skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny that people are adopting BitCoin without any compelling evidence that it is safe. All alarm bells should go off when you hear "security without trust". I'm sure that if BitCoin will be taken seriously, Bruce Scheier will be happy to cause the first decentralized currency crash.

There are many things you can do to rip apart a peer-to-peer network. You start by generating a few million identities. Next, you start manipulating the peer sampling mechanisms to surround nodes with evil peers and create groups of evil peers ready to acknowledge transactions. Finally, you can convince surrounded nodes of pretty much anything (e.g., that the network is far smaller and younger than it actually is) unless they consult a trusted authority claiming otherwise.

Of course, if you had a trusted authority you wouldn't have to go through all this trouble and you could just let it sign a bunch of coins or even handle the full transactions. It would be just like every other currency, and now you know why.

By the way, anyone can rent a cheap, on-demand GPU farm from Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/
btw, i am a lurker on this website and had to join just to comment to you because i thought you deserve it. thanks.
National Geographic Builds House From 'Up', Launches Into The Wild-Blue Yonder
That's exactly what I did the first time I saw it - I tried to turn it on for a while, then figured Verizon must have it turned off and walked over to the Galaxy Tab.
The Three Types of Searches
Looks like we just replied to nostrademons at the same time, but we slightly disagree. You say that the dependence on population size is slow (sqrt) but I say there is no dependence for most cases. Are you sure you aren't confusing the dependence of confidence on sample size as opposed to population size? See, e.g.,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Signal...

I could be making a mistake somewhere.
Ask HN: Mobile Developers?
[Note: Posted before, but over the weekend, which is poorly trafficked.]

I'm working on a project to help you guys get better publicity. Specifically, trying to serve that middle ground for apps that aren't on any Top 10 lists.
If you have a mobile app you've developed (for any platform), please shoot me an email (contact info in my profile), or leave info in the comments so that I can get help you out.

If you're already doing well enough that you don't need any promotion, post here anyway, and you might get some unnecessarily.
General Motors reply to Bill Gates
That the editors even bothered to contact Sokal to suggest revisions is damning. It isn't that Sokal wrote a sensible-sounding paper filled with mathematical BS. He wrote BS in their own language, in the "field" in which the editors were supposedly experts. It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. If I did that, would you say the VCs were completely competent, and that it was natural I could fool them because I threw some technical terms into my presentation?

Or, to turn the tables, suppose a Harvard Business School professor pitched a business idea to Richard Dawkins to make money by producing flu vaccine through a process entirely made up by stringing together impressive-sounding terminology that the business professor pulled out of biology papers. Suppose Richard Dawkins offered to invest money in the business. Would you say, "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. Richard Dawkins is quite competent at biology. He only mistook an incomprehensible stream of jargon for a plausible way of manufacturing flu vaccine because he was confused by the business plan?"
Looking at the archive, the ones that jumped out the most at me were

Bambi http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3658592877/bambi-1942

Hero http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3515529474/hero-ying-xio...

Tron (1982) http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3500707114/tron-1982

Surprisingly The wizard of Oz was less interesting than I would have thought. Though the scenes in the Emerald city (bookending the assault on the Witch's castle) do jump out.

http://moviebarcode.tumblr.com/post/3512965847/the-wizard-of...
I believe the limit using the current bitcask backend is (40 bytes + average key size) * (replication factor) / (number of cluster nodes * memory capacity of the smallest node). If that factor grows above 1, you can't store any more.

IIRC correctly a 64-node cluster with 24gb of ram per node will handle a few billion 32-byte keys, replicated to three nodes. For larger keyspaces, the current recommendation is to use innodb, which doesn't need to keep keys in memory.
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Just Launched Today!! Feedback Appreciated.
TSA randomly took over and searched an Amtrak station in February
It's funny that people are adopting BitCoin without any compelling evidence that it is safe. All alarm bells should go off when you hear "security without trust". I'm sure that if BitCoin will be taken seriously, Bruce Scheier will be happy to cause the first decentralized currency crash.
There are many things you can do to rip apart a peer-to-peer network. You start by generating a few million identities. Next, you start manipulating the peer sampling mechanisms to surround nodes with evil peers and create groups of evil peers ready to acknowledge transactions. Finally, you can convince surrounded nodes of pretty much anything (e.g., that the network is far smaller and younger than it actually is) unless they consult a trusted authority claiming otherwise.

The longest blockchain are accepted as the most authoritative. Unless the evil peers are able to generate enough mining power, they can't discard transactions.

While evil peers can refuse to transmit or rely transaction, it only took a single peer to connect to the authentic network.

Also notes that the bitcoin network do not use any form of identities other than IP addresses themselves. So the attackers would need access to million of IP addresses to create that many evil nodes.

