skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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?

There were banks before the FDIC and people trusted them. The threat of insolvency can (but doesn't always) keep them honest.
How did people trust banks before FDIC?
There's no way to know which IP address corresponds to which bitcoin address.
It's also summer time and it seems like internet usage dips quite a bit in the summer. People just spend less time sitting in front of the computer and more time out doing things. Kids have fewer papers to write so they spend less time avoiding them on Facebook.

I've seen plenty of seasonal cycles like this in various websites I've managed in the past. It's not exactly a new thing.

Also FB and Twitter got a lot of press for touting HUGE user numbers, but now that they are at hundreds of millions of users, they are obviously killing spam accounts more aggressively. I wouldn't be surprised if as much as 25% of the users on Facebook or Twitter are spam accounts or bots. At its peak MySpace was certainly up there in that range.
> Half of the page is full with stupid Google AddWords

Not trying to justify Mahalo actions here, but what you just mentioned is a big failure on Google's side. When you add an adsense unit to a web page is with the goal of displaying "contextually related" ads. This is what Google promotes, but it doesn't deliver in most cases.
Computer Science Teaching Made Accessible
BitCoin has an analog in cash. Yes, it's anonymous but there are things you simply dont do with it.
Facebook should be heralded for using a real user engagement metric in the advertising reach numbers. They could claim every registered user as a "user" but then they'd be lying (like most other services do).

Given the near total saturation in the US, it's not surprising that their monthly actives are starting to show some decay from the quality of installs going down as they grow as well as some seasonal affect.

Basically, the replacement rate of new installs in the US is lower than the number of people who have not been active in the past 30 days. If we had more granular data, I'd be willing to bet the loss is primarily in users who installed recently, not longer-tenure users losing interest or switching services. Like my mom.
What’s New in SEO for June 14, 2011
The Rails core team does seem to treat the project as if it's a personal playground

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

And thats a dangerous attitude to have, because as smart as they are (and they are very smart guys, make no mistake), they can also make bad decisions, just like the rest of us ... the difference being that the impact on all of us could be huge.

The author says Rails is growing up, part of growing up is learning to be responsible too.
That and the fact that the racy humor was more of a novelty in 1996, when most FPS were in the Doom sci-fi vein of 'stoic hero shoots his way through alien/monster/etc wasteland'. Ten GTA games later, nothing really shocks us anymore.
Math disorder makes consumers easy prey
On the WebGL mailing list someone mentioned that it's not HW accelerated except on Mac OSX which makes hard to see this as a fallback for WebGL. There is also talk of using flash(molehill) as a fallback but that entails some conversion of things like shaders and sharing the data between the javascript vm and flash plugin etc.

EDIT: also for IE, it's probably best to just get Chrome Frames.
I found your "Joe Sixpack" reference extremely comical.
Support for 2.3 will be dropped as soon as 3.1 is out.
http://www.simures.com does a lot of the things being requested -- input boxes for resizing, url passed as part of the url for easy access, doesn't resize your actual browser, etc. http://www.simures.com/800x600/news.ycombinator.com is a good example.
Also, depending on what the sales tax applies to, it can be a fairly good thing. Some states exclude clothes, unprepared food, and medicine. People also understand sales taxes, unlike income taxes.

Given that, progressive taxes are just as foolish. A rate is a rate.
Mobile Wallet and NFC - An Evolution, Not a Revolution
Fake quotes like this strip any sort of credibility away from wired.
Don't do your self the disservice of self-signed - you can get a free cert from startssl.

The CA landscape has changed.... what used to be expensive and required a lot of paperwork is getting cheap/free, and CAs are pushing "Extended validation" certificates and whatnot (the ones that turn your browser bar green, etc....)

Just hit up startssl and get a real certificate... it's that easy. No strings attached.

