed this (I did browse the GPL FAQ to check the latter, but did not spell it out)
The first startup I worked at did this. They hired kids straight out of (or in) high school, like me. They hired recent Indian immigrants who couldn't work anywhere else because of visa issues. They opened an office in Shanghai where they could get programmers for $20k/year.

It worked, well, terribly. The startup folded in a year and a half mostly because of code-quality issues. I remember talking to the founders near the end of my gap year, where they said that of the 10-ish or so high schoolers they hired, only two of us really produced more than we cost (even on our piddly $20-30k/year salaries), and even then we needed a fair bit of management support.

These were also not random people - one of the founders had been a teacher at my high school (he'd been an entrepreneur with a successful exit before then), and he basically skimmed the top of the class off and got them to work for him. Many of us later had successful careers at Google, Bain, or hedge funds.

But there's only so much that you can do to compensate for inexperience. There's a lot that you learn in your first job or two, even if you already know how to program. And until you learn it, there's a good chance that you'll be negatively productive.
Any ideas on how to encourage readers to look at the "newest" page more often?
I'm feeling vaguely nauseous about doing it, but I'm going to defend Adobe. I've criticised Adobe a great deal in the past, but I think that Flash is slowly becoming a legitimately open platform.

The top-end Premium version of Flash Builder is indeed $699, but there's a version available for $249 and a perfectly good compiler available for bupkis. Adobe offer completely free Flash Builder licenses for students and unemployed developers. Beyond Adobe there's an excellent open source IDE for Windows (FlashDevelop), a very powerful proprietary IDE (FDT), Eclipse plugins and a TextMate bundle. There are several good free options for AIR developers.

Adobe have really been sweating it over the image of Flash amongst developers. They're still a long way from perfect, but they seem to really be sorting their act out. While they would very much like developers to buy their expensive IDEs, they certainly aren't obstructing competition. It would be nice if AIR went open source along with the Flex/Flash core SDK, but compared to Apple it's a very open platform.
Why should I work for you again?
Good, let them struggle.

Maybe someday they will learn that the only developers aren't young and just out of college.

There are plenty of good developers that are self taught, and there are also plenty of good developers who aren't in their 20's, but if you every look at the "about us" of these startups, and they have pictures, what do you see?
The other important quota free value add that is fairly unique to Australia is ISP run game servers. Most of the major ISPs run large numbers of free game servers. These are historical benefits though, I think we're reaching the kind of bandwidth costs where people are less concerned with whats on the quota free list.
Any input would be much appreciated.
If I could use Amazon as a low-level payment processor and in do so this gave me license to use a 1-click implementation (my code, not some generic JS hack) in my marketplace, I would happily be the first customer.

Unfortunately, Amazon Payments - as offered today - is simply not a fit for my platform. If they rolled out a 100% API driven payment gateway that didn't require any Amazon credentials... again, I would happily be the first customer.
the only IDE i use is when I'm working in a smalltalk environment. That is an IDE. Everything else I've used that gets called an IDE has been a pale comparison. When not using smalltalk I bounce around between vim, emacs and textmate depending on the task.