skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you think the background and the font together are going to make a change, then by all means, conduct a test and see if whichever metric you're working with goes up. I'm in favour of isolating changes as much as possible, but if you believe that two elements of your design work only in concert with each other, then they should be modified accordingly. These aren't random permutations you test, they're new tweaks to a design that you suspect might help.

Sure, changing the font may be meaningless, but at least with a test, you KNOW it's meaningless. I try to let experience and taste guide my changes, but without checking that the change is effective you're just guessing.

Design exists to further a goal. Sometimes the goal is brand related, which I'll admit is just about impossible to measure, and sometimes it's seeing if you can reduce the frequency of support requests. One of these is obviously a better candidate for A/B testing.

[Edited to fix a spelling error]
interesing variation in reactions to previous postings:
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=gömböc&...
and
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=gomboc
You're probably thinking of the guy who claimed he lost 25k bit coins (which at that moment was "worth" 500k USD). This was a trade of 500,000 bit coins.
"to virtually nothing" - I believe this is misreading the chart. I had to take a second look myself. The light red column at 5:10pm is trade volume (240K sold). The price stayed between $17-18. The sale of 260k at 5:50pm was priced between $10-$13. The lowest price during the 'crash' is $10.

My theory is there are miners with large amounts of BTC and someone decided to sell a lot in a relatively small market. According to the depth-of-market calculator and there is only about 2000BTC in total on the buying side right now. Its easy to swing the market.
More likely, people trying to make bank when (not if) it happens again.
Stack Overflow has excellent visual design. It serves the application's function and audience faithfully. Reducing visual design to "does it look pretty?" is insulting his own profession. In this case I suspect it was the result of separating web design into a number of arbitrary sections to bulk out a blog post.
BankRate CEO talks IPO
If design is anything you want it to be, then I don't really see the point of talking about it.

Maybe you were not commenting on the article but just making a point. If that's the case I apologize. But my post was specifically talking about the kind of design that you would hire a web designer to do, so in this case the line is pretty clearly drawn.
That would be awesome. Unfortunately it's quite hard to build your full app on pypy right now as it's hard to compile working database drivers and some other things you might want to use in a web project.

Check out Alex Gaynor's slides from DjangoCon for more info here: http://alexgaynor.net/2011/jun/07/djangocon-europe-2011-slid...
Misleading headline (exposing a science bias). The article states "This paper, which is featured here as a JBC Classic, is the most highly cited paper in science." I don't happen to know if it is still the most cited paper ever, but this article can't actually make that claim without doing the bibliometrics for all of academia.
mtgox acts like a central authority. basically all these trades were happening in mysql database within the exchange between internal accounts, there were no actual bitcoin transactions.
अलीगढ स्टेशन पर काल बनकर आई मालगाड़ी ने पांच को दी मौत,एक दर्जन घायल
It's called a candlestick chart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart
"And I go to the site, and I still have no idea what the hell it does. I'm just hit with an ugly login page, and no incentive to sign up at all."

What he said. what the blog is suggesting is what Dropbox does amazingly well (which his site does not)- Explain what the service does on the front page with little to no navigation, show how your day could be improved by using the product - and then split second the user thinks "mmm, maybe I'll give it a shot" they should be registered and using your product in less than 5 seconds. Super quick registrations with no verification emails and those damn password/email 'type your email again' boxes will sell me every time. Hell, let me just type in a username and email, log me in and shoot me the password later. If it's worth using, I'll come back and use the password you sent. So while the blog has a good point, it's just applying it to the wrong area.
Mtgox has announced they're indeed reversing the transactions.
https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell...

Presumably they can do this because they're not actually bitcoin transactions, just exchange trades. The bitcoins and USDs entering and leaving Mtgox are not going to roll back.
Getting Leverage in Hostage Negotiations
the difference is here: not one line but thousands of lines.
No, there were definitely transactions for $0.01 per BTC in the live feed.

Here is another nice graph: http://leanback.eu/bitcoin/plots/20110619195756-mtgox.png
> I never said ALL and I never equated it to piracy.

No, of course not. You just said nobody was going to care if patents were being infringed because they use torrents for copyright infringement. No, you never said the word "all", but you did ask why this would change anything, which would be quite strange if you were at all considering, say, Blizzard.

Of course, this is before we even start to get in on your apparent conflation of the end users (who would be the ones committing copyright infringement with the software) and the developers (who would be the ones allegedly committing patent infringement).

And, because it's really not worth starting another comment for it: your automatic assumption that downvotes == people trying to silence the opposition and your subsequent goading are really childish. HN is, for the most part, a sane, sensical, and mature community and it reflects poorly on everyone when you make such baseless assumptions. Have you considered reflecting on what your comment adds or detracts from the conversation? I think you'll find that it adds little while the "everyone is so jumpy about it means I'm right" comment is an inane way to curb conversation.
There are two charts here.

