skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think each of these arguments do not hold up. Most people have already discussed but I will summarize.

Severe Problem Number 1: Seeding Initial Wealth
This problem is similar to Gold Miners or anyone initially to an asset class. You already retracted your scam comment, so thanks. Remember, governments are currently seeding banks and itself with wealth through inflation. Its a different set of winners based upon market forces.

Severe Problem Number 2: Built in Deflation

The money supply is actually inflating (slowly). People will make educated, market based choices about how to act with their money once the currency settles down. That will likely be assigning higher value over time to Bitcoin. The Euro or Dollar have the opposite, and many would argue much worse problem: you don't want to hold them because the issuing government slowly saps value through effectively built in inflation.

Severe Problem Number 3: Lack of Convertibility
Try trading government currency in a collapse situation, you will encounter problems. Right now, Bitcoins are roughly as easy to convert as any other currency. Bitcoins are inheritly no more or less convertable except for the lack of current market makers (a good point you brought up).

Severe Problem Number 4: When Something Goes Wrong, It Will Die
Look at Zimbabwe to see an example of governmental currency collapse. Any currency can die. People used seashells at one point, they died. I'm not sure Lyra or Franks are worth anything today.

Bottom line: Yes, Bitcoin can fail (so can any other currency). It is earlier than other currencies in its lifecycle, so has a different set of risks. Is there speculation going on right now, almost surely. Bitcoins appeal to people because it is not government based, electronic, and low cost. Many of the problems you note are just different problems than existing currency, for better or worse.
If people have to pay for their own health care then obviously the rich are going to get better care in general. If you have public health care and kidney selling then presumably the government is buying kidneys for anybody who needs one.
Let me tell you a story about Sweden.

A few hundred years ago, they realised they would soon get low on trees suitable for critical parts of war ships. So they planted a lot of them. An early triumph of ecological resource awareness.

Those trees are ready about now, but won't be used for their original intent... :-)

Re nuclear waste -- it can always be made into a slurry pumped down into old oil wells. There is absolutely no connection to ground water, so it won't come back. (It is probably a bad idea, since there might be uses for it in a few decades.)

Quote I argue against: "who see technical progress as a kind of god given fact or as the natural direction humanity must take."

>>You are mistaking that as an argument against all future technical development.

It is really hard to read any other way than as a Luddite. In addition, I note that you made a claim -- but didn't present any other way of reading that sentence...

>>I disagree that pollution and energy use gets less with better economies and technology as a rule, even if there has been some progress as you mention

Go check some statistics for pollution for e.g. Northern Europe over the last 50-60 years. (Much less Mercury contaminants, waste water treatment, no low Ph rain, etc, etc.)

Less energy is used to create new units of GNP increase. Energy is used better. Some of that GNP is used to find alternative energy implementations.
Nice linkbait title. (That's getting really old around here lately.)

To correct it: "When Loss of Competition Stifles Innovation"

Your incentive to motivate would have been the same without competition as it is after your last competitor gives up. It's no different.
What do Bitcoins do? Nothing.

That's not true. Bitcoins can be securely transferred between accounts without the need for a centralized broker. That's not "nothing".
I work from home and have a great setup. I'm also a moderate introvert, but I end up going to work at cafes and outdoor space because I also love to be around the intangible energy of other people, even if I'm not saying a word to any of them. Plus, I sense the ability to add novelty to my environment helps trigger a certain bump in creativity.
It's easy to see what's wrong with invalid HTML.

What's wrong with valid HTML?
VCs Fund Webvan 2.0
You also need to pay good developers better than bad developers, and fire the worst developers, and have competition among companies for the best, and have some way of knowing who the best and worst developers are.

Imagine what the state of the software industry would be like if developers were hired like teachers! Anyone with an appropriate qualification would be given an office and told to write code. Every year their salary would go up. The codebase would get worse and worse, and everybody would complain about it but nobody would ever fix it.

