skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difficulty of generating bitcoins increases exponentially over time

No, it changes in proportion to the number of blocks generated in the past week or two. This could even result in a decrease if the number of miners decrease.
Replace "trolling" with anything you want, how you call it doesn't figure into my argument at all.
I think generating bitcoins is a way to have controlled inflation and to distribute new bitcoins into the economy as fairly as possible.

The value of bitcoins should (and hopefully eventually will) be worth their value in work/productivity/product beyond the effort it takes to create a new one.

Yes, bitcoins are overvalued due to media hype the same way hot IPOs are. Eventually the price will settle and the value will be determined by market conditions rather than gold rush demand.

Then again, I would never waste my time.
To answer this question: Yes. And it happens at the NSA everyday when they are monitoring suspected criminals whether they are terrorists planning attacks, foreign spies conducting industrial or economic espionage, drug dealers trafficking banned substances, pedophiles, and other similar criminal activities.

This should come as no surprise to anyone that the NSA or FBI does contain the money, manpower, and legal authority to do things 'in the public interest'.

Patriotic hackers are a different matter and though they tend to hide within the underground, they often times are contracted by authorities to gather information or sabotage other more devious hackers.

EDIT: And of course, someone has to downvote me because they disagree with me pointing out what is already happening. I don't understand how you can disagree with facts.
Twitter Joins the Social Network Battle too, with BackType Acquisition
Emotion Reading Technology
I know robgough already mentioned it (hi Rob!) but go to http://geekup.org/ - the next one in Manchester is on the 12th. It's was designed exactly for folks like you (well, not exactly, but you're not expected to have lots of geek cred or anything!) and there's also an online mailing list so you can get to know some names first. There are meetups all across the North.

Also, check out #nwrug on irc.freenode.net (oh and #geekup actually - but I don't go in there much). I hang out in there and it's mostly people from around Manchester or Leeds. It's ostensibly a Ruby channel but, to be honest, it's rarely discussed. It's great having new people come in and get to know us - happens all the time. If you end up in there, I'm 'petercooper' there too.
I figured out the loophole and tried it. No one has gotten any Invites. Damn. That places needs people.
Could you at least change the error page to include a link back to the main 'new' page?
When my wife and I are looking for homes, we definitely take the needs of our two home offices into consideration. We don't care about formal living and dining room spaces.

A company like Dell has very tight supply lines made possible by online orders. They couldn't do what they do efficiently if they had to predict demand and stuff a retail sales channel with product six months to a year in advance. That's how you did it in 1982.
Everyone who says, "Just go, don't be shy!" has either never been shy, or gotten over it so long ago that they don't remember how it feels.

A good way to dip your toe in the water is to find an IRC channel that meets every so often. You can get to know people there, so when you first show up, you'll already be somewhat familiar with them.
I've tried that too. No one has reported getting any Invite or email.
Radio-controlled flying super hero
Interesting Web Data from 24 Hours on Hacker News' Front Page
I was referred to HN by a former colleague only 4 months ago. I'm the farthest from being a programmer of any sort, but I work in and around technology and he knew I was somewhat of a 'knowledge whore' aka philosopher. I like being in the know. "Sponge learning" is a great practice. I walk away from the monitor each day knowing what I don't know.

Thanks HN
Learn Hacking and seurity.
Every person I've tried to Invite has GMail. Not getting Invites. Grrrr.
That is definitely new to me. Granted, I was a child in the 80s but I never new that we had minitels down here. Live and learn.
Jbooth was being facetious.
Very cool. Great work, Hanwen!

I'm interested by the fact that he has sufficient Go code to compile to make distribution useful. After all, a Go screencast shows the entire standard library getting compiled in seconds on a macbook.
SWF (Sassy Woman Founder) Seeking Technical Soulmate
I would first start to talk to a lot of people that have a connection with your industry.Usually they give you some ideas of who might be interested.
.. really? Interesting! Thank you for the correction, I've been reading enough about BTC while considering mining and this is the first time I've heard this.
I think there was an edit in the parent from something like "new machine" to "upgrade" while I was writing the reply. Of course, I could've misread it too.
I love the idea of clip on technology, like the project for turning your smartphone's camera in to a high powered microscope. There's a whole world of possibilities out there, especially for the hardware hackers, now that so many of us have high powered computers in our pockets.
Supersize Your Startup Dev Productivity
Scott, I looked at you guys the other day, and I couldn't see what you did that launchrock and unbounce didn't, but for free.

