skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exchange rates are set by supply, and demand. Bitcoin has through technical means controlled the supply part of the equation, but how can it control demand? So fluctuations in demand will cause changes. In the growth period, Bitcoin can't be stable, and it would be impossible for any currency to do so without extremely precise statistics on how a currency was being used and control over inflation (so you could, say, adjust supply exactly to match fluctuations in demand).

In the long run, most of the obvious equilibriums for Bitcoin are very far away from whatever it's currently trading at. If Bitcoin fails and becomes playmoney, then it's overpriced by hundreds of times; if it succeeds and replaces any sovereign country's currency, then it's undervalued by hundreds or thousands or millions of times. So in the long run, you must expect it to not be 'stable', but to change drastically - in some direction.

(If this isn't convincing, try applying the double reversal test Nick Bostrom devised for combating the status quo bias (http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf) and anchoring (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). Suppose that Bitcoin were at $2 rather than $4. Would you be saying 'obviously the right price for Bitcoin is $4, so I should buy some'? I doubt it. )

When Bitcoin is supposed to be stable is when demand for it is not varying; supply will be stable by the Bitcoin architecture, and hence, the overall equation wouldn't change in that situation. This differs from fiat currency in that you are only vulnerable to changes in the demand part of the equation - there is no Fed or other cabal that can hurt you by manipulating the supply part of the equation.
I would improve the typography on your app. It doesn't flow well and readability is incredibly important for a review site.

If you need a kick in the right direction with font stacks, checkout http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-s... . They have some pretty good advice.

Good luck!
I actually 1: did not use quicksilver, 2. did not use kaleidoscope, and 3. never used RSS. These thoughts are purely empirical:

RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place, which is why it is so silly that Apple added it for consumers, not once, but TWICE. No one actually uses Safari RSS. If they did, why the need to then add it to Mail.app? Would it add even MORE value to add RSS to the Finder too? Why stop there, iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt.

Dashboard being a failure is clear. If it was a success (like the App Store), we'd still see Apple touting widgets and maybe even selling them. The fact of the matter is that there is no ecosystem of people writing widgets for this thing. Dashcode was largely repurposed as an iOS web app creation tool (also unused by all). So the result: no Kaleidoscope and hardly any Dashboard use.

Spotlight: It has been shown to be much slower than other tools (and was terribly buggy for many releases, where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt?) Most of the "Add on" features are broken too: if you type a simple formula into it, it will show the result, but you can't copy/paste it, so what's the point?

I'm not hating on Apple, they clearly get a lot of stuff right (such as Expose!), but their track record proves they get more stuff right when its their own idea. These little feature additions that seem designed solely to kill third party devs seem almost like half-hearted mini passion projects of single engineers that then die when they get reassigned to something else.

Feel free to directly address each of my points.
I wrote a memoir that's mostly about education, leading up to the creation of Facebook.

http://www.amazon.com/Authoritas-Students-Admissions-Foundin...

It's self-published through my company, Think Computer Corporation, under the Think Press label.

The web-based version contains links on a page-by-page basis to primary source documents and is available free here:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/authoritas.html

In case you're curious, my response to Peter Cooper's Amazon.com comment is here:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/cooper.txt
It's not even consent. Toshiba should be listing this "feature" as a security feature, letting potential buyers know that there is non-removable software that allows this laptop to be tracked in event of theft. Marketing this has the potential to turn it around from "Toshiba plants rootkits" to "Toshiba has some of the best anti-theft protection"

I don't see this listed in the official specifications, so if it were me that found it, on a laptop that doesn't say it has it, I would also agree that this is malware.

http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/T100/T135-...
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2491729.
> The CIA is paying BitCoin members to give talks about it.

A BitCoin developer to give a talk about it to them.
It's just that 'class system' exists in society and it's a different kind of animal, that phrase carries a lot of negative political and socio-economical baggage, negativity such as 'monarchs' and 'peasants' and what have you.

In the corporate world however it's just a chain of command, it is used to distill order to some extent and typically is claimable by those who succeed.
I had a boss whose philosophy was "Four weeks severance is cheaper than hiring a HR manager", and it did seem to work out pretty well. The company still had to deal with a 'nuisance' lawsuit, but was something totally out of the blue.
The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog
I've self-published an ebook & screencast series on math (http://betterexplained.com/articles/math-betterexplained-ebo...) based on my blog content.

I've written more about the numbers and process here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=870015

The parent thread by Peter Cooper is very interesting too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869106
Maybe also run it as a key-signing party? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party
Link for those not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

Personally, I think assassination markets could be a net benefit (think of the bounties on someone like Kim Jong-Il), but then, I like them enough that I write stories about them so I'm biased: http://www.gwern.net/fiction/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walk%20Towar...
It's optional for a reason. If people want to give away that information, they will.
Show HN: crawl a website and store it in S3 from your browser
Tyler Durden for the Internet Age
Yea since the recent switch to https, you have to convert apps to show on the https but since I am hosting it on heroku for free I dont have the https.

