skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again a Bitcoin advocate asks us to compare a hypothetical fantasy institution with a real-world business,

The biggest company in the arena is currently mtgox, which is admittedly a bitcoin exchange, but they also have a merchant solution and function like paypal in some respect. They have a multi factor authentication scheme.

There is also a company called bit-pay that acts like a regular payment processor.

Also, Gavin is working on adding support for multisignature transaction, which will help everyone in the bitcoin ecosystem.

and, presumably, to plow money into Bitcoin accordingly.

It doesn't matter as long the argument stand or the reason is sound.
OP here.

Is it? Yes, the thrust of the article is about GOOG abandoning the Android brand. However, it follows that if GOOG is to focus on Play as the brand for tablets (and phones) they will also further invest in Play exclusive technologies.

Today all new platform features GOOG builds are put into "Android". If they are serious about a new brand they will start building platform features that will NOT go into Android.
Baby Boomers: We had it all, and still do.
About as much as I think of attaching electrodes to my private parts and giving the government an activation switch.
Having worked in the industry, I know invoice price is not actually the lowest price they can go. All car manufactures have something called "dealer holdback" or some version of it (sometimes multiple under different names). They essentially charge the dealers $300-$1000+ extra for the car so that the invoice is artificially inflated; when the car sells, the manufacturer gives the dealership that money back. So even if they sell you a car for "invoice" they're still making money.
The reason manufacturers do this is not necessarily sinister to try and rip people off, but it's to protect the dealers from themselves and to protect their brands. The trend is changing now, but up until 10-15 years ago, owners of car dealerships generally had NO formal education (many still don't). They would take deals and do things that would cause the dealerships to get into financial trouble; this way the manufacturer guaranteed the dealership made some money... Also, of course, the manufacturers always try to protect the perceived value of their brands through price controls
Scala is definitely worth learning. Learned it as a (much) better Java and have never looked back.
April fools! The trick is that people judge you by how you choose to make yourself appear and dressing a certain way doesn't make you any less authentic.

I'll also add that as a member of a certain minority community, I've been criticized by peers for not sporting an "authentic" style, despite the fact that 98% of potential employers would likely send me packing were I to show up to an interview in said style. You don't know how someone will interpret your appearance, so unless you really know your audience, the smart money says "look good for investors" (or employers etc)
According to Wikipedia: "The halo effect is a cognitive bias that involves one trait influencing others in one's judgement of another person or object. First noted by Edward Thorndike in the 1920s, the halo effect has since been applied to a variety of other fields".

This is a primary reason why you should really, really care how you look. I am not saying that it involves wearing a suit 24/7, but even if you are a hacker-type, in real life, those things matter.
The reason you can get away with sneakers and jeans is that how you look doesn't matter, what you have to say and what you do is what matters. Investors aren't giving you money because of your fashion sense, they're giving you money so that they can get money back.
Thanks. Interesting!
Google owns an ecosystem, that is something WP7 has not. Win8 will have difficulties with the Windows legacy. Play will probably run Chrome what is a formidable brand, Google want's to go ChromeOS in the long term anyway. Don't forget it is Google Play, so the most valuable brand in the world is a part in it.

I don't think Google's position is that bad, but it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
truecar.com (and other similar sites), for better or worse, will be the downfall of the traditional car dealership... The price they give you is generally free (or very close) of ANY profit for the dealership.

They have a contract with the dealerships to honor the price, but b/c they cut so close to the bone there are instances where dealerships end up not honoring the price and try to negotiate anyways. I've seen it first hand, it doesn't work (people generally just walk out, as they should...)
if you are working more than that and don't have >= 1% of the company, you are getting used. its really as simple as that. startups are a pyramid scheme - seed round employees get Nx series A employees gets Nx as much as series B employees.

that's not necessarily unjustified but a series B employee should not be working the hours of a seed round employee.
Apparently, the algorithm behind his rotation policy is NP-complete.
Atlassian is a Sydney based company.

$ date
Sun Apr 1 07:50:24 EST 2012
Make shapefiles of satellite ground tracks with Ground Track Generator
I just picked up an Android phone and one of the first updates changed the Android Market to Google Play, which first of all was very confusing, and second of all, struck me as a desperate rebranding of the App Store at a time when Google (I think) should have been marketing it's existing app store and exerting control over the perversions that carriers were/are inflicting on Android handsets, a Genuine Android certification program or something of that sort.
Sensational headline that's kind of what the post is about to get to front page
I know how you feel. Thanks for the recommendation on Sologig.
Does changing every single default really make you feel better about yourself?