Along the bottom of the chart is the volume of trades, i.e. how many shares/coins are being sold or bought (and whether they're being sold or bought).

The chart in the middle is the price and variability of the trades (i think).

Not a stock person or a BTC trader. Just gawking at the spectacle.
It's already a little disturbing to realize that a single account held 261K BTC out of 6.5M BTC in circulation.
The small bar indicates the range of prices during the time frame (for example, each bar could represent 15 minutes of trading on a 15 minute chart). The big bar shows the closing and opening prices for that time range. If the closing price is below the opening price the bar is red, and vice versa.

The red bar that shoots up from the bottom is the trading volume, and usually isn't covering up the bars so it looks strange. It just says a ton of BTC was sold in that time frame.
Sounds like it has been dealt with pretty well:

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell...
Mt. Gox trades rolled back, thief only got away with $1K in BTC
MTGox runs its own private system. They display the value of BitCoins you can withdraw, but they're not really BitCoins until you withdraw them.
But if you bought a bunch of BTC at $0.01 and then withdrew them, Mt.Gox should have irreversibly sent that over the real Bitcoin network.
Which begs the bigger question, why hasn't any single ad network dominated the mobile space, like Adsense did for non-mobile space?
Informal equity agreements
Hi all,

I'm doing a startup and I feel we need to establish a basis for equity distribution before we get too deep into the project. My partner is hesitant to sign a formal agreement before we get a good sense of who's putting in the most work, as we're all still in school in different places in the world. Would it be possible to sign an agreement that would establish a basic range of equity: like no one partner can get less than X percentage until we are about to get funding and sign an official agreement?

He's insisting we wait, but perhaps if we get something in writing it would be something that could hold up in court. I trust my partners - I do - but I think it's wise to establish something from the very start.
Trades are internal to Mt. Gox until you withdraw your money either as bitcoins or as USD. The compromised account had a $1000 per day withdraw limit, so the thief could only withdraw $1000 after selling all those coins. The rest of the cash is still within Mt. Gox, and therefore the state of the Mt. Gox DB can be rolled back to before all the coins were sold.
Where is anarchy? What's burning?

Someone sold a huge amount of Bitcoins. The market acted accordingly. Expect a bounce back to the old exchange rate as soon as Mt. Gox is available again.

Of course it might be possible that the computer of the person who sold the Bitcoin was cracked. But that's not the fault of Bitcoin - if someone is not capable of taking care of the security of his local computer, it's better not to use a distributed currency where your money is basically stored inside a single file.
Not as such. As an example, Steve Jobs ownes 7% the shared of Disney. If tomorrow, he were to sell them all, no matter what the price, there might not be enough people to buy them all, so people who, for the laugh, said they'd buy Disney stock at $0.01 a share would eventually get the shares. Thus the stock price for Disney would drop to $0.01. A similar thing just happened to BitCoin, but rather than shares of Disney being traded, it was bitcoins.
Newest update:

Apparently someone got the whole user account database of Mt.Gox

I wont publish the link to it though for obvious reasons.

Quick analysis: the database is legit, it contains user id, username, email if set, and a bcrypt hash. The hashes seem salted with a global salt.
Wow, this is the reason I read Hacker News day by day rather than the gibberish most of mass media produces.
Here, have a few more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Adoption

Do these outnumber the pirates? I don't really have the figures to even start commenting on that. But I think it's pretty clear that it'll make some difference if the BitTorrent protocol is found to be infringing on some patents.
These are tricky discussions since many people have strong opinions.

I'm going to assume you're a bit like me. Self motivated, been designing things since a young age. Reads a lot. Talks to people to find out what they are up to. I even did the thing you mention where I stopping going to all lectures one semester and just took the midterm and final and did the projects. That semester I got all As though, doing the bare minimum, which I suppose for myself was more than the maximum others were doing.

Someone like yourself is naturally intellectually curious and likes to create things and explore. The structure of college is not really necessary especially with a technical degree. Engineering programs tend to have reduced general ed/humanities requirements anyway. For something like a classics background, perhaps college is really beneficial. For engineering, nearly everything was things I already knew about since I'd been making things and reading tech journals since adolescence. As to the professors, very few had any life experience designing working software used by other people. Most professors simply don't know very much about design, creating things, or running a business. Most have lived sheltered lives, straight to teaching from grad school. If I was studying Russian literature I would not be impressed by a professor who could not read Russian and had not read any Russian literature. Likewise, the situation where professors of computer science do not actually practice in the field is quite bizarre.