(Repeating this because I ignored it for about a year until actually checking it out and realizing I'd been an idiot)

ALSO

Given the single utility of this - just inline the scripts you need and avoid the request overhead. You can probably strip out all the functions you don't need to minimize the load time. You could offer a minimized version as well....

ALSO

Very cool! Thanks!
What to Say To Someone Who is Sick
Originally submitted by brandall10 - but now deleted. Not sure why - I thought it was interesting.
Does any one know if this technology, or other technology like skin grafts can be applied post scaring? IE, is it possible to remove severely scarred skin (by cutting it off) and then use skin grafts to replace it?

Just wondering if these technologies can be backwards applied to existing skin damage, or if they need to be executed relatively soon after initial skin damage.
It matters most where you can build markets.

It matters not where it purely a poltical (read most often moral) statement.

Customers don't prefer to buy clean stuff. Most of them prefer to buy cheap stuff. That is the reality, that is the reason discount is doing so well.
The single best advice I can give you is to do what you know best.
Why are business schools failing at the education of entrepreneurship?
The point is that all of the IP addresses recorded in the network transactions are Bitcoin users.
This seems a bit off to me. We're used to scanning things, specially after doing something more than once and since I already know what I want, I can click on the OK button as soon as I see it. No back-tracking needed.

I think the difference is optimization for first use and subsequent use... but thing is, we've all seen OK/Cancel prompts before.
They didn't, necessarily. Banks were just a place to get loans and a slightly more secure place to keep money than a hole in the back yard:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Deposit_Insurance_Corpo...
The problem, or the solution depending on your point of view, is that Rails is not backward compatible between minor releases. Each minor version is work to upgrade to it. My recommendation has always been "start with the latest version of Rails even if it's RC status" since upgrading will be a pain. Hopefully the RC will be complete before you need to launch.

Then you have to make the decision for each app - "Do I upgrade or stay on the latest version"? I personally prefer that tradeoff - Rails can cleanly add new features even it breaks the past. Then I decide if I need those features more than I need the pain of upgrading.
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/50864867-76/adobe-james-co...
The populist solutions are the political summits that year after year claim to want to solve the worlds pollution yet do nothing.
I was thinking just the opposite. When it comes to frameworks, opinions are good things. But you kind of look like an undependable jackass if your opinion changes every 5 minutes.
Startup Accelerators and Older Founders
Banks also inflate the money supply using fractional reserve banking, effectively diminishing the value of every other dollar in active currency.

If you think that is honest behavior, then bury all your money for 10 years and then try to spend it. Suprise! You've been robbed.

If I'm not mistaken, there is an eventual limit on the amount of bitcoins that can ever be created.
If you have a solution to how to solve the first part then by all means I all ears.
It is burdensome to track sales taxes in every part of the country. It is much harder than keeping track of 50 values. I actually wish that sales tax was determined by the origin of a package and not the destination.
I haven't used Bitcoin, so this is an honest question - Why doesn't the software encrypt the wallet automatically?
The whole point is that the risks and dangers aren't known beforehand. One of the things that happens when a company prepares to go public is that its financial reporting must meet certain standards. That's how the risks and dangers become known. The phrase that describes this is "financial transparency".
At Harvard, countless undergrads taking the introductory CS50 class are producing games, websites, and iPhone apps

My hunch is that the people doing this had already self-trained before taking this course. I'd be really surprised if someone with zero background in programming could take an introductory source like this, and start producing working software.
In such a world, the expert's value is only partially based on the quality or depth of his knowledge

That's not even remotely likely, and I think that's easy to prove. Go to any bookstore and pick up a graduate level text on biology, or maths, or whatever. You have all the knowledge right there in your hands! Now read a page, do you understand it, can you apply it? Probably not. There is a lot more to most fields than just an "API reference".
Inspirational Commencement Speeches
Steve Jobs @ Stanford
Sheryl Sandberg @ Barnard
Jeff Bezos @ Princeton
Conan Obrien @ Dartmouth
Stephen Colbert @ Knox
Oprah @ Stanford
JK Rowling @ Harvard
Brain Games & Brain Training - Lumosity
》Cite that it has happened, and cite that it matters, please: Brain size is only very loosely correlated with intelligence

Maybe you should share some of your own citations before making claims like that.

