skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting conclusion.

I think there's a balance. Young hackers have amazing energy and still-empty lives (no mortgage, kids, etc). They truly enjoy coding for long stretches, reading about coding in their off time, etc. They also tend to be fearless learners. When was the last time you saw a 45 year old pick up a new instrument? Younger folks are more willing to jump on new technologies. That's powerful.

As you say, older folks are more efficient. But perhaps the wisdom they've gained makes them more powerful in lead dev/management roles where they can apply that wisdom to a larger group of younger rockstars.
"Still, I think it's great to attract students with a fun, application-oriented course that gets them excited about the field, and hit them later with the more abstract ideas that might seem less relevant at the outset."

Where is the fun and easy intro to BioChem course so that we can entice more people to become doctors? How about an "Intro to Medicine" where we do fun stuff like play Operation and dress up in scrubs?

All you're doing is postponing the high attrition until the second year, when the students learn that you bamboozled them with a cute and fun intro course. You can, and should, offer that course to all comers, but don't pretend like CS is just a continuation of that.

If you visit a few military recruiters, the Air Force will try to dazzle you with technology and exciting job opportunities and the Navy will tell you how much money you can get for school but gloss over the "you're on a ship for six months at a time and your job is to sweep it" part. But the Marine recruiter will say, "The Marines aren't for everyone. It's really hard, but we're the best."

The Marines have no problem meeting their recruiting goals, and I'd argue this is a much more honest and effective way to get people on board who are going to be in for the long haul.
I reached a similar conclusion a while back and actually ended up writing an app that would automatically wish friends happy birthday when I was trying to get to grips with the facebook api:
http://blizzardsystems.co.uk/dr/node/44
Sales tax is only regressive with regards to wealth and/or income. It's perfectly linear with the activity it's taxing.

Also, non-regressiveness is a far cry from an established benchmark for a "good tax".
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Very interesting indeed, FF 4.0.1 tried to resize to (0,0), probably because it overflowed.
It seems like secure servers where you can store / access your bitcoins could be a good product.
Very important point. Knowing to ask is a valuable skill.
If anyone wants it I'd be happy to write up a quick how to on how Bitcoin really could be shut down, I have some expertise in the area if that matters and no serious bias either way.
Unfortunately, it's not too useful for websites in right-to-left languages, like Persian, Arabic and Hebrew.
This is great! I am also setting my Facebook birthday to today. This is gonna be fun.
Nope.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/bank-ach-theft/
Flow Is Why The "OK" Is Always On The Right
Understanding Copyright And Licenses
Thanks, your explanation is really helping me to understand! :-D

One potentially embarrassingly stupid question: you mention the government becoming a market maker. As far as I'm aware, it's not unknown for traders to spot an opportunity and corner the market. Surely Bitcoin's in an early enough stage to still do so?
That'll severely limit liquidity of bitcoins, making them undesirable for use for any purpose.
I do not have a dbg build on this machine but a stack trace may be in order.
This tool is misleading. It sizes the site according to your CURRENT browser size then lays the semi-transparent graphic over it. This means that if I have a 900px wide content area centered in the viewport, and my current width browser width is 1400px, it appears that there is 250px of empty background on the left and a 380px wide browser would see almost nothing. That's inaccurate.

tl;dr: take this tool with a grain of salt, resizemybrowser is a much better method.
Wiretap picture frame
I believe people have already brought up this argument in the past, but what are the arguments against why forking new bitcoins won't devalue the currency? Lets say one day Lady GaGa decides to start her own bitcoin, would that in anyway devalue the current bitcoin network if everyone instead decides to start mining Lady GaGa bitcoins?
Maybe older developers have more time to go on SO?
I think you should take the statistics with a good pinch of salt―and not only because of the issues brought up in the debate on the article about the Stack Overflow data[1].

> The junior developers ask more questions. This means they know less (which is why they ask).

