skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a hard time believing the intrinsic value of anything is zero.

Well shit man, I have some random bytes I'd like to sell you. How much are you willing to pay for 'em?

So I'd argue that being able to cryptographically transfer a bitcoin is an intrinsic property of the bitcoin, and therefore something that gives a bitcoin intrinsic value (assuming you think this property is useful).

Like I've said before (and nobody has yet taken me up on this offer), I'm selling Bitcoin Prime. This has the following properties:

1. Every string of bits that is a bitcoin is also a bitcoin prime

2. All bitcoins prime currently in existence are owned by me.

Does my huge stock of bitcoins prime have any intrinsic value? I think not. But if anyone disagrees them I'm more than willing to part with my entire collection for a hundred US dollars. (I reserve the right to invent bitcoin double-prime as soon as our transaction is completed...)

My point: even if a bitcoin is a string with some unique properties you don't actually own that string of bits in any useful sense, you only own it by convention with other bitcoin users. Bitcoin is just one of an infinite number of possible equivalent systems, and just happens to be the only one in which there's any real money floating around at the moment.
I recently began working on a web app in common lisp(hunchentoot, restas, postmodern). I chose lisp because:

* I love lisp. I admit that as long as i can't find a reason NOT to use it, i will.

* Me and my partner still don't know exactly what we want to do. We have a few ideas, but both of us are pretty inexperienced, both technically and business wise. Common lisp is excellent for experimentation and many people have had success using it to fill in the gaps in their knowledge about a certain domain. My next couple of weeks will consist of just building "stuff".

* I don't understand what other advantage does a full stack framework have, except that it made a bunch of choices for you(ORM,template engine, structure of your program). If I were to write an app in python, i might be tempted to use something like flask(or some other "micro-framework"). I like the idea of hooking together different libraries, rather than filling in the blanks of a full stack framework.

Basically I've found no reason not to use lisp, if you know it. Don't let the reddit story scare you, things have changed TREMENDOUSLY in the past several years.

Now there are a lot of common lisp success stories, i made the time to search for them(I'm not about to invest my entire summer in something without learning from others first :D). Check out mahmud's comments here on HN, for some of his experience, to cite just one example. Search, don't just ask. This this thread is mostly identical to at least 3 others I read in the past week while reading old threads about lisp and web development.

Another excellent lisp is clojure, and people have been using it for web apps to great success as well. I chose common lisp over it, because I prefer multi-paradigm languages over ones with stronger accents(whether its OOP or FP). But clojure is still my second favorite language, and if you're into FP, check it out.
Virtual currency: Bits and bob
It seems like most people are using nodejs for the web, and nodejs includes a library for HTTP.

What are some good web libraries for Erlang?
Chrome could (possibly) replace Firefox in future Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth says
Also on the latest n-back study:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/a-simple-exercise-...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230443230457637...
Virtual Currency: Bits and bob (Bitcoin  Economist)
Sorry, I missed the end of the article. I should have been more attentive.
So I just noticed this:

"Contact us: 614-LULZSEC"

A phone number? A cursory google search didn't come up with anything informative, except that someone commented that it was a number pirated by LulzSec with call forwarding (http://mrnumber.com/1-614-585-9732). I'm certainly not going to call it myself, but I'm just curious as to what this is, how they're using it, and what do you find on the other end. Thoughts?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Area_code_614
This is awesome--can't wait to get one (disclosure: I am an investor).
Share your insights: aha.betterexplained.com (beta)
OK fine, Duncan might not have chosen the best words when comparing Node to Erlang.

But how's Node.js "backwards"?

It seems to me that the author has picked on one statement by one individual, and turned that into a link-bait.
You copy photos to the folder, it puts them on the web automatically organized, then deletes them from the folder. http://ourdoings.com/
There is no contact info in your HN profile
A pyramid scheme is a zero-sum game where wealth accrues up the pyramid in exchange for promises of future riches to the new recruits. YC startups thus far have been a positive sum game to the tune of $4 billion. Additionally, new YC companies aren't required to pay anyone for the things YC provides (as opposed to a pyramid scheme).
.. or erlang processes. Or python greenlets. Or Haskell forkIO threads. Or libcoroutines.. Etc.

See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549023
take another look at that recipt.

1. veggie scramble:
at costco, you can get a 50 pack of eggs for less than ten bucks. round up and call it ten cents worth of stuff. Veggies aren't free, but they are pretty cheap in bulk.

2. bagel with cream cheese:
at costco, I think it's two dozen bagels for five bucks. round up and call it a quarter. Cream cheese in the giant tubs is similarly cheap, call it another quarter.

3. o.j. I don't know the bulk price for O.J, but I know I can get a flat of cans of o.j. for fifty cents per.