The correlation between raw volume performance on general mental ability assessments is about .4, which is very significant. For a comparison, siblings' intelligence has a correlation of about .47. Considering that siblings share both a great deal of the same genes and have a similar environment, the fact that brain volume has nearly the same correlation is huge.

http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002074508023258...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11129/box/A1833/
He means that there isn't enough people to cash with the current rate. That is $500K.
Also I expect bitcoin to be shutdown because it could be a great way to fund terrorist activities.

So is cash :)
Do you really have no idea how much money Nokia makes building phones or are you just a troll ? Apple tried to play chicken with Nokia over patent and lost, if they don't like it they shouldn't have started the feud to begin with ...
Does anyone care about your new product?
I feel like this would be better as a browser extension instead of a bookmarklet... I get a bit queasy about the potential for MITM with this implementation. An extension that could bring GPG to the mix, would be VERY awesome (if that doesn't exist, I actually haven't tried searching for that...).

Cool project though :)
I think you might be getting too specific, but I'm sad you got downvoted. I think it would be very useful to have 2 tracks of a degrees- a "computer science" more academic and algorithmic training and a "software development" with industry practice, team project focused.

We need the people who can advance the field to get the training to do that- and the people who just want to create the next great company should be able to learn those skills.
How would a bank stop you from getting taken to the cleaners if an outsider got access to your bank account in malicious ways?
Beats me. Probably one of those "get around to it later" things.
That's not entirely a negative... We're better off that people are incentivized to not bury all their money. Deflationary spirals are no fun.
> Since I don't see this specifically addressed in the text: I suspect this is a classic case of survivorship bias.

The text didn't seem to do much besides present the stats. But he say this:

I knew that with age coders tend to switch careers, but I
was surprised to see the size of the drop. After the peak
age of 27, number of developers halves every 6 to 7 years.

I figured that "survivorship bias" was sort of the exact point he was trying to make. Beyond that, there's really no discussion of causation (getting older makes one more "mature" or whatever), so I think it's implied that weeding out less committed devs is exactly what's going on.
Bitcoin is not money on the bank, but cash. If your wallet is stolen, the bank will not refund you, either. You can, however, go to the police and that is what the victim here is doing as well. There is, of course, a much lower chance of catching the thief than there would be with real cash.
When one person drives the platform strategy, and it is opinion-driven, then conflict like this is inevitable. You either agree or you don't, and if DHH changes his mind, you might changes yours, too.

I don't think it is a statement on the platform at all - just a repercussion of one of its tenets.
I just got hacked - any help is welcome!
allinvain
June 13, 2011, 08:47:05 pm

Hi everyone. I am totally devastated today. I just woke up to see a very large chunk of my bitcoin balance gone to the following address:

1KPTdMb6p7H3YCwsyFqrEmKGmsHqe1Q3jg

Transaction date: 6/13/2011 12:52 (EST)

I feel like killing myself now. This get me so f'ing pissed off. If only the wallet file was encrypted on the HD. I do feel like this is my fault somehow for now moving that money to a separate non windows computer. I backed up my wallet.dat file religiously and encrypted it but that does not do me much good when someone or some trojan or something has direct access to my computer somehow.

The transaction sent belongs rightfully to this address: 1J18yk7D353z3gRVcdbS7PV5Q8h5w6oWWG

Block explorer is down so I cannot even see where the funds went.

I tried restoring an earler backup of my wallet but naturally that does not work because the transaction has already been validated.

Needles to say I feel like I have lost faith in bitcoin.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do besides just jump off a bridge?!