Perhaps with an attack, it will be possible to disrupt transactions in the bitcoin network, but it will not be possible to steal money or make money disappear. However, it would need to be very carefully planned and executed.

By the way, anyone can rent a cheap, on-demand GPU farm from Amazon: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=1795.0

You seem to not have done the math yet.
Amanda Hocking explains the difficulties/myths of self-publishing
The Right Way to Found a Start-Up
Another way we have discussed solving the mobilization challenge in addition to the one I listed above, is to proved so e standalone value of the app in the absence of having critical mass.

For example, a primary benefit of the app is that it saves users money. One thing to do is offer users discounted cab fares if they dont get a match. In order to do this you would partner with cab/black car companies and charge them a lead gen fee for customers using gobicab. Instead of collecting that fee though, you pass it onto consumers in the form of savings or a discounted ride. So either way, if the user finds a match or not, they will receive a cheaper cab ride.
"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative."
-Woody Allen
Android Passes iOS And RIM For U.S. Smartphone Subscriber Share
This is a good question. I believe a libertarian society would function well; but what about the boundarys between societies -- Could somebody live in libertopia, but operating plantations in slavtopia where the labour is cheap and fear keeps environmentalists away. (note: I think there is something to prevent it --- I just don't see what it is yet).

However, your other points: nobody is motivated by money. They want the 'wealth' it is convertable too. And wealth is all valuable things: medicine, automobiles, green energy, free range chicken, homes, etc.

'Wealth of Nations' Adam Smith? I don't recall him being that specific. The wealth of nations was largely an accounting of the wealth of Britain and his inquiry into the cause of it (capital, specialized labour, deregulation).

---

Actually I think I have a solution. If libertopia was better -- no skilled labour would move (or stay) in slavtopia. The few viable industries (diamond mining, oil & gas, lumber, etc) would expire as Libertopia naturally developed alternatives (like it already has: synthetics, electric cars, composite woods).

The transition period is messy though.
The acquisition may make sense in light of a saturated market. They effectively kill off a competitor and can move in on their customers.
Cyberduck is free, this piece of software isn't.
Mobility Reigns Supreme at GDC
Yes!

That's next on the queue. Stay tuned.
"I do think though that a lot of management issues are simply avoided by having a good team."

The circle is complete :-). Its been my experience over the last couple of decades that the correlation between "good team" and "good manager" is 100%, and more importantly they converge reasonably rapidly to that point. (which is to say if you find yourself on a 'bad' team and it isn't getting any better, then there is a strong probability that the manager isn't operating efficiently.)
As a Computer Engineering student, Octopart is defiantly one of nicest sites for buying parts or just looking for data sheets. I actually wasn't aware it was a YC company, but it makes sense!
Yes. This is what I meant regarding what the problem is. The mention of SUNDR was more of a side comment on how one might implement a service whose only job is to store your data without being able to understand it. I wanted to point out that it is possible. But this is a technicality anyway. The big questions are:

(a) What does it even mean to require that the cloud companies provide you with a mechanism of converting the cloud data to some common format that you can use without the cloud app. In some cases, there might be no such common format. And,

(b) Do cloud companies have an incentive to play along and provide you this way out. It would be work for them. Somehow they need to care.

These are questions with unclear answers. Yet, the problem stays: your time and data are completely unprotected. What is more problematic is that the common user is not sophisticated enough to be aware of the (high) chances that the cloud app they use will go bankrupt and shut down leaving them with nothing.
Its described as a consolidated search engine so i dont think its fair to say that its "nothing" like Google. Different problems though, you're absolutely right. I suppose I was generalizing but I think you see my point.
[the TSA] has been far more active than imagined. Teams have searched bus passengers all over the country, have done similar things at train stations, and have even blocked traffic on bridges to search trucks and cars.
To my knowledge, there is no such thing as an in-memory bitcask backend for Riak. Could you have been using regular Bitcask (keeps values on disk in log-structured files) or the ETS memory backend?
Congrats to both of you. I'm still waiting on my hardcopy to read this from cover to cover. If the beta is any indicator, this is going to be a really compelling read.

Any idea when the MEAP orders should start shipping?
we'd love to see how @listia does over time (S09)
No-SQL injection in Mongo PHP
Hi o1iver - catching up... Great - feel free to get in touch via twitter - @hfuecks is me.
I never thought I'd see the day that Apple would be winning on price. This surely flummoxes the current tablet challengers.
Meh.

Now if it was "Get the best Percent sign" or "Get the best Oglethorpe"....then we'd be talking.
Nice clean example, though I was unable to actually like it. Does facebook actively monitor and block such uses, or is there some flaw in the code that doesn't allow the like to occur?
I want this, but have no reasonable need for it.

ehh, maybe I'll get a raise.
we were able to get ours after registering the trademark and then waiting for the twitter account to be dormant for 1 year. Luckily, no one was really using it. If it was not dormant, I suspect it would have been much harder if not impossible to get.
A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality.

