skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Deflation. There's a creed in mainstream economics that deflation is bad, repeated here. "if your money is getting predictably more valuable, why would you want to spend it?" It's just false. Would you buy a computer today if you can buy a more powerful one by waiting until tomorrow? People do.

s/spend/invest/. I mean, why would anyone spend money on food? There's no storable value! I can dream up silly situations too, y'know.

Meanwhile, there's a bit more to modern economic theory than a single pithy quote. Like, when deflation actually happens, you get this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Historical_examples

And this is deflation over a short scale. Bitcoin will experience constant, effectively unstoppable deflation every day after 2020.

>Mainstreamers like the leaves-on-the-fire effect of inflation and also like to overlook the fact that stimlus impairs cyclic corrections

Got some numbers on that? I seem to recall basically no problems occurring during periods when inflation rates are 0-10%.

>and detracts from the role of money as a store of value.

Money isn't supposed to be a store of value; the object of money is to facilitate exchange, not to inhibit it. Investments are a store of value. If you want to store value, invest in the S&P 500.

>"When Something Goes Wrong, It Will Die." I found the logic here non-sequiter. Bitcoin will be tested but from what we know about it at the moment, it looks solid.

SHA256 will -never- be broken, that's for sure!

>If we had a period of high inflation, it's reasonable to expect people would trust finite-supply bitcoins over an unending supply of newly-minted, inflating notes.

The medium that is more easily exchanged will be exchanged. Ever wonder why e-gold never took off, even before governments tried to stop it?

Mind you, I really, really want Bitcoin to succeed. I don't like the Federal Reserve and it bothers me that the federal government has control over the money system. However, I'm not going to disregard science to make myself feel better.
Flip camera inventor turns to high-tech grilled cheese
Intel's Museum of Me finally gives your Facebook ego the attention it deserves
3 Types of Entrepreneurs: Compliers, Negotiators & Bulldozers
Agreed. Explicitly created vtables in C are much more flexible than implicit vtables provided by C++ for classes containing virtual functions.
It is easy to patch vtable functions by optimized implementations on the fly either on a per-class or per-object basis.
As someone says, one-time pads are impossible to decrypt without they key. But you can guess the key or use some other brute force mechanism.

My guess, SHA-256 will fall to a quantum computing algo in a few years.
To me, Bitcoin is more like the Jehovah's Witnesses. They believe that only 144,000 people will get into heaven, and that who gets in will be decided by who recruits the most people to the Jehovah's Witnesses, so once you have the Jehovah's Witnesses meme you have a super-strong incentive to spread it widely.
I've heard that unlike say steel, the majority of gold ever mined is still in circulation, and by circulation I mean locked vaults.
A few large organizations control the vast majority of it, and this is especially true since governments have not needed to hold gold for years.
The reason for the scarcity of gold, and it's value, is that this gold is not for sale.
One gold owning organization could make a great deal in other currencies by attacking the gold market, much as quantum fund used it's sterling holdings to attack the British currency with great success.

Lots of people seem to think gold is 'safer' than paper currencies, while it seems the same. Am I missing something important here?
Someone should really help this guy out with a design. Anything is better then this!
in the current system, it's unfair that government (through tax law and control of force) mandates that you use a form of money that doesn't function well as a store of value

The governors of the Federal Reserve are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress, and politicians, for all their numerous faults, understand that if the economy goes in the crapper it hurts their chances of getting re-elected. So there is democratic accountability, albeit democracy on a long fuse, that discourages the Fed from doing something stupid with the dollar.

Bitcoin’s early adopters, by contrast, are only special because they got on the bandwagon first. They don’t have any special talents that they are being rewarded for, and they aren’t accountable to anyone.
"For example, I didn't contact github because I knew one of the peole working there was in on the joke."

hmm, couldn't it be that some other customer service people would actually do their job about your issue? How do you know it would all be channeled through this one guy that was in on the joke? In any case if they did ignore your request, you could still do the whole crashing thing...
Have you got any more sources for the IBM part? I can't find much.
This is very nice. Any similar resources for Python documentation, etc...?
I've heard a variant where the tube is curved such that the other end is also at your location, so no giant telescope is needed to see the end that inserts the new ball (or pulls the string) from the end where you are waiting for the action to have the consequence you are looking for. This adds the complication of you being both observers despite the effect needing to travel a huge distance, so one observer has two relativistic frames of reference.
Such switch happened once.

It was found, that due to overflow, someone issued a lot of bitcoins to themselves in the block. During several hours was released a new client, which ignored flawed blockchain. When most people moved to a new client, the new blockchain overcame the exploited one.

Though it was when bitcoin wasn't popular.
Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class.

What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely manufacturing/labor costs?

From the article: "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."

Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be undertaken lightly.
SlingPlayer for Google TV beta opens [video] - SlashGear
Apple gains control of iCloud domain | Apple - CNET News
IBM released documentation after the PC had been cloned through "clean room" reverse engineering.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
Serial CEO Judy Estrin On Startups and Innovation
You come up with a name based on the observed behavior. I'm honestly amazed that they've made it as far as they have without decent naming conventions -- the use of good identifiers in your IDBs cuts reversing time way, way down.
"With the exception of Blizzard, PC gaming already died"

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/115/1152453p1.html
I'm wondering if this is an attempt to force down the bitcoin trading price - not necessarily by the author but possibly by the publicists.

Force down price, buy up bitcoins, profit. It's like playing at being a city trading firm.
Google attack: blaming China 'unacceptable'
Why not?

With apple you have to buy/carry/maintain two physical devices (ipad, notebook) and here you potentially can choose/switch within the same device. Way smarter and more environment friendly too.
HP announces in-app purchase for webOS, starts accepting TouchPad apps
1) Early adopters. I couldn't find a point here.

The point is that it's a scam. It's designed with enriching the people who made it up in mind. The only difference between this and my "Hey let's all use these pieces of paper that I printed as money" scheme is that these guys actually got it off the ground by allowing the first few adopters to also print their own money in significant quantities.

2) Deflation. There's a creed in mainstream economics that deflation is bad, repeated here. "if your money is getting predictably more valuable, why would you want to spend it?" It's just false. Would you buy a computer today if you can buy a more powerful one by waiting until tomorrow?

Computers, yes. Food, yes. Other stuff I actually need right now, yes. But I sure as hell am not gonna invest in your startup... or in any other business for that matter, so that's just wiped out half the economy. I'm also not gonna buy a house, I'm gonna rent... but who'd be dumb enough to be my landlord?

Really, the faith which some folks seem to have in this particular bubble-in-value-of-intrinsically-valueless-asset is scary.
This is kind of the opposite - a newly made homebrew game for an obsolete system - http://morphcat.de/superbatpuncher/

Super creative use within the limitaitons
I don't think it dumbed anything down. In general, comments weren't good before the buttons, and they aren't good after.

There are a few truly insightful or witty comments, just like there always was.
Home working: Why can't everyone telework?
ec2 developer for our erlang stack at hover (based in india), working from anywhere is fine
looking for someone to firstly start this off as a contract work, before a full-time offer ->
http://jobs.hasgeek.in/view/yqxo3

~B
How on earth would people legally sell netflix passwords in bulk anyway? This was something that needed to be addressed on the state level because no other laws were being broken in the process? But spam is okay?

The lobbyist force these industries have must be insanely powerful and expensive. Well, one more law that the people arresting and judging you are probably breaking themselves or their kids are.

I'm pretty sure the future of law enforcement is to make sure everyone is breaking some law at some point and they can basically arrest and prosecute you at any time, so you best obey, citizen.
Issues related to the expectation of privacy will depend on jurisdiction.

But copyright is interesting. Generally, copyright is held by the photographer. Who is the photographer in this case? The one who blindly operated the camera by remote control? Or the one who unknowingly pointed the camera to the subject? Perhaps there is no copyright here.
Talk to us again in 5 years when you've got some experience under your belt and you find out how woefully unprepared school has left you, despite your recent epiphany.

Then talk to us in 10 when you figure out that you could have learned all that same knowledge for free, in less time. Or that you could have been doing a job and someone would PAY you to learn it, and you'd learn even more in even less time.
As far as electronic signing goes, I've had clients use RightSignature. It's not free, but it's much more painless than PDF signatures.
That's a bit over dramatic. Just because the RIAA sponsored or endorsed a bill doesn't mean its necessarily a bad thing.

Can you provide a reason why it's unreasonable for a company to want each person (or even household) who uses their service to have a separate subscription?

That being said, I haven't read the bill, and only know what the article says about it.
I don't see what justification there is for this being a law. It's simple enough to make it part of the Terms of Service, and then terminate the accounts of anyone who's logged in on more than 10 IP addresses at the same time.

It's fundamentally different from the old "theft of cable" laws where the service provider doesn't have full control over the signal/content.
The Architect of Companies; The Entrepreneur
It's not just an opinion, blocking your event loop will halt the world in nodejs.

Now give me your address, please.
I disagree. We live in an isolated world where noone shares anything, and as a result ppl feel lonely.

This sorta stuff needs to be discussed
Atlantic Global Review: Integrating Project Management with CRM
There is such "gold" - Ruthenium.

It's not valued above industrial value.
The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS
As someone says, one-time pads are impossible to decrypt without they key. But you can guess the key or use some other brute force mechanism.

