skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
George Soros shorted $10 billion worth of British Pound and then made $1 billion in a single day. I don't know what would have happened if things had gone the other way but I think he was mostly-in, if not all-in.
>Gold is intrinsically similarly useless as bitcoin.

That is incorrect on many levels. Gold has applications in MANY things. I bet the device you used to type out that comment has a bit of gold in it.

The comparison to BitCoin and paper money makes more sense, but it doesn't. This is because BitCoin has no one backing it. If the dollar drops, well the US is backing it; and they will be forced to deal with the consequences. If someone pulls the rug out on BitCoin- might never happen, but who knows- then no one is responsible. BitCoin is a fun game, and that is all it should be. Such rapid deflation will not go on forever.
No, he's saying just because they correlate doesn't mean they cause one another (in either direction) at all. But the articles claims otherwise.
You want to add a task?

task add "this is the task description"
There is an excellent tutorial available on youtube:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-abs0s8uis
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuiSbMS0_5g
Here you have: Betting $136k on one roulette spin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jBbE7neKT8
> If someone pulls the rug out on BitCoin- might never happen, but who knows- then no one is responsible.

How might someone go about doing this?
Andrew Carnegie would respectfully disagree with your first tenant:

"Put all of your eggs in one basket -- and watch that basket!"
A society where people regard rules as general guidelines is a lot healthier for its neighbors and citizens alike than a society where laws and rules are enforced blindly and swiftly.

Very, very bad advice.

A society (like our own) where everyone is in violation of the law at all times is a society where the authorities can go after anyone, at any time, for any reason and make something stick. It's called "selective enforcement".
One of my first questions was whether some people with long commutes had them because they were 'B' or 'C' candidates with limited career options. If that's the cause of some of the long commutes, it'd explain many of the other factors nicely.
South Tyneside Council takes Twitter to court in US
PageRank is an abomination (mathematically)
SHOUTING is a good way to get karma under the new system. It's rare for people to downvote, so comments that scream LOOK AT ME will get lots of upvotes.

Just as long as you don't overdo it, or say anything too controversial.
Here's one that went the other way: Nick Leeson had been accumulating losses from unauthorized bad trades. He attempted to cover his losses with a massive wager that the Tokyo stock market would not move overnight. Alas, the Kobe earthquake hit him!

The beginning of the end occurred on 16 January 1995, when Leeson placed a short straddle in the Singapore and Tokyo stock exchanges, essentially betting that the Japanese stock market would not move significantly overnight. However, the Kobe earthquake hit early in the morning on 17 January, sending Asian markets, and Leeson's trading positions, into a tailspin. Leeson attempted to recoup his losses by making a series of increasingly risky new trades (using a Long-Long Future Arbitrage), this time betting that the Nikkei Stock Average would make a rapid recovery. However, the recovery failed to materialize.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson
Can this just be an option in our personal settings so that everyone can either have the scores shown or not based on their preference?
1) Drop me a line if you need a biz card ;)
2) Moo.com
My thought (with no research done) is, Mac malware is 90% phishing/user tricking, 9.99% Word macros and 0.01% possibly real (it can happen, it just so rarely does, and it can be something unix-wide). Windows is 70% user tricking, 25% because (nearly?) everything is run with admin privileges, and 5% zero-day/could attack an unprivileged account.

I'd like to know where I'm wrong so I can comfortably tell people this.
Chameleon magnets: Ability to switch magnets 'on' or 'off'
Are you willing and able to offer someone INCREDIBALE rewards? Just what would those be? Or can you merely just make empty promises? What makes you smarter, better, more awesome than the many other dudes out there who think they can take down Facebook, iTunes, and Amazon? I'm assuming Google is in your cross hairs too. I trust that you will work hard - but so will a LOT of your competitors. What makes you different?
I love the idea of lower power ARM devices, but the first thing my mind goes to is visualization. What are the implications?

VirtualBox has been a boon for me for virtual server environment testing.
> Such rapid inflation will not go on forever.

Isn't it deflation if you can buy more with the same amount of the currency?
Quick anecdote:
About ten years ago I ran a prominent AOL hacking website called AOL-Files.com. AOL employees had admin rights tied to their screen names and the ones with the highest levels of access had to enter a SecurID token after they entered their normal account password. Since we were always trying to outdo each other, these high-level employees became a popular hacking targets.

Getting an employee's password and SecurID token was very difficult, as you can imagine. Most phishing attempts failed, but every now and then we found an employee who would enter their password and SecureID pin into a bogus website, which we then had forwarded to us so we could immediately log onto their screen name before the pin changed.