[1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...
Relevant: http://code.google.com/p/phantomjs/
is a headless browser based on WebKit

I don't have any hands-on experience with it, but if one were to go down the path you just described, that project would likely be a great start on that journey.
"It's Unfundable" to $100,000,000 w/ SecondLife Founder Philip Rosedale
Yes, but they're still selling Symbian phones, and still developing Meego for "research purposes".
Exactly. I remember a few years back there was a bit of an outrage at Apple for "doing" the same thing.

But really, if somebody messes around with their own hardware, do they really expect Nintendo/Apple/etc to have tested against that? Of course not. They've got more important things to test and support.
Bummer, I want to see Akira Kurosawa's Dreams
The hashbang is a big gory mess and glorified for all the wrong reasons. Mostly it brakes best practices and destroys the chance for graceful upgradation and degradation.

What is truly amazing is that there actually are other solutions that still offer the best practices like graceful upgradation and degradation with less effort. This article goes into the issues and the alternatives:
https://github.com/balupton/history.js/wiki/Intelligent-Stat...
Is SEO a bad word?
Whoops, looks like I was confused about the terminology. Thanks.

In case anyone else reads this: according to the wikipedia article, the term "intensity" in "intensity gradient"--in this context--is just the strength of electric (and magnetic) field associated with the laser. The electric field, in turn, is the gradient of the electric potential [1]. Point charges will follow the potential gradient, but neutral dieletric objects (which I think is what optical tweezers are usually used on, and which usually can be modeled as dipoles) will follow the intensity gradient.

Simple dipoles can be pulled with optical tweezers, but limits on laser power mean that the distance between intensity extrema (and so the maximum distance things can be pulled) is relatively short. The hypothetical tractor beam only works on objects more electrically complicated than dipoles, but doesn't rely on following an intensity gradient and can pull all the way back to the source.

[1] This may not be quite applicable here because of the ambiguities in defining a potential for non-static electric fields like those of lasers.
The Hunter Becomes The Hunted
Around 300 mhash/sec coming to our bitcoin mining pool are from several Google's ips.

Is it another 20% project? :)
It's a year old, but still very relevant.
perhaps http://n.odecs.net - still in it's infancy but being built in C# on mono and integrates with threading right off the bat
a friend suggested using ebay to "test" the market and gauge superficial interest before listing on flippa. This was to save the flippa fee at first. Though not sure if that is against the TOS of ebay
You don't know his name, and you've never seen his face. But this year, as America leaves Iraq for good after eight years of war, we also leave behind a man believed by our military and intelligence agencies to be the best terrorist hunter alive. He's still there, hunting. And so are the terrorists.

I know, it's off-topic. Still, this is such a fascinating profile of a guy that surely is among the most driven I have ever read about.

This goes to show just how insanely much one driven person can accomplish - which is just as applicable in terrorist hunting as in entrepreneurship.
Pet peeve on sparklines: they're clean because they get rid of chartjunk, but they're also pretty uninformative without context. Right now, they add almost nothing to the presentation ("@dropbox hasn't changed <much> since <some time ago>, but this other guy's popularity is <swinging wildly/pretty small and noisy>").

Tufte originally intended them to be inserted into text and contextualized by it. As an extension, he suggested adding small indicators of scale and position as colored dots for example.

Either that or just lose them and graph the relative results of each of the contenders. It all depends on what kind of story you want to tell.

Edit: just noticed that you mention that this information is tracked over the last 30 days, but since that's not localized to the graphs, it's pretty easy to not notice it.
Hmm... and when they check your credentials? I'm not sure it's as easy as getting around the age-verification on porn sites (are you 18? yes / no)

Maybe there are investment conglomerates out there - or group buy in / mutual clubs where I can put in a share of the money towards the actual facebook purchase.
A rich child has a much higher standard to live up to, and much more to lose. If I'm an eight figure trust fund kid and I screw up bad I end up being middle class. If I'm middle class and screw up I end up middle class.
I totally agree with your point. I am working on this in parallel with the hardware spec because my main financial stakeholder is pushing to create the project budget.
Great design!

How are you taking payments?
Samsung is the company best positioned to compete on price. The Tab 10.1 is an anomaly because it uses an nVidia processor rather than a Samsung processor, but for most of their products, Samsung manufactures their own LCD, CPU, RAM & Flash.
Brilliant -- I've built a couple of Android apps so far, and found that poring through the SDK, while valuable, is somewhat a steep curve to those of us who don't enjoy Java.

Seeing the language documented one function at a time also loses out on how the components interact, design patterns that make sense, and other considerations that I am certain this will help with.

