skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that…a stock photo of code?

/**
* Creates a new demo.
* @param o The object to demo
*/
public Demo(Object o) {
this.o = o;
String s = CONSTANT;
int i = 1;
}

That aside, this is basically a good idea with laughably poor execution. Other comments have addressed that it’s centralised and non-anonymous, can be double-spent, is not fault-tolerant, and (perhaps worst of all) is a fiat currency without fixed supply. There could indeed be a superior alternative to Bitcoin, just waiting to make the leap into the mainstream—but this is not it.
Your average street thug would not be able to get a gun very easily, probably. Then again, neither would your average citizen, so they wouldn't need them. When your victims are unarmed, all you need to be is bigger and stronger than they are. Or bring a knife. Or a friend. Two on one with no guns involved is usually a foregone conclusion.

More relevant, are you honestly saying that organizations such as drug cartels, which have been known to make catapults, submarines, and whatever else they need as they need it, would be incapable of making firearms? The plans for many firearms are openly available and all it requires is some machining equipment (soon probably just 3d printing ability), and a lot are made outside the US. Taurus firearms, for example, are all made in Brazil. Do you think a suddenly growing underground market for weapons in the US would go untapped?

Not only that, the US has approximately 90 guns per 100 people. How long do you think it would take for all those to be 'destroyed'?

In short, you would gladly disarm law-abiding citizens, of which nearly all US gun owners are, so you can feel a bit safer, or perhaps feel as though you live in a country or state that is a bit more 'progressive'? How would you feel when one of those disarmed people is stabbed to death when the cops don't reach them in time? How would you feel when a woman is raped because she had no chance of fending off someone twice her size? Is it worth the tradeoff to you?

To me, the thought of people being forcibly disarmed and then assaulted or murdered with little to no ability to defend themselves is much more egregious than allowing people the freedom to defend themselves with the best tool for the job and dealing with the consequences of having outliers who abuse the right - and make no mistake, they are outliers - violent crime rates have been on the decline in the US for over a decade. But that isn't even the real point of the 2nd amendment, which is a conversation for another time.
A new word for the day: pilcrow. I never knew those ¶ thingies had a name other than "paragraph mark". Thanks.
There is an interesting discussion about this on stackexchange.com.

"Turning off Google search results indirection":
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off...
Chrome 18.0.1025.142 beta here and works for me.
Max and I are good friends, and no, I didn't rip off his idea :)
The Methodology Behind Ringmark
PACman?
There's also a VM written in Go by kballard: https://github.com/kballard/dcpu16.go/

And a disassembler in JavaScript by evilpie: https://gist.github.com/2300590

Edit:

CoffeeScript, too (via steverb): https://github.com/Janiczek/cfs-dcpu16

@sp332: I feexed it
Because you don't ship when it still kills people. Google launches stuff in betas all the time (arguably too much and for too long), but I'm glad they're not out there letting anyone test self driving cars or augmented reality contacts.

Apple's difference isn't that they iterate, it's that they don't talk about their new stuff until it ships.
Interview with Larry Page: Apple's Android Pique 'For Show'
People I know who currently work for Groupon say that the culture there is falling apart. To get the numbers investors expect the sales people need to reach unrealistic sales numbers. Management is grasping at straws, trying every trick in the book to not let the whole thing fall apart. The Groupon model is simply not sustainable, it was a onetime gimmick.

As someone who lives in Chicago, I am worried about its failure and with that the future of the tech scene in Chicago.
One word. SpaceChem.

This looks heavily inspired by this indie game. In spacechem you must you use "chemistry pipe design skills", that highly resemble how you design logic circuts, in order to create certain molecules.

It also seems quite inspired with what you can do in minecraft with the redstone.

All that, but more open, pushing the limits. Not such a bad idea.
Thanks for the expert feedback. From my very limited sec experience, I saw account_id in cookie, and identified that as a red flag. OTOH, I think a random token in the cookie, identifying a server-side session that stores the account id, would be a good approach, as it's the classical HTTP auth implementation. For example, what the Rails tutorial describes [1].

For SSO, the other apps can ping the cookie-originating app: "Hey, who is this browser with this cookie token" ?

[1] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
I'm buying first gen. Then second gen. All the gens.
The most confusing part of the site is that it's not clear how they turn goats into MintChips.
oh man, someone needs to trademark iGlass NOW
I like the article, but the popup ad on your first mouseclick was too much for me.
Reading glasses are not just for people over 40 anymore
Would you pay $5 per month for this hosted blog engine?
MSSQL 2012 now available on sqlfiddle.com; compare features with 2008
is it a mistake releasing concept videos far ahead of the state of the art?

hopefully what google announces at i/o will be shockingly advanced
I don't disagree about those dynamic languages. I wouldn't even try to use an IDE for them. BTW, Go has nothing to do with the JVM.