At least one of these changes (disabling local backups) doesn't even increase performance. Unless you just like data loss.
Unfortunately, you've completely missed the point of the article.
It's hard to see the downside for Amazon here. If other manufacturers started selling great, cheap tablets, so much the better for Amazon. That's more people with easier access to Amazon's media empire.
How about decoupling your clothes from your identity?

Maybe, but you can only take that so far. I think the thing to keep in mind is that clothes are communication, almost as much as what you say. The MBA, the punker, and the hacker all have their messages they send with their clothes. You can't avoid communicating, if for no other reason than that people will draw their own message from what you choose to wear. May as well make it count.

You can decouple what you say from your identity, but that can be fake too, sometimes.
3 Years of Bootstrapping – Half a Million Dollars A Year Later
Could also be titled:

'Google is going to go bankrupt next week'
'Apple is no longer selling apps'
'Programming language x should never be used again'
'Developing will kill you'
'Computers kill kittens'
This is seriously creepy
We Need A Private Mode For The Whole Internet
This post has some pointers on this:

http://tutorials.jenkov.com/dependency-injection/when-to-use...
Is a trajectory issue. When flash was expanding the range of systems it could be run on, then the future looked rosy for it as a delivery platform.

Currently however it seems to be contracting on all fronts, while at the same time adobe is making life more difficult for the developers by giving them extra costs. So the trajectory really does not look good at this point.
I honestly don't have a preference on the eye candy present in most operating systems, but I do know that I dislike the agonizing wait introduced to open a new window, watching it's open animation progress frame by frame after I've put my workstation under _Heavy_ load. Removing a lot of the visual fluff can help keep someone productive, even when their machine isn't being the most responsive.

It's entirely preference, dependent on the specs of the workstation and the user's ability to open a couple hundred web browser tabs, 5 VMs, and 2 different O(log n) sorting operations on some database all at once while still maintaing a Skype conversation with a co-worker.
I find the more I study economics, the more I see examples of problems that could be solved, by technology or otherwise.

Information asymmetry is a big one. FareCaster is a good example of a company that succeeded by reducing information asymmetry.

Arbitrage opportunities are good to look out for too. Same for building markets where no efficient market existed before (eg. AirBnB, Etsy).
I could use the old 8300 keyboards (even though the keys felt small), but my wife's 9780 is almost impossible for me to use with any precision or speed. It's much faster for me to use my N1 stock Android keyboard with one thumb than fumble with those minuscule, oddly beveled (9780, not 8300) keys. But she loves it!

I think there are plenty of landscape Android sliders out there, and even though many are getting long in the tooth, the CPU/GPUs would still easily surpass all but the latest-gen BBs.
What you're looking for is called static recompilation. It's what Emscripten [1] does, it statically recompiles LLVM bitcode to javascript. Emscripten is a wonderful project, by the way. After compiling from LLVM to Javascript, it applies an algorithm (relooper) to the "intermediate" javascript code whose result is code that resembles the structure of the original code so that, for instance, if the original code has a loop, the final javascript code will also have a loop. It is a true gem, and it's part of what makes Emscripten so awesome and fast.

I believe I could do static recompilation for programs that run on a barebones environment and do not employ self modifying code. The more general problem of finding all executable code in a blob of arbitrary binary data (which I would have to solve if I wanted to run an arbitrary program unmodified, which I do), is equivalent to the Halting Problem, so that is a no go. This means that, to have a general solution, a hybrid approach of static and dynamic recompilation would have to be employed.

For well behaved programs, code generation on the fly does not pose a significant overhead (that's what the profiler tells, if I recall correctly), so I'm not sure the hybrid approach is worth its weight in complexity.

Besides, I don't know if I'd be able to run a full OS, though, because those need interrupts (in my case, currently there's a timer tick and the UART interrupt when input is entered through the keyboard), and I haven't thought about handling that.

[1] https://github.com/kripken/emscripten
I can understand the confusion and your point. Paul graham is PG and his posts are always rocketed to the top. But, you can always check the profile (which I do often to get a better perspective on people).

Checking someone's profile is great because you can see their post discussions and comments to see if they're genuinely an ass or if they're geniuses you can learn from all of their other comments.

There's nuggets of gold in comments. It took me a year after I started reading HN before I really learned to value the profile and comments function.
You both haven't hit it on the head.

People have to trust what you say and what you do. How you present yourself partly determines how people perceive and trust you.
Show HN: Yet another "my first open-source project" thread. Feedback, please?
I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731

Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project.

Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv

Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones.

p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.
Not really ready for a position of responsibility in many US corporate workplaces, either.

And this is symptomatic of author's lack of experience. Prodigies excepted, a person right out of school probably doesn't have sufficient knowledge to accurately diagnose business processes, marketing communications, and UX design paradigms holistically.

