skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin is already not legal tender. Legal tender means you are _obligated_ to accept it as payment for a debt (eg, in the US, a lender cannot refuse a payment on a debt in dollar bills). It does not _necessarily_ mean that non-legal tenders _cannot_ be used for barter.
> I'm not sure the courts take reexaminations seriously as a defense.

That generally depends in part on how far along the court case is when the reexamination request is filed.

On one hand, federal judges want to keep their cases moving; they themselves are judged by the peers (reputationally only; they have life tenure) in part by their average time to final disposition. If an accused infringer files a reexamination request in the USPTO just as its infringement case is about to go to trial, the chances are the judge might order the trial to proceed anyway.

On the other hand, a reexamination proceeding could make a case go away, or even just narrow the triable issues significantly. That would free up the judge and his or her law clerks to work on other cases.

And random factors can make a difference. I once had a judge fast-track a patent case about programmable thermostats. He did so because one of his law clerks that year had his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. The judge wanted to finish the case while that law clerk was still around to help him. The law clerk informed me and the other side of this at the first case management conference; he also noted for the record that my law firm had turned him down the previous year when he applied for a job with us; ouch .... (The case settled soon afterwards for unrelated reasons.)
I don't think those polls captured intensity, either. After several months to get used to no points, I feel very strongly they should be brought back. These threads are much less useful without them, especially when I don't have time to read/judge every single comment, or am not familiar with the discussion topic.

E.g., if there were points in this thread, I'd have a much better idea what the 99% of non-commenters thought about points...
I'd say yes. All/almost early adopters are already enlisted so to speak, and most are already stocked with bitcoins.

And every hour 300 new bitcoins are mined, I'm still willing to buy some, but I'm a rather late adopter, and, obviously, there a limit for me too, after which I'll stop buying.

Anyway if bitcoin will survive until 2013 then... I'll be ready to accept bets (as in 10 to 1) that it will make it.
He's suggesting a cross between a hellban and the reply delay, where you can reply but your comment has to sit in purgatory for a while before anyone can read it. That way people think they've got in their two cents in the fight, but in reality they have to wait just as if they couldn't post.

It would presumably solve the problem of fights turning into a series of sibling replies or spreading to other threads where the participants see each other.
Nab there'd be privacy issues. It would never fly.
I second this. At first I was against the hiding of points for the reasons others have stated: to show good comments.

In reality you would get situations where someone would post a thoughtful and well-reasoned comment (2 points) and someone would reply with a very minor correction (12 points).

It also seemed like "wars" were fought over points too, purely anecdotally.

My own experience is that voting now seems to be more rational. People seem to upvote when something should be upvoted (my guess is that this topped out before if someone thought a comment had too many votes). When something is negative, it's indicated so it doesn't tend to get downvoted into oblivion.

As for curating interesting comments to the top, this happens now and seems to work quite well.

I just wish there was a way to:

- Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and

- Filter comments by "quality", sorta like Slashdot has. The meaning of this can be vague and "quality" doesn't have to be a straight point measure but I'd like to see a way to just see the best comments, particularly when there are 300+ comments.
Today the joke-explainer duty falls upon me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Even if you are familiar with the expression, the full article is well worth reading.
I am somewhat disappointed that he didn't say he'd goosed his Mac's performance with "3MB of hot RAM." Oh well.
Read asymco.com , even though he is long on the AAPL stock... at least his reasoning is based on analysis.
We seem to be talking past each-other, but I'll take the bait. If I understand correctly, you seem to be saying that corporations should be afforded all of the same rights as individual citizens. While certain rights (e.g. freedom from unjust seizure, trial rights, etc.) are important, on the whole, I disagree. Maybe that's where we differ, but I'm not sure if this is the point you are getting around to making.

To make my position more clear, I do not believe that corporations should be afforded all of the same rights as citizens. History has shown this to be true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist). In order for capitalism to succeed and our economy to prosper, we need a proper regulatory environment that can protect the interests of individual citizens against organized groups of individuals (e.g. corporations). It is not enough to leave corporations to self-regulate because too often, our interests dramatically diverge. And again, this isn't an easy task, but I believe that it is one worthy of effort.

N.B. I'm not all that interested in defending this point any further, but would be happy to hear you make an argument for it, as I haven't heard many great defenses of the "corporation as citizen" argument.

Regarding the Citizens United ruling; here's what the Wikipedia article has to say on this case:

The Supreme Court reversed the lower court, striking
down those provisions of the McCain–Feingold Act that
prohibited all corporations, both for-profit and
not-for-profit, and unions from broadcasting
"electioneering communications." An "electioneering
communication" was defined in McCain–Feingold as a
broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that
mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general
election or thirty days of a primary.