Why don't you consider the need for LLVM+clang and the subsequent huge amount of work indicative of an uphill battle to retrofit the IDE?
>I wish there were a middle ground - institutionally backed bitcoin.

You could realistically do something almost as good as that without any reliance on either bitcoin or trusted computing, if you have a central authority. It actually seems pretty simple: You create a website where people can put in a credit card numbers and exchange money for secret (1000+ bit) numbers. The server keeps track of how much money is associated with each number. If you have a secret number, you can then go back and trade it back for money, or you can (anonymously) trade it for a different secret number -- which permanently invalidates the old one and assigns its value to the new one.

This way when you want to spend money, you just disclose a secret number worth the value of the transaction in question to the payee, who immediately exchanges it for a new number that the payer doesn't know, and is thereby the only one who can subsequently trade it back in for government currency. (Of course, in the common case they just re-spend it in the same way as digital cash rather than redeeming it for government currency.) Make it so that you can specify values (i.e. trade in a $5 number for a $4.50 number and a $.50 number) and you create a situation where anyone can sell anything and receive a number as payment, and then buy something else and spend the number as currency, all while neither of the other parties or the payment processor have any idea who you are.

Add to this the availability of VPN accounts that assign all users to a single public IP, so that users can route their SSL-encrypted transactions through an IP shared by thousands of others who do the same and thereby prevent the transaction processing server from associating transactions with IP addresses, and you have digital anonymous cash.

The main disadvantage is that the secret numbers are exactly like cash, i.e. if someone gets hold of them then they've stolen your money, it's gone, and there is nothing you can do. But that's how cash works. And I kind of wish someone would implement something like this -- I mean think about all the money you could make just by holding the currency people pay you for the numbers in low risk securities between when someone pays for one and when (if ever) it eventually gets redeemed for government currency.
Nifty, w' the point about queues (sometimes you don't need 'em, and can "safely" discard requests) being both blindingly obvious and most often neglected...
Our plastic monopoly money is the bees knees.

But in all seriousness, if MintChip is for real and doesn't get hacked, and if I can finally say good bye to the penny (which I have already been getting rid of for over 2 years) then I'll have to admit that the Mint is probably more innovative than any other government entity up here. :)
Larry Page: one-year anniversary of taking over Google's CEO
This article is completely lacking any info which would allow the reader to judge how news-worthy this story is. Is this supposed to be a primary energy source (e.g., sunlight goes in, hydrogen for fueling cars comes out)? If so, what advantages does it have over existing technology? Does it have hope of being economically competitive?
I like reading it to see how people react to such a question, not really the advice people give. Most people seem to think divine intervention is the best way.
To me it looks amazing and really impressive. I kind of expected Google to release some bulky glasses as rumored, that would look like version 0.1 of such a product in the future. But I'm really impressed with what I'm seeing so far.
I believe the target for strictly-hardware transactions is to keep them low-monetary value. For example a digital replacement for the $10 you keep in your wallet to buy lunch from a hot dog vendor.

Not saying the potential for a hardware exploit resulting in a money tree isn't there...
Hackers Grab 1.5 Million Visa, MasterCard Numbers
Oh, this is because these technologies complement each other... Not much use in having people wearing augmented reality glasses if they'll die in car crashes as soon as an ad pops up in front of their eyes when driving. They won't even click on the ad. Hence self driving cars...

Kidding apart, it's nice to see Google innovating in many fronts :)
the video makes this technology look awesome. But I am still skeptical to how well it will actually work.
The #1 expense over your lifetime won't be your house, your entertainment, or your cars.

It will be TAXES.

If you build a career path that can take advantage of tax breaks you wind up with a huge advantage from the start.

For tech entrepreneurs - focus on building your enterprise value. Reinvest profits into GROWTH so that you wind up paying the bulk of your taxes in capital gains vs. personal income tax. On $1m or 2m in money the difference in what you save is staggering.

In real estate you can take advantage of all sorts of loopholes to reinvest or shelter profits that let you drastically increase your available pool to invest and create gains.

And for goodness sakes at the very least start a LLC or S-Corp if you're making more than $25,000 or so a year from "side projects / consulting" so you can properly write off and document all business related fees (computer hardware, cell phone usage, home office, etc).
I am the creator of this and I am planning to add varnish support within this week to make your blogs HN/reddit resistant. I'd love to know if anyone would be willing to pay for a blogging platform built for hackers/programmers/developers.
The EA logo is why they weren't clicking the first ad. I don't know about other people, but I avoid EA at all costs.
From pre-PC to post-PC: Happy birthday, Microsoft
Also, in the concept video he goes into a physical book store and selects a physical book and buys it. Surely, his Googgles would just scan the book tell him how much cheaper it was in the Google Store... Rather amused that when meeting a friend he spent time checking in to the location rather than talking to the dude.