4. Coke. figure a quarter. (I can get a can of coke in a flat for about that, I figure there are some savings using a fountan. call it a quarter for two glasses of diet coke syrup.)

so we're at a buck thirty five in materials at costco prices. Of course, you have to pay the rent, and you have to pay some kid to assemble it, you have to pay for insurance, etc... but as a business owner, I'm not going to go with groupon unless I'm in a situation where I've overinvested in fixed costs.

I mean, renting buildings isn't like spinning up a cloud server; Usually, you've gotta sign a multi-year lease, and usually you've gotta pay for expensive cooking equipment; equipment that costs you the same regardless of usage.

Employees are a little bit more flexible, but there is a training period. New people provide negative productivity for a time, and if you don't give your old people enough hours, or if you jerk them around on what hours they work too much, your people who are good enough to get work elsewhere will do so.

Further, I think most valuations of groupon are assuming that groupon will provide some 'this deal only good during the less busy times' solutions. If I'm paying all my fixed costs and the building and employees are idle, the marginal cost of another customer is not very much more than the cost of the food, and in this case, the cost of the food isn't much at all. Heck, I know times in my business when I overbought capacity when it would have made sense to take a 75% price cut to move product and salvage something from the situation, rather than just paying for capacity I wasn't using.

Now, personally, I still think the groupon is massively over valued. I'm just saying, it's not any more massively over valued than linkedin or facebook. All of these companies are being evaluated in unrealistically favorable light; I think if you shine that same light on groupon, it looks pretty goddamn good.

What I find scary about the groupon hate is that a lot of it seems to be because the founders cashed out early; this means that cashing out early will be more difficult for founders the next time around.
Speaking of concurrent programming and parallelism. If you're not into functional programming, check out Apple's Grand Central Dispatch[1] and Objective-C Blocks[2].

Unless you write your own Objective-C http server and run it on Mac OS X Server (it's not that hard, I've done it), this isn't very useful for Web programming. However, if you're comparing the languages / frameworks themselves (you can use all three to code command line tools, for example), GCD becomes a very seductive option.

GCD works by throwing code blocks (obj-c closures) into queues, and letting the runtime do its magic. You can have it execute code synchronously, asynchronously, or in parallel.

GCD will optimize and distribute your blocks the the available CPU cores. You can even enumerate using blocks, and instead of doing loop iterations one by one, it'll distribute them to the cores in parallel.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
[2]: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/cocoa/...
Apple's entire stack (hardware, software, support software) is built on the assumption that you're going to play by their rules.

Example 1: "erase all of your music and replace it with the 5 songs on the computer you plugged it in to"

If you plug your iPod in to a computer and "sync" it, and said computer only has 5 songs on it, what do you expect to happen? Apple intends for you to sync your iPod with your own music library. Anything else is sacrilege in the church of the RIAA, and is therefore not accommodated.

Example 2: "Look at what happened to the iPhone 3G when you "upgraded" it to the new OS; it stopped being functional (answering a call could take 5-10 seconds. Launching an app equally long, etc). To the point where I actually had to jailbreak mine to get it into a usable state again."

I used an iPhone 3G on iOS 4. It was bad. It was slow and unreliable. I'm not sure why they didn't lock it to iOS 3, other than the fact that Apple marches forward, with or without its user base. I guess maybe that's Apple's message to us. "We're headed that'a way, with or without you."

Example 3: "...the new version is there to take away some previous functionality (breaking things like ourtunes, for instance)"

Straight from OurTunes FAQ: "ourTunes is the continuation of several open source projects designed to allow you to browse and download from other people's iTunes Music Shares." Are you really surprised that Apple broke this? Apple believes in forming relationships with organizations like the RIAA. It's the reason they were able to deliver products like iTunes Match. Large portions of iTMS + iCloud feature set couldn't have been done without these agreements. Look at the legal battle that Amazon and Google are facing because they didn't get a deal signed.

Now, don't get me wrong. None of the examples I rebutted above mean you're wrong. It just means that you're trying to use your device in a way that Apple didn't design it to be used. That's a huge ideological road block for some people. I don't blame you one bit.

For anyone who doesn't want to walk the Apple path, I think there are better choices. However, that doesn't mean you'll have less yak shaving to do, it just means that the manufacturer won't stand in your way.
You may have a point with the random bytes. That is as close to worthless as makes no difference.

But regarding your "Bitcoin Prime": your system isn't backed by proof of work. My point is that bitcoins are not just a set of random bytes, or even a chain of signed transactions. They are also secured by a proof of work chain, and without this they are not bitcoins, by definition.

So even though you can come up with a set of bitcoin primes, one for each bitcoin, there's no proof of work backing your system. You can't reuse the proof of work that backs bitcoins without knowing all of the private keys, so you'd have to start from scratch.
You might want to note this in the README of that repository, and maybe update the tag-line description at the top of the github page. (I assume it's this one https://github.com/daeken/Emokit)
I don't know on what information the article is based and really doubt that Apple will not provide at least some sort of web access. And iOS users aren't forced to use iCloud - GMail, Dropbox and all the others will still be available ... even in iOS.