From where I sit, this ruling removes barriers from corporations making political contributions (I'm not as concerned as you are with the medium that the electioneering communications are distributed in). This means that they are now better able to lobby for legislation that benefits them to the detriment of their young/upstart competitors (as someone posting on a board related to startups, I'm surprised that this doesn't concern you too). Again, this story was a good illustration of legislation benefiting the entrenched/monied interests over the interests of individual citizens. While it would be nice if the world were perfect, it isn't and we must deal with the realities presented to us.
Is this really a bad thing? Now people can stop hoarding them and start really using them as currency. It never really mattered what they were worth unless you were holding onto them. If you use bitcoins to enable transactions only and keep your money in real dollars then it can be pretty useful.
If configuration writes are serialized through a daemon, why not use the same daemon for configuration reads? The daemon could parse the text-based configuration files once and then publish the parsed settings using shared memory (protected by a read/write lock, since reads will outnumber writes)? The daemon could update the published settings in shared memory and slowly write them out to disk.
I'm not even sure if characterizing this is a four horse race is accurate. The article acknowledges the existence of other giants such as Microsoft and HP, but state they are behind the times and struggling to catch up. But are there any other rising powerhouses out there besides the four horsemen? eBay?
Show HN: I made time app for contract programmers w/ new iOS location feature
Scrivener is really tuned for slicing and dicing prose. You _could_ use it for code, just as you _could_ use MS Word as your IDE. But it would probably be a bad idea.
Beyond the PC: special report on personal technology
I agree with the author, but still it reminds me of "Beating the average"
> This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin.
The tax cuts of the last 30 years have been accompanied by massive deregulation and cuts to social services. Society has taken a huge right-ward tilt, conservatives have gotten everything they wanted. But you guys can never get enough and are always claiming that we need more tax cuts, more deregulation and more cuts to social services. The deficits created by the tax cuts during Republican administrations are used to demand cuts to social services during Democrat ones. It's happening now under Obama, even though conservatives are in a panic over supposed socialism there have been huge cuts at state and local levels, Federal government has shed half a million jobs [1], and Obama has been negotiating trillions of dollars in cuts to Medicare.

We are living in your vision of the world. And it is awful. Corporations and banks have totally corrupted our democracy, so yes, Washington D.C. is useless. But the bankers are the source of the problems. They are a blood sucking squid on humanity's face.

When all the banks failed a few years ago it was a great opportunity to break them apart, too big to fail should be too big to exist. But instead we were all told, by both Democrats and Republicans, that if we didn't save them it would supposedly plunge us into the worst economy since the great depression. So tax payers gave them the free money and propped them up but we still got the worst economy since the great depression. And NOT A SINGLE BANKER WAS FIRED OR PROSECUTED, even though there has been tons of documentation of fraud. The government is in their back pocket, they do as they want.

[1] http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/08/263588/the-cons...
The peak is for census jobs
I personally run my applications entirely through index.php but your argument does not make sense. You can easily include one file at the top of all your scripts and have that handle things like autoloading, authentication, etc.

Then if you need to make a change you are still only changing it one spot.
I'd guess WordStar. Or failing that, WordPerfect.

WordPerfect was more commonly seen, but WordStar fits the description of "Runs on CP/M and is not supported" better.

Edit: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar#Abandonment
Did you contact them? They will usually tell you what 's wrong with the documents . True, paypal is extremely understaffed compared to most banks.
MS is definitely a competitor, but the article seems to be saying that they lack the energy and freshness of these four.
Of course it would require more infrastructure around bitcoin. There is already an impressive amount of exchanges, and it would be pretty easy to exchange bitcoins with software like android bitcoin wallet. excellent app btw: https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet

Gold isn't really a good instrument of exchange. Gold-backed currencies are, but the central issuer has proved problematic historically.

Of course cryptocurrency used widespreadly is just a nerd fantasy right now, but I believe in it more than to a new gold standard :)
Can someone comment on Telesocial's API?
Recently I read about a company doing a free voice API - Telesocial.com. They supposedly have a free voice api (I checked it out) that makes free mobile calls in the USA. What I want to understand is how is this possible, given that all other Voice API services charge money for this? Second question is their REST API. It seems to map / take ID's from other services (Twitter, Facebook, iOS and Android) and maps them to phone numbers. Why would I give them this info? I have tried to enter my user's into their API, but it makes each user verify / opt-in with a hard challenge. Is this replacicatable?
Haskell is a hard language because (a) laziness is not intuitive, especially when space-performance matters (sadly, it does) and (b) pure functional programming is just not practical for most people. Like the OP said, it's awesome for brain-stretching, but not the easiest language to use.