Actually, you can't even reliably brute force a one time pad. The key is always the same length as the message. All plausible messages of length N are equally valid solutions for a brute forcing algorithm.
Website, Email and Social Media for E-Commerce and Online Customer Service
Yes. This is completely addressable using technology. No need to turn people into criminals. Why can't they just prevent any one account from viewing more than N videos simultaneously? Could make N 1 by default, and then charge people for family packs where N is higher than 1.
Also worth taking a look at: http://james.padolsey.com/jquery/

It lets you quickly view how a particular jQuery function/method works.
Using criminal law to deal with it seems like a fairly over-the-top, dramatic step to take. It's not necessarily unreasonable for a company to want each person to have a separate subscription, and they can even mandate it in their terms of service, and take action to terminate the accounts of people violating it. But criminal prosecutions for sharing accounts?
> Along with perfect visual and coding skills, "The Valley" wants designers in-house and under control. If companies want to hire talent, they need to be more willing to hire remotely.

This is a brash condemnation. In my experience startups are just as willing to hire remote as any other business, with the possible exception of those who have no local talent at all.

> Interface design can be done from anywhere on the globe. It's silly to restrict your hires only to locals or those desperate enough to relocate.

For the past 3 years, I've worked for possibly the most distributed startup in history. At one point I think we were averaging something like 1.8 people per country, with the largest time zone gap being 8 hours between Sydney and Palo Alto. I've telecommuted for several other jobs and a ton of contract work as well.

I know how to be effective remotely, and certainly running a startup this way gives you a hiring advantage, but it's not without significant downsides. The idea that it's about hovering or butts-in-seats is a strawman to the extreme; that type of attitude is a sign of failing before you started anyway.

The reason to all be together is that the collaboration is better. You will share ideas better, iterate faster, experience less friction in communication, and feed directly off the communal energy. You can take steps to narrow the gap with technology, but even a full-time video conference link is not the same as physical presence. I don't blame any founder for keeping everyone in one place.
Can anybody tell me what's the matter with Xen? I believe that a few years ago there was a lot of talking about Xen. Then all of that seemed to die out, and it seemed that the kernel developers instead developed KVM because it's simpler than Xen, and so the Xen developers had to re-release patches for every kernel release. What's the current status of Xen? How widely is it used? How widely is KVM used? Why is it being integrated into Linux now even though KVM already exists?
While this doesn't necessarily make the bill unreasonable, I'd say there are much better market approaches.

For example, Netflix limits the number of devices you can connect, logs what you watched, and uses your watching habits for recommendations. So, if I were to share my account with others, they'd see everything I watched and anything they watch would alter my recommendations. For those reasons alone, I keep my Netflix account to myself.
That's not what the law is meant to prevent. It's meant to prevent me from sharing my online service (Netflix) account with my mother. It's meant to persuade me to tell my mother to get her own account. Clearly these people don't love their mothers.
This is pretty exciting, seeing as how it's the first major UI rethink for Windows since Win95.

I like the idea of simplification of the UI for the average mom and pop user. For them this will probably be a great fit with the large buttons and having one application that fills up the whole window. It almost allows people to think more abstractly, in terms of activities rather than apps for a lot of things (i.e. 'what do you want to do' vs. 'how do you want to do it').

I do not like the idea of having to switch back and forth between the legacy Windows Shell and this new shell. That, in my opinion, is what I would call as a developer, a 'lazy implementation' - probably easier to implement for the developers, but not the right way when it comes down to usability. I hope they are planning some kind of tighter integration that will make that more seamless...
i dont get why the RIAA is worried, netflix should be MPAA's doing...
Google said +1 won't influence search ratings. This is just a mark for your friends.
I've heard that unlike say steel, the majority of gold ever mined is still in circulation, and by circulation I mean locked vaults

Quite possible.

A few large organizations control the vast majority of it, and this is especially true since governments have not needed to hold gold for years

Say what? A few large organizations, who are not governments, hold the vast majority of the world's gold? Are we into conspiracy-theory talk here?

Lots of people seem to think gold is 'safer' than paper currencies, while it seems the same

"Safe" depends on what you mean. For instance, you could say "US dollars have a 99% chance of retaining at least 80% of their value in five years, and a 99.9% chance of retaining at least 10% of their value in five years. Gold has only a 80% chance of retaining at least 80% of its value in five years, but a much higher 99.999% chance of retaining at least 10% of its value in five years".

Gold gives you much more volatility in the short term, but acts as a hedge against the collapse of any particular currency.

I wouldn't buy it though. I'd buy land (with houses on it), which acts as a hedge and pays you income.
Money supply is increased by purchasing bonds, reducing the discount rate, or lowering the required reserve ratio.
Great article. Not really hacker news-worthy though, is it?
It's a good article, to be sure.