But if you click switch to http you can see my app and you will see the permissions I ask. I only ask for basic information.

The applications that go 'viral' are the ones that usually ask for permission to post on your facebook feed and these are the ones that usually post things even when you dont want them too.
On second thought what someone needs to do: Build one of these out of Beagleboards! :-D
Invenio to run your own digital library or document repository (OAI)
http://petervandijck.com/iabook/ Information architecture. Took me about 4 months in the library of Colombia university (Peter Parker!) to write it :)
"Netflix could not build new datacenters fast enough."

Seriously? We're supposed to believe that? No, they chose not to spend the money required to do so. If there continue to be enough datacenters for Netflix, then it -is- possible to build them fast enough.

There are many advantages to moving to the cloud. There's no reason to say things that are so obviously false.
You can claim 'sociological issues' all you like, but when people see you're a fantasist with a laughable view of how the world works, and you're dealing in sly insinuation and race baiting... 'sociological issues' aint gonna cut it.

Well, I say that, but with the naivety on show in this thread perhaps this guy is onto a winner with 'sociological issues'.
It's just that people have become accustomed to price inflation so things should just "cost more". Does it make more sense for candy to cost $0.05 or $1.50? Given improvements in efficiency, you'd think that the price of candy would have gone down from what it was years ago.

However, due to inflation from the monetary system, everything keeps going up.

The advantage of BTC is that it is infinitely divisible (to the limits of floating point, which will be interesting).

In the USD system, hoarders lose, in the BTC system, hoarders win.

I'm not sure which I prefer. I'd like a decaying cryptocurrency that guarantees money remains in circulation.
Releasing startup soon -- Constructive criticisms needed for "buzz" page
HN,

I know all you guys have a short time so I’ll try to be as quick as possible. A friend and I are going to release our startup in about two months that will be a social approach to rating, buying, sharing and collecting coffee.

37signals “getting real” is a book I hold close and dear and they recommend to get out a “buzz” page to collect contacts. So I built a simple one with a few features:

- Linked up to fb instead of asking for emails for social proofing and its a lot easier to “like” something than give up your email address.

- Showed my friends screenshots to get quotes, linked to their twitter accounts to give credibility

- Since its not released it hasn’t been featured in any outlets, I did however submit it to some of the leading “link dumps” and put their logos in there. Even though being seen on digg isnt a big deal, the logos add credibility

- Offered incentives that will be followed up on: early adopter badges and early invites.

What I’d like from you guys:
1. Like it if you like coffee. I’d be smitten.

2. What would you do to make a more efficient and effective buzz page to collect user bases? What pearls of wisdom do you have to market and grow a new web app/startup?

3. If you are a coffee drinker, how do you think technology can be used to make your coffee experience better? What would you really like to see in future iterations of a coffee application? (Some early requests from friends has been to add coffeehouses in the mix)
Gift to M.I.T. from Bose Founder Raises Tax Questions
He implied that google leaned on his employer to fire him. He never himself got in touch with google, so we don't know if this is true, do we? For all we know, his managers felt that he was being an unnecessary troublemaker and not wanting to jeopardize the company's relationship with google, decided to fire him on their own.
fwiw, cmd+c will copy the result of the simple formula in spotlight.
Your fiction books' descriptions are great! I'm going to check out the previews on my Kindle app. If the books are as good, you've got a new fan!
Yeah, I am sorry. The submission missed a "Kathy Sierra's view on ...". The original article was not what I wanted to highlight.

Serves me the lesson: avoid posting on HN when it is late night and I'am tired.
My favorite part (with reference to eToys):

"They ditched a perfectly working MySQL application and migrated to Oracle which caused them to hire Oracle consultants $2000 per day and spend millions on Oracle big-iron."

Reminds me of when the ads manager at Google decided we needed to ditch MySQL and get a "real database" for the ads system. "Real database" in that case meant Sybase, but it was still a barely mitigated disaster. Sometimes it seems as if the "real" databases are just a colossal scam.
Adrian Cockcroft will be speaking at the "Talk Cloudy to Me" event today: http://www.meetup.com/cloudcomputing/events/16701362/ - swing on by if you're near Mountain View!
What bothers me most about this is that these workers have a shift that essentially makes them invisible to the rest of Google employees. They come in many hours before the bulk of Googlers and they leave at a time when there is the least foot traffic on the campus.