---------------
[snipping out posts that don't contribute much]
---------------
Re: I just got hacked - any help is welcome!
June 13, 2011, 09:05:04 pm
allinvain

First thing that I noticed is that my slush's pool account got hacked into and someone changed the payout address to this:

15iUDqk6nLmav3B1xUHPQivDpfMruVsu9f

I then changed the password and proceeded to run some antivirus and anti malware scans. Some stuff was found, but they were all cleaned up and they were all in my windows user profile temp dir which I deleted all the temp files. God I can't even type properly. Sorry folks I'm a bit emotional now.

I then left another virus scanner running and went to sleep. When I woke up I check my bitcoin wallet. I leave the client running to help the network, and I notice -25,000 (and a transaction fee) gone.

Fuck, I really should've moved the coins to a vmware linux session I have running. But the question is was it already too late? Could someone had my access to my wallet.dat for a long time and now just decided to "cash out"
Heh. I just think it's funny that the table is referred to — non-ironically — in the intro of this piece on 6 Stunning Projects That Show the Power of Data Visualization:

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/10/six-stunning-projects-...
Yes, but there's no FDIC-insured BitCoin bank, and there's no way to write a virus that steals cash.
Perhaps that was the reason for the black friday.
Same brain-washing as it were in the time of rice of J2EE..
They lost the most important think - the balance of being good enough and become just another bloated framework.
Alright, so who's got the best GPS spoofer for Android?
Fair catch, I could have chosen more precise words.
Ask HN: Cloud hosting that doesn't suck?
I'm working for a small startup which is experiencing some growing pains with regard to application hosting.

We have been using Amazon EC2 for a while to host our systems. We use them for everything -- production servers, staging servers, monitoring systems, backups. We're not happy and have never been.

The main issue with Amazon is flaky performance, especially with regard to IO. Our Rails apps run at a crawl. Even their best configs have pretty slow per-core performance. We could buy a bunch of physical servers and colocate them for a fraction of the price Amazon costs us per year, and enjoy a tenfold performance increase.

The second issue is the pricing structure, which does not allow for fine-grained resource allocation; the configurations Amazon offer are rarely ever "just right", and it's not possible to tweak them to save money when we can make do with something small and simple. Scaling horizontally to work around the resource granularity issue is not really an option as it would be too costly.

There are some other technical issues that are tiresome to deal with, such as Amazon's dependency on a weird NAT structure that require ugly workarounds in our management systems (eg., Puppet).

We have migrated a few hosts off Amazon over to Cloud Sigma, which we immediately perceived as having better CPU performance, and a _much_ nicer pricing structure where you essentially pay by by the gigahertz (CPU) and megabyte (RAM) in 5-minute intervals. However, we quickly met a wall with regard to IO, which is even worse than Amazon despite the fact that they use Linux KVM with local disks.

I would like to hear about other people's experiences with other cloud hosting services. We need something that "just works" and provides performance comparable to non-virtual hosting. Colocated hosting is fine, too -- probably better, in fact -- as long as adding or removing hosts can be done quickly and painlessly through a web app. At this point we are even considering admitting defeat and just colocating everything.

Any help would be appreciated. Note that we are in Europe, so any recommendations will need to take our location into consideration. Thanks!
>If you think that is honest behavior, then bury all your money for 10 years and then try to spend it. Suprise! You've been robbed.

That does induce people to spend,invest or save(savings in banks are loaned out to others by the banks) which drives the economy.

The problem with bitcoin right now is that it's being thought of an investment to hold on to, instead of a currency that must be exchanged for goods.

Imagine if the dollar was appreciating in value big time every week and month. People would stop spending and just hog them. The economy as we know if might collapse and lead to a full blown depression.
Banks inflate the money without creating (printing) it physically.
I guess a bank taking deposits and giving loans in bitcoins would do just the same.
+1

If resolution is bigger, makes a new window instead of warning.
Right. I also think we need surgery for the rest of us.