The most notable hack was when BMB, my co-founder, gained access to an account with keyword admin privileges. What this meant is that he could direct any keyword to any destination. He chose to redirect keyword "Welcome", which every AOL member is sent to when they sign on, to our website, aol-files.com. For a period of about half an hour, every single person who signed onto AOL was redirected to our AOL hacking website. We received over 100K hits in 30 minutes.

I've got an archive of AOL-Files up on my blog [1], which has lots more information about this hack and many others. Ah, memories...

[1] http://www.mattmazur.com/archive/aol-files.html
Interesting to see large amounts of transactions happen exactly on the hour (or sometimes half-hour). What's up with that?
Surely those are just standard depth-maps as used every day in VFX for compositing? Each pixel has a z-depth as to how far it is from the camera, and using standard compositing software (Nuke) you can blur just a slice (depth-wise) of the image based on the z ranges?
I don't mean to be too harsh on a well-intended project, but the startup genome reminds me of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

http://www.gasresources.net/Cargo%20Cult%20Science%20-%20by%...

There's a reason why scientists use controlled studies to disentangle causal effects from mere correlation. I'm sure there is some value in the startup genome for people with the right mental framework, but I would be careful about interpreting the data as "guidelines for success".
I think that whether you decide to show the comment scores immediately or not, you should should show them after some delay.

Judging from the replies to your comment, pg, at least some people read old threads. I know I do. I find helpful advice and information from them all the time. I think that people reading these threads should be able to get the benefit of seeing the scores.

The arguments against showing comment scores are almost exclusively about the thread quality. If the scores aren't shown until it's too late to comment, there isn't going to be any noticeable impact.

If I haven't overlooked anything significant here, you wouldn't be hurting any aspect of the site, but you'd be helping some people get more out of it.
While I'm not generally in favor of color coding (I'm colorblind) I have to agree with this variant. It gives the benefit of being able to see highly valued comments for the quick skimmer, while still avoiding or at least blunting the hypersensitivity to comment scores that encourages the worst behavior.
Actually quite easily. If your nation bans the trading of bitcoins for the official state currency, then you have a problem. Regardless of the fact that bitcoins can be transferred w/o outside observation is irrelevant if you can't purchase or trade for goods and services. And at that point, you're either black market, or you're fucked.
Hacked some python script together for parsing this and generated some HTML file with the data out of it.
Still not sure when to change the frame, the whole thing is of by some pixels.
Online Personalization Creates Echo Chamber to Affirm Biases
>If the dollar drops, well the US is backing it; and they will be forced to deal with the consequences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation

Currencies made by governments routinely lose >99% of value in few weeks. How this "backing" helps if you lose everything? In my country it happened 15-20 years ago.

Also even US dollar drops every year.
Should i post it, not sure about the legal component. I'm from germany so reverse engineering is allowed in some cases, not sure if this is covered here.

So here is the parser script. The example.html is very messy sorry for that.
https://gist.github.com/997861
I'd wager it's going to be similar to current levels. The past few Apple refreshes didn't change battery much (Macbook Pro actually dropped in battery life.)

Once battery is good enough, weight optimization is the next step. I bet these will be beyond ultra light.
Inscribed on two statues outside the NYC Appellate Courthouse:
http://i.imgur.com/81Lhp.jpg /
http://i.imgur.com/Bd8IY.jpg

"Every law not based on wisdom is a menace to the state" /
"We must not use force till just laws are defied"
BitCoin doesn't promise any returns, and doesn't distribute anything to new people who sign up. It is only a Ponzi scheme if the real world's economy is a Ponzi scheme. I don't know if it is.
Actually Luigi, you're missing the best and most fundamental rule:

3. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns
Microsoft & Linux cleaning agents
Ask HN: Need design help?  -  Looking for remote design jobs
Hey guys!

If you are a code ninja but not so much designing, I'd like to help you.

im willing to take and work on a couple user interface or branding projects as a freelance or even work exclusively with a startup remotely.

You can see some snapshots of my previews works here: http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia

And if you are interested, drop me a line at nico@nico.im

Cheers,
Nico.
I'm not that intelligent, but a few folks on the BC forums and other places have brought up some great points:

1. Government shutdown

2. BitCoins P2P network is very vulnerable to denial of service attacks; ones that actually cost money!

3. Public Node can be tracked; no more anonymity.

4. Technical merits of the crypto implementation have not been fully tested; is there a possible flaw?

5. Social engineering and one-time inflation.

6. Unreliable and opaque banking organizations; no one is backing it.

There are many more, and they could all be fixed if bit coin was a centralized currency system, but it is not. It is too soon to say "BitCoin is ridiculous and will never work", but someone with a motive and means can definitely make a miners life hell.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=69178

Here are some things BC has going for it though!

