skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. It's the same as any Ponzi scheme. A promise to early adopters that they'll get rich; initial returns seem to prove out the promise; a giant wave of hype drives a steady stream of suckers into the deal; the existence of the hype is sufficient justification for further hyping stories, providing secondary waves of publicity; the creators quietly cash out their positions and retire to small Caribbean islands; eventually others start trying to cash out; this creates a reverse hype wave ("sell your bitcoins now before they are worthless!"); and wooosh, in a week bitcoins will indeed be worthless. If it were a real currency the creator might face jail time but in this case the creator may well get away with it. The creator can plausibly (notice I did not say truthfully) disclaim any knowledge of how the scheme would unfold.

It is interesting from a technical perspective but from a societal/historical point of view, not at all. This same cycle has played out infinite times in human history and will play out infinite times in the future. People always manage to convince themselves that "this time it's different".
Kidney failures are highly correlated. The 'backup' really isn't all that useful.

This is still a terrible idea.
At this point I'm convinced the Android UI is way better than the iOS UI. Forget how pretty it looks -- the presence of the back button alone elevates the UI in my opinion.
Re: Deflation

You're thinking too small. Think of holders of vast wealth, who in an inflationary system, are forced to invest their money and earn a significant return in order simply to maintain the value of their wealth. In a deflationary system, they are no longer at risk of losing wealth by letting their money sit in a bank, and so the least risky course of action for them is to simply hold on to their money. This means that the markets for things like angel investing and venture capital, among others, dry up as holders of significant wealth are no longer incentivized to invest their money.

An inflationary currency is what gives us our social mobility. Without it, holders of wealth don't make risky investments, meaning socially mobile entrepreneurs don't get funding to allow them to join higher social classes, wealthy investors no longer lose their shirts and move down the social ladder, and the society at large becomes entrenched in its current economic makeup.

I would not like to live in a society with deflationary monetary policy; money is meant to be spent and made to work for you, not hoarded.
The story on the page you link to does not even add up. The title says that he sold his kidney for an iPad2, but later it says "he returned home with a laptop and an iPhone". So what did he buy?
$3400 is only A LOT of money in a poor rural area if it is spent on local, non-traded goods: the consumption value of an iPad 2 is roughly the same in rural China and in NYC. If anything, it may be far lower in the poorer country due to lack of complementing infrastructure.

It actually makes me think that the iPad 2 part of the story may be entirely fictional: perhaps the kid made it up in order to seek publicity and attention.
I think the kernel of contributors with a good-faith interest in bitcoin is smaller than you think it is, but either way: if bitcoin is getting multiples of the attention that the hiring thread is, I think most reasonable HN people can agree that it's being overrepresented.

Lawyering over the site guidelines here isn't productive, since nobody (that I've seen) is arguing that bitcoin contravenes them directly.
Maybe we should not be surprised, but we should be as upset as any espionage attack merits.
Money is the most important thing in the world. You've just fallen prey to the mass media propaganda, that finance is boring and ppl should not pay attention.
Is 500k a Net or Gross value?
For dinner, yes. For lunch, I go to whatever's convenient and sounds tasty. Heck, I'll pay six bucks for a ham and cheese sandwich I could have just as easily brought from home, because I'm lazy. A grilled cheese sandwich I couldn't bring from home (well, not if I wanted it hot) so it's even better!

PS. I'm surprised the paleo-diet nuts haven't shown up in these grilled cheese threads yet...
Cell phone spy software 
A mobile telephone might be of the query and connection about the world
Sure, but you have to transfer your money somehow, and it will be easier to track, let alone a huge hassle for you...
Is Microsoft ditching .NET in favor of JS?
They're not stealing from the person who loaned them the password, but "theft" is definitely the right word.
I wouldn't adopt this business model without an insanely good team of programmers... or an insanely good team of lawyers. Maybe even both.
I would love to move to Mission Beach, San Diego! Best surfing place I've ever been to [1]. However, I assume, that there is more interesting stuff going on in Silicon Valley.

Right now, my plan for the summer is to couch surf around a bit in Palo Alto first. Then, if I find nice people I will offer them a small but fair monthly payment so I can use there kitchen and bathroom and hang up my hammok in the garden.
Has anyone tried this before? Any tips? Looking for a couch surfer?
I'd like to bring down my expense to the minimum of what is sustainable, healthy and productive.

Can you use the Stanford library and Wi-Fi for free? You can at MIT but here in Munich the Wi-Fi is locked for non-students/alumni. Also, according to Phd-comics, there is a much free food there as at MIT, right?

[1] I learned to surf whites with a long board there within a few hours. The best thing is, that you can walk instead of paddle because the water is so shallow. This way, you can surf all day long, even as a rookie. Also, board + wetsuit are $10 whereas in San Francisco I couldn't find anything cheaper than $25. In San Diego they even let you bring back the stuff any time you want, with free pick up later the day.
And this is bad because ... ??