I dare say they "know less", but this doesn't necessarily mean they are less expert. Junior developers might be more experimental, more curious, and more willing to actually ask questions―and these are all very desirable traits in a developer.

"You can't teach an old dog new tricks."

[1] http://coding-and-more.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-official-dev...
Google offers $280M to help businesses, home owners to buy solar panels
Mozilla Mark Up Crowdsources Backing for the Open Web
I am aware of that. But there are also physical realities in food production. What is the point of your nitpicking?
FLOSSmole data confirms declining GPL usage
Yet Another Way to Evade TSA's Full-Body Scanners
It's interesting to consider why that is. I could start a BitCoin deposit insurance company, for example: you'd pay me X% of your balance each month, and I'd make you whole in the event of fraud.

Of course, I'd want all sorts of regulations on how you set this up; I might sell you some kind of extra-secure system for managing your balance, for example. At that point, the market would basically be putting a price on BitCoin security.

Obviously, my deposit insurance scheme could go broke, if I price it wrong. That's theoretically a risk with SIPC. It's not a risk with the FDIC, since that is ultimately backed by the government's ability to print an unlimited amount of money.

So it might make more sense to say that deposit insurance is a feature of unstable currencies: if anyone's dollar-denominated debt can be 100% guaranteed by the government, then the value of everyone's dollar-denominated assets will face an inflation tax to pay for this guarantee.
Yes, I will install ssl cert in future (at least self signed), understand the risk. Standalone bookmark is great idea, but I am not sure if I can fit script to 2048 bytes. Maybe, I'll make html5 cache manifest to avoid network access.
He'd also need to HTTPS all the scripts that script requires, and devise some way to ensure that the script was never called from a page that itself included any HTML or JS over a non-HTTPS connection, because any of those document loads could also MITM the script. Isn't Javascript crypto fun!
I think most of the arguments people have any time Rails does a major change can really be re-interpreted as:

"I have a moderately complex Rails app that I want to upgrade, but I don't have much confidence in my tests, I maybe don't have proper separation of concerns, and I just know that one hacky thing I did a while back is going to bite me in the ass."

It's just something that happens over time in any moderately complex app. I see Rails point release candidates as a good reminder to bust out rcov and spend a few days plugging up the gaps in test coverage before the stable release comes out.

If you've been procrastinating upgrading your Rails 2.3.x app to 3.0.x, you're really gonna have fun going straight from 2.3.x to 3.1. Sometimes you just gotta rip off the band-aid.
it took me a moment to realize this as well.

nice for us to be ahead, for a change… :)
Doesn't that only prevent the federal government from levying that tax?
Without knowing how much real backing the exchanges have it's hard to get a figure on what effect a large dump would have on the market. Additionally, you'll get shock dumpers who do a run on the exchange once they see value erosion. $30,000, although fabricated, feels right. Although i'd add that's probably an upper bound rather than expected value.
Holder of a useless non-technical degree here. Tens of thousands of dollars spent on education, and now I work an entry-level retail job. But I do count myself fortunate that I have no debt from my (perhaps mostly pointless) university experience.

Using my spare time to teach myself programming and some math. :-)
But that's not the question here -- the question is whether Rails is getting progressively easier or harder for a newbie to pick up and whether those changes are going to result in better or worse applications.

--------------------------------

If you read the article he makes other points as well, the author of this article just seized on this because it was probably easiest to shoot down.

In the original article the author says ...

"The speed of change in using and learning rails however is a real worry for anyone who wants to use it. It might completely change by the end of next month"

That's what I'm interested in discussing, and I suspect where the real problem lies.
Nothing like standing up a straw man and then tearing it down.

