skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who are new to Bitcoin and would like to learn more:

The new What Is Bitcoin? video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

Bitcoin FAQ - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

Bitcoin Wiki - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Main_Page

How Bitcoin Works - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_bitcoin_works

Installing Bitcoin - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Getting_started

HowTo Mining Bitcoin: Fedora 14: http://bit.ly/fb54ye and Ubuntu: http://bit.ly/ewVzhu

The Bitcoin Faucet (free bitcoins) - https://freebitcoins.appspot.com

Buying bitcoins - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Buying_bitcoins

Bitcoin 6-Month Price Chart - http://bit.ly/hzVKpq

Bitcoin Community Portal - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin:Community_portal

Recent Posts here on the forum - http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?action=recent

-------------

Comments from February when BTC/USD first hit $1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2200705
Thanks. Your UI is pretty awesome. Yeah we should talk. Tweet or shoot me an email!
i believe you can edit your application, although unsure if it'll be reclassified as a "late entry."
While the video does look great, I'm afraid I still do not know how real-world value is attached to BTCs--it seems as if a 'step' is messing in the 'how it works' explanation.

I'm assuming that was the major desired end-result of this video; if it wasn't, it was the question I was hoping most to get answered.
Nag a ram anagram gel goo sog siguntes
There's lot of real adoption. The bitcoin forum alone get 500 posts a day and a whole lot of traffic. Maybe you should check us out at http://bitcoin.org

I myself run a little magazine about bitcoin that is hosted on a VPS that I pay in bitcoin. I even own a domain name that I paid in bitcoin.

The economy is still small though, but with adoption, it could become real big.
>No, they are mentioned because they are the criminals who intruded and vandalized the system!

"They" are not relevant in any way! "They" are tabloid meat for an internet drama. "They" are a distraction from the fact that a hosting company had piss poor security surrounding the core product. The entire story could be told without mentioning the hackers by name, or providing any biographical information. The only reason to include them is to distract from the real issue.

Replace "16 year old" with Russian, Chinese etc. Yes, vandals are bad. That's not exactly in question. In question is the sheer gall of PHPFog to shift blame to some kids to try and cover their embarrassment.

I think the blog post should be rewritten. Instead any mentions of the hackers should be completely neutral. Then it will be PHPFog getting out there and taking responsibility for their mistakes.

No distraction. No hand waving. And no tabloid drama.
This is why you should use https when it's available. https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
What is the point if only 21 million can be generated? Are they infinitely divisible or something? Thats less than one bitcoin per person in California alone.
Money supply is limited to 21 million bitcoin ever. Plus, as more people bring more mining computers online, it become harder over time to mine.
They are divisible to the 8th place. Even then, that still could be fixed.
No it can't the total money supply is limited to 21 million bitcoins, this will create drastic problems unless they are infinitely divisible.
That's a news story from Canada. Nuclear building costs vary widely from country to country, depending on the type of plant, the local infrastructure, and how psychotic the political and regulatory system is. In contrast, South Korea is steadily building nuclear plants for a fraction of the number quoted in that news story, and China is building them even cheaper. Without any sudden cost surprises, I might add.

Contrasting the two, I have to wonder: what's Canada's problem?
Does getting Call of Duty: Black Ops(Steam Account) for $26 worth of bitcoins count as enough of a "real use case" for you?
http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=4807.msg70315#msg...
Supply and demand. On the supply side, it's limited to 21 million bitcoin forever.