Maybe the most socially advanced country in the world - Norway - has a government run website, showing every tax payer's income, savings and taxes.
It's like Haskell, with a slightly heavier syntax. And it's eager. And you can unsafePerformIO all over the place (but avoid doing so even in Ocaml).

(* Ocaml *) --Haskell
let foo = 42 foo = 42 -- top level declaration
type bar = data bar = -- type declaration

Also, records in Ocaml are a separate kind of type, more like C structs:

type bar = { x:int; (* defination *)
y:float;
}
bar.x (* "member" acces *)

"Message passing" and "Method calling" are strictly equivalent, at least when everything is synchronous.
Hah! While trying not to pick a fight with the comment I was replying to, I ended up picking another fight. Guess I can't win :)
the rest of this is just sort of the press being slow.

Or just the press doing exactly what Sequoia wants 'em to. "Sequoia invests in yet another startup doing mobile payments for restaurants" = boring story. "Sequouia invests in grilled cheese" = exciting story.

And here we are, we're part of it, helping out by talking about it. But I don't mind, as long as the grilled cheeses are good.
Watch ufc Streaming,megavideo
Watch ufc Streaming,megavideo
He is currently working behind the counter is a jewelry store, when he can not do to leave their disappointment with the romance to come through, when he sold an engagement ring is a happy couple.
I think Bitcoin is fascinating, even though I believe it won't succeed and is quite possibly a big pyramid scheme.
>Easy - I collect taxes at the point where physical goods are exchanged for bitcoins or are used to deliver products.

The state does this, but people already get around this by conducting cash transactions. Bitcoin creates another option for this.
I did say most. The number of students is not increasing at a rate that would mess put the per student in most parts of the US.

http://nces.ed.gov has a lot of the actual numbers as opposed to partisan websites on either side.

PS: I am still trying to find a good source for # of non-teaching staff to teaching staff ratios. I get the feeling it has changed heavily in the last 30 years.
I'm not disagreeing with Milton Friedman at all.

Read the sentence "Prices might even fall gradually as higher incomes led people to want to hold a large fraction of their wealth in the form of money." Inflation is a Money Supply / Money Demand phenomenon. In the long term, Money Demand tracks real output, but in the short term (such as the recession we're currently in) you can see major swings in demand that counteract what would normally be a quite inflationary money printing exercise.
Quite possible, but there's been a number of negative articles on Bitcoin as well, including this one.
But the GDP graph also doesn't look anything like that monetary supply graph.

Huh? [0]

[0] http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met_y=ny_gdp_...
Not sure, but it is home to Nashville, which has become the epicenter of recorded music in America.
To derail slightly, some of the comedy shows we ended up dealing with were "Party", "Hotel" and "Free". We didn't require that people used a specific hashtag for each show name (our audience wasn't savvy enough), but we wanted to make sure there were more indicators than just the name.

Some included the hashtag for the comedy festival itself (easy), key performer names, temporal or location cues and relevant other words that were strong indicators for the comedy show rather than its other meaning - I curated a list. The same approach'd work here.

Why are TV shows so badly named, though, that's the real question? Is it the drive towards simplicity I'm starting to see in a few different places? Or is it "grittier" if it's a show named after just a surname?
"The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling which allows anonymous spending in the campaign finance environment and its impact on elections may be one of the issues triggering this review by the EFF."

Sorry, but what does that have to do with it? The ruling is a 1A issue.
Exactly. Also, they may suffer under the "not build here" syndrom. I heard this is true for Google.
Definitely educate yourself, but don't forget what your core business and get distracted trying to do everything yourself. The services you hire - whether legal, artistic, development, accounting - can be force multipliers for you. Believe it or not there are attorneys out there who have experience as technologists and entrepreneurs that can keep you out of hot water. Find one that you can develop a good working relationship with and you won't get nickeled and dimed for every phone call (I take a lot of questions over the phone or email, many I can answer in a couple of minutes and don't charge for).

Just like any other business, there are those out there that want to drain the entire LVA in the first month. The good ones will help you develop that relationship that helps you maximize the value you get from your attorney.

Make sure you understand how the attorney bills for services. If you're not sure, ask - "do you charge for phone calls" - "do you bill actual time or six minute increments" - "will you discount your rate if I pay early?" Get those in writing in the retainer agreement.
For that matter it's similar to what TV stations do. Now a key difference is that TV usually pays for the original content, but from the consumer's point of view it's the same: find OC, slap your station logo in the corner, and surround it with advertising. All those clip shows like 'craziest police chases' and 'worst TV moments' rely on this model. Hell, there's whole channels that rely on it...I saw one recently called True TV or similar that seemed to consist of nothing but recycled news footage (mostly crime/emergency drama', library sound effects, and some 're-actors' - industry-linked professionals who sit there making pithy or occasionally witty comments in hopes of leaving whatever line of work they are in and becoming z-list celebrities instead.

