skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I immigrated from Taiwan in the mid 90s and went back this month, the first time in nearly 17 years.

When I left, it was squarely sitting in second-world status, but I was surprised to go back and find a modern, bustling, clean, developed nation. There is infrastructure there, unlike most American cities. I live in Seattle, and everything around here feels like it's falling apart - you walk around and there's the distinct feeling that you're walking through a relic... something from another era, now disused and slowly decaying. I did not get this feeling anywhere in Taipei. Everywhere you go something is being overhauled, more metro lines are being built constantly, there's new construction, new businesses. Technology is being integrated into people's lives in a wonderful way - even my 80 year-old grandmother navigates all the touch screen smart-card kiosks in the MRT system like a pro.

It was a bit of a disappointment to come back to Seattle and pick up a paper transfer riding a dilapidated bus that doesn't even have a voice-recorded stop call-out feature. It's even more depressing to watch all the political infighting in the city about rapid transit buildouts - the Taiwanese tunneled through much more densely populated, existing developed areas years ago, and now they get to enjoy one of the most advanced rapid transit system I've ever seen, while here in Seattle we've been sitting on our ass about this issue for 30 years.
Stay in or drop out? The entrepreneur’s education fiasco - TNW Entrepreneur
Old Dominion University

The school is mostly Windows for user-facing machines, with OS X machines also available. The university-wide HPC machines are running Solaris 8.

The CS Department also uses OS X and Windows in the labs, but usually kept much closer to the most recent release. Most professors in the department expect you to sign on the Solaris machines to do work. The HPC machines are running CentOS.
Maybe they just think his rant is incoherent, of low quality, or don't think "why XXX will fail" rants are positive to have on HN.
I like Microsoft, but as a disclaimer before my analysis - I bought 400 shares of Microsoft stock a little bit ago at $25.79 per share.

Here my thoughts:

-Microsoft's price/earnings ratio is around 10, which I feel is pretty good for a company with a lot of stable revenue base and a chance at upside.

-This article talks about Microsoft's poor performance in tablets, which is true and worrying. I'm not sure Microsoft will make that ground up. They do have an excellent research division, though, and I'm wondering if they can make a strong showing in the next generation of technology after this. I don't know what that'll be, but new input devices should be coming online. The Kinect is amazing, I was really blown away playing with one in Singapore. If Microsoft can build on that to do alternative input and the next generation, they could have a huge renaissance.

-They have a very solid installed base. Government and business are very likely to keep running on Windows and Office. For consumers, even if tablets totally take over - and I'm not sure that'll happen - late adoptors will be buying those pre-installed Windows laptops and PCs just like always.

-$50 billion in cash reserves means they've got a lot of time to figure something out going forwards. Lots of cash + some very stable covering their fixed costs + big research division = seemingly a pretty safe buy with some upside.

I don't think it's a good stock to buy for short term appreciation - it might well go down over the next 2-3 years. But I'm comfortable holding it for 10 years. I think there's a decent shot it pays well in dividends and holds its value and a decent shot for lots of growth and appreciation.

Of course, maybe the house does fall over. Do your own research, etc, etc, etc.
Not sure about offering it for free, it's a possibility. I may try a lite version of some type. That worked for Trainyard.

I briefly looked at Unity and thought it looked great but more suited to 3d games. I thought I could move faster with cocos2d but I can't comment on how true that is.

BTW I decided on 2d for two reasons:
1. it's easier to develop
2. I haven't found any 3d games I like!

I also hit up a whole bunch of forums, emailed a stack of review sites, most of which didn't reply, or they were charging for reviews. I got that one review I linked to which was great. I'm most definitely not a marketing guru!
Get the best corporate brochures design company & firm in India
The article mentions this issue explicitly. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)#Securit..., Nehalem (and later) CPUs have an IOMMU that let the OS choose which parts of memory to map into the device's address space.

In other words, this issue has been dealt with: you don't expose all of your laptop's memory to Thunderbolt devices.
Gorgeous. You'll love it.

Look for a place in Marietta, Alpharetta, or near Emory's campus (Druid Hills i think they call the area) for the nicest places to have homes and Midtown and Atlantic Station for the nicest condos (in the city, we just call it downtown here).
Censorship, Governments, and Flagellating Google
"Asking why I think bitcoin won't work is like asking why the sky isn't red. I mean, wait, you think it _is_ red? You actually took that seriously? Oh boy. Where do I even start?"

Yeah, I strongly suspect that anyone with a solid understanding of finance has the same "where I begin?" reaction to something like bitcoin.

I mean, a lot of effort goes into managing real currencies and they blow up far too often. Sure, yes, a lot of corrupt manipulations also go into real currencies but that's because these currencies are controlled by human beings and can be life makers-or-breakers for people.

