skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hrrrm. This redefinition, while trivially possible, seems irrelevant. Possession of assets is first and foremost a practical matter. (I think you understand this, but for the benefit of the discussion…)

In the case of primary real-world goods, possession comes from being able to physically access the state of various matter and energy: I physically own a house to the extent that I can reliably live in it and make modifications to it and so forth. I physically own food to the extent that I can make use of it by eating it. Other people can alter the game by acting as environmental forces to change the set of available interactions.

In the case of fiat currency and economic goods, practical ownership (including but not strictly identical to theoretical legal ownership) is similarly determined, but with more of a focus on laws of people rather than the laws of physics; the former are backed by the latter, but usefully form a separate conceptual layer.

The case of Bitcoin is also analogous, but there is now a focus on the laws of mathematics as they apply to the state space in which the Bitcoin system operates, and in particular to the practicalities of computing—a strong cryptographic attack could still destroy the system.

So the reason that owning all the early Bitcoins prime is not useful is the same reason owning all the virtual dollars in a parallel system to the US banks is not useful despite being able to invent whatever such system you want. Because no one will recognize this, the amount this changes your set of available physical interactions with regard to primary goods is very small. (I haven't taken weird social goods into account in the above, but I think a similar argument applies since they also require external recognition.)

That said, I think the GP poster would do well to clarify what ey meant by “unique properties”, and perhaps whether (as I interpret it) “unique” is meant to be “of the set of currently active systems, for some fuzzy activity threshold”, thus excluding Bitcoin prime and the infinite variations thereof.
Bitcoin: is worse is better
Ask HN: Who's using bzr for version control?
I see a lot of push behind git and to a lesser degree, hg. However, bzr remains the read-headed stepchild of the DVCS world. Why?
Ask HN: What ten apps could you not live without?
In a vein of which book you would want if you were trapped on a desert island; what ten applications could you not live without (including both games and productivity)?
Luis von Ahn Harnesses Brainpower
Intel predicts 10GHz chips by 2011 (from 2000)
except when we have to pay for their surgery or whatever via their emergency room visit.
I like the comments after the article - many people suggesting that Intel is selling themselves short with this prediction.
Chris Sacca answers ‘What is success?’
There's more power in putting together a handful of common words in a powerful image or metaphor than a particularly apt selection of a single word, for several reasons.

Overuse of obscure words will reduce the size of your potential audience; Shakespeare wrote plays that were seen by a broad slice of the population and have humour and puns to match. It wouldn't have made sense for him to dig too far in this direction. Original words, meanwhile, are frequently formed by joining together two other words. Joyce was especially fond of this.

A vocabulary wielded almost like a weapon has far more value as a social signifier. Uncommon words are especially potent if they're capable of sending an adversarial interlocutor to the dictionary, because in the heat of the moment your opponent is left with only two choices: concede a point, or look stupid or uneducated asking what you meant.

Particularly precise words are also subject to some of the same problems that Orwell enumerates in Politics and the English Language [1]: lazy prefabricated sentence fragments that waffle around the proper thrust of the desired meaning. His essay is a strong affirmation of the value of plain English, suggesting effort be applied to original metaphor, simile and imagery instead.

[1] http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
140x speedup was compared to optimized python version. I've tried it vs. pypy now (version 1.5) - it is 20x faster.
had that x86 emulator that could boot linux a few days ago.
Despite challenges, Apple's slow horse is poised to win the cloud music race
Even if entropy isn't shared, you can't really test a CSPRNG by feeding it through "ent".
Just like gold :)
Beats me.

git has a too-steep learning curve and is just cryptic and hostile.

svn is too intolerant of slight mistakes, leading to difficult-to-fix situations, and merges don't work very well.