This seems to be endemic in American screen culture, slightly less so in the print world. In contrast, European copyright has a side feature called 'moral rights' 'droite d'auteur' - even if you sell the copyright, the original author always retains the right to be identified as the author. There's no financial obligation associated with this for the copyright owner, but it ensures the creator remains associated with the work. My limited recall is that in commercial copyright infringement disputes, courts take a strict approach to evaluating lost profits, but in cases where someone has stripped out the identity of the creator there are often additional sanctions, since it's considered an attack upon the creator's ability to earn a living in the future by being identifiable from their existing work. I'd need time to dig up citations for that, so don't rely on it. but I do think the basic concept is a good one.
Not quite. Your wallet can have an arbitrary number of addresses. You can receive at one address, then send that balance out to a dozen different people using a dozen different sending addresses.
If you're clever about it, the markup on a grilled cheese sandwich can be enormous. Fifty cents worth of bread and cheese sells for eight bucks if you make it look fancy enough. Simple menu, assembly-line cheese-grilling, minimal cleaning and packaging, and simplified payment system and you can serve a lot of people in one lunch hour. As long as they can keep the customers rolling in (which is just a matter of (a) marketing and (b) making good grilled cheeses) it's a licence to print money.
I would love the split keyboard on my iPad too, oh and thumbs that are 1/4 the size of my current ones :)
api.jquery.com

This is the nicest documentation of any language I've ever used. The page loads, the cursor defaults to the search box, you type in what you are looking for and the browser hides searches that do not match and then you can use the arrow keys to go up and down then list to the one you want.

As for the problem trying to find "is" just type "is(" if you are looking for the method itself.
The limited inflation and eventual deflation aspects make it more interesting then tradictional alternate currencies. The world is not going to get flooded with an unlimited supply of bitcoins just because there's more demand.

How is gold not a ponzi scheme BTW? Ponzi schemes don't run for 3000 years.
It's the perfect HN politics thread, practically speaking.
Reminds me of "Everything I want to do is illegal." http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp...
Naw, the voting anti-spam algos on HN are pretty good. I have a slight vested interest, but I don't really want bitcoins to go up any more for a while, I'd rather it stabled out and people started building real apps with them. With the growth rate of the currency as it is, it is hard to justify building a BTC app when I could just contract out at $100/hr and then convert that into bitcoins.
The Valley want designers that can code? The Valley is confused..
Another sad thing is the way Chinese refuse to allow organs to be donated the normal way.

For various reasons (religion, traditions, mistrust of hospitals) China has virtually no willing organ donors. The numbers get made up from executed prisoners, or even less legitimate sources.
Poor child (to that extent) and has (probably) Internet and also the interest to own an iPad? A little strange to me.
Nuts? Some people who follow paleo style eating are definitely more... evangelist than others, but let's not tar all cavemen with the same brush.

I don't eat grilled cheese, but I never thought it was particularly healthy before reading up on nutrition and experimenting with a more paleolithic style of eating, and I certainly don't now; but neither are many other restaurant chains' signature offerings. You can eat them if you like, it's your own body after all.

(Aside: My impartiality to grilled cheese is possibly also because I'm British, and you can't get a decent cheese-and-beans toastie here for love nor money; it's nothing without the beans, I say. Nothing!)
Money supply needs to be a flow, instead of a stock, so that it can adapt efficiently to supply and demand and change with population and economic output.

The entire system could thrive on one bitcoin.

No, it couldn't. One bitcoin could not sustain a currency market, and a one-bitcoin market would value that bitcoin at highly variable prices.
> Low pay, odd/long hours, uncertain future, non-existant code base...

This sounds like programming in grad school!
This is gonna be fun.

He didn't make any claims about the national average, he was making a claim about his district.

False. He made a claim about the State:

The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student.

He said "schools", not "my schools". And I provided a MI-specific figure of $9,666 in my response, reproduced here: [1].

Even for a national number (which you fudged from your own link, heh)

False. I copied that from the linked government data [2]:

Current expenditures in constant 2007-08 dollars ... School Year 2006-07 ... 10,041

So, what do you have to say now?

Dummy.

You're a classy guy.

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/of-all-states-n...

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
Under-Monetized Facebook Dominates Display Ad Market
Personalization in commerce: An ethical bargain
Hi Adam, I'm Carl Lumma. I usually upvote your posts on Quora but I didn't upvote this one because of "scam" and also because you gave more reasons than necessary. "Built-in deflation" is alone the reason bitcoin cannot work as a currency (at least, not without a prevailing currency to act as a 'heat sink'). This can be remedied of course by the practice of holding bitcoins on deposit in exchange for demand receipts, which can then be printed and sold without restricting the withdrawal of deposits. And I suspect that, with continued popularity, institutions will start doing this.
Theft results in a perment loss. Tresspassing is probably much more apt.