You've designed a product, listened to customers, and brought your business from nothing to profitability. That is more than most attempted entrepreneurs have managed, and more than most of your professors. You've done this while managing passing grades, that is quite an accomplishment, it's more of one than getting a degree.

I liked what you said about how when you hunkered down and focused on the business is when things did well. Don't be shy, just go for it. That was a good move. I also understand about the possible naysaying and negative influence of parents, this is the old saying "A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his relatives and his own family." It's not just prophets though, it's most things. New town, new start, new person. It's interesting that college allows you free time and space to succeed, completely aside from the classes. Would be nice if you could keep your apartment and just deregister and stop going to class but hang out in the area, much as the original vision Jefferson had for University of Virginia as a learning community, where there would be no classes and no hierarchy, just people working on their own projects.
They apparently had 500k BTC in their MtGox account, which is insane. Unless they were actively trading all of that they should have withdrawn from MtGox to the BitCoin network.
If I'm doing my math right, $500k is something like 2% of the bitcoin economy. Imagine what would happen to wall street if someone cashed out a few trillion dollars' worth of stock at once.
It sounds as if Mt. Gox managed to shut things down before anyone could do that.
You know whats funny about that whole 25k thing...he has shown no proof, says he filed a police report but has not shown it, media went wild with it (with no evidence) and to the best of my knowledge no media outlet has interviewed the supposed law enforcement regarding the matter....I smell some FUD...there are numerous more inconsistencies with his story and many believe him to be a troll.

NO early adopter leaves his wallet.dat file unprotected on a known compromised computer. Especially one who claims to be an early adopter and saying he got in later in the same post. If you really read that whole thread you will smell a rat or troll also.
Well put. And I forgot to mention: thanks for the article! I especially like your definition of "feel", distinct from "look".
Thats not ignorance so much as politics.
In Japanese history they were the victims of WWII, their army went to china as a peace keeping force and then they were nuked.
It seems in some ways it is more valuable to have a tablet / phone with a really low market share and an uncommon user agent so it is treated just like a desktop browser by web sites.

My mobile phone is a Maemo device (running Linux), which most people haven't heard of. I've only noticed about 5 sites that detect the browser's user agent string as mobile so I get the desktop version of just about every site.

This has pros and cons. The browser slows down with some Flash embeds and obviously many mobile sites are more suited to a mobile device. Many sites also allow me to switch to the mobile version if I feel like it and I can't ever imagine being blocked like the New York Post is doing with the iPad.
> As income inequality has grown dramatically in the nation, the very wealthy are blamed for all manner of social ills.

Boo hoo.
Yeah, but my guess is that not many people managed to withdraw them because of the stability problems the site had/have. Mt.Gox will probably have some losses, but not that high I think.
I was in the bitcoin forums and mt gox as this happened...they shut down afterwards.
I wonder how the distribution of bitcoins compares to that of dollars
Google Reminding Users To Call & Wish Dad On Father’s Day
The flash sale broke the price resistance chart: http://mtgoxlive.com/orders
What about optimizing your app later? I've rolled out a number of rails apps, and I now feel that the rapid prototyping it provides is actually a form of technical debt. The execution speed and memory footprint mean you will have to scale harder, faster. I would like to remove framework components and middleware that I am not actually using, and transition cleanly from a rapid rollout to an optimized final product. But even in rails 3 I haven't seen good evidence that it's possible to do this, without being hackish. How do Django and other frameworks handle this?

Another way of saying it is I would like a framework that is "additive," where you start with a very lightweight core and then add components as you need them.
If you don't speak Hungarian you could just reply "yes".

http://www.google.com/search?q=gomboc+food
I think that someone actually kept that 250k BTC in their MTGox account!
MtGox account database leaked
I don't think the db is public, it's being sold for a price.
> Of course it might be possible that the computer of the person who sold the Bitcoin was cracked. But that's not the fault of Bitcoin.

Just like it's not the fault of the dollar if someone mugs you at gunpoint. Except robbing someone typically requires you to take physical risks and (threaten to) use violence. I'll be very curious to see any effective way of tracking down bitcoin thieves.

If you have to be a security expert to own more than a few dollars worth of bitcoins, the project has effectively failed already.
...and by "ready to ship" they mean "not ready to ship, but might be by the end of the month."
I've built many a "sprawling web app" quite successfully with Django.

Django and Rails have long since outgrown their original, in-house roots.
3 Year Old is an Amazing Finger Painter 
Could be fake, but if not, this kid is amazing. You be the judge.
Managing Rackspace Cloud Server (Kindle Edition)
Does anyone know if Tech companies do similar things to what banks and law firms do in terms of golden handcuffs?
and honestly it only dropped for a minute...then it went right back over $14...so even if this had really been legit it would have sorta recovered.
> Someone sold a huge amount of Bitcoins. The market acted accordingly.