We tried both at my day job, and are now very happy on bzr. I also found it really nice for my single-developer spare-time project.
I'm having a hard time with your argument. Some things jump out:

The only data that could ever be provided would be a very limited set, namely, to the external behaviors. - This isn't true at all. We slice open brains to find out how they work. We stick things in them to measure and stimulate them. One fellow even had a camera installed to produce phosphenes via electrodes on his visual cortex. Science has gone well beyond external behaviours. (We are talking about the mechanics of brains here, so B. F. Skinner doesn't get an invitation. Once the brain simulation is running and babbling then he can psychoanalyze it all he likes.)

Consciousness as an object isn't even a scientific entity, - That's good news, not bad. If it's not a scientific entity, we don't have to worry about it or hold it up to scientific scrutiny. Similarly we can stave off worrying about whether it has a soul, and which God it belongs to should it in fact have a soul--whatever that means.

but what people really want to get at is consciousness, and the brain without that is probably not the problem most people have in mind. So one could simulate the brain but only on a very restricted very of what a brain is. - A brain is whatever science says it is. The word you want to (and are free to) play with is consciousness. For maximum convenience, you may define it as the quality a brain produced by sexual human reproduction has and that which an artificial brain made by humans has not. Whatever it is it makes us very special indeed!

There was more sarcasm there than I would have liked, but I can't resist. So I apologize, but I hope you see my point: arguing that a simulation is impossible because of some mysterious scientific non-entity is simply not a scientifically valid argument.

(Bio-/electro-)mechanically speaking there is no known inherent barrier to simulation. Roger Penrose likes the idea that there is some sort of quantum entanglement responsible for human consciousness but it's not supported and he's having a hard time even demonstrating that his specific claims are possible. So for now, I am happy to assume that (robust, human-like) brain simulation is possible in principle. I don't know, of course, and I probably will not live to see it. Then again, computing is a runaway train and there are some compelling players in the simulation field at this time--so who knows?
Tell HN: Upgrading to Rails 3 is a side project, not a todo item
I've spent about a week now upgrading SproutRobot. The changes aren't that substantial, but there are lots of little differences. I've spent a lot of time tracking down silly little bugs in my code. Granted I'm also migrating from Webrat to Capybara, but getting Webrat up and running was turning out to be a project in and of itself.

YMMV, but my recommendation is to make a rails3 branch, spend a day on it, and then get back to real work. Spend a day a week on it until it's done, but don't expect that you'll be able to power through.
For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target
Top 8 ways to annoy a tech blogger
The permissions are required by the extension API to capture a visible tab. The extension doesn't currently track your browsing history. Always a concern of course.
You only need the SMB connection to grab the username, right? That seems straightforwardly guessable.

Apropos little: UNC path filtering is something the Rails generation of webdevs have a bad habit over overlooking.
3D interactive anatomy - anatronica.com
Nihilist.
re: branded

There are certain requirements to use the Android trademark. For instance, Barnes and Noble don't get to use the Android brand for the Nook.

Allowing unapproved apps isn't one of those requirements, and in practice some Android branded devices have indeed disallowed such apps.
Empire Avenue: A Fun Social Media Influence Builder
I've actually never heard of org-mode before. :) In order to use it, how well versed does one need to be in Emacs?
Thanks! When you convert the capture to an image, it should appear as an image on the page where you can right click and save as. If it doesn't work I'd appreciate any details, feel free to email me. Mparke78@gmail.com
Other reasons why one would be wary of using something like this:

- you are designing in a man-in-the-middle.

- you are adding another server round-trip (=latency)

As a
Brent Hoberman and lastminute.com
Other reasons why one would be wary of using something like this:

- you are designing in a man-in-the-middle.

- you are adding another server round-trip (=latency).

As a library, this might be useful. As a service, it, IMO, would need to add more than combining APIs.
Maybe we just need to emphasize the negative impact of long commutes. Suddenly you have that commute time to do something else. :)
This recipe worked for me:

- first thing, check for physical causes (thyroid, etc)

- listen to motivational/inspirational speeches by people who made it

- get out of your house! Be among trees as much as you can, and get as much (indirect) sunlight as you can.