But, from the perspective of the online services there is a simple real world analogy that actually happens. Having 10+ people live in the same rented appartment. The lanlord is being paid, but his costs are larger than a single renter due to an increased useage of the property. Still, netflix is probably not the proponents of this law it's all about the RIAA and MPAA who hate the idea of unlimited content on the cheap.
Don't Netflix servers block you from accessing content from different devices using same credentials simultaneously? That's pretty much a library situation.
It's not just the future of music, it's increasingly the future of a lot of artistic work, including software development. The ability to control your own fate, choose your own projects, and especially to earn closer to what you're worth is revolutionary and transformative.
I went through the exact same experience. In retrospect, it's awful that I came to expect to be treated so horribly about a utility. Comcast isn't perfect, but compared to TWC it's all unicorns and sunshine.
"Whether you agree with the laws or not, file sharing stuff you don't have a right to have a copy of is, in fact, illegal."

The thing is, if the courts allow for the honeypots then people who want to download things that they DO have the right to a copy of can also be fined. There are plenty of freely (free as in both beer and speech) available works that people download via bittorrent. If Titan Media has masqueraded their porn as something that is freely available would you feel the same way?
No, it would not be hard. As someone who operates the backend of a web search company[1] I can tell you that if you crawl a site you can tell when the original went up and when the copies went up. At Blekko, we let you go an view it.[2] Now if you add to that the understanding that Google has to index your page in order to serve page relevant content (no sense putting ads for nipple piercing on a Christian advocacy site for example), they know they are serving an advertisement on duplicated content. (where 'know' here is defined to be they have all the data they need, at the time of serving up the ad, to algorithmically identify duplicate content.) When I worked there I got a pretty thorough look at how that part of the business worked.

They could flag the account and they could cut them off (its in their terms of service they can cut you off for any reason, and have done so to people in the past) but they don't. Given recent updates in their search ranking [3] they clearly can "identify" sites where this check would be implemented, but they choose not to. I speculate they don't for the same reason Apple doesn't look too hard or deeply at the working conditions at FoxConn, willfull blindness is a wonderful thing.

[1] I run operations at http://blekko.com

[2] http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Ftheoatmeal.com%2F+/domaindup...

[3] http://jeffmills.com/2011/01/29/duplicate-content-is-now-a-p...
How exactly might it be "a big pyramid scheme"?
I work from home and love it. I'm not an introvert either, I just prefer the freedom. It's never gotten in the way of me advancing professionally.
INSTALLED_APPS = INSTALLED_APPS + (...) can be rewritten as:

INSTALLED_APPS += (...)

No?
Try implementing that!
You remove the author attributions and where it came from?
I don't think you exactly understand the definition of a Ponzi scheme. It might well be a bubble. But Ponzi? No.
0) Bitcoins were easiest to mine at the beginning => the creators & early adopters have a large number of bitcoins

1) New investors demanding a finite supply of bitcoins are increasing the exchange rate of bitcoins/dollar.

2) Early holders of large volumes of bitcoins can therefore cash in their bitcoins for a great deal of real money from new investors desiring to enter the market.

ergo, money shifts from new investors to the creators. (If the creators are smart enough to cash out. Which it seems they are, as Satoshi has disappeared. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto)
I think she is being very honest, and she's right on the money.

I think it's fair to point out she appears to be very attractive, and she may possibly be experiencing some of these benefits at a higher level than other women in the industry who may not be as blessed with such beauty.

Don't get me wrong, same happens for men in many cases, ie, a slob in an "All your base" t-shirt is looked at differently than a groomed man in a suit.

I just think this information should be factored into her post.
Simvastatin side effects
I think Bitcoin is fascinating

I do too, for the same reason that the tulip mania in the Dutch Golden Age

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_17/b3678084.htm

or the South Sea Bubble

http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes3.asp

are still fascinating. I've known about those failed investment strategies since childhood, but I still see fully grown human beings falling for strategies that are no more reasonable.
As a compromise I'd be willing to accept a moratorium on all bitcoin-related articles up to "Bitcoin Post Mortem", whenever that may be.

I have to admit, however, I can't resist commenting on the bitcoin articles when they show up. It's the classic "Someone is wrong on the internet!" reaction. Maybe those of us who aren't zany bitcoin-boosters need to make a pact to stop commenting on these articles and hopefully once robbed of controversy they'll go away.
Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Standardize Structured Search Data
By assets increasing in value I was referring to currency, not the cost of commodities.

In your story, I would attribute the $25 a loaf bread to the credit panic, not the resultant of a consumers increase in purchasing power -- such as the expected deflation in BitCoins.