Links to the threads would be nice.

The speculation is what did it in for me.

You say:

At the risk of constructing strawmen, I would like to now present my perception of the two most popularly voiced plans.

At which point I was expecting to read an unbiased over view of the popular proposals from the community and perhaps some links to the discussion threads.

And after presenting the "decentralized" version and colouring it with an analogy to chinese black markets, you say:

Is this a transition? Yes. Is it disruptive? Definitely yes. It is certainly not what you want a currency you’re using for every day transactions to be doing.

Which essentially tells me you only presented the decentralized argument to me so that you could burn it down for all to see.

I won't go so far to argue whether your position is wrong.

As a reader I just felt the article to be another Internet soap box. Links would be nice and saving the speculation until the end would have helped, IMO.
This is deflation caused by central bank (due to contraction of credit).

There was a deflation during all 19th century, when gold were money, without any ill consequence. And it was a century of growth due to industrial revolution.
Nicole Sullivan talks about how to manage massive CSS code bases and what to watch out for. She also was involved in facebook's effort to reduce response times.
Florida Free Online Newspapers
> IANA cryptography expert. Is this feasible in the way the author predicts? Could SHA256 be cracked quickly, a la MD5? My gut is that it won't be able to, but I can't back up my argument.

IANA cryptography expert either, but my understanding is that the biggest threat to SHA is quantum computing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer
It seems like this in particular applies to most government-issued currencies as well (except that they have very good marketing and market share). Each currency itself has no intrinsic value and depends on "marketing" (reputation of the government minting it) and market share (number of places accepting it). If people lose faith that a government will do a good job managing its currency or even think that the government will disappear soon, the worth of the currency (in terms of what people will give you for it) will probably fall.
One fair non-structural criticism, a weak, temporary criticism and two things billed as criticisms that aren't.

Actually, all of Adam's criticisms deal with the supply and demand of currencies, and they are pretty strong and damning as a result. In sum, the supply of Bitcoins is finite (despite a growing population) and the demand for Bitcoins depends on (a) confidence in Bitcoins as a currency and (b) consumers' ability to convert between Bitcoins and fiat money with little friction.

(1) Adam's point is not the unfairness of early adoption, but that early adopters control all the rents. Today's miners will control currency as it appreciates, but after a point (say, the supply of mine-able Bitcoins is exhausted) there is zero reason to demand Bitcoins unless they supplant paper money (very, very unlikely).

(2) I'm weak on my deflation theory, but I don't think the computer-purchasing analogy is 100% right. Instead of buying the computer with paper money, consider buying the computer with gold bullions during the commodity boom. Why buy that Macbook Pro with x bullions today if you can buy it with x-y bullions tomorrow? Adam isn't arguing that "deflation is bad," but rather that the supply of Bitcoins as currency will dry up as their value appreciates.

(4) You can't hand-wave this away. Consumers have confidence in US dollars because the Federal Reserve and U.S. government can step in during a crisis and back people's assets. There is no similar guarantee for Bitcoins once something goes wrong.

(3) Why is convertibility not a systemic problem? Lack of convertibility falls out of all the previous points! Why accept bitcoins for cash if (a) they're not backed by a central authority, (b) almost no one else accepts them as money, or (c) they will be obscenely expensive once the supply dries up?

I can't believe Bitcoins have gotten this far. They're a currency accepted by almost no one as payment, guaranteed by no governing body, and artificially supplied as precious commodities without the benefits of said commodities (Bitcoin engagement ring? 24K Bitcoin watch?). They're a great theoretical exercise, but their real-world value will trend to $0 in the long run.

EDIT: barrkel gets to the point when he/she says "the value of money is a product of supply and demand, no matter whether fiat or specie." The fundamentals of Bitcoins are such that (a) supply will artificially dry up and (b) unlike precious metals/commodities, there will be little demand for Bitcoins aside from use as a currency (or a Ponzi scheme).
Great post. However, deciding whether the range of options you are considering to solve a problem is too narrow seems to be more easier in small business structures as a result of efficient interactions.
University didn't teach me which method is the best, but that other methods very often exist. And how to decide which one is the most interesting for my own need.
Should I buy t-shirts?
"No such exemption applies to Washington’s vast nonprofit sector, however, where long, unpaid internships are unavoidable if one wishes to make a career serving the public interest."

I would rewrite "serving the public interest" as "working there". Would HN readers assume that one can only serve the public interest by writing policy papers or lobbying for the cause of x/y/z? Also, the many associations here often pay fairly poor wages, but unpaid internships are anything but universal.
Looked interesting.. until I was greeted by a ridiculously long lead generation form.
In order for one person to be able to save (or invest), someone else has to be willing to borrow (or sell stock).
Top business ideas for entrepreneurs in 2011