But Joshua Topolsky mixes two aspects here: Having (limited) web access vs. providing full-fledged web apps that make a native app obsolete.

Apple is selling hardware and therefore is interested in pushing native apps instead of web apps. Google on the other hand sells no hardware and uses web apps to sell advertising. These are completely different approaches.

Moreover, its not really fair to write down a product that was just announced, is 3 months from release and wasn't seen and used by anyone.
Erlang HTTP server: http://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/inets/http_server.html

Webmachine, "A REST-based system for building web applications": https://bitbucket.org/justin/webmachine/wiki/Home

See also: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
I think my social circle is less active and less dramatic than yours. I guess that means that I am boring and my friends are also relatively boring.

I guess different social circles are different and it probably varies by age group as well.

I find your comments interesting because it is so completely different than my social world.

I should also add that I don't find it addictive at all.
If you want to learn rails, don’t get the latest pragmatic programmers book. Go and get the 1st or 2nd edition. Get an old copy of rails and ignore all this.

Worst. Advice. Ever.

Once you’ve figured that all out then upgrade and expect to spend the same amount of time learning all the new stuff. You don’t save any time jumping to Rails 3+.

This just isn't true.
It's an instance of it, though classical physics has the same property. Feynman introduces this stuff in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kab9dkDZJY
Based on a sane P/E and assuming strong revenue growth and minimal risk Facebook should sit around 1/15th of a Microsoft. If they can hit 10billion / year in revenue in 3-5 years they might be worth ~1/3 of Microsoft but IMO anyone buying Facebook at 100billion is an idiot or banking on the greater fool theory when there are not all that many fools left.

PS: IMO, the odds Facebook will be worth 400 billion in 5 years is much worse than the chances it will be worth less than 25 billion in 5 years. Buying a sock with no dividends in sight, a strong chance of losing 75+% of it's value and little real room for growth is a poor long term prospect. In the short term day traders may be irrational but the market is a fickle beast and can turn on a company vary quickly.
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I know both and I take Node seriously. Using the same language at both the client and server end has some serious benefits. And web servers are mostly shared-none, so not having first-class support for communication between Node processes is not that big of a deal. Node has its niche.
Thank you. Good thinking. Anyone know a good one in Boston?

Also, it turns out that the entire idea of their app was the same as ours. They had to be aware of us. Same name. Same app.
This guy is bullshitting
Shades of Google in Skepticism Surrounding Facebook IPO
cognitive prosthetics

I like that term.
My node.js project spreads all node.js i/o across multiple node processes ( in machine, network, or browser ) and creates a distributed EventEmitter across all nodes.

https://github.com/Marak/hook.io
Suggesting Node and Erlang have the same concurrency model is a complete pigeonholing. CPS != Actors.
What a bunch of gobbledygook.

People tend to lump Node and Erlang together because they both avoid shared-state concurrency. But they're completely opposite approaches: Erlang has concurrency but no shared state. Node has shared state but no concurrency.

Not that you'd get this from the article.
I agree that the barrier for entry to Rails is quite high. To really get into it, you might have to learn:

* A new language

* A new framework

* A new programming paradigm

* A new set of libraries

This is going to be really hard if you're currently a spaghetti coder. Will you learn a lot? Will you become a better programmer? Will you enjoy coding more? I say yes!
i found the ever changing world of rails intimidating when i first started and that was in the wonderful world of 1 moving to 2 but at the end of the day all you really need is to get the same version of rails that your book/tutorial covers and stick with it..
eh, not sure if it's a business application or what, but I've dealt with similar things in code. To me the best way to do it is through recursive callbacks and modeling the problem over a large data set. Recently I've gotten into shoveling the output into Eureqa and letting it come up with close-fitting (unreadable and basically nonsensical) equations to model the results for faster processing of additional input after the fact. If I understand you correctly. Sorry I can't help more, it's not my area of expertise exactly...just something I've (been forced to) dabble with...
> Using the same language at both the client and server end has some serious benefits.

What are these benefits? Are they really exclusive to Node? (or if not exclusive, then vastly simpler with Node)
Just skimming the terms for their cloud drive, they have the right to increase the fees at any time, without notice, effective immediately; though it won't affect your service during its term. However, the "term" of the free service is not mentioned - I would expect it not to have a term.

If they are going to promote a free service, and then scare you with a "binding contract" agreement (which indicates they are really serious about it), they should at least go to the trouble to assure you that they won't charge you for what they say is free.

They also don't guarantee security or privacy - that's fair enough, pretty standard.
On Becoming a Renaissance Programmer
I am not an accountant, but I imagine it has to be booked as revenue in an accrual system on a per-period basis. To satisfy double-entry, it would originally be booked as cash and a liability.