Demand is supported by people who accepts bitcoin. Currently, the price is around 0.80 USD per bitcoin. It used to be only 5 cents per bitcoin.
They are divisible to the 8th place. That's 21 quadrillion unit of bitcoins.
Interesting, I should open a bitcoin bank.
Eli Pariser: Beware online "Filter Bubbles"
What's the quickest and easiest way to buy a couple hundred BTC?
That was also all greens a couple of days ago when reddit was down.
The Search for Ingredients to Replicate Silicon Valley
Firefox 4 Overtakes IE9's First-Day Download Tally within Hours of Launch
That price is fake, because the market has no meaningful depth. A single $50,000 transaction would drop the price back to near zero.
For small amount of bitcoin, you can use CoinPal at http://coinpal.ndrix.com/

Even though I did not personally used it, many people recommend the service.
I can confirm that there are no problems (and were no problems) with their CDN...
(Not knowing much about .NET myself, I can only repeat what they said in their pitch). They apparently use a standard stack, whereas Azure runs on a heavily customized stack that requires extra work to make a standard .NET app run on it. Think Django vs. Django on AppEngine.
I tend to curse my computer a lot for reading my programs wrongly.
Detecting Certificate Authority compromises and web browser collusion
And the ones who own the initial supply are the ones cranking out the solutions to the problems?
I am sure, many of the HN users here would have found at least a loophole in similar systems in the course of time. What I do in such situation is letting the service know about the flaw. Isn't that the ideal behaviour ?
Yes. Those who solved a problem get to send 50 BTC + transaction fees to himself.
There's also #Bitcoin-OTC where trading is done over IRC.
Here's the Order Book, viewing USD offers: http://bitcoin-otc.com/vieworderbook.php?sortby=price&so...
These considerations apply to a much lesser extent if you're at a shop that uses version control.
Not quite sure what the appeal is here?

Low transaction fees are nice but why not use something like Dwolla which is dollar denominated?

The "mining" concept also confuses me. Is the currency backed by CPU cycles? If so, what are the CPU cycles being used for?
Hm, my understanding from poorly-recalled internet surfing was that Google had a very strong culture of code reviews. But I suppose as a former (current?) Google employee you know better.
GK Films acquires Tomb Raider Movie Rights
You should see the tv special "Merchants of Cool" which talks about the tv and music industry, being owned by just five companies, and how they mold and shape the product, tell us what is cool, then sell it to us only to tell us it's not cool anymore.

This doesn't surprise me in the least, if it proves to be true (which it appears to be, I'm just saying it isn't an undeniable case.)
With the addition of the FlashBlock plugin (http://flashblock.mozdev.org/) the chance of those crashes happening drops significantly.
It feels so good to be a YC company :-)
Tl;dr - Jay-Z featured a previously unknown wine in a music video, suddenly it is selling at a luxury price ($300 a bottle) for a bottle of wine experts say should be $60-$90 a bottle. The writer makes a case that Jay-Z has financial interest in the wine company.
Metrodeal.com Proof of Purchase - Group Vouchers Philippines
Dwolla is great, ... but for smaller amounts their $0.25 per-transaction fee is a limiting factor. Especially if what you want to buy is only $0.99, for instance.

Also, when you receive Dwolla as payment and want to spend that money using your bank ATM/debit card, after you withdraw funds it then takes a couple days for those funds to reach your bank (via ACH).

For now, Dwolla is available for U.S. accounts only as well. Bitcoin has no such limitations -- it is just software and a network protocol.
Show HN: SoWink's Blog is Now Live
Yes, but it's not yet up and running. It's on its prototype stage. I'm planning too to deploy it as a free service. Don't know yet if I'm gonna monetize it or not.
Google has a strong culture of code reviews, but that's not mutually exclusive to accepting an expedient but ugly solution and moving on. Most code reviewers are sensitive to pressure to launch; in rare occasions, you'll see something held up while a bunch of architectural decisions are redone, but usually the point of a code review is to fix obviously wrong or easily fixed issues, not to make massive changes that will block a launch.
A couple years ago I created a small international proxy service.

The service was targeted at advertisers who wanted to advertise in other countries but didn't have an easy way to see international ads or landing pages from competitors(most landing pages in this niche were geotargeted and would redirect based on your IP). It probably took less than 10-15 hours to hack together in PHP.

I didn't have a freemium model or anything like that, I knew that this service had some value to some people and priced it at $50/month.