Privatise the whole school system, equip children with generous vouchers, let schools compete for students. Throw in an accreditation scheme and a bunch of compulsory examinations upon graduation if you're concerned about quality. And if you must, throw in a government-run "backup" school just for any students who can't get accepted into any private school. I don't see any drawbacks of this plan.
> State lawmakers in country music's capital have passed a groundbreaking measure that would make it a crime to use a friend's login... The legislation was aimed at hackers and thieves who sell passwords in bulk

Haven't read the bill, but this makes it sound like they're punishing the people buying the passwords, not the ones selling the passwords.
Micropreneur Academy
Considering to join the Micropreneur Academy. Curious to hear from those who have gone through it. I have a mature software product (www.MaxScheduler.com), but crummy marketing. Wondering how much it would help someone in my position.
I leave the reason that this is among the funnier HN crypto comments ever as an exercise to the reader. And, of course it happened on a Bitcoin thread.
Already done by OP.
Mark Suster Comments on Peter Thiel’s “20 Under 20″ Education Program
I read something in a book about the history of England that's somewhat connected to this :

In England somewhere around the 18-19th century, members of parliament got no salary. The highest aspiration that you could have was to make enough money from other sources so that you could devote yourself to being a politician.

Now, some famous politician at the time recognized the fact that this implied that only people of considerable wealth could take part in the government, that this was a problem, and the law was eventually changed so that they would get a basic salary.

It sounds a lot like what I read in that article mentioned, where good internships are essentially impossible to get for people who can't afford to work for free for any extended period of time.
Apple Malware Cat and Mouse
Action and habit
Should freelancers have agents?
This came up on the remote freelancing hacker thread but it's a good question raised by ajpatel.

Well-known actors are in demand therefore it's in their interest to employ an agent to seek out the best work possible and the best rates and to maintain a steady workflow.

Well-known freelancers are in the same position - they can now pick and choose the projects they work on and managing their own workflow is kind of a hassle.
Recruitment agents exist for the good of hiring companies - but surely it would make sense for the freelancer to have their own agent who would take a small cut of earnings and place the freelancer with the best gigs possible.

Does any know if any such entity exists and if not surely it's a prime idea for a startup!
Agree on the ethics part. I am not sure anyone would be brave enough to come out and criticize a company they have invested in....
Is Apple ready to play cat and mouse with malware developers?
[Taking the default path of every other middle-class kid in search of a middle-class job] teaches you to better question everything, not to question for the sake of questioning, but for the sake of proving to yourself and others that what you’re doing, that what somebody else is doing, is really the way it should be done. It also gives you a much wider berth of existing theories and hypotheses that you can use to create new knowledge from.

It seems unlikely that there would be some kind of mass-market institution that teaches everyone to question authority, especially if so many authorities had gone through that institution. It seems much more likely that any institution that markets to 18- to 22-year-olds is going to market itself as totally rad and rebellious.

Here's what I think happened: I think the author of this post got older and wiser. That tends to happen to people, even if they participate in the extended adolescence of school. Granted, it happens a lot faster to people who drop and and have to pay bills and don't even have a meal plan. But it happens to nearly everyone.
Maybe our account is different, but my girlfriend and I have watched shows on two different devices simultaneously.

Maybe they limit it by IP? We were both at home.
Interesting...but I can't see using it for a desktop system. As a heavy user of a number of engineering and software development tools I just can't imagine how this is any good.

For example, I don't see using Solidworks or AutoCAD with my fingers. I also don't see using any CAD/EDA packages like Altium Desiger (electronics circuit design) with my thumbs. The same applies to firmware, software and web development tools (Keil compilers, Altera/Xilinx development tools, Dreamweaver, Komodo). For that matter, I can't even see using Photoshop or Illustrator that way. I could rattle off dozens and dozens of applications that would be seriously impaired by touch. It's cute and sexy, but it is the slowest and most cumbersome way to interact with a computer.