- work out: both cardio and strenght training. Regarding strenght training, bodyweight exercises are fine. Regarding cardio: do not run! Unless you have proper technique, you can injure yourself. Fast-paced walking is OK. Other favourites: stair-climbing, biking.

- watch what you eat: avoid high glycemic-index foods

- avoid consuming too much alcohol

- don't be alone all the time
(To respond to your first comment for a second: I run open source projects that have tens of millions of users, so I know quite a bit about the feeling on the other side of that specific issue: those text messages I mentioned I get all the time are about bugs in something I distribute for free under the BSD license.)

You are now conflating "prorietary" with "charity", which is ironic at best, and seem to be disagreeing with my arhument not because you disagree with it's logic, but because you dislike some indirect ramification to a cause you believe in, which is sad. :(

Open Source is not some magic bullet that makes something fundamentally maintainable: it simply affects the cost of one option, which is accepting the lock in and operating the project yourself. 99% of the time it will be cheaper to take another alternative, like "migrate to another solution", which is certainly something you can do with a proprietary solution.

So no: I disagree with you; if you are choosing an open source project just because it is open source, you are a bad businessman. Example: if you chose mod_python for your web architecture today--a discontued (with prejudice: the sole remaining official maintainer hated it) project that I seem to be the only remaining user of and which (honestly, despite what I tell people) wasn't very good in the first place--over a proprietary alternative that actually had a working business model, like ASP.NET, solely because you could maintain the former yourself, that would /clearly/ be a very poor and highly costly decision for your company, and would easily allow a competitor to run circles around you on cost of development and maintenance. There may even be reasons why mod_python would be chosen over ASP.NET (such as a plausible, if painful, migration path to mod_wsgi combined with the now know to be incorrect preference of coding in Python ;P), but this one in specific is simply irrational.

As for Digium: an ecosystem (like Skype) is fundamentally different than a hosted API, and I'm confused as to why you feel it appropriate to compare them... I can replace Google Translate (an API I rely on and do not regret choosing), but I cannot replace Skype, even if the entire client were open source.
Clearly that's not universally true, otherwise racing drivers would use automatic gearboxes. It may be true for everyday driving, but I'd need to see some citations for this claim.

Frankly, I'm a little dubious of automatic transmission. Perhaps I've just been driving the wrong cars, but I haven't found an automatic gearbox that can match a human being. For instance, if I'm descending a steep hill, I'll stick the car in a lower gear, but an automatic always chooses the higher gear.
>>There is a crucial difference between believing that a computer can simulate a brain and believing that a windmill can do so.
>That depends entirely on what you think a brain is

No. It depends on what you think a computer is. You see, the reason why many scientist today believe that a brain is computer or can be simulated by a computer is that computers are universal machines. In contrast to a mill, which can only mill grains, a computer can simulate earthquakes, the weather, cars, other computers, and, you guessed it, mills.

>People are ignoring a good lot of scientific method when they propose that were a computer to every simulate a brain the veracity of that simulation could ever be verified.

You seem to ignore the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test.

>What would essentially be needed in the simulation, that is the production of consciousness, could never empirically tested.

How do you know that I am conscious? Or any other person you converse with for that matter.
Is that book full of these trivias? I would love to read more trivias like that.
bash (I could use (z,c)sh if forced at gunpoint, but I have too many personal scripts relying on bashisms), byobu/screen, rxvt, openssh-client, git, vim, irssi, chrome, empathy, dropbox.

There was a time when I would've listed mutt, procmail and getmail at the front of a list like this, but mutt doesn't seem to play well with flaky connections, and with desert island broadband being what it is...
Thinking there is a difference between believing that a computer can simulate a brain and believing that a windmill can do so doesn't depend at all on what you think a brain is, or on what a brain actually is.