I guarantee you that if a truly substantial amount of dollars were sunk into bitcoins, a whole lot of dubious things would happen, some of which I might be able to think of and others of which neither you nor I would think of.

Here's just a sampling of specifics: Gold is nearly perfect as a physical currency and store of value. Yet gold has booms and busts. But if bitcoin has a bust, why would it ever rise again rather than some other "cybercurrency"? And if bitcoin could crash that way, the thought of this tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy and there you are, it's doomed to collapse.

And that's just one point - "...where do I begin?"
sagarun: the title is a statement, not a question; it didn't need a question mark.

/pedant
I disagree that I should care about who's computer I do my computing on. As long as I retain control of my data and the software, why should I care who is the owner of the metal box full of electronics that that software happens to be running on?
Believing in the gold standard is disbelieving in capitalism

This betrays a deep ignorance of capitalism. It's not about "making money", but rather about exchange. The two parties in an exchange both expect (and usually gain) greater value afterwards.

Capitalism means "private ownership of the means of production", where the "means of production" are the capital goods. Money or "financial capital" is just one possible facet of capital.

Strictly speaking, there is no money creation out of economic activity, outside either: gold mining (when you have a gold standard) or monetary expansion via the fractional reserve mechanism. What is made is: goods, services and capital for future investment. People eventually want goods & services rather than money itself. And even those who seek money as an end in itself are in fact trading valuable services for pieces of paper (or whatever form money has in that instance).

Now, as for the argument that bitcoins are "pointless busywork that produces nothing of real value" the value comes from having a robust and forgery-secure digital token. Whether it's good enough to be used as money remains to be seen.

Bitcoin is still more or less a proof-of-concept. Even if the underlying foundations, like SHA256 are found flawed, it remains a valid scheme for p2p crypto-tokens, with different crypto primitives.
Re: peer view; it's open source, so there's the peer review.

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

It has about 100 forks (contributers).
In a couple of years we will start seeing a lot of computer vision applications - and robots will be one of them.
This is because the computing power has just got at the needed level.
Once you have vision you can really start applying the other old AI stuff like planning, etc.
Of course this is not Artificial General Intelligence, but it is a step forward and it will greatly improve the visibility of current AI.
Weird, I submitted the same article yesterday and got only 5 up votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2525463.
$50 billion in cash reserves means they've got a lot of time to figure something out going forwards. Lots of cash + some very stable covering their fixed costs + big research division = seemingly a pretty safe buy with some upside.

On the flip side, the only reason Microsoft has $50 billion in cash reserves is that their CEO failed in his valiant attempt to use it to buy Yahoo.

I've got to believe there are more promising companies to invest in, even over the 10-year horizon you mention.
It stores key/value pairs instead of relational data. I've been looking for something like this for a while as a replacement to NSUserDefaults.
Their website says nothing, but they link (http://green-energy-reviews.com/zenith-turns-an-israeli-kibb...) to a video that shows a presentation with a slide of their technology with the text:

5 kWh PV + Thermal -- 30,000 Euros

... and they claim their products will last 20 years.
No, the tech part boils down to "If the crypto is hacked, the whole system goes down in flames." Offline currencies can tolerate a bit of forgery or fraud, but the moment a bitcoin is successfully forged, all bitcoins instantly become useless.
I think an interesting data point is that the bitcoin faucet guy had to implement an out-of-band authentication system because people were anonymously double-dipping with new, trivially easy to generate id's. You can prove you paid a transaction, but you can't prove who it actually went to.

Much of the legal issues would be taken care of if it was coupled with a government-accessable authentication system linking bitcoin accounts to tax id's. I know that sounds bad to a lot of bitcoin fans but it would eliminate the money-laundering issue that the existing system has.

That would leave bitcoin as a more predictable/more convenient gold standard and it would no longer compete with US currency.

Although, now that I think about it, the problem is that the fact that you have to pay US taxes in USD is really what gives the Greenback it's strength/weakness. The government could still affect the conversion rate which would give it economic controls. This could be mitigated if it was an internationally accepted currency.
> In order to create currency, you have to do a bunch of pointless busywork.

It's not pointless you're doing proof-of-work on previous transactions which creates a chain of work to verify and secure transactions.
> The ability of governments to print (and destroy) money is a key tool in economic management.

I tend to agree with that. But, as far as I know, it's a tool they don't have: most money is created by private banks (through loans). I understand elected officials may be poor at managing money creation and destruction, but aren't un-elected officials worse?
Hacker News Meetup in Copenhagen on Wednesday - if you read this you qualify :)
Top Logo Design Contest Websites
Logo design contest sites are getting some serious business now a days. Individuals or companies who hold contest/projects on contest sites get hundreds of logo design concepts from different and best designers around the globe, contest holder has to pick the best logo design from the submitted designs and the one selected logo is awarded to a designer with money prize which contest holder offered while posting the project. Today I am listing top logo design contest websites very helpful for designers looking for online work.
>FAIL #2: Even if it was a good idea, governments would squash it.