The situations that are cited in the article seem like apples when comparing to the situational oranges of today. A shaky foundation like this hardly seems like a good place to build a valid logical argument. But, it sure does look cool.
Even if you could somehow minify all of AES into a bookmarklet, you'd still lose any time any page this ran from requested HTML or JS from a non-HTTPS link, since any of those requests could poison the runtime.
Mt. Gox and Bitcoin Market already do that.
Highly personalized content to over 500,000 people only once? What, is there a separate Nigerian prince wanting to deposit money in each of their accounts?
Will they keep doing security patches for those?
What, you don't read your code in reverse chronological order?!
At least you guys Rails have something new to look at, good or bad I don't judge. I've been using Zend framework for the last 3 years and it's latest version 1.10 has lived like "forever", until the day ZF 2.0 comes out, which has been "promised" a long time ago
Angry Birds Coming Soon Everywhere (Literally)
IMHO the shadiest side of the bitcoin daemon is that it discovers peers by connecting to an irc channel. Just like a typical virus botnet handles command and control. Connecting these two uses of IRC is pretty obvious, and then you get a virus that attacks windows machines running bitcoin and steals wallets.
That's also not a secure way of generating an AES key; those crypto keys can be cracked quickly. The problem you're trying to solve is the entire reason for PBKDF2.

You should also use SJCL's AES.
Microsoft: One Major Windows Phone Update a Year, Update Releases in Between
The catch all route is there, you just have to uncomment it. It takes one second.

There are other points where the article is plain wrong to. "It used to be that you just used Prototype, now it goes to vast efforts to be agnostic." No, it switched the default to JQuery, thank god.
Steven, no need to be so antagonistic. The NDAs are between Google & its employees.

I am not worried about losing my idea. I am not 100% focused on getting a prototype done. I want to find a real partner to work with on my current concept or any others.
Glad to see Congress tackling the tough issues the US is facing.
>Weekend project

>encryption

Choose one.
MyYahoo and Hacker news : not compatible
http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Doesn't work anymore with My!Yahoo. Any idea how to fix that?
Living tissue lasers
What prevents you from setting up a BitCoin bank?

More interestingly: are the features that let you set up a dollar-denominated bank features or bugs?
They have been pretty good about doing that. There was a security patch for Rails 2.3.x 6 days ago: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2011/6/8/ann-rails-2-3-12-has-...
I don't think they're offended by use of the word "flash." The OP is about a substitute for WebGL, which exposes low level OpenGL commands to Javascript for hardware accelerated graphics. Flash's API is neither low level nor hardware accelerated, making it a poor fit for a WebGL fallback.
Better workplace alt-tab skills. They take years to develop grasshopper. :)
Bitcoin is divisible to one tenth of it, if I remember correctly. Prices in bitcoins can be adjusted to reflect the deflation. Merchants are already using MtGox API and ticker so they set a price in dollars, and the displayed price in bitcoins is updated as the BTC/USD exchange goes up or down in MtGox, automatically.

Extending your argument, the Government could try to mess up buying up a lot of bitcoins, to force deflation, then selling them all to force inflation, and so on. Good luck with that, because that would be very expensive in dollars (buying high and selling low). And if the Federal Reserve did this with out-of-thin-air dollars, it would just weaken the dollar in the long term, what would be good for Bitcoin.

Some people say the Fed has being trying this price suppression with gold. I don't know if that's true. But apparently nothing has stopped gold to go to the roof in the last 10 years.
What... That's like saying the shadiest part of the BTC daemon is that it uses computers because botnets use computers.
Automatic Login Links
Latch: shoot me an e-mail and I'm happy to share plenty.

The "I" and "we" is a little tricky. Someone else is involved with the current concept, but his role really comes into play farther down the road.

The purpose of my post was regarding a partner, not just with this concept, but with many opportunities going forward. In that sense, it's an "I."
Third sentence:

> If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD.

Yep. Anyone who doesn't do this is stupid.
The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it's a personal playground. But the improvements they make do seem to (usually) be good ones. Since it's almost always the case that you can eschew their choices, the complaints I hear are not compelling.
If you try to cash them out all at once, yes.