I’ll be honest about my education. I studied CS, so the most biology I took was in the last grade at school and I haven't studied any anatomy. but I know to use table knife, scissors and how to wash my hands. How hard can it be to do some minor surgery?
The "Drop Dead" is an allusion to a famous New York Daily News headline from the mid-70s, "Ford to City: Drop Dead", after President Ford said he'd veto a bailout of New York City.

Here's a pic: http://images2.dailykos.com/images/user/426/Ford_to_City.PNG
I've been thinking the same thing... maybe lightly abraid the skin and then spray?
We're not all criminals. Civilians keeping 500K in their house is plain stupid.
It would be nice to have that option. "Anonymous, untreacable, and un-recoverable, or not-so-anonymous, somewhat traceable, and recoverable."

Plus, I'd bet that you could create an onion router-style arrangement with multiple off-shore banks in different jurisdictions.
LulzSec: We Hacked the U.S. Senate
Tips for getting started with Python
I doubt that encrypting the wallet on the HD would have helped much. It sounds like allinvain's computer was compromised. The attacker could have copied the decryption key when it was used legitimately by allinvain.
Top iPhone Passcodes Revealed
How a Good Facebook Fan Page Should Look Like: Tips, Best Designs
You guys all know what a huge role Facebook plays in people’s lives — it is the most visited social network, and the second most visited site on the web! For many people, Facebook has become their virtual home, and they cannot imagine their lives out of the Facebook world.
It was late when I posted this... I meant "Teens AREN'T the most discerning audience"... :?
Or maybe Google is being smart here. Anyone who stoops so low as to use Mahalo as a resource must need a credit card so they can afford to purchase a real reference book on the subject.
Please. I've been writing rails apps professionally since 1.2. My observations:

1. jQuery quickly replaced prototype for most projects via the jrails gem. This just reflects the underlying reality.
2. Coffeescript as the default was a bad idea. This would make more sense in say a year from now.
3. Rails 3 active record w/ ARel is HUGELY better. I used to have to pull out find_by_sql every so often, haven't needed it yet in rails 3.
4. Bundler solves a whole raft of annoying dependency issues in rails 2. I can't tell you how many hours I lost to dealing with weird issues with vendored gems.

Bringing rails2 apps to rails 3 is going to suck for you. I'd argue that one of the prices for the elegance of rails is that you need to spend more time constantly upgrading it.

However, the advantage of this price is that you have a framework that has been consistently lead of the pack in terms of productivity and simplicity.
I think both make sense but the specialized degrees could be taught by more application-oriented institutions or part of a different degree (engineering vs. science).

The term "vocational school" sounds a bit derogatory but that might be more suitable for a lot students who are less interested in theory.
It also makes me wonder if there's a market here for mobile software that helps with basic math. These people might even benefit from something as basic as software that can translate back and forth between a decimal number and a quantity of dots.
Questions for Start-ups - Is it worth a shot?
My wallet is on an IronKey - in order for me to use it I have to plug it in and decrypt it. I also backup my wallet on a NAS server but the wallet is encrypted with GPG.

Gotta protect your data!!
Since I'm coming from Python, JS, and C, passing a null instead of a string doesn't seem like an "edge condition"; it's the same kind of error as passing an integer or Map instead of a string. Passing 0, I suppose, is an edge condition.
This is where "state of the art" is really an apt phrase. Rails 3 is effectively a community consensus on the best way to make most webapps today. Rails 2 was the community's best stab at that same goal a few years ago. The distance between the two is explained by a changing state of art, and some ferreting out of weaknesses in the framework.

I think rails developers blindly upgrade their apps, just because they want to be on the hottest new technology. I know I am drawn by the glitter of rails 3.1 beta. But everyone should really weigh the business decision of upgrading; what do you really truly gain by being on the latest rails for all your apps? Sometimes the technical debt you take on by maintaining an old framework is less than the effort you have to spend to upgrade, especially for sunsetting apps.
Programmer Resumes are Deprecated