Take magazine subscriptions. You pay $240 for an annual subscription to Frisbee Fancier's Magazine at the start of the year. They book this:

Cash at Bank: $240 -
Magazines Owed: - $240

Then they send you the January edition ("Gold Plated Frisbee Showdown!") and do this:

Revenue from Subscription: $20 -
Magazines Owed: - $20

That is, they move $20 from liability to revenue. Cash at bank is unaffected by this transaction.

How Groupon chooses to recognise the timing of revenue will affect their apparent numbers. I would prefer a conservative magazine-style model as above, but it might be possible for them to book the revenue up front and then use that as their basis of their projections.

I don't know enough about Groupon or accounting to be certain. Seek professional advice before investing etc.
We need a programming language for the rest of us
here's a small video interview (game industry focused)from this year e3:
http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2011-a-word-with-john-carmack/17...
The assets pipeline feels horrible, it's really slow. I upgraded to Rails 3.1rc, realized it fights with Heroku unless upgrading to the Cedar stack. Lesson learned: stay away from Rails release candidates. But I downgraded to Rails 3.0.8 because 3.1 was just more of a hassle starting out. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, usually when I'm fighting the framework it's a sign that I don't fully understand something. I loved Rails 3.0 when it was announced, but I share the same sentiment as the OP re: 3.1 at the moment.
This seems somewhat tasteless. Surely there's a better way they could push their services on their physical-goods customers.

If this is a response to iCloud, it's not a very "Apple-like" response. Then again, Amazon's cloud offerings aren't very "Apple-like" either, for better or for worse.
Agreed. Rails has significantly changed since 2.3.x, and is extremely different to 1.2.x. These changes aren't just for the sake of it - Rails keeps on improving! Start at 3.1 and you won't be sorry.
exactly.

tl;dr: don't feed the trolls
Amazon is the kind of company that spends a lot of resources understanding how visitors use their site. I'd venture that Amazon knows exactly what product categories are strong "browsers" and which are strong from an "inbound link" or "search" perspective.

Browser - Customers come to amazon.com, click through to a category, and just browse

Inbound link - Users are fed to a landing/product page by some other source (like a shopping engine or app)

Search - Someone comes to amazon.com looking for a specific product an immediately places a search

Understanding which categories are used by these different classes of user allows you to re-focus your primary navigation to maximize efficiency for each class.

"Browsers" need categorical navigation. Notice that the top three (non cloud service) categories available for immediate browsing are all entertainment related. These are categories with a significant requirement for discovery; that is, visitors looking to discover new content.
Amazon as publisher: What does it mean?
I believe you're confused between mergesort and quicksort. Can you post the code how you'd code mergesort?
I was disappointed in the binding of Volume 4A. It's the cheap hard-to-hold-open kind most publishers seem to have switched to around 2000. They didn't even give the pages wider inner margins to compensate.
Watch Movie Online
news to day , movie Series Online,
Knuth wrote TeX in the first place in the 1970s because he missed the experience of reading a really nicely produced book on a digital phototypesetter. History may not repeat itself, but it does seem to have an echo sometimes.
Yeah, I've been planning to but have been totally swamped. I should probably do that tonight.
And it's not even the founders who cashed out early, it's the investors! Andrew Mason only cashed out $10m, which is probably under 1% of his stake in the company.
Have you emailed Knuth about it?
Numbers are of the essence. That site has less than 1% of the volume of Mt. Gox, and Mt. Gox is considered too thinly traded for business transactions.

I don't see how the existence of that site, and trading over IRC channels, changes the fact that the bitcoin economy has become centered on Mt. Gox, and in the future, maybe, on several other exchanges. I never said that Mt. Gox is ALL there was.

BTW, I see the reasons that a proper exchange is more popular - there are 3 or 4 transactions an hour on bitmarket.eu, the escrow provisions are weak (as you said, it's for the bitcoin side only), the Paypal fees will be high on the small amounts traded, and trading higher amounts will get negative attention from Paypal - they will not let people trade virtual currency over their systems (and they consider bitcoin to be in that category).
It's hardly a response... it's been that way for a while.
This sounds like an old person ranting about the good ol' days when it's probably a personal phobia against change.

I started learning rails just as 3 was coming out. I had made a site with rails 2 and while googling around for help I found all these tutorials about rails 3 and they definitely made everything much easier. Sure, if I had more time invested in 2 (like this guy?) I'd be peeved, but I'm luckily more aligned with the direction of rails rather than its past.
I wrote the post and to clarify, I didn't mean to suggest that interfacing with Android was impossible with Clojure, simply that is was easier with Scala. As rickmode points out, there are some things that make Clojure more difficult.
The experience is frighteningly common. More common to be forced to lie, than it is to not, in my experience.