On June 12th, $3,5M were exchanged on MtGox. For 8 of the last 10 days, the daily volume has been above $1M. I think that you could get these $500K in small chunks in a few days, provided you do it full time.

Edit -- Source: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg30zigDailyzvzcvzl...
If you use Pidgin, you can do just that with the Pidgin-Encryption plugin. Both parties need the plugin installed, though.

http://pidgin-encrypt.sourceforge.net/
Anybody have the text of the post available? The site's not working for me.
But what would be the other options for a normal user? You could completely hand over your wallet to someone else, but that sort of defies the point of Bitcoin: they could log transactions, be raided by authorities, etc. You could store your wallet in a way that's physically secure (say, on a flash drive), but this just requires the hacker to insert software that waits until you try to spend some of that bitcoin. You could maintain many separate wallets on separate flash drives, so you would only lose part of your savings to this sort of attack, but that is inconvenient.

The only solution I'm coming up with would be to hand over control of your wallet to an anonymous-yet-trusted third party who's hidden behind Tor or such. The difficulty is in finding (or creating) an anonymous-yet-trusted party in the first place.
Creating Particles With Three.js
Granted the market is easy to manipulate with small transactions that can start large swings; as well it would be difficult to find a buyer if you wanted to liquidate a lump sum of this size without a solid discount.

That said, I think you're overstating the impact this would have. The recent downswing from ~$30 to ~$10 in a period of a couple days was speculated to be due to MtGox consolidating 20 times this amount.
I'd argue that those kind of course are precisely what higher education needs less of.
England has multiple exam boards which offer the same qualifications, and compete with each other for business.
Total WTF.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/25/teachers-cho...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/may/26/exam-boards-...
Military aircraft that are capable of supersonic are quite small in comparison to airliners. The boom is considerably less. But it still generates noise complaints; the military only does it with impunity in war zones or hotly contested borders (Golan Heights).

The noise complaints and subsequent laws were one of the things that killed Concorde. It wasn't allowed to fly supersonic over populated areas, so it ended up only flying trans-Atlantic routes (didn't have the range to cross the Pacific.)

The other thing that killed Concorde was the fuel usage. For the same amount of fuel as a 100-passenger Concorde ocean crossing, you can fly a 400-passenger 747 round trip. As fuel costs have continued to climb, the economics have made less and less sense for the never-profitable Concorde.

It doesn't help that they had that bad crash outside of Paris, grounded the fleet, and then finally started them flying again on the morning of September 11, 2001 -- thereby immediately facing the worst market for air travel, and the highest oil prices, in decades.

(I don't have sources readily available. This is all stuff I learned from fellow museum staff working with G-BOAG at http://www.museumofflight.org/concorde )
While I won't point out the technical reasons why encryption is hard, I will say that I think this project is cool.

I think encryption is something more people might use if it were accessible.

But it's hard enough as it is without making it so easy that Joe Sixpack could use it -- especially since implementations as we know it require Joe Sixpack to understand what he's doing or else the encryption fails.

However, tools like this at least give us prototypes for ideas that could one-day bridge the gap.

Good job, dude. Hope you stick with it and find a way to make it better.
Wouldn't this also defeat the purpose of BitCoin in the first place? And by "purpose" I'm referring to the whole "anonymous, untraceable" aspect of it. It's very much like cash - it's anonymous, yes, but also if it gets stolen there's not much you can do about it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but given the P2P nature of bitcoin, wouldn't it effectively give someone interested in malicious activity a list of target IP addresses? In theory he could set up his own P2P, watch for large transactions, and then he has an ip running a bitcoin client who (potentially) has a large wallet.