The case that was made by the parent is that since a computer can simulate a windmill, there is a distinct difference in the relative likelihood of the beliefs, not that either was actually true. Depending on the idea that the brain was a computer to prove that it could be simulated by a computer would be pretty much assuming the conclusion.
Show HN: Hierarchical Tagging with Rails 3 and Closure Trees
This is a really common symptom of adult ADD/ADHD. I highly recommend the book Driven to Distraction. It helped me make sense of a lot of aspects of my life that I just couldn't understand before.

http://www.amazon.com/Driven-Distraction-Recognizing-Attenti...
Hemingway is another great example of an author who used "simple" language. As a side note, Mark Twain’s “Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling” is a good read/[1]

[1] http://christopherwoodall.com/blog/?x=entry:entry101221-0220...
You also need to get the PIN that the specific user is using in addition to the access code from the token. You can use it without a PIN but that is reducing it to a single factor auth solution.
Yeah, only the username. Still, that seems like a pretty hard thing to blind guess at in most attack scenarios if you can't get it through the cifs connect. My reading is that you couldn't brute force it, you'd have one chance to set up the iframe with the cookie file in it which needs the username, or at least just one chance per clickjacked drag action that the user executes for you.

If it's a targeted attack I suppose you have a better shot, are most home windows user names set to the user's full name like "John Doe"?
I don't know, but Microsoft doesn't care anyway (or so they say), according to http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217116/Microsoft_dow... .

But I do hope that he told Microsoft before the world.
That's my thinking; it seems like it'd be most relevant in a targeted attack. Presumably there aren't so many patterns of usernames that you'd run out of chances to get one.

It's clever! I don't want to take anything away from it, except that I think it's been written up somewhat breathlessly.

Grossman probably has a good point that most applications aren't even superficially protected against clickjacking, and so this isn't going to be a common attack any time soon.
I purchased a year subscription to RescueTime but now think it was a total waste of money and configuration. It is a minor curiosity to see where I spend my time, but gimmicks to keep me from doing things I am otherwise inclined to do (like spending an hour or so on HN a day), are not good long-term solutions -- often ultimately creating a backlash as they are perceived as solutions.

For example, I know someone who created a weight-losing app in which you bid against yourself to meet certain goals for losing weight. It is sort of a perverse incentive and it is much better to encourage healthy habits (e.g. exercising, eating better) than try to stop people from doing things that they have an inclination to do. As an example, it is better to give someone who only knows McDonalds a good burger so that they go out of their way to eat a good burger (presumably less frequently) rather than creating a system that gives them a minor electric shock every time they show up at McDonalds.

I suppose you could make a case for RescueTime on the basis of monitoring your employees, but I'm also generally opposed to this also. You should basically only hire employees that want to do their job, rather than hiring people or tools to monitor and "enforce" productivity.

Which is to say, peak productivity comes from within and from being engaged in the project one is doing, rather than any quantity of external stimuli. I stopped perceiving a need for RescueTime as soon as I left behind crappy consulting gigs and started doing things I enjoyed again.
I know we don't say "!HN" around here any more, but I'm bringin' it back!

!HN
Almost all DDL is transactional in PostgreSQL, so the usual equivalent to the above would be:

begin;
alter table current rename to current_old;
alter table current_new rename to current;
commit;

Transaction-safe DDL is a very handy thing indeed.
That's a good point. I believe the patents on the NES Lockout chip expired recently and hence the flood of NES/Famicom hardware clones in recent years.
c'mon thats not fair. Sure they havn't delivered on the speed front ..but they overcome it with multicore tech, which in the end means the same thing to the users.
Bad link - it's to the blog, and what's on top will change as more things are posted. Here's a perma-link:

http://thestartuptoolkit.com/blog/How_Ill_manage_my_next_fou...

Having said that, it's an interesting read. Thanks.
I'm a big fan of org-mode but mostly because emacs is great and it is useful for more than just todo lists. I end up using org-mode to organize lots of different things. It is great.
A lot of this advice is not very good, or at best is misleading.