I never took this seriously as a major project/startup, and so the only promotion I did were a couple of forum posts in the Buy/Sell/Trade sections of relevant forums. In retrospect, it could have been much more successful had I taken the time to drive paid traffic to it. I remember the customer lifetime value was north of $300, and conversion rates were very respectable.

The service wasn't positioned as a tool for anonymity/illegal acts(we explicitly stated we kept logs), so I was able to avoid the problem of chargebacks common to such services.

Because of that, unlike other proxies that had to take payment in complex, nonreversible forms like Western Union, I could take PayPal payments and automatically provision an account on checkout. After you signed up, you would instantly be given unique IPs for the countries you selected that you could just plug into your browser. This ease of use was a key factor in the service's success.

It ended up making between $600-$1000 a month pretty consistently only a couple months after launch. Eventually, I got tired of dealing with support issues and sold the site on Flippa for a healthy revenue multiple.

The coup de grace: I was approached by several of the people who didn't win the auction but were still interested in the site. I ended up selling a few white-label versions of my (very simplistic) software for $1000 each.
currently in or traveling to tokyo or fukushima soon, submitter or author?
The real issue is that you shouldn't have much code to clean up in the first place.

If you occasionally need to hack something out to ship it before its effect is lost — go for it. Clean it up the next time you touch it.

If you're constantly writing code under pressure like this, you have a management problem. Your boss probably doesn't code. Sucks for you.

If someone constantly ships poor code, you have a talent problem. Mediocre talent can kill a startup. Get rid of the bad apple ASAP.
I finally jumped into ios development. Not really on the side since it's been my main focus lately. I went from not knowing any ios stuff to launching my first app in a week. I'm about to put my third app on the app store. I'm not making much money but there's a ton of potential.
It's not an "if you do this, I hate you" post, it's a "I'm sick and tired of Western media focusing on only the nuclear plant when there are so many other things that they could write about, like this amazing story of a man who saved lives" post. That's a bit verbose for a headline, though.

I wouldn't know what reddit's like since I've barely ever been there.

I don't see where the verbosity of the content linked has anything to do with anything on HN. For example, in the last 10 hours, I've seen: "programming motherfucker," which was a large meme, a page with nothing but three or four bar charts and no analysis, several short blog/opinion posts... So I don't know why HN should be focused on the length of a post or how many words are used in it rather than the content.

Finally, there are plenty of sensational headlines on HN. Off the top of my head, I remember "Bag of Hurt," "Rip-Off Express," "Are Happy People Dumb," "Limitless Brain Power Possible," and I'm sure there are thousands of others that I don't actually remember. I do remember just yesterday, I was sitting here thinking that some headlines seemed really sensational just to get people to click.

I think it was even James Altucher, who is often linked here, that admitted in a blog post that he makes sensational headlines that have nothing to do with his actual content, and those are often linked here!
The "mining" concept also confuses me. Is the currency backed by CPU cycles? If so, what are the CPU cycles being used for?

Bitcoin is not backed by anything. CPU cycles are used to ensure the security of the system.

Low transaction fees are nice but why not use something like Dwolla which is dollar denominated?

That's like comparing eggs to chickens. Bitcoin is more than just a transaction clearing house, but also a currency that is completely separated from the control of governments and traditional banking institution.

The advantage of bitcoin is that anybody on the planet can use it. I can send you bitcoin just as easily across the street or halfway around the world. Bitcoins cannot be frozen as easily as your bank accounts can be frozen. There's also the fact that bitcoin cannot fail due to one single company.

Not quite sure what the appeal is here?

It appeals a lot to technogeeks who happens to also be libertarians, people who worries about economic policies of governments, and so on.

But bitcoin in my opinion can facilitate greater efficiency in the world economy by making it easier to transfer capitals across border. That alone is valuable.
It's not that simple, because you have to factor in all the negative externalities. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, people aren't paying the full cost of the planetary resources they are using.
I like the idea of Bitcoin, but I've been running the client for about two weeks on my quad-core machine and still have not generated any Bitcoin. It's a little disappointing!