There's a clear intention to keep this group segregated and hidden from the rest of Google and that's a bit disturbing.
I had to scrounge around all over the net finding stuff. The EPUB format alone eventually required downloading the spec. I didn't expect to be reading specs as part of the technical bits of writing a book.

Then there was the question of who to send the book to -- once it's done, where does it go? And, if you ask me, it's very easy to get screwed as an author.

There are about a dozen different decision points you have to go through -- format, topic, compatibility with other formats, distribution, marketing, sales, etc. Each of these is non-trivial.

For instance, you could just offer folks your book from your web site. Click the button and get a download. But do most people know how to take a download and put it on their e-reader? Are you sure you want no DRM at all? Which vendor do you want handling the mechanics of the sale, if any? If you offer a download from your site, does it preclude also offering the book on Amazon or iTunes?

It's issues like that every step of the way. As another example, I found EPUB looked one way on one device, but converting it to MOBI for a Kindle caused subtle changes. It's almost like browser compatibility BS all over again.

Wasn't trying to duck your question, but I basically found nothing that wrapped it all up in one easy-to-understand package. Perhaps if I make a few bucks with the first book I'll go back and write an ebook, "Ebooks for hackers" which assumes you know stuff like CSS, XML, and XHTML and instead concentrates on the other parts.
Sorry, not really trying to prove anything.

Though, I have come across code that used those idioms from the Perl docs. The code that it was buried in looked like it was someone that didn't know Perl very well and was probably just copying from the docs. E.g. everything had a function prototype, which is something I've rarely come across even in 'cute' Perl code.
To me that quote sounds like Netflix didn't have enough time between when it found out the capacity was needed and when the capacity was needed to build datacenters. So they had a problem with data center build latency and not throughput.
And I thought bitcoin wasn't going to go anywhere, I made about 3000BTC back in 2009 and just over time forgot about it and lost my 'wallet' id (a hash), kicking myself in the ass now.
I understand that the mouse events it uses have no context for mobile users, and I'm planning to fix this. Thanks for your suggestion with jQuery Mobile.
But let's say your lab is raided while you aren't there and the police are trying to tie you to the lab. You had better believe they'll be checking your credit card statements.
Doesn't make it interesting for me; OLAP queries are very easy to distribute.

Also, kdb+ achieves a "billion rows per second" scan on a similar dataset with just one or two instances (rather than 40), if you know what you are doing.

Color me unimpressed.
Germany (I'm blissfully unaware how that compares to the rest of Europe. It might be that we're on the more aggressive side of the 'protect the employee' scale) here:

No way would that get me fired. They could try, but it would be very painful, I'd make sure that I get a good compensation at least (or sue them to rehire/keep me).
You'd have a hard time fireing anybody for a _single_ offense. Ignoring the question of whether this really is a big deal anyway, unless I do something very, very stupid (strip in front of my coworkers. Grab some cash/remove the projector from a conference room and install it at home/physically threaten/engage someone) you've a hard time to send me home. For things that aren't valid reasons for immediate termination but still considered baaaad you'd need to reprimand me first. Maybe you got a case the second time I do the same thing or something similar.

I understand that this is a different world and as others have pointed out: This view conflicts with the entrepreneurial 'I want to start a company and manage my team as I want to'. But it should be an interesting exercise to understand that this rules exist. And while I'm largely ignorant politically and cannot judge or compare this situation (I never experienced something else):

It does seem to work without grinding the local business to a halt after all..
> This is about whether or not unions have been systematically demonized

Then why were you talking about how badly the working class is doing, particularly due to health care and gasoline costs, both in the previous post and this one? You can't argue something and then declare it off-limits for discussion because we're really talking about some other point.

If you want to talk about how the working class is doing, face my question directly, instead of dodging it with a sarcastic jab about how great the working class is doing. Explain how working class people have a harder time affording any reasonable list of goods from the 1960s vs today.

I will grant you that health insurance is ridiculously expensive, with the caveat that insurance is a stupid way to pay for most health care. I will argue further that even once you account for the massive increase in health care costs, the working class is generally much better off financially than in the 1960s (speaking of fudging statistics, how about the sudden shift from "the last 40 or 50 years" to "15 years ago at the height of an economic boom / asset bubble"?)
Because they don't support complex queries.
Really sounds to me like a consortium that would end up using its collective power to destroy non-members. Would be easy enough at some point to make sure only large corporations can afford to be members, and go after innovative small companies with their shared portfolio.

Legal reform makes a lot more sense to me and is less fraught with potential with abuse.
This is the flip side of radar detecters. Its not like they are giving personalized information on a specific person.
Octodex: Octocats for All Occasions
> Passive-aggressive is something like "I respect your right to your opinion, no matter how steeped in white male professional privilege it may be."