Letters don't always need to be pitch perfect and early versions of solutions sell on problem solving, not interface design.

More importantly, many true startups have a business model that is fundamentally flawed without considering the potential for large infusions of outside capital. That's why most crash and burn.

That's not to say that leaving a place where paychecks bounce is a bad idea. Assuming one is the smartest person in the room, however, probably is.
Quickly chart your CPU/GPU temperature with Python
I agree that this is the most interesting part of the article, sociologically. My father was a tech guy who passed away over ten years ago, I believe that if you had the power to do so it would be an invaluable gift to your loved ones to leave them little messages every so often… (as long as your relationship was healthy!) But unlike the attached article implies, psychologists shouldn’t be concerned as I don’t think most people will ever feel like we are truly “communicating” with our deceased loved ones as communication is always a two-way streak.
A robot giving standard-human like answers (or a relative enabling that) isn’t really your loved one communicating unless that loved one somehow took the time to sit there and guess what you might answer in different scenarios. As much as I’d love periodic messages and jokes sent from my dead father to appear every once and a while (and would look forward to and treasure them) I could never feel compelled to reply back to him, or desire a robotic answer, and once you cross that line then I think it falls into “socially unacceptable”.
I don't think there's much doubt, from a management/accounting perspective, that supporting diverse requirements for a workforce of individuals costs more than supporting uniform requirements for a workforce of enforced clones.

The thing is, the cost isn't what really matters, the cost/benefit ratio is. You want to put your people in an environment that optimises the productivity of your organisation as whole, by getting the balance right between supporting both individual performance and effective collaboration. If detailed customisation of the environment for every single member of your staff to hit that balance will increase your costs by 100%, but doing so increases productivity of your overall organisation by 200%, then it's a very beneficial action.
Wow - I will use this so much. Thanks for writing this. I suspect you won't get as many responses to this as it's C, not Node.JS or Ruby, but I will find this very useful.
Two is one. One is none.

This includes equality in failover systems. The common issue in all of these cases is not the DB engine, OS, stack, whatever, but the infrastructure.
Sure -- the syntax for arrow functions has been floating around for ages, in Haskell, C#, and probably most relevant for me, the "stabby lambdas" in Ruby 1.9.

One of the first ideas with CoffeeScript was to simplify function syntax, mostly because JavaScript's anonymous functions are so useful and pervasive that you end up with a lot of this:

_.each(toRemove, function(key){ delete data[key]; });

... where the "word" function there doesn't really tell you anything meaningful about what you're trying to accomplish.

Arrows were appealing for a shorthand function syntax because of their visual representation of what happens in a (pure) function. Input goes in one side, output comes out the other. The input determines, or points to, the output. Since we use parentheses symmetrically to group parameters to a function, both when you define a function and when you call one, we arrive at this:

(input) -> output

... or with our initial example:

_.each toRemove, (key) -> delete data[key]

That was the thinking. CoffeeScript actually originally used => for all functions, but the fat arrow distinction was introduced when we introduced bound (lexical "this") functions as an alternative to normal (dynamic "this") functions.
I'm an idea-guy who's training himself to code because I find hard to trust clueless technical-guys as co-founders. Everytime I'm trying to talk to a tech-guy about ideas and sales and marketing, all I'm getting is that Bambi look, you know, just before it get hit by the car.

Try get some life experience. Problems are only one question away.
Clickable: http://github.com/bsg/libserv
19 > 18
#39, my new linkedin url is http://www.linkedin.com/in/pedalpete

thanks
It is difficult to get hard numbers, but probably the limiting resource is the energy in form of electricity, not the availability of carbon dioxide. So, if this is a good idea, the producing plant should be near a cheap electricity plant.
Thanks for commenting. I really appreciate your interest. Please keep in mind that the project has not been tested thoroughly yet and may fail badly in an unexpected way.
Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
Simple! Fork, Spoon, Knife! how did they keep a straight face?
You raise a couple of very good points that I myself have struggled with.

First of all, as someone who's been coding non-stop since the beginning of college and later on for years for a large corp, I have little to no experience with the "outside world". I have lived in the academia/enterprise-industry programmer bubble my entire life. I can think of ways I would improve bug tracking, programming, source control and other tools that we use day in and day out, but I don't have a clue about how I could help a small business increase their revenues. As you said, total lack of real-world experience.

Second, I often hear the complaint about techies having no clue about marketing and sales. Do you have any suggestions for how we could address that, and perhaps find a common language with the "business guys"?
I'm assuming 'miles apart' is working from home or cafe?