Yes, I know I could buy some, but until there are enough venues that accept Bitcoin, I'm only motivated enough to get free Bitcoin. The only one I've seen that I'm interested in so far is a site that lets you bet Bitcoin on pro Starcraft 2 matches, although the idea of buying Call of Duty: Black Ops for Bitcoin is pretty good too.
Some disadvantages to vouchers:

With additional choice, now schools will be forced to spend your tax dollars to market themselves... this is an additional overhead to the already underfunded system.

Plus what happens when a local school "goes under"? If some folks are forced to drive their kids for 30-40m to another school because no local schools can be funded, is that in their best interests?
You can buy your brother a GiftRocket to a place right next to where you live, like a coffeeshop down the street. Yelp also has a lot non-businesses. For example, here's one in the middle of the Presidio in SF:

http://www.giftrocket.com/send-a-gift-to/inspiration-point-p...
There's no such thing as a free lunch.

When you're using quad-core machien to generate bitcoin, you're probably wasting electricity. That doesn't stop people from pooling their resources together and mine, though.
Chavez says capitalism may have ended life on Mars
Pricing doesn't have to be rental, or purchase. There is a continuum.

For example, Stardock has made a nice niche for itself in skins for Windows, among other products. Their flaship product, ObjectDesktop, costs something like $50.

For $50, the customer owns a copy of ObjectDesktop forever. Plus, they get a 'free' subscription to all changes and upgrades for a year. After that, the subscription automatically expires. The customer can renew if they like. Customers addicted to downloading the latest tweak or feature discover their subscription has lapsed, then decide to renew. Even if they don't renew, they can still use the software they bought.

Stardock is continually improving the product, adding cool new features, engaging users on its forums etc. etc. I suspect most of their buyers choose to renew their subscriptions, or decide to do so when a particularly neat new feature comes out.

Stardock started in the early 1990s as a university student part-time project and is now a multi-employee operation generating what I imagine is a very nice monthly cash-flow. The owner/founder clearly does whatever the heck he wants while keeping a tight focus on continuing to deliver value for paying customers. No VC money, no angels - just organic growth from revenues.
Dictionary.com:

nuke [nook, nyook]
-noun
1. a nuclear or thermonuclear weapon.
2. a nuclear power plant or nuclear reactor.
3. nuclear energy: to convert from coal to nuke.
That the backup cooling was an utter failure. From what I understand, there is backup battery (8 hours, which worked), backup diesel onsite (which failed), and backup diesel offsite (from what I've heard, arrived properly, but they didn't have the proper "connectors") - I don't know for sure.

That we didn't have an absolute catastrophe doesn't win points in my book. It seemed to me that there were several points in this incident where the people in charge were a bit iffy about what might happen next.....inexcusable under the circumstances. None of this should have happened.
Does a blog reviewing music count?

Though I started in 2008, I didn't really make any attempts at monetizing until late 2009 and started with Adsense, then linked all the albums reviewed to two online stores that sell the CDs in question. All told, it took me maybe 3 months to make my first dollar and even longer for affiliate commissions to come in. I didn't make my first sale until maybe February 2010.

Obviously this isn't a product-based project, so it's not representative of the webapp stuff that others are producing.
Is the term 'hacker' starting to lose meaning in modern culture?
I am surprised to see that a restart of the browser is still required to enable / disable extensions and themes in the new FireFox 4.

Is this the case with Chrome as well?
Ok, thanks. I was wondering if there was some other root exploit at play, not just bad system configuration.
"The Power of Your Youth"
I published an ebook (http://www.branchrock.com) and it's been selling. Since I'll never run out of stock and it's priced as an impulse buy, I expect that it'll continue to earn passively. I got my first dollar on the first day I started selling.

I plan to continue writing books, both non-fiction and fiction, and I expect that they'll all help bring in passive income.
From your FAQ >Who is PoundPay?
PoundPay is our payments provider. If you buy or receive a GiftRocket, you'll receive a few emails from them.