1. Distributed with no single point of failure.

2. No "mint"; could be a bad thing.

3. No individual company can be arrested and shut down.

4. "Anonymity"
http://www.dribbble.com/nicogarcia
Then maybe a comment should get a single star if it gets a moderate share (5%) of the total points, or at least 5 pts, whichever is higher. Zero starts would be the default.
> Please make it possible to use milli- and microbitcoins as soon as possible

Bitcoin supports transactions as small as 0.00000001 (1e-8).
Agreed. I usually am able to churn out a blog post or two and do coding on pet projects.
Ren Ng, a former student of Marc Levoy's (at Stanford), started the company. Ng was widely believed to be one of the rising superstars in computer graphics/computational imaging when he decided to leave academia and start Refocus Imaging.

The company seems to be doing well, and recently changed names to Lytro in order to not be pigeonholed into refocusing applications only.
U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse
I also agree with the article but FourSquare seems to me more like a counterexample rather than the best example. Its utility is arguable even after the network effects, let alone without them.
Exactly. With my current gig, I have a 60 minutes train commute (Paris has relatively good public transportation, apart from the strikes ;) ). This allows me to read a lot of books.

I have a hard time reading at home, with so many distractions (computer/internet being the main one). If I were to reduce my commute, I fear I wouldn't read as much.

Maybe I'm just rationalizing my long commute, though. I should look into living closer to work, and deliberately blocking distraction-free time for reading at home, on a comfortable couch. But it would cost me 700€/month more than my current arrangement, and I don't know where my next gig will be located.
The Caltrain ride does go incredibly fast. Muni is a totally different story.
Sneak Peak at the first blog to become a comic book
Let's be clear that this is Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party. His title is now "political evangelist". It's not surprising that he's in favour of a currency that is free from government control.

(Not that I disagree with him in general, I just thought this is something to take into account reading this article)
There's nothing more dangerous than a confidant gambler. Taking one high risk may wipe you out or make you rich, but taking a series of high risks will almost certainly wipe you out. His past success has nothing to do with this wager he's making now. It's like playing russian roulette 10 times in a row.
Actually, while the Bitcoin system itself does not arbitrarily distribute any money to new clients, there does exist a Bitcoin Faucet[1] to help newcomers try the system out, allowing various people to acquire a few free cBTC once.

[1] http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
If you think about it isn't the success of YC and other venture firms predicated upon doing something roughly the same?
"They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver"
Corrected. Sorry about that.
Yes, Foursquare would be a "social" idea in my mind. However, Dennis Crowley has had an exit previously, so I think it makes social ideas easier for him to pursue. I think social ideas with network effects are very difficult to succeed with when you're a first time entrepreneur with no track record.
I predict that the dollar has at least a thousandfold increase to go in the coming few years. Therefore I have shown that the dollar is a Ponzi scheme?
The basket many people are holding all their eggs in, is the USD. That has depreciated significantly in the last few years, with a very good chance that it'll continue to do so.

My home currency isn't the dollar but my app is priced in dollars and that sucks. I'd far prefer to have Euro earnings and earn a few bitcoins a month as a speculative investment.
Okay, here is one:

You sign up with the company. You give them a bunch of different categories of budget, and whether or not its a hard budget that you can't go over or a soft budget that can.

They send you a pack of credit/debit cards highlighting the category. Say a big red "Eating out" card, or a light blue "Groceries" card, etc.

All of these debit your bank account you've linked to the service (a la paypal). On the service you setup "sub accounts" (which I'll hereafter call accounts). These are debited when you use a card, but only up to the amount you've authorized for the month on hard accounts. If you have say "33.49" in luxuries, and you try to charge 36 bucks, it denies it and sends you a text, "You only have 33.49 left in luxuries". If you try to make a charge in a soft account (aka one you're okay going over, but that it takes out of a different budgets, say Groceries will take out of dinning out), the charge will go through, and take any of the excess amount out of the account specified as the overflow.

There would be a webapp and smartphone app that would show all these balances on all these accounts you set up so you could see up to the minute how much was left on the cards.

Basically, 21st century envelope budgeting with no book-keeping once you set the budgets, with cards that work on the web or in restaurants or at any store.

It would be useful to everyone who's bad at balancing checkbooks, or money management in general, from teens to just people who are too busy to really worry about it.