Or something like "found it interesting that these workers, who perform labor similar to that of many red-badge contractors, such as software engineers, custodians, security guards, etc., are mostly people of color and cannot eat Google meals, take the shuttle, ride a bike, or step foot anywhere else on campus."

Or "I was not aware of how secretive the Book Search project is"

Or "understand how seriously my curiosity could jeopardize not only my own job and Transvideos’ relationship with Google"

> His statements are completely factual, even underplayed.

His statements are very slanted. "chubby white man", "extremely confidential area", "filtered and separated neatly into their bracketed accounts", "Ralph, the millionaire who owns Transvideo", and others I mentioned previously are carefully crafted to paint Google (and Transvideo) in the light of not only an exploiter of minorities, but also a petty company that cares more about their data integrity than people.

> I didn't even hear any ill-will towards the company

There's plenty of ill will and contempt there, seething beneath the surface in that passive-aggressive voice.
I'm currently reading your book "Accelerando" (in parallel with about 20 other books). HN readers would probably enjoy the density of ideas evident in it.
> just videoing the parking lot is somehow an act on par with a Michael Moore muckraking job

You are being disingenuous. He wasn't terminated for 'just videoing a parking lot'. He clearly stated his goals were to investigate class and race on the Google campus as it related to the yellow badge workers. That sounds exactly like Michael Moore style muckraking.
I agree, the "Build it and they will come" idea drives me insane. For the 0.1% of people that the approach works for, they treat it like gospel, and it just ends up giving the other 99.9% of people with great products an entitlement complex.
Imagine Amazon starts accepting bitcoins. The rate will probably skyrocket to more than 100 USD.

Actually, digital currency is inevitable, it's only a matter of time till there's some global currency not controlled by one government. Bitcoin is a pretty good candidate.
Right now it is trivial for a government, botnet owner, or even a sysadmin with access to several thousand machines to completely corner the bitcoin market and actually use a cartel to "steal" bitcoins from others.

Bitcoin is not controlled by a central authority. Instead it is controlled by any specific individual or group that is able to get about 30% of the computing power of the network. While this is very expensive for your average middle class person, a typical millionaire or billionaire (not to mention government) could completely dominate bitcoin overnight.

Bitcoin is NOT democratic. It's ruled by people who are wealthy in conventional currency because those are the people with access to the most computing power.
Cool project, I played around with the CSS a little bit myself but didn't have as much time a I thought (running late right now) but I'll still show you what I came up with so far just so you can see an alternate perspective.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/U4uO8.png
Color Scheme: http://i.imgur.com/6oUyx.png

If you like it and actually want to implement it, shoot me an email (proexploit[at]gmail.com) and I'll clean up the CSS and send it to you, this was all done in firebug and turned out messier than I intended.
You are correct that the exam focuses on the understanding of the Java language / platform and not so much on general "how-to's". It's not a hard exam, and I really wouldn't think that it demonstrates more than a medium level of familiarity with the platform.

I got it a couple of years ago as part of a standardized training package at a company I worked at. I had medium skill with the language already and didn't study very much. As I recall, most of the ?'s were on generics and class inheritance - not surprising given the OO focus of the language.
Vertica is legit, we tested it against a billion rows on a single server and it didn't blink and eye. It reads compressed data, and optimizes compression based on the column's data type
for that ec2 price you could get a few years of vertica licenses
Yes, back in 1994. "Lenguaje Ensamblador de los 80x86", which means "80x86 Assembly Language", published by Anaya (major Spanish publisher). It's now out of print, but there were over 20 reprints and it was pretty successful, was recommended at many universities, etc...

http://www.keenzo.com/showproduct.asp?ID=2328952

I wish I had written it in English, it would have helped 10 times as many people and opened 10 times as many doors. Money would have been better too.

I'm writing other stuff now, but it's fiction and as of yet unpublished (and unattempted to). In due time.
Simple description of popular open source licenses
I wrote a 50k NaNoWriMo entry a few years back. I never tried to publish it (except on the web). On reflection, it was garbage - friends who read it (or pretended to) said they thought I was trying too hard to demonstrate technical ability at the expense of plot. I currently have a second novel in progress (using the excellent Scrivener software) although I don't expect to complete even a first draft for a long time yet.
That sounds like a book I would buy, but of course, I have almost all the other Erlang books too.
Google vs Bing
Kindles have built-in support for highlighting and annotations, although using the buttons to highlight is surely slower than using a physical highlighter. If you're just highlighting important passages and not every other sentence (as some people are wont to do), it shouldn't be a problem.
U-boot as coreboot payload (detective hacking)
Wow, it looks like Python (PyPy) is with an order of magnitude of C on every benchmark. Nice work!