1) Turning "enable_seqscan" off is almost never a good idea. If Postgres isn't using an index that you think it should, you should figure out the underlying reason why. This would be akin to killing a fly with a sledgehammer.

2) The main thing that is going to impact whether a given index is in memory is how often that index is used, not it's size. The advice about reducing the size of indexes is true (in that a smaller index uses less memory, which is always good), but if you have 10 indexes and you only actively use 1 of them, then those other 9 indexes aren't going be taking up much memory. The biggest issue is they are going to slow down your inserts.

3) Manually vacuuming isn't really necessary for newer versions of Postgres (>8.3 I believe, where autovaccum is enabled by default). There are times when you do need to VACCUM, but probably not that often in standard usage.

Here is some simple practice advice for postgres users:

1) If you are using an older version of Postgres, upgrade to Postres 9. It has a lot of huge improvements over previous versions.

2) Purchase & read Greg Smith's PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance (as mentioned previously by another poster). This book is phenomenal.
Would it be possible for you to try ShedSkin on it?
Microsoft’s Revenue From Android Is More 5 Times That From Windows Phone
Well done, Sacca!

I loved the "lose your baggage" visualization, and the importance of full attention.

OMG, and I never thought of email as just "running defense," but that's so true.
Ask HN: A list of server optimizations and setup tricks/tips?
I've been seeing a bunch of tips recently about stuff like patching Ruby to increase startup times and PostgreSQL tips and tricks, so I was wondering if anyone has just a complete list of compiled tricks to run the most efficient possible server for web apps?<p>It'd be a great resource for many, I am sure!<p>Thanks.
I think the Linksys WRT54G is the greatest example of that.

Initially popular because they could run linux, I've seen countless friends and family buy the later locked down versions because it looks like the one that their tech savy friend has.
It's also available for free on PBS.org:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html
Interact with git from python
It took AdGrok about a week to get through everything, too -- we have 20-odd gems, though.

Don't underestimate how long the upgrade will take! It's not just an afternoon...
This is truly inspiring
The guy who started bitcoin, Satoshi, is said to have mined >1.5 million; back when difficulty was ~1.
That is true, but we don't have something like this peep open style, with a nice mac feel to it. Or am I missing one? I like this polished style instead of a fully integrated version in emacs.
Actually I admire the foresight of the folks who were using "lifehack" or "gizmodo" for their passwords on those particular sites, rather than giving up one of their high-security passwords to the apparently-butterfingered hands of the clowns at Gawker media. If someone guesses my gizmodo password then the worst they can do is to comment as me on gizmodo.

If dumb sites want passwords for dumb reasons, they gotta expect to get dumb passwords. I applied for a job with ACertainBigCompany the other day, and it not only forced me to create an account with a password in order to submit my job application, but also told me my regular password wasn't secure enough. Screw you, job application site, I'm almost certainly only going to use you once!
Sadly the metaphor doesn't hold. I heard somewhere that something like 19 petaflops is roughly equivalent of the processing power required. I don't recall exactly from whose arse that number managed egress but I suspect it's more on the mark. Obviously 1e15 transistors is not going to give you that.

A transistor makes a bad neuron. Neurons have complex behaviour in and of themselves, and maintain various kinds of state that persist after action potentials (i.e. after firing.) Transistors don't do that individually, so the analogy is quite bogus. Not only that, but connections between (synapses) are not as trivial as a simple wire and even engage in two-way communications. Considering each neuron may have multiple inbound and outbound connections, sometimes over (relatively) vast distances, counting the neurons alone is inaccurate. And I haven't even gotten to diffuse signals. There's a lot of overhead.
Shakespeare really is the king. His vocabulary was unexceptional, his stories were copied from others and, still, yet his masterpieces are immortal.

That teaches us that we don't need either exceptional tools or ideas to succeed.
I've been meaning to get around to playing with Python/PL and Postgres for a little while now