Please oh please make this system :OD
Didn't work for me. I tried almost a dozen stores that should be open, (it's almost 4PM GMT right now) and I couldn't find a single terminal to chat on. Good idea, but it needs some fine tuning.
The startup genome: insights into the nature of startups and entrepreneurs
To clarify, I was attempting to describe my impression -- through this example -- that pg won't simply "follow the masses", if he disagrees with them or decides he wants a different result. I did not mean my comment as "why didn't you address this sooner?".
This article is kind of a trainwreck, but I want to say that generally I'm glad when this kind of rhetoric is coming up. There are a few caveats though which I want to address first: The word "duty" is a human invention, and as such has only meaning in human societies. Depending on the particular society, it may in fact be your duty to do one or the other thing. Ironically the word "duty" and these conclusions imply exactly that which torrentfreak argues against: Blind obedience.

Now, as politely as possible, I want to point out that this is the kind of rhetoric useful for discourse with stupid people.
It's a somewhat good sign actually, because invariably stupid people have to be the target of discourse, maybe even the main target. Surprisingly I'm glad whenever I read about these kinds of arguments, because it means that the discussion has finally landed 'in the trenches', where the actual battle will be lost or won.
Similarly I was glad to hear people in the U.S starting to call healthcare a "right". The same caveats as before apply here. It's not a right unless society starts to define it as such inside its body of laws.

Philosophically I'm opposed to the direction in this article/blogpost, even though it may be necessary for stupid people. Really we have way too few laws and the only reason we are experiencing problems is exactly because of things torrentfreak tries to advocate for: Personal responsibility. Police officers acting out of hand, politicians not being of integrity...all this can be amended by laws that are fair and which are executed to the letter with zero room for personal interpretation.
Let's not go the religious route and start calling laws in general "open for interpretation". That'd just open a whole new can of horrors. We are not perfect, but laws are what holds us together. To say it as unequivocally as possible: The goal should be to have laws that can be followed as blindly as possible and which are executed as mercilessly as possible. Until then, let's not destroy the fabric of trust that our society is built upon and name the real problem. Imperfect laws, not laws in general.
LG Prada phone.

Plus, the border of the original Galaxy S is black, makes a significant difference. Not much room for innovation in a candy-bar touch screen, really.

I'd side with Samsung on the legal argument, as well. Apple is known as very secretive, Samsung announces products FAR ahead. Saying that Apple hasn't announced their products essentially penalizes Samsung for being open about what they have in the works, and announcing and showing their products early. If Apple plans to release the iphone5 this summer (and if history is an example, they do), wouldn't this be the same argument that Apple used?

I'm not a lawyer, but punishment based on pr schemes seems weird to me.
2. BitCoins P2P network is very vulnerable to denial of service attacks; ones that actually cost money!

The guys developing Bitcoin should take a look at the Phantom protocol then, which is supposedly very resilient agaisnt DDoS attacks.
Tip: botnet hunting is a perfect example of something you should not learn from a set of instructions on someones blog. To do so would be a criminal sacrifice of an opportunity for joyous discovery and autodidacticism.

It's called botnet hunting for a reason. The thrill of the chase.

I'm really glad that I was 13 before the era where you could just go and get detailed instructions on every possible piece of knowledge, and before there were places like stackexchange where people scramble to answer your every question in seconds. Instead I had to spend hours days and weeks doing this stuff from scratch, and without that, I doubt if I'd be paying the rent with computers right now.

Sorry if this sounds a bit condesending, I'm just trying to help people get the maximum utility from their time skulking around in virtual alleyways chasing criminals. Surely a noble aim? ;)
Ask HN: Best Java programming book for the Beginner
I am going to school in the fall and my intro to CS class will be teaching us Java. I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good beginners book, but not one of those "for dummies" books as I find them useless. Thanks!
If this new MacBook Air has a touch screen to run all the current iPad apps, while all OS X apps can simply re-compile to an x86/arm Universal app to run on it, it would definitely be my dream laptop.
Two words: plausible deniability.
"The iOS-like Mac OS X 7 Lion"?
The difference is that bureaucrats know how to work the system. They make sure that they aren't fired.

Haven't you ever noticed that management can stay the same at a company but it's the workers who are replaced (at least more frequently replaced)?
Cool stuff. Got a lot of insight from the code.
Creating custom HTML themes for Tumblr
Online Insurance Leads
Aussie student finds universe's 'missing mass'
Mac OS X Lion (Mac OS X version 10.7, don't ask me why they stated it as Mac OS X version 7) is getting some iOS features[1], hence the comparison.

[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/
Summary question for the author: http://bit.ly/aorWMz
Yeah but it's a pyramid scheme that makes you tons of money! /s
I wouldn't be surprised. The PM has his eyes set on the Arctic! And the U.S. be stealin our oil! ;p
This is HN! Post the darn thing!!
Securing a linux workstation