Thank you for sharing.
The list is 'top grossing'. You get there by having a high sales by dollar per unit time. They put the price up and bought the app a few times. They get 70% of what they paid back. And the app is suddenly grossing the same as a $0.99 app that's selling hundreds every minute. This launches it into the chart. Then they drop the price and real customers see it and think it's a very popular $0.99c app.
Why would this shock you? Don't you find it interesting/impressive?
See also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2295347
Raising money on AngelList? Working with McClure? Ask Jody Sherman
Haven't been able to because you tried and it was broken, or because there wasn't anyone to tag?
Summify's Technology Examined
"I used to be fascinated by this type of centralized system and spent a lot of time studying and designing them. Unfortunately, there is pretty much always a way to overthrow/overtake them with lies and large groups as long as there is a central authority. Looking at the government's somewhat arcane approach and apparent lack of verification of its methods, I highly doubt that it would be different from all the others."
Dynamic Efficiency, the Nash Equilibrium, & Kobe as an Undershooter
Pak Vs Kiwi, 24th World Cup match
I doubt that translating a few hundred lines of Markdown into HTML with an efficient JavaScript JIT is noticeably more expensive than, say, decoding a big JPEG picture or displaying a Flash ad, or having menu items slide in and out.
> If I'm middle class and screw up I end up middle class.

No, you end up working a crappy part time job at a call center with no benefits and no future, desperately trying to convince yourself that you're still middle class because you work a telephone instead of a mop.
Why Content Farms Thrive (Marksonland)
As someone with a less rare disease, I can say a bigger danger is getting a very negative picture about your condition. The people that are very active in these communities are often the ones that are dealing with the disease more often due to severity (i.e. those that are dealing with the disease fine are often not seeking out these communities). This creates a selection bias that can give you a very negative picture of your prospects that doesn't correlate well with reality.

I'm not saying that these communities are bad. You just have to take everything into consideration when dealing with them.
I'm going to guess "hightened". My mother was recently diagnosed with a myeloproliferative neoplasm, and has been reading & connecting online with great vigor since. I can't speak for her, of course, as to how she knows who to trust, but my sense is that it's not quite like googling for diabetes or toenail fungus and getting homeopathy links in the results. Rather, it's more like exchanging emails with other patients with the same disease, and reading documents offered by the Mayo Clinic etc. No doubt she still needs to exercise critical thinking, and not everybody is equally equipped for that.
> You could comfortably stuff that in any decent database (SQL Server for example, I'm sure PostgreSQL would work too).

You may have noticed that the OP's requirements were:
* a REST interface
* sharding
The costs of SQL Server are unbelievably high, and which you can do horizontal partitioning and sharding, Riak is designed to be used in this manner. On the other hand, re: SQL Server according to this article the "horizontal partitioning feature requires Enterprise or Datacenter licenses which have a retail price of 27,495 and 54,990 per processor." I think the OP made a wise choice. http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/02/SQL-Sharding
My counterpoint is that Cloudant test and harden the CouchDB that we embed, it's not, for various reasons, a verbatim copy of CouchDB itself.

That said, vanilla CouchDB is quite stable. While there are always bugs, I don't recognize the system that the original poster is describing.
Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers (TED 2011)
Top WTF TMI Online Mistakes: Blowing the "Second First Impression"
Are Your Doctors and Nurses Hygienic? RFID Lets You Know.
Why is it?

Is this mostly a social issue , i.e. sexiness of techcrunch like startups ?

Or is it an information problem, i.e. because it's hard for software engineers to come across worthy problems from other domains , that they have the ability to solve ?

Or is is something else ?
Actually, the difficulty adjustment is 2016 blocks, not 2100 blocks. Sorry for the inaccuracy.

The GPU farms are actually ATI 5970, not 5870.
So I tried to view the "Welcome to Socialcam" introduction video on my Nexus One with 2.3.3, and the app ended up hanging every time I tried.

Is this a known issue?
As someone who suffers from a rare disease I have to be skeptical about whose information I trust. I tend to rely more on scientific papers and resources like PubMed. Many times you hit a paywall but with some good searching techniques you can usually find the full articles/publications for free.

As for my disease there is some very good scientific information out there and I have even found that there is an experimental procedure using stem cells (hematopoietic cell transfer) that could potentially cure me. The main problem is that there is a lot of misinformation on the Internet about stem cell transplants. There are a lot of places that are taking advantage of "medical tourism" revolving around stem cell transplants. These places are giving patients false hopes by providing a version of stem cell transplant that is IMHO not effective. You need to make sure to validate your findings and stick to respectable scientific sources. If someone is saying they have an amazing cure it is most likely snake oil.
Thx, I'll be implementing Recurly.com , I should be finished with that in a few days.
How to mirror your website on Amazon S3
Meet Edward Frenkel: A Mathematician Greater Than The Sum Of His Parts
Sharing JavaScript libraries between Node.js and the browser