But these could be useful in situations where you don't have your hands free to hold a smartphone. For example, I would very much like GPS as a heads up display for cycling around London. And skiers/snowborders would enjoy them for other information (How many Gs am I pulling in this turn? How fast am I descending? Where am I?)
It's a new digital means to transfer canadian dollars. It's not a new currency.

Pretty much everything after that java snippet is incorrect in your post.
Why is there no public announcement of this? Why does the actual Canadian Mint website have no links or mentions of this project? Why are there goats and wheat on your webpage? What is this for, some digitally enabled 19th century version of Canada? What kind of goofy hoax is this?
Suggestion: Sorry, I don't have the time right now, but someone should start and curate a github project containing specs, test cases, expected results, etc.

A nice addition, until Notch's actual design is known, would be to specify a simple community-created "hardware" spec: say memory areas for 40x25 text, 80x25 text, 320x200 monochrome, etc. and a low page (say the first 0xff bytes) for switching between those modes. That way, code could be easily shared and tested.
> Real artists ship.

While true, don't you think that the world would be a poorer place without the research from Xerox Parc? People who were notoriously bad at shipping, but their ideas were used to create product elsewhere.

My only point is that shipping isn't everything for research, unlike product development. So the question is really, are they looking to build a product, or research the future of computing? Perhaps both. Having said that, I do wish I could get my hands on one...
No rlwinm
> He was saying we shouldn't expect Groupon to be around in 10 years because the company's plan is to collect as much cash as possible, fire everybody, and shut down, keeping the money for the investors.

Every bubble produces these, but usually the money is kept for the management-investors only. SCMR and Zhone from the tech bubble executed that plan spectacularly.
I utilize the Startup Weekend as a tool to work on stuff and do something fun. Check out the upcoming events at: http://startupweekend.org/events/
I haven't found a website that keeps track of Hackathons...
"The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history." -Hegel

See Research In Motion (RIM).
Maybe Mozilla should consider creating arewetolerantyet.com in the light of Brendan Eich's donations to questionable political campaigns.

SCNR ;)
Have Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman ever actually built their own distro at all? I seem to recall Linus saying he didn't have time for that, and he'd rather leave that task to somebody else who cares about it more.

More to the point: there are hundreds upon hundreds of different distros out there - it's not even that hard to make your own. Technically, anybody who compiles the kernel specifically for their own system and chooses a base of software around their kernel could call that a "distribution" and put it on the internet for anybody to use with a small amount of effort. You don't even need to know how to code anything to do that - you just have to know some command-line stuff.

That's kind of what I like about this - a game that "takes out the hard stuff" and just gives an overview of building a distro and what goes into it. If this helps educate people about the process and get more people learning about computers, I think that's great.
Visa, MasterCard confirm credit card security breach
It's easy to get that mentality.

I am in a broke period of my life right now. One can easily tell me about how much it is all my fault, but I thought I had enough money to last for two years when I quit my job, I thought I could find a job within six months in the bay area, people could argue that I am generous to a fault and people I have lent and given money to in the past can't or won't help me out now.

So it is easy to have some depression when scraping together a few bucks for transit to a job interview becomes one of the harder tasks. It's doubly frustrating when you get on the wrong bus and wind up 45 minutes late to the interview.
Garbage collection isn't necessarily that difficult, especially when you're in a single-threaded (or cooperatively multithreaded) environment and don't have to contend with an OS. Here[1] is a cons-pair system I wrote in Forth which uses tag bits to identify pointers, a mark-and-sweep garbage collector and a free-list style allocator. GC takes linear time with respect to heap size, and allocations are constant time. The allocator itself (not counting all the list utility routines) is about 60 lines long and fairly easy to understand.

[1] https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Mako/blob/master/lib/Algorith...
Your revolution will not be stolen
Back in the day, people used goats for currency. Then it became wheat, then coins, then... you get the picture.

The Mint will be issuing a press release momentarily.
>Ugh. It's called brevity.

No, brevity is cutting out the unneeded parts. Cutting out the "except" part of someones argument is not it.

>No, but you seem to. You want me to poll friends (anecdotes)

You also seem to confuse polls with anecdotes.

You do know that polls are a valid statistical tool, right? Or that, when the subject is what guys think polls give an immediate representation of the truth on the matter. Do you know of any other way to get closer to what guys think on a subject than asking them?

>Insert your whole statement if you want, it's still sexist B.S.

Nothing sexist about it --it's an observation about what guys believe. The belief might be sexist, but the observation cannot be as it's not judging the belief as a good or bad thing. As I said, "most men wouldn't even consider a sexual attack by a woman unpleasant except if they found her ugly". Everyone I know seems to agree on it. Assuming you're a guy, is the notion of being sexually assaulted by a beautiful woman unpleasant to you?