It doesn't seem very free market to rollback the market and cancel all the free market trades that happened.
You make some good points, but..."some dispute over bus seating?" I assume you're talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, widely considered to be the first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement? The one where a young 25-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King first rose to national prominence? The one where the non-violent protest tactics of groups like the SCLC, which would go on to dominate the struggle for civil rights until the 1970s, were given their first serious test on the national stage?

The problem with the approach you suggest is that students do not, and will not, care about or engage with material devoid of meaning and context. How will you get kids to memorize the "dates of key events" without getting them to care about "what they mean?" I can barely get my history classes to sit down.

History is all about meaning and context. Dates are inherently meaningless; it's the stories that history tells us about ourselves that give it worth. We need dates, and we need chronology; it just seems like your approach would lead directly to me (a history teacher) getting beaten up.
which makes me think mtgox got very lucky. I mean the hacker could overcome $1000 limit a day (roughly 80 bitcoins) by creating thousands of bogus accounts, putting on the market bid orders at $0.01 in all accounts, drive the market to the bottom like he did to fill his orders and quickly transfer 80 bitcoins from each account out of the exchange. he could get away with bitcoins worth of millions irreversibly and completely anonymously.
Jobs would never, ever, under no circumstances, allow that.

Could it be someone suggested "NeXT" as a prank?
Flexibility of the language I imagine.

Function application: point free or not?
Control flow: Monadic? Continuation passing style?
Do you prefer to use Functors and fmap or list comprehensions to build lists?
etc etc.

In Haskell it's natural to define new functions which embody the control flow you want to express. This means that the way you prefer to solve programming problems tends to be reflected in the structure of your programs in a much more obvious way. It's a bit like Lisp in that sense: consider that in lisp, you might write appropriate macros to structure the solution to your problem, and your choice of solution will then show up in the syntax of the code you write in a more obvious fashion than if you were writing in a curly-brace language, where the fundamental atoms of code remain the same regardless of your style of programming.
Thank you very much for taking the time to track that down. The facts are incontrovertible in this case, the article about the report is a bald faced lie. This is disappointing on many levels. It's not clear whether Brian Bolduc the article author or David McCullough the historian being discussed in the article is the perpetrator of this specific fraud, but it's egregious enough as to need to disregard all the conclusions of the article, just as we routinely disregard all the testimony of perjured witnesses. A pity since maybe there is something to what is being said. We can't use this article as a source for it though, it is tainted.

One good thing that came out of it is drawing attention to the actual study, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a..., which shows that knowledge of history is getting better across the board.

In contrast to many federal web sites (census bureau being a notable example), that one is a pretty usable site. It has things like sample tests you can take and ways of examining national results on each test, even including sample written responses to essay questions indicating different levels of acceptability. I went through the 12th grade questions and a fair number of them are pretty hard. The "proficient" level is not easy and that only 1/4 of students are there is not so bad.
there is daily limit though. you can only withdraw up to 80 BTC a day.
What should they have done differently?
How to Jam Radio-Detonated Bombs
It's more than that, because this is talking about getting two points exactly opposite each other.

Yes, you still use the IVT, but there's slightly more you need to do. Specifically, something like taking the angle from 0 to 180, and then computing the difference between f(x) and f(x+180). That lets you use the IVT to show that there has to be a zero, and there's your result.

Or something.
Besides, if I remember correctly, the most convincing point of skip list is that it provides better concurrency. In the environment where python still have GIL, I would be skeptical about that.
Am I being completely unreal?
Hi all,

I am a 22 year old web developer. In the last three years I have been developing for the mobile and web platform. I've been hired with no degree, based on my skills solely. I am now faced with a very difficult decision of 2 very compelling options.

Now, I am now in a cross path in my life. Should I go and study for my first degree in computer science, in a well known university, or should I join a team of 3 very good friends who are also extremely talented (a doctor in electrical engineering and another two excellent developers) and start a start-up?

I am currently convinced that I have a wonderful idea. I want to give it a try, but don't want to postpone my studies anymore. I decided I'll give this idea a chance.

To my understanding building a start-up and pursuing this dream can take forever, that's why unless I give it a final deadline I believe that I won't study at all. That why I decided that if by one year I raise an investment of a million dollars, and in two years I can can make 10 million dollars, I will forget about studying. How unreal am I? Am I daydreaming?

What would you do?

thank you!
If they were Satoshi, they could be sitting on enough early-adopter bitcoins that 500k is relatively not insane.