LaunchRock adds the social validation thing. I'm not sold on their thinking there. (I'm using it to find my target market, which means I'd be ok if they were just able to track IF they shared, not how effective they were).

Unbounce has better reporting than launchrock, and some nice templates, but their social contest pages are smoke and mirrors. You can't determine if anyone shared w/ them either.

Both are free to try though. 50 signups on someone else's domain is simply useless, unless you're anticipating failure.
Samsung should go to court with them

What happens if a judge rules in favor of a Microsoft injunction against selling Samsung-made Android phones? The trial could last years—or decades—and the whole time Samsung couldn't sell it's phones in the US.
She fun , bollywood news , fashion: Home again, Chavez salutes independence
> I would rather people look to philosophy for answers to their intractable problems than religion.

Religion ended slavery. (Yes, some religions advocated and supported slavery - they lost to the ones that didn't.)

What has philosophy done in that domain. (Is it poor form to point out that philosophy pretty much went Nazi during the 30s.)

Yes, philosophers produced logic et al.
HN covered this idea a few days ago in this thread, when talking about the kid who got locked out of Gmail.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2726630
Rethink your Data Model (NoSQL)
I feel for you and hope some people here are able to bump you into the right direction. It should take nothing more than 3-5 contacts and you should be good to proceed (by joining one of them to another geek event, easily extending the network with lots of stress removed).

You're not alone with these fears - in fact, you're probably in a field where this seems to be well-known (and sometimes the stereotype). I moved to Israel recently and, while not the prime example for being an introvert, I tend to sympathize with you.

Except for one contact (via HN, no less) I've yet to convince myself to join a local networking event - and I even declined a nice (via HN, no less..) invitation for a meetup recently, because I felt that I couldn't 'show' or 'offer' something of interest.

Bottom line: You're not alone with your situation and your fears. Asking for help here is already a great step, now just accept some of the offers from people around you.

Contact the guys that are available and set up a date as close to now as possible. That way you won't try to think it through for a long time ("Should I?"..). Jump! :)
Wow. I know very little about mining and had no idea that the market moved that fast.
You won't cite facts because you can't cite them using any reliable sources.

You're just pathetically complaining about America while you're here reaping the benefits. Why not move if the USA is so bad?

As anamax says: while it's clear that America is far from perfect, it's unclear who, if anyone, is anywhere near as close. Suggestions? (Note - the answer has to have significant capacity. Otherwise I'll nominate some random church group in Texas. Come to think of it, random US church groups do more good than most countries.)

Until you've got something better, the appropriate response is "thank you".
It's a dynamic IP so you were pointing to another machine.
Let's hope judges are still capable of noticing an extortion racket when they see one.
"But π=3.14159265358979 is a time bomb! Sooner or later it will fail you when it’s not accurate enough anymore."

Well, actually for almost everything humans do, this will never, ever fail you. In fact, I can't think of a single thing this will fail for outside of physics research or formal mathematics.
Is manually penalizing the ranks of spam sites solid engneering too?
While I was a student I didn't use my spare change. I spent cash and sometimes coins over £1. However I wasn't throwing it away, I was just emptying my pockets into a box. As time went on my change accumulated massively. After a couple of years I took it all to a bank: I had nearly £220.

That's not quite the same since it wasn't just pennies. But the point still stands: (1) I never had pockets full of change, (2) after a while it was worth me cashing in. This would be the case with even any high quantity of low value coins. I know people say that you shouldn't pinch pennies, but it didn't waste my time to do so. It's as easy as putting your keys down and in 5 years time it will be worth something to you.

...tell your kid that they are his if he can count them for you?
The author's familiarity with Windows doesn't make his argument that Microsoft is likely to provide better security weaker. Indeed if his story is to be believed, the fact that he initially used Dropbox might be seen as indication that he is aware of and in a position to evaluate Microsoft's security or lack thereof and that his decision to switch was based on knowledge rather than self-promotion.
"It all spells trouble for MS in the medium term"

Only if Google increases their level of support. I work at a large business and we spoke with both Google and Microsoft. Though I'm a Google fanboy, I'll admit that the level of support from Microsoft is currently much better than Google. Microsoft's cost of implementation was also lower.
I think we are talking at cross-purposes here, in different perspectives, so let's stop.
> Drop the strong signal of a search term being in the domain name [...] It's been abused beyond belief.

I whole-heartedly agree—but people still search for "facebook.com login" and similarly trivial queries. If Google broke returning "facebook.com/login" for these it'd lose a lot of its value for these people.
You won't cite facts because you can't cite them using any reliable sources.