I started writing a game in Haskell and found that the scaffolding necessary to do randomness in the "right" way was just too painful. It could be that I hadn't learned the idioms well-enough to see a better way of doing things; but if I had trouble, I think it's fair to say that most people would. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fan of functional programming. I just think pure functional programming is impractical. Mutable state is like radioactivity: it's necessary, powerful, and sometimes very useful, but must be handled with extreme care, not promiscuously thrown about.

My favored computation model is one in which the waterline between lambda and pi calculus is clear: message-passing between agents who should ideally be referentially transparent, unless referential non-transparency is part of their design. The upshot of this is that if an agent needs to be optimized using mutable state, none of the others care. That is, it's what OOP should have been.
GigaOm now has a confirmation[1] with a short Q&A that says "VDIO and Rdio are run by separate teams".

[1] http://gigaom.com/video/vdio-janus-friis/
If you're writing the app, you're absolutely right. Apps should be written in such a way that everything is properly sanitized and sandboxed.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who use PHP are stuck with third-party apps with questionable security records, such as WordPress. If you want to have anything resembling security in such an environment, you need to resort to band-aid solutions such as disabling functions. It's far from optimal, I admit, but at least it helps reduce damages if (or rather, when) the third-party app gets hacked.
This is interesting. At Virginia Tech, we switched from Blackboard to an in-house system built on Sakai about 2 years ago. It's much better than Blackboard, but even as a student, it's dreadful. Our professors apparently have it much worse though.

It would be nice to see a system that uses Google Apps. This would be a big step up versus the systems in place now.
It is if the only reason that they have value in the first place was the hoarding and speculating, which seems a reasonable interpretation of events to date. A currency of no value is not useful for trade.

I mean that "if" as a true logical statement, not an implied assertion that it must be true. (I do believe that, but I'm not asserting it right now, because I'm not defending it.)
I'm in the school of thought that anyone who says Bitcoin is a pyramid scam is trying to scam Bitcoin and/or intentionally depress the value of BTC for personal gain.

I am an early adopter, I was one of the first 100 people to mine, and I've mined thousands of BTC (including 650 with a single CPU), and I wrote the most popular miner, DiabloMiner.

If it was a pyramid scam, why would I currently be ignoring the current price of BTC in USD? It just means the demand is currently low, and since I'm not selling, who cares?

Mining is not about making money, its about preserving the cryptographic integrity of the currency. Also, no, the exchange rate is not yet below the cost of mining for many miners. It will have to drop below $1 before everyone is out.
>Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy [...]

Respectfully, I disagree.

Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting interesting content; what appears on the front page is what has been upvoted sufficiently. I presume you wouldn't argue that HN users should read all submissions, and decide what is interesting and noteworthy for themselves.

You have a point, in that there may be feedback effect with comments.

Personally, I don't think that a comment being highly rated seriously effects my judgement of its content. It does, however, draw my attention to that comment.

I would argue that comment scores should not be optimised to give the most accurate rating to comments, so much as to filter comments - e.g. draw attention to comments that are interesting, and might otherwise be overlooked.

As such, if there is positive feedback in good comments being 'overvoted' I don't see a problem.

I accept that this is a subjective perspective, determined by what I want from HN. I want to use the smart community here to quickly learn important information, and gain insight; as such, I don't really care whether comment scores are 'correct', so much as whether they are useful.

As others have said, the ability to see the wider community's aggregated opinion on a particular set of conflicting comments, is also useful, where I lack the expertise to evaluate them myself - but I wouldn't be casting any votes, in such a situation.
Carmack didn't write that code. It was written by Greg Walsh.
What about alt accounts? Sure, you can try to track that via IP, but by the time you start thinking about that, even this "pretty easy" feature starts being real complex and prone to problems (like misidentification behind NATs, etc).
thanks, I've taken two semesters of Java, php/mysql, etc in the past so I should be able to get it down fast.
I think more interesting is what outside major players will jump in. Facebook and Microsoft have some good ties.
registered!
I would like to see points displayed after voting. I think they have more information content when hidden before the voting takes place, but I think it's useful information.