Then it's just a matter of running common exploits (or new ones, if you have them) in order to access the machine and the bitcoin wallet.
Banks are regulated by law and have the funds insured by FDIC. i.e even if the bank goes belly up, the FDIC will make sure the depositors get the money. With BitCoin, how do you trust a bank? Even if it's just by word-of-mouth trust, eventually the bank will be taken over or run by non-trustworthy people. The threat of federal prison keeps most real banks honest. Nothing like that exists in the BTC world.
Back in the day, it was very common among Java programmers to consider using ?: as atrocious style. It was a relic from C, eccentric and therefore confusing, just more damage inflicted on the language through the influence of conservative programmers who didn't "get" Java. Since most Java programmers were monolingual and learned from books that relegated ?: to a few sentences inserted somewhere for completeness, many didn't even recognize it as an operator.

Even setting aside my love for the ?: operator, I never understood that attitude. One of the major selling points of Java in the early days was that it was simple enough for everyone to understand pretty completely. It was supposed to be impossible for a guru to write code that a junior programmer couldn't understand at the small scale with some effort, line-by-line, if not at the large scale. Training programmers to be competent at only a subset of the language undermined the purpose of having such a simple language.
How many years did this take?
You would be able to get past 2048bytes using mozilla or chromium

See there: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/limits.html

I just tested a 1Mb bookmarlet on chromium and it works.
No, that's not what I'm getting at. I'm trying to convey a different perspective.

For example very few houses or business here have flags. It's mostly a car-dealership / cottage thing.

It's actually just jarring to see how many flags are on display in the US even without getting into political sympathies. It's the visual equivalent of someone shouting in public.
FDIC or SIPC don't cover you if you have stacks of cash that get stolen.

This guy wasn't using a bank, he wasn't encrypting his wallet, so that is inevitable.
After spending over 100 minutes on hold with Comcast last night, reading this article dramatically lowered my blood pressure. It is nice to know that some people still care about customer /service/!
What Angry Birds really needs is cloud service to store game state and scores. I have Angry Birds on my Evo, my iPod Touch, and will likely have it on my iPad that I'm getting soon. It would be nice if I didn't have to replay all of the levels on each device.
> Facebook is not going to be supplanted by Twitter or iCloud...

...and neither will HTML pages supplant desktop applications or brick-and-mortar stores, right? Because neither of these serve remotely the same purpose?

That's exactly the way things often go in technology and business. New wins over incumbents not by attacking them head-on on their home turf, but by creating a new niche with some interesting, unforeseen properties.

At some point commerce realizes world + dog uses it and start providing goods and services -- and the new is thence understood to have supplanted the incumbent.

Facebook is pretty much the landline phone of late XX century. The market's ripe for something like the cellphone to disrupt it.
Colleges transitioned from being a place of higher learning to a place "where dreams come true" several years ago. Preparing your students to build the next Angry Birds or Facebook instead of reimplementing a search algorithm that has been implemented a million times before is much more in line with the goals of both parties. A strong foundation in CS is not necessary, or even important, when your goal is financial success.

I do agree that the fundamentals are very important for those who are interested in pure academic pursuits. It is very unfortunate that college has become the goto place to get a job, not a place to learn. But the truth of the matter is that the vast majority are only in class because they are looking for future wealth. Colleges, being businesses, will naturally tend towards catering to their customers.

The good news is that with the proliferation of the internet, academics can now learn about CS fundamentals even if the formal CS programs go into decline. Of course it is not too late to fix the education system, we just have to get past the idea that college equals job and return school back to its roots of a place to research and study.
This is a minor point, but I didn't feel that the Social Network's depiction of hackers was glossy or inaccurate. I was actually very impressed by that aspect of the movie.
Most of finance these days is finding ways to subvert actual trading of value and dilution of risk, instead attacking (in the security sense) currencies and markets.

While markets and liquidity are helpful to the world the finance workers don't deserve credit for it - they're just workers in someone else's system for one, and usually predators at that.
i'd bet that 4-5% of ALL accounts on the site are spam/bots/fake profiles. maybe more. you're talking 20-30 Million accounts at that rate.