Anyone could destroy (read: fake transactions, etc) it given enough computational power. I also remember reading that the main developer was invited to talk to the CIA.
>You can prove you paid a transaction, but you can't prove who it actually went to.

You can prove which account it went to, and a person can prove they control an account. (edit: well, you can send to an IP address, but that's dangerous - it can be intercepted - and almost totally pointless - accounts don't identify their owner)

As to the tax setup, I've given that some thought. If your employers gave the government the public key of the accounts they payed out to, and the people associated with them, the government would have perfectly accurate income reports. The same way they have now. Switch to an entirely income-based taxation (can also add property taxes, etc, but not really sales tax) and their calculations would be drop-dead easy.

Getting people to pay is another issue, but that's no different than it is now. If someone withdraws their money and runs, they have to be caught before they can be forced to pay.
Just because something is open doesn't mean anyone is actually looking at it... or more importantly, REALLY verifying it.

Linux is Open Source, Apache is Open Source, both have had lots of major security exploits lurking in them for many years prior to being found and they almost certainly have many, many more still in there.

Having something be Open Source is great for a lot of reasons but it is nowhere near a replacement for a dedicated rigorous peer review process based on mathematical proof of the algorithms.
He confuses making money with printing money, as well as capitalism to trick people to beleive they get richer by inflation.

The only good point he made was regarding securing the system. Sha256 is just one piece of the chain. How can we secure the bitcoins on our computer ? Some bitcoins might get lost by computer crash or stolen. Is there a way to prove ownership of a bitcoin ? I didn't check the working principle in details yet. Is there a way to prove ownership of a bitcoin ?

There are good lessons to learn from Brazil, how they got out of their financial cryzis.

One critic I would add is that some flexibilty should be made possible in the currency value to adjust to ressource grow. Some people might buy bitcoin today for cheap. But the more people will use it, the more the population will grow, the imbalance will grow with it. The value of current bitcoin will grow very fast and some people who bought them early in masse are very rich. This is because the price of ressources will have to adjust to match payement capabilities of people. So there is still a strong ineqity in the system (compared to people able to print money), there is just an unperceptible shift.

If you want to get rich and bet wich better odds than in las vegas, buy bitcoins as much as you can now.
Screenfluent: Zeitgeist of beautiful web design
Japan may close nuclear plant, tiny radiation leak at another 
Electricity wholesaler Japan Atomic Power said it had stopped the leak after a minute amount of radiation was found in gas that escaped from the Tsuruga nuclear plant on Sunday. It said there had been no impact on the environment.
Japan Atomic said it was investigating the cause of the leak, which is bound to increase public unease over the troubled nuclear industry in the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima nuclear facility in March.
Given nearly impossible computational power. Quantum computers pose a risk, but that would just mean it would have to switch to some different public key system (there are plenty to choose from on http://pqcrypto.org/ ).

If any one attacker gets, say, 9/10ths of the world's computer power, the best they can do is get 9/10ths of the generated coins, and slow down the system by not including transactions. Falsifying transactions is far, far harder to do, on an astronomical scale.

See: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_... (the rest of the page has a decent breakdown of attacks)
Latest Mobile Handsets
Microsoft reputedly has of a poor record of commercializing their excellent research (they're not alone - e.g. Xerox PARC). It's tricky, which is one reason startups often overthrow the oldguard in the next disruption (as Microsoft itself did).

But your example of Kinect is promising... even if they bought it rather than develop it themselves (idk which), they have commercialized this research.
Analyzing unused function parameters
Very true! And a lot of these logo's have a nice design but are not designed to be a good logo. A good logo includes:

Being readable / recognizable when small
Being readable / recognizable when printed in black/white/gray (fax/copier)

Because maybe one time you want to print your logo on a pen or something other small. Or someone might copy your document under a bad copier. A logo is more than just a great picture.
And I could destroy (read: fake transactions, etc) the current banking system given enough computational power.

I would start by brute forcing their private keys, and go from there.
I'm not an economist either, however i am familiar enough with Central Reserve Banking, and the statements of Fed Chairmen, reporters and economists who state that changes to interest rates is the tool by which economies are managed.

Even keynesians like Paul Krugman agree that changing interest rates has an effect on the economy. They just don't think it's a good tool to manage economies.
Education: Graduates and Jobs: A Grave New World (1971)
Why everything is dirtier
Because when thinking about time of day, people are more likely to relate to the clocks they look at to see the time than to the sun which few people use to work out the time?

Obviously, a clock wouldn't be 24H, but none the less it starts and ends each day at the top, not the bottom.
It's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
Prebuilt pdfs also available here - http://www.miek.nl/files/go/
I have no idea whether BitCoin will do well, and after reading all that I still don't. I do know that equating BitCoin with the Gold Standard is an analogy that doesn't support the points being made.