>It would be awesome if you pointed out where I indicated anything like this.

Gee, maybe in the part where we were discussing how you should NOT advertise your GPS position through all those social apps, and you said that you disagree.
The problem is no one has locked you in the closet - just open the door and look around. Heck, you have a whole hour to look around the house and estimate how long it takes to build the thing.

You are limited by how long you can spend inspecting every nook and cranny of something, but you're only limited by time. The "door" metaphor is misleading. Nothing is standing in your way from exploring the space.

If you can find the "hard parts" of the house faster than someone else, you're likely to be a better estimator. In fact, my favorite trick is to focus on one hard part and extrapolate up. For example, write down how tricky it is to build the kitchen, or heck just a cabinet in the kitchen, so everyone gets it when you say "oh, by the way, there are 10 more rooms."
What is Canonical bringing on the VPS that is so specific? I haven't yet seen anything really interesting coming from Canonical.

They have a debian base with more recent packages but they also break more often (although quality has improved on Ubuntu in the last couple of years). Sure these are good systems.

My experience on Ubuntu has been roughly equivalent to my experience on ArchLinux.

What Canonical brings is more clicka as we call them. GUIs certainly are appealing for a certain category of users that also happen to be casual system administrators.

Also, I suppose you are slightly missing the goodness of PaaS. The only interesting thing in PaaS is instant deployment (as in single-step). A VPS with a custom image and a couple of scripts hardly ever gets as easy as PaaS unless you are small and thus have very few different configurations (which is a good thing).
Although Google will make this more popular due to their marketing efforts and brand, it's hardly their brainchild.

Tom Furness developed similar devices decades ago: Once out of the military lab, this was a key project of the Human Interface Technology Lab at UW in Seattle in the early 1990's.

Updating for smaller chips and components contributes to the current form-factor which includes the front-facing camera not present in the earliest versions.

The upside of course is that this might finally get some traction with Google's budget and efforts.
Re: Go, yes, meant to write: Groovy!

>Why don't you consider the need for LLVM+clang and the subsequent huge amount of work indicative of an uphill battle to retrofit the IDE?

Well, I'm not sure about the "huge amount of work". We just saw some release from Apple and that was it, we had XCode 4. Shouldn't have taken that much, more like 2 years or something for everything, considering that was around the time Apple started using LLVM.

They did retrofit it, but only because they had a more basic IDE before. Not because something in the language particularly prevented it.

It took the Eclipse project a few years to build their first version of the IDE too.
No, the two largest problems are the 1. The boil-the-ocean nature of the problem of getting anything like a critical mass going when your ocean is the size of the entire web, and then if you do 2. you will piss off a lot of websites, the only reason you haven't seen this is that none of them have had enough success to rise to that threshold since Third Voice, and relatedly, Microsoft's Smart Tags. The merely technical problems are quite boring in comparison. Changing content is probably barely in your top five and "reputation" definitely isn't.
I was concerned when they mentioned a criteria for judgment was originality of the idea... What can be done with online transactions that hasn't already been done?

I suppose an app that allowed offline transactions would fit that bill, the only problem being that your app would be offline.
That's a fine approach, but developers push back on it because it requires all the apps in the SSO federation to be connected at all times. Most shops should just accept that requirement and get on with their lives, though.
I agree, each of the 2000 is an individual human with their own narrative. The worst mistake management can make is to forget that humanity.
SecureUDID 1.1 Released
So you've just replaced traditional fees with two exchange fees.
I've never written an LLVM backend, but one difficulty that immediately jumps out at me is the 16-bit architecture.

LLVM specifies types with bitwidths and 32 is most commonly used, meaning a backend would have to either emulate 32 bits, forbid the frontends from generating 32 bits, or silently cast them all down to 16 bits.
You can do all stars but if you say you need at least X people to rate before showing any. That's what many sites do.
The largest problem with Bitcoin has always been how insecure peoples computers are. WoW accounts where only worth a few dollars and yet account hacking was incredibly common unless you used a physical authenticator tied to your account. Thus, to securely use Bitcoin you really need a third party either a 'bank' or a vary secure device.

PS: Banking websites have their own issues. But because they tend to use multitiple forms of authentication the are significantly harder to break into on the client side.
Hi Amy, going to ask you the same questions that many have asked before: you developed products in a more or less saturated market, how do you come to the conclusion that the world needs your product? (considering that there are nice looking time-tracker and customer support out apps out there).
Ask HN: Why the animosity of Reddit?
I made mention of Reddit in a comment recently and was downvoted to oblivion. Does the HN community dislike even mentioning Reddit? I thought Reddit was a YC spinoff?
Does anyone know what they mean in the Javascript API docs when they mention that it's only supported by Microsoft Windows with Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher?
Why do you say Zynga? It was my understanding that their financials are a good bit more stable, even if they are Facebook-dependent.