I don't even see using the Office suite like this.

An on-screen keyboard might be the thing to do today...but...and there's only one way to say it...they suck in a big way. Useless for anything non-trivial, even on a tablet. Typing on an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard is orders of magnitude more productive than poking at the screen.

Then there's the question of multiple screen behavior. All of our engineering workstations have a minimum of two large (24in or more) high-resolution monitors. A good number of them have three. There are engineering design applications (like Altium Designer) that use multi-screen environments very effectively to greatly enhance productivity. I need to know how this new UI will affect these scenarios.

In my not-so-humble opinion I have always thought that MS really needed to fix and enhance XP rather than what they've done with Vista and W7. As a power user there's so much in Vista/W7 that makes you say "really?". They've also just about ruined the Office suite. If you were an expert user of the prior generation of Office and had a code base of routines and tools they pretty much made you look like a complete newbie with the new UI and approach. Productivity with Office definitely took a big hit for most tasks for quite some time.

Despite criticism, Windows is a workhorse OS used across thousands of different industries. I really hope MS is very careful about not damaging this user base for the sake of being "trendy". Tablets are great fun, but I don't see doing my day-to-day work on tablets any time soon. Wrong UI.
I still hold a grudge against them for disabling short tags by default.

Who decided that "<?php echo $variable;?>" is better than "<?=$variable ?>". I think one of their main arguments was that it could conflict with XML / XHTML parsers, but the people who want to parse php files using XHTML parsers are probably in the minority.
The problem is that teaching isn't a meritocracy. We talk about how hard it is to evaluate coder skill, but it's infinitely easier than evaluating teacher skill

The interesting thing is that students know perfectly well who the good and bad teachers are. And really, the school principals should know this as well... and if they don't know then they could easily find out just by sitting in on classes and looking at the students' work. It's not really a big problem for a boss to know how well his individual employees are doing, bosses do that all the time.
Build mobile interactions for the physical world at Bump using JS/HTML5
poor John Gruber.
Looking for RubyGems 1.8.5 Breakage
>Most problems with the critiques of Bitcoin like those in the linked Quora post is that they are debunking a straw man - the idea that Bitcoin is intended as a universal replacement for all other currency systems. By those standards of course it will fail.

Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency. That means that it's supposed to be effectively the same thing as USD or the Euro. It's not supposed to replace any other currency, it just needs to be able to do everything that any other currency can(except pay taxes). The problem is that it doesn't do that right now, and I don't see any way of making it actually work. To actually be a useful currency, people need to be able use it on everything, otherwise it's just a proxy for a "real" currency with an added gambling element.

Right now, it's basically the same thing as paypal or Google Checkout-something that people use to buy things online. By that standard, it's not even decentralized anymore, because everyone gets their BTC from MtGox, and they have to keep logs of all their transactions.
You make a good point. I started to write what promised to be a lengthy reply, but I realized it came down to a simple characteristic--flexibility. Ultimately, what's needed is flexibility provided to the employee. Provide the means to work from home (VPN, etc.), to arrive/leave the office as needed, etc. Does the employer trust their employees to do what they need to get their work done?
The actual bill [0] modifies Tennessee Code 39-14-104 [1] (reproduced in the bill at "Under present law") in order to include "entertainment services" as a subset of "services".

Note that the bill does not make it illegal to share your password. It only makes it illegal to "avoid payment" or give services to "another not entitled" to them. Netflix TOS allow you to have up to six devices associated with your account, and to run simultaneous streams up to the number of discs in your plan [2] within your household [3]. This usage remains legal under the bill.

[0] http://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/billinfo/BillSummaryArchive....

[1] http://www.michie.com/tennessee/lpext.dll?f=templates&fn... and navigate to 39 then 14 then 104.