Meta: I have noticed that I've yet to read an article titled "Why (assertion)" that isn't garbage. Anyone else notice that? Bloggers: if you want to make a point, don't presume to explain an existing fact. Introduce your assertion in the title then back it up.
The fed is filled with Keynesians and nobody disagre that the fed manage the economy by changing interest rates.

What the critics say is that it doesn't work (and considering how many bubble there has been I am inclined to agree with them) and that it would work better without it.
It has been worded, formatted and styled with care. Although said content is not new, it isn't wrong either.
First of all, I've wanted to write a post like the OP's blog post for a while, but haven't gotten to it. Mine was going to include more math about deflationary spirals.

It seems that most commenters here are nitpicking the OP's individual points mostly due to their snarky/inflammatory wording and due to imperfect analogies like the comparison to the gold standard.

No, bitcoin isn't exactly like the gold standard. However, does it peg the value of the currency to an invisible standard (the money supply curve [mining])? Yes. Yes it does. Does this remove any and all flexibility from the currency? Yes. It is, in fact, bitcoin's decentralization that is its core weakness. It makes it impossible to expand the economy without devaluing the currency (see wikipedia for deflationary spiral). Transaction fees don't count, since they don't expand the money supply: they simply help the mining metaphor continue when the injection curve has been exhausted (by redistributing, not creating).
On Matt Zimmerman's blog;
http://mdzlog.alcor.net/2011/05/06/moving-on-from-canonical-...
Ironically, you seem to have forgotten that "hack" is also a synonym for "kludge" -- long before programmers started referring to themselves as hackers as a term of pride and endearment, many writers were referred to as "hacks".

I don't see any problem with referring to using a documented workaround as a "hack" in that context.
Thanks. It's weird though: I'm sure I copied the url and didn't edit it.
TweetDeck and the Holy Grail - Twitter Acquisition Puts an End to That
High Quality Websites - Google's New Ranking Factor
Osama bin Laden’s hideout recreated in Counter Strike:Source
Misses the main point: There is no proof that BitCoin or its implementations are correct.
The Most Useful LinkedIn tool ever: See who's working at the sites you visit
google-talkplugin is still broken on a virgin x86_64 squeeze.
Poor Old Nokia
Lots of people are focusing on this quote: "First of all, I admit, I don't totally understand the bitcoin algorithms and systems. I don't really need to." And saying it somehow invalidates his theories.

I disagree.

I don't need to be an expert in a field to know that experts aren't correct 100% of the time. Even in Mathematics, which is a pretty logical place that depends on proofs, Mathematicians are sometimes wrong about things. So it makes sense, in a "meta" view, to talk about "what if they're wrong".

The op's point (in that part of the article) is that if there's a problem with the algorithms, and there are almost always problems, then we'd be worse off because of the digital nature.

You can be as annoyed as you like that the op is basically saying "I don't understand what you're doing, but you probably made a mistake somewhere", but that happens to be true.
What impresses me most is how accessible this is. Even a child could operate this solar panel. I also feel you don't need many specialized skills to build it from scratch once you have the schematics.

We need more ideas like this. [edit]: FrojoS' links show they do have more ideas like this.
Alex Payne - Rules for Computing Happiness (2008)
I love the trailer... it doesn't get any clearer that this is a party game. Any plans for online multiplayer?
Personally I've always been put off by the perceived (let me know if I've got this wrong) ease with which American companies can get rid of you, and the short notice they can give you (2 weeks is what I've heard) - here in the UK the law is heavily weighted towards the employee.
I am just not obsessed with total control. There are things I care about, and there are things I don't.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web
server, you're defenceless

Uh, oh. I am there for convenience, not to fight.
The media may suck, but I remember cperciva saying that tarsnap signups actually increased after a security bug (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...) - prospective customers were impressed by his response. In fact, my opinion of KeePass is higher after this incident ("seem to be properly paranoid") than before ("who?").
It's 2011 and we're still just cave men afraid of our shadows. What rational reason would China have for trying to invade the US? Doing something like that would just piss off the rest of the world and wouldn't solve any problems they have anyway.
Bitcoin money ≠ the Gold Standard.
Markets for targeted SaaS solutions exists. Nobody is going to develop these for free and the businesses who need them are more than willing to pay (the value gained is much, much higher than the subscription fee). There are enough different businesses with the same need, that economically combined (through fees) they can support a team that develops the necessary software. These businesses are not going to collaborate with their competitors to develop the same software in a million years, but through SaaS providers, they basically do. Most of the people I know who work in software are basically involved in this at some level. It's not going away, and in many cases, it is really the only reasonable model.
Play framework for Scala: finally a fresh MVC web framework for Scala (and Java)