Your examples are from HUNDREDS of years ago. A little out of date no?

You're just pathetically complaining about America while you're here reaping the benefits. Why not move if the USA is so bad?
As anamax says: while it's clear that America is far from perfect, it's unclear who, if anyone, is anywhere near as close. Suggestions? (Note - the answer has to have significant capacity. Otherwise I'll nominate some random church group in Texas. Come to think of it, random US church groups do more good than most countries.)

Until you've got something better, the appropriate response is "thank you".
I agree completely, but because no other engine provides decent results while indexing so much, there's really no viable alternative right now. DDG is good for very mainstream things, but does not do a good job of finding user profile page X on site Z, etc.

All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior.

The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these?

The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.
Out of interest - why did you buy bitcoins? For purchasing goods? Or for speculation (to re-sell when, you hope, the price goes up)?
There tends to be a lot of myths about Microsoft security particularly in the non-Windows using community. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft tends to be very good about security updates, disclosure of bugs and holes, and remains vigilant about finding and patching up unknown flaws. Additionally, Microsoft hasn't had to answer before Congress on the matter of the securing their user's data. So trying to compare Microsoft's apparently "embarassing security failures" to Dropbox having to testify to Congress is like comparing your post to a PG essay.
No-one else is stupid enough to waste their time building the things I come up with... and that's only half in jest.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks. At the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find. If the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced. If they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased. The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.
I meant specifically, when he said that for a currency to stay at a certain rate, it means money must be flowing into it.
I don't know if this tweet is true, since I'm already on G+. The rest of you can try and report back:

http://twitter.com/#!/rothgar/statuses/87767198084505600
Atomic Hacker News
I meant the opposite. You forward your mail to the non-Google Apps account.
Agreed there is a huge opportunity in solving the "eye ball" problem. Unfortunately the days of 1 to 5 cent clicks on Adwords is a thing of the past.

I still think there is more we can do to help the organic stuff, but getting started today still requires rolling up your sleeves and doing real work.
Site visitor numbers plummet 90% after EU cookie law change
When I lived in France I loved Free. Best ISP I have ever used
I'm using this on a project right now and am finding a lot of successes derived from its use. We tried to build our JSON in the model using the traditional #to_json/#as_json approach in Rails, but found this was falling on its face when our data model became more complex (which, itself, is probably a code smell, but that's another story).

Good luck! I hope it brings you success.
Twice I've posted to this thread a good answer to your question

"Can you please suggest online resource to learn great beginning and advanced probability concepts?"

but somehow someone at HN has used some HN software function to make my posts invisible to others.

My second post was made 'invisible' within a few minutes of my posting.

Just what HN has against solid information on probability is not clear, hut it is brain-dead.

Someone at HN has some severe problems between his ears.

It looks like you will have to post your question on some other forum.
There is plenty of noise on either side.. if you want to look at it like that.
Have you thought that's because many people do buy currency and items?
It was up for me, but here is a mirror:

http://www.cutawaysecurity.com.nyud.net/blog/file-content-hi...
I was wondering the same thing. Are nearly instant compile times one of the selling points of Go? Not that this isn't still very cool, but a also wonder what the use case is.

Perhaps one could put some Go code in a scripting language and have it compiled on the fly based on the data types passed to the function?
Use yum to list all 'php-' packages, unload them all and load in the 'php53' equivalents. I'm sure some cleaning up is involved but ...
0wning Insecure Office Printers
No. They sign a contract that probably covers that unlikely outcome.
The system contracts and it becomes easier to mine. As long as the number of clients doesn't approach zero, transactions should be OK.
Well, sure. Google is a machine that turns small text queries into internet links. It does this remarkably well. If manually penalizing sites gets you solid improvements beyond what automated or clever methods give you, it is bad engineering to not do it. What's the argument against this? Sure, it makes engineers feel icky to have manual anything, and it's not nearly as scaleable or reliable as some hypothetical automated solution. The issue is that the hypothetical automated solution doesn't exist. I'm sure they have 500 of the smartest, most capable people in the world working on this every single day, that they haven't found it is good evidence that the solution is not obvious.

Surely a fully automated, self correcting algorithm exists to penalize spam sites and shitty content farms, and whoever comes up with it will be heavily rewarded financially for doing so, either because they will make major inroads in the search space, or because there will be a bidding war for the technology. That nobody has come up with it outside of Google either says it likely is outside of the engineering ability of humans to do it at the moment.
They blocked 1 domain and the millions of subdomains it was reselling.
Pagerank has nothing to do with domains. It applies a score to individual pages.
I just realized I can use G+ as a blog and just post those entries publicly... It would be even better if they'd implement tagging.
I am fascinated by the Truecrypt file histogram. I'd be interested to see a histogram of an encrypted partition or whole file system.