[2] http://www.netflix.com/FAQ?p_faqid=2902

[3] http://www.netflix.com/TermsOfUse#instant
The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales
zferral.com (http://zferral.com) custom referral programs for your website.
You don't appear to understand how Bitcoin works. Money does not shift from new investors to the creators of Bitcoin. I'm not quite sure what confusion of ideas lead you to believe this.
Irony: Does not work with JavaScript disabled.
Hey, a new idea! Toilet paper with QR codes on it :-)
apple is pro . yes they can
Mostly, I'm peeved that the oatmeal's stuff has been reposted somewhere called "funnyjunk".

The oatmeal is not funny.
Yes, this is the real problem. The core jQuery documentation is nicely organized by category, and if I can't find something by browsing I can find it by using a Google search of the site.

The plugins though are a mess. Any category I click on seems to have a huge list of options, some of which are great and some of which are sort of half finished and abandoned. Even if anyone could submit anything for display on the site, it might be nice to have an additional organizational layer on top that only shows a curated set of plugins. I just find something like http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/ easier to browse through. I think most of the organizational concepts between the sites are the same, but there just seems to be less cruft there.
Perhaps there is a business model here? Create a Tineye style crawler that digs the web for matching images and is smart enough to serve up DMCA notices for a small monthly fee to content makers. It will track compliance and put it all in a nice dashboard so creators don't get overwhelmed reining in the copy cats.
In the bay area this seems an increasingly irrelevant question (join a startup vs. big company), compared to grads deciding between joining and startup and starting a startup. I'd be curious to see more discussion on that pros/cons surrounding that decision for new grads.
Regarding your third point, the order book for the most popular Bitcoin exchange (Mt. Gox) is available [1]. Looking at the data, it seems there's actually quite a bit of liquidity bidding 7-10 USD and asking 10-13 USD per Bitcoin. It's only about 10,000 or 20,000 Bitcoin of depth on each side, so you can estimate the impact of buying or selling 15,000 USD worth of Bitcoin on the market. Of course, it might move less if you 1) consider using a dark pool of liquidity for a "large" trade, 2) add one or more limit orders to the order book (instead of using market orders), and 3) consider the fact that the order book gets "replenished" as trades come in.

[1] http://mtgox.com/code/data/getDepth.php
Very few people are buying WP7 phones at the moment (even though big manufacturers have put their weight behind it, think HTC, LG). What would make people buy Nokia phones with WP7? Its camera?

Two things:

1) Mango. The WP7 OS actually is probably better than Ice Cream Sandwich, and we'll see with iOS5, but certainly stonger than iOS4. The first rev of WP7 had tons of gaps. They closed pretty much all of them (except tethering) and added stuff others don't have.

2) Nokia still has some of the best phone designers in the world. It's just they had Symbian. Couple WP7/Mango with Nokia and you have fireworks.

This early in the game its dangerous to think you already won.
Blog Posts to Read for June 2, 2011
Ah, I forgot about that! I originally fixed that by installing a modified hildon desktop, but that's been incorporated in the community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU

EDIT: I also had to force the phone-ui to landscape mode so it wouldn't jump around on me.
I think what is needed is a (crowd-sourced) list of 'similar plugin' links, using metric such as ratings or number of downloads for ranking.

This works on the Chrome Extensions website, you quickly skip over the unmaintained plugins and the ones with no reviews. https://chrome.google.com/webstore?hl=en&category=ext
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 arrives on June 8 with Honeycomb 3.1
I think lots of people have underdeveloped phone skills these days, so aren't good at working at a distance. They don't know how to do a phone call well, wether it be pacing, tough issues, agendas or any of that. They especially don't deal well with understaters or the like.