I've never seen "fights" over karma scores, especially over the difference between +2 vs. +20 (downvoted posts are visible by color). Usually posts about upvoting or downvoting (i.e. "Why is this crap at +20?" or "Stop downvoting me" or my favorite, "I know this will get downvoted but...") get downvoted hard and people learn that the community dislikes them.
Satoshi's white paper disproves everything you just said. Either your comment is out of ignorance or out of malice. Go read the white paper.
Metro is fine with a mouse. I would like to see it become the new widget layer on top of the desktop wallpaper, without hiding the old task bar, and preserving a Windows-7-style start menu.
If it ever was, I would love to see that article.
The intro read like it would be a much longer article.

tl;dr - Haskell isn't easy enough to use / is lacking good toolchains for author's use cases
I am shocked Calacanis made a two sentence statement without a plug for one of his companies.
Here's my questions Recently I read about a company doing a free voice API - Telesocial.com. They supposedly have a free voice api (I checked it out) that makes free mobile calls in the USA. What I want to understand is how is this possible, given that all other Voice API services charge money for this? Second question is their REST API. It seems to map / take ID's from other services (Twitter, Facebook, iOS and Android) and maps them to phone numbers. Why would I give them this info? I have tried to enter my user's into their API, but it makes each user verify / opt-in with a hard challenge. Is this replacicatable?
Why starting anything is hard
God says, "according cleave embrace fabulous disguise foot selected
awaited "

On one level dopimines make everybody equally happy. Everyone has highs and lows. You never manage to have a high for very long. I donno. Justice seems to go beyond biology. All I know is I talk to God and He approves anything that happens. Get yer own God.

God says, "lived Unchangeable manage extended gave recollect liftedst
exalted womb excepted toiling faithful one's calculation
appear unfeigned Your suffered clearly lifts weakest wants
stowed keep unspeakable Those taunt whereupon suspicions
anger perversion question met implied spirit advices elect
lingered cattle endeavouring Willing clearly "
> - Look at comments you haven't seen yet; and

I find this handled helpfully by http://hckrnews.com/about.html
Linode is the fastest if you are looking for speed and their plans are pretty cheap comparatively.
Is that much better than printing money and distributing the new money to major banks? That is what the US government is doing now. Most countries do a combination of distributing newly printed money to domestic banks and the government itself.
I don't think you can upgrade the SSD on an Air. My understanding is they are pulled apart and soldered to the MB in order to give the Air its awesome form factor.

Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong, because that is one of the primary things keeping me from an Air instead of a MacBook Pro.
PC Games: Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensi (2010/MULTI2/RePack oleh mekanika RG)
Information Retrieval is not search!
Ah I didn't realize you had made the graphic. I hope I did not come across too disparagingly.
I think we also see less bandwagoning.

To better illustrate this effect, let me present an example. When I'm reading a comment and it makes an initial impression on me (good or bad), I have to decide whether I'm going to vote on it (if I'm unsure, I'll just leave it unmoderated). When I see the score, it gives me more confidence in my opinion so I vote more.

If others fall victim to this similar pattern of behavior we'll wild variation in comment votes and we'll see scale free behavior of votes (i.e. preferential attachment, comments with higher votes will tend to get more votes).
This goes beyond "can't use a bash shell". I've written chunks of IP stacks, multiple implementations of HTTP as both clients and servers, and done a ton of server-side socket level code. I'm reasonably confident that I meet the requirements.

Yet every time I need to look at Rails, I run screaming because of the huge, steaming mess that learning it has become.

The point about C++ was real. It's exactly the same feeling I get when I bump into boost nerds who honestly think template metaprogramming is the path to the future.
script doing the work: http://www.samsung.com/us/microsite/galaxysII/js/script.js

Quite nice to see in action from a code perspective, but I'm not sure I actually like the final page layout...
Painful. Great they got their stuff back but apparently it takes knowing people at google to get stuff done beyond the 'sorry we can not answer further emails about this'.

I understand that there are limits to what technical support you can offer your end users but the fact that someone is a reporter with 'access' should not be the determining factor in who does and does not get back their email after a hack (which is a large word, account compromised would be a better description) like this.
It's a problem because the people who are using bitcoin have seen the value drop to less than 10% of what it was, so why should they trust it to be a currency worth using?

For it to be a currency it doesn't need a huge value per bitcoin, nor does it need to be constantly rising a huge amount - but it does need to be reasonably stable.
What is the Limit to Human Population Growth?
Fortunately, your info is incorrect.

The RAM is soldered on board. The SSD is a SIMM-like module, which can be upgraded by the user.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express

I'm still not sure if I'd do it for 256GB vs. 240GB or 480GB, but maybe, and the cost savings vs. Apple might make it worthwhile. Speed could be a plus too.
it would require a financial transfer to purchase
them to begin with

Not it doesn't. Barter. You send me bitcoins, I send you stuff.