This sounds a bit strange. Are these marketing emails or just receipts?
Lol, CPU mining is not sensible, use GPU. And why do you think that it would be easy to get free money? Bitcoin value is pretty high, so there are people running GPU farms & mining it. Competition is high.

I think currently mining is profitable, you can pay your hardware investments back maybe in 2-6 months.
EA's branches of WebKit, available at http://gpl.ea.com, are designed for integration into console video games and don't require any sort of X server or OS interface. It's not the most up-to-date but it's sufficiently modularized to adhere to the LGPL without violating the Sony/Microsoft developer agreements.
Django 1.3 released
I've had an application running in Second Life for the last 5-6 years to facilitate people making machinima. I haven't changed the price since it launched, at around $6 USD. When it first launched (also when SL was much more popular), I was selling several hundred dollars a month.

I still pull in $30-$50 a month on it, but I don't do much to promote it anymore. Linden Lab has really fucked up over the years and the quality of their software (the environment my app runs in) has gotten considerably worse. Its sad to say that my machinima app ran better 5 years ago than it does today, and multiple re-writes over the years has proven it impossible to go any further with the it.

Alternatively, I just put my first app up in the App Store last night. Its waiting for approval. I'm going to keep launching small utility apps and see where it goes.
I'm on Windows 7 - 64

I imagine it will get worked out, but its not until something fails that you realize your dependence.
Django | Django 1.3 release notes | Django documentation
"You don't modify code without intent to change it's behavior. You're there to fix a bug, or add a feature."

This makes a lot of sense. If you clean up code on anything other than a just-in-time basis, you risk fixing up something that will never need to be modified before it goes out of use.

Choosing coding standards makes a lot of sense too. If you're coding a MVP, the probability of code going out of use is higher and your standard should be lower. Your team's comfort level with modifying dirty code (how much does it demoralize them? does modifying dirty code fit with their style?) is another consideration.

I think it could make sense to vary the desired code quality depending on the personality of its primary maintainer and how likely it is to get thrown out. A corollary is that if different coders on your team have different preferred levels of code quality, you should assign them to different parts of the project on that basis.

I think there is a fair amount of room to apply microeconomics-type thinking here, along with behavioral economics-type thinking about what biases (e.g. hyperbolic discounting) might cause one to choose the wrong level of code quality. And there's also the opportunity for professional development as coders become more comfortable programming at different spots on their personal output speed/code quality potential possibility curves.
I was surprised that just putting an adsense unit on the side of my personal blog (4k hits/month) manages to generate $25/month.

It's a highly technical blog, mainly documenting my personal electronics projects, but covers pretty much anything I want it to, which rather limits my readership. Having a more cohesive, single subject would certainly raise the glass ceiling on readership.
Using Lead Nurturing and Scoring to Deliver More and Higher-Quality Leads
Mining is the method how transactions on the Bitcoin payment network get processed and stored. The only reason you would mine is if you wish to invest the significant amount of time, equipment and electricity necessary to do so. Compensation for the mining activity comes from "rewards" in the form of new bitcoin currency that is issued.

The more cryptographic hashing calculations that your hardware can perform, the more likely you'll earn the currency "generation" reward. The reward is issued roughly once every ten minutes. All the miners are competing to become the recipient of that next reward.

Because there is no central authority, the currency is protected by the network. The more mining activity, the less likely an adversary could mess with the payment network's transactions. Now that Bitcoin is among the largest distributed computing networks that exist, corralling the necessary computing power to act as an adversary is becoming something that is more and more difficult.
They're payment confirmations. No marketing emails. We'll clarify the language, thanks.
Sorry you had a bad experience. I have gotten nothing but superb support from Amazon staff. I'm surprised they weren't willing to accommodate you, doubly so if you were ready to pay.

One thing that surprises me is when people talk about utilizing multiple availability zones in EC2 as some sort of burden. It's very clear from their documentation and architecture that you need to be capable running in at least 2 availability zones regardless if you want any sort of availability.