Hmm, may not get any work done this afternoon.
It was called "videotexto". Telesp had, AFAIK, the largest install (in terms of pages and functions) but Telerj also had its own network. At that time, it was common for BBSs to support Minitel terminals connecting through 1200/75 (v.23, AFAIK) modems.

http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletexto#No_Brasil
This is one of the dumbest things Google has done.

If Google really wants to get rid of 90 percent of spammy sites all they need to do is block any website that is registered with Godaddy.
Can anyone speak to how this app works? Does the phone store a local copy of the block chain?
I just notice VIA and HTC are founded by the same woman[1], and I know the financial situation of VIA is not good...

[1] http://blog.laptopmag.com/2011-most-important-women-in-mobil...
What does biodegradable mean anyway
Ofcom maps state of UK broadband
> That's a lot harder for most people to manage than just using a search box.

Hey, sounds like a business opportunity. "Join our bogon-buster network! [fine print: invite only, your activities and reviews will be rated by other members.]"

Of course, after awhile, you'll need another layer on top of it to make sure that your bogon-buster networks aren't full of spammers themselves.
Looks matter, eh?
http://remodelista.com/posts/diy-concrete-block-tables
You are of course free to disagree with the author, but I hardly think that makes it biased. Logging in with any password is objectively a pretty embarrassing security lapse. I'm not aware of any problems like that with Live Mesh. Or even, really, with any online Microsoft products.
Thanks for trying. That's too bad. That place needs people.
Those BitCoin miners could also be good gaming PCs. Once I take mine out of action, it will simply be a gaming PC that paid for itself. I actually bought a gaming PC off ebay for mining - of course if you just bought a crappy PC with a fast graphics card it might be different.
Objects are Premature Optimization
It looks like Google has improved deleting users since the last time I had to do it. That's a relief! They've been improving Google Apps a lot in the past year.

http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=33314

"Shared documents created by the user will be deleted within five days unless ownership is reassigned. You can reassign ownership of all documents created by the user before deleting the account. If you only need to save some documents, spreadsheets, or presentations, ask the user to reassign ownership of selected documents prior to deleting the account."

Shared calendars aren't deleted. Email seems to be unless steps are taken to export the data prior to account deletion, etc. etc.

It'll be interesting to see their take on Google+ content.
Yeah, that's the bit I learned a week after doing the calculations. When people first started, they were using CPUs. When GPU usage became available, CPU-miners became so horribly inefficient that electricity cost alone killed them.

Now, granted, I can't imagine anything being that much better than GPUs, but new GPUs are usually much more efficient than old ones, and they come out all the time. It could quickly became an arms race just to break even.

On top of that, apparently there's also a built-in cycle that makes it harder even if the machines don't change. The linked article touches on that briefly as part of his decision.
Google Revamps the Social Scene
It isn't right. It would only be true if every miner was immediately liquidating the bitcoins they were awarded. Such a massive oversupply would likely overwhelm demand and push the price much lower.

In reality this is not what BTC miners are doing (from what I can see). They are mining and hording BTC for later use meaning that the mined coins require $0 to enter the system to maintain equilibrium.
Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search on google maps, add "!m" to your query).

But the underlying search is Bing.

Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)
> I'm wondering about the tax consequences of perks as opposed to equivalent salary bumps...

"free food" can't be taxable to the employee because there's no accounting. There may be limits on how the company can expense it but I suspect the "keeping them at work" is a good enough argument.
System administration and deployment tool in clojure
S&P, Fitch & Moodys
We need to unite all the hackers in the world to destroy the internet presence of these companys.
Lets unite and destroy their business.
You, and many others, seem to imply that being "bad math" (mathematically not sound) is the same as being "bad" (in the broad sense). The author never said that the method was useless, nor anything similar. PageRank was an obviously great advance at the time, but this does not mean that it can not be improved.

Now, if you accept that it can be improved, the author has a great point: trying to understand the role that this made up constant plays in the algorithm (and getting rid of it if possible) is a clear path to what might be an improvement.

Oh, and "physical constants" are not even remotely similar to using a made-up constant. Physical constants are measured experimentally, meaning that they "exist" in the object that the mathematical model tries to explain. Now tell me how do you measure ".85" being an "existing" constant in the "ranking of website importance" object that pagerank tries to model...