I really like the idea of two spatial configurations. Personally, I work remote for a small company that is mostly local - I visit the office a couple times a year and love the personal time for face-to-face discussion, etc. If I could have that a couple times a week, or a hour a day, I would love it.
Every comment in this thread right now is casting doubt on Jason's point that you shouldn't be fake to seem more businesslike for investors. Wow. That's a bad sign.

Jason's talking about good investors and he's right. Take YC - if you're talking to the YCers about your startup it's just absurd to place importance on "businesslike" apparel or indeed anything other than your startup. No doubt there are a few genuine exceptions (Tesla liked to work in formal dress) but for the majority of us that comes as a relief.

I thought what Jason's saying was a truism by now. Valley culture may not have permeated everywhere in tech but it's far more widespread than it used to be - widespread enough that the point about dress is probably a good litmus test in most parts of the US and Canada. And any place it isn't true, that's a problem. The Valley culture of being informal and focusing on the work evolved for good reason.
i don't disagree with what you say, but i worry that what you are implying is that people should be able to able to suck freely - not everyone is lucky enough to be able to have that attitude to discrimination.
Scala is far more object oriented than Java. So + is a method of the Int object and you can write 2.+(3) instead of 2+3. Methods are allowed to be operators, so that you can write 2+3 instead of 2.+(3). If _ is a separate token it represents an unnamed parameter, no more no less. In your specific case some_obj open_! translates to some_obj.open_.! It is not too difficult, you are just at week 1 of Scala.

As for language comparisons

1. C is simple/readable

It is way better than C in terms of readability. All
constructs in C are simple, but it takes a lot of C code to accomplish simple things. Also, how readable is
while(<star>d++ = <star>s++);

2. Python is explicit

The advantage of Scala here is static typing and performance and much better IDE support. Python code typically looks cleaner than Scala code, but I have been told that closures in Python are less than perfect. Python OTOH has no build time issues.

3. Clojure is more functional

Clojure is not more or less functional than Scala. There are varying definitions of "functional"-ness. However, the gold standard of a functional programming language is widely recognized as Haskell. Scala is far closer to Haskell than Clojure in this respect. Again the significant difference between Clojure and Scala is static typing, not functional-ness.
I've always wanted to start my own company, and this will be my second time applying to Y-Combinator.

But I am certainly more receptive to the benefits of working at a good company where I can learn a lot.
There are two methods for funding pensions: PAYGO (pay as you go) or funded. With a PAYGO plan, you pay current retirees out of current income, and hope that future income will be enough to cover future retirees. Public bodies often use PAYGO plans, in large part because they can always tax (or print) money in order to cover shortfalls if they have to.

With a funded plan, you put aside money from current income to pay future retiree claims; current retiree claims are paid from money put aside in the past. Private companies often use funded plans, in large part because any shortfalls can lead to pensioners not being paid.

The USPS is a very unusual hybrid of public and private and, in many ways, has the worst of both worlds. Rather than follow the "normal" rules other government agencies or other private companies follow, the USPS is "lucky" enough to get rules written especially for it by Congress. And THAT is the source of the current controversy.

There's nothing unusual about prefunding retirement benefits, but there are legit questions about the precise rules that Congress has written for the USPS. They argue they're being asked to prefund too much; the counterargument is that they face unique challenges, and the prefunding requirements are sensible. It's a very very dry, very very complex issue, and honestly, I don't have a clue who's right. :)

HOWEVER, I can say who's wrong: The linked article. Contrary to the article, the USPS is not making an operational profit. In FY 2010 it had an operational loss (NOT counting any pension funding) of $600 million. In FY 2011 that rose to an operational loss of $2.2 billion (again, before the disputed pension funding payments). It's projected to keep rising.

The USPS is seeing collapsing mail volume in every profitable category. Their fundamental market (delivering first class mail) is vanishing before their eyes, and nobody has the slightest plan to fix it. Right now they're little more than a government subsidized catalogue delivery service with an eye-wateringly expensive retail outlet network and legacy staff costs. And THAT is the real issue.

A normal company would respond by trying to change their cost base, but again, the USPS is neither fish nor fowl. They can't close post offices or fire workers the way a private business can, but they can't rely on seemingly infinite funding from the US government the way a normal government agency can. They're are, well, going broke.

And that, in turn, is why the pension funding argument is so heated. Is the USPS going to be around in 40 years to pay worker pensions? If you're confident the answer is yes, then letting them leave pensions unfunded is safe, and might help get them through the current crisis. But if you're wrong, then pensioners will suddenly see checks stop coming. (We tend to think that's a Bad Thing.) So if you're afraid the USPS might not be around down the road, that makes pension funding very important. shrug Make your guesses and you get your policy outcome. :)
That's cool. I won't use it straight away anyway, but will definitely be useful in the future.