I don't think most people handle those issues well face to face either. Most f2f meetings I've been in have been abysmal wastes of everyone's time.
So their unique value comes from private transactions...but there's only a finite supply of bitcoins? How many of these transactions can actually occur in 2013-2014, when every bitcoin has been mined and their value is skyrocketing?
I published a Ruby version here: http://programmingzen.com/2011/06/02/10-ruby-one-liners-to-i...
Memphis Heat- Travel To The Pacific Northwest - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
This wouldn't be entrapment even if law enforcement personnel conducted the string.
Once again, it all comes down to what you choose to study. Mathematics? Yes. Womyn's Studies? No.
But Hacker News is not coping the content, it is linking. You need to go to the creator's site to actually read the article. This example is if HN was coping the whole article and removing all author / source names and links.
Huh?

Public school STUDENTS get the short end of the stick. Public schools as institutions get rich funding streams, second only to Medicaid at the state level.

I'd suggest looking into the $7,500 per student figure as well. Usually when school people look for more money, they lowball that figure by excluding things like capital expenses, administrative expenses and busing.
The battery life is certainly an issue, but I find the UI just as fast as the equivalent Android. I also love the touchscreen because of the stylus.

You can prevent the orientation sensor from making things jump by forcing either portrait or landscape mode in the phone-ui application.

Most of those bugs in the apps have been fixed in the Community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU
> Part of the value is in their utility as an anonymous currency: try taxing the guy that's paid in Bitcoins.

Easy - I collect taxes at the point where physical goods are exchanged for bitcoins or are used to deliver products.

If you can't use bitcoins for food, housing, netaccess, or energy....
I'm of the mindset right now that me working for someone else should be considered a privilege by them. If they don't, it's not some place I want to be involved in. I'm not talking red carpet fawning all over me type of stuff, but at least an acknowledgement that I could be doing something else with my time (just like they could have hired someone else).
Red Hat used to not care about Xen, and now they still don't care. But as long as they don't deliberately break it, I guess RHEL 7 will inherit Xen support for free from upstream Linux.
Agreed, anything would be a step up from what they have now. Although I would imagine it's someone on their list of things to do.
Boston VC & Angel Investor of the Year Voting Now Open
I was (and still am) a bitcoin user during this period, it was managed relatively easily and quickly; major miners updated their clients and within a few hours, the competing blockchain had died off.

This would likely be even easier to accomplish today; as things currently stand, all mining pools and groups have a vested interest in maintaining the integrity of the blockchain.
> Email, text chat, even video chat just ain't the same as having a guy next to you that you can interrupt at a whim to discuss things with.

I suspect that the guy who is being interrupted "at a whim" would prefer to be working at home.
>> It is illegal for lobbyists to pay bribes.

In the US the bribes are in the form of campaign contributions. No money comes from the lobbyist, but if the legislator performs, contributions appear from various PACs (Political Action Committee) and corporations. With millions flowing to individual cmpaign committees, I despair that meaningful reform is impossible.

Much legislation is written by lobbyists (or their clients) because the issues are too complex for legislators or their staffs to understand. Is anyone surprised that some clause favoring the client or inductry is burried in the hundreds of pages?
Ask HN: Why did AirBnB raise $100million?
So by now we've all seen the news that AirBnB has a valuation over a billion dollars, raising $100 million for a website connecting people who want to rent out their space and those that are looking for it.

OK, so they are running a market-place web-site. They hold no inventory, do no physical distribution, and if they ate their own dog food they would have very little overhead.

Now, I know they probably have (plans for) a large marketing team, a dedicated PR team, some engineers, and executive management. But just because they COULD raise $100 million, doesn't mean they SHOULD.

What are they using this money for? Is this considered a 'lean' round given their plans? Why hasn't the coverage of AirBnB gone into more depth of their business plan, or any sort of justification on this valuation and funding?

They may have a good run rate, revenue, etc, but I still can't see a clear reason a web-site would need to raise that much money in one go.

Is there anyone else who knows more behind this deal? With the recent IPOs, and Techcrunch already covering AirBnB-like verticals, I think understanding the drive behind the money (if any) is valuable for everyone in the industry to keep their head on straight...