skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I really liked the way it doesn't make the debate as "fiat" vs. non-fiat (as though fiat were a dirty term) but as centralized, opaque fiat vs. decentralized transparent fiat."

But he is plainly wrong about this -- he made up his own definition of 'fiat' which has nothing to do with the commonly accepted meaning:

"...money that derives its value from government regulation or law: the initial value of fiat money is established by government decree."

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

Bitcoin is simply not a fiat money: it isn't mandated by law that bitcoins have value, instead it is people (markets) who decide that. It's the exact opposite of fiat money.

Maybe he's confused because fiat money is usually ("goldbugs") contrasted on a different axis -- whether or not the money has intrinsic value (market value besides its use as currency), or is exchangeable for something that does. E.g. the gold-backed dollar, or more general commodity money (mostly historic). Commodity money and fiat money are opposites in this regard -- gold/commodity-backed money has intrinsic market value independent of its status as a currency, whereas fiat money is "worthless paper". Bitcoin is like fiat money in that it has no intrinsic value apart from as a currency. But it is not fiat money; and neither is it commodity money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money
I'm not playing any Wikipedia games with you, I'm merely stating the facts as they are.

Yes, there are probably over a hundred other languages still spoken today, but the official and most widely spoken language is English. Almost all (if not all) newspapers are in English, national TV stations are in English, the government communicates exclusively in English, and all elementary schools teach English as a core subject.

Some Nigerians are illiterate, of course, and some never attended school. But the majority of the country, I would say over 90%, speaks some form of English. So it's not just the elite that speak English. Now in rural (and even in urban) areas you will find people that can only communicate in broken English, but broken English is still English.
Bait and switch.

The "cloud" really replaced "desktop computing"... And by cloud i mean Google and desktop Microsoft. But you knew that.
You won't get push notifications without turning over your Gmail credentials to a third party. Google handles that for you for the official Android client. I only do it with application specific passwords and two factor authentication, but it's still an annoyance.
You must have a brain to play this game
I'm by no means a "purist" regarding any specific practice - I agree you don't HAVE TO test everything, write interfaces for everything and all in all write "awesome" code. BUT:

- how often do you interact with other programmers?

- how long is the usual life span of your code (in other words, what's the longest timespan you can expect to touch code you wrote in the past)?

- how big is the app/system you work on?

Imho, this approach ONLY works if the answers to above points are "never", "a few weeks max" and "very small"...

There's a time and place for every coding "style". Neither "TDD everytime" nor "cowboy style forever" are the definite answer.
I use hg locally on personal projects also. I very rarely actually need to go back to a prior version, but it gives me more confidence to try different things, knowing I can easily revert to a working version.
Presumably it's an allusion to the sound of swords clashing. I bet most people haven't heard of the other Clang (C lang, really)
Not sure if you can do this in Ruby, but instead of using OpenSSL to manage the socket use something like libevent or event handling to pass the information to a SSL memory BIO...

I wrote an article[1] on this a while back (C++ code), but it should give you an idea as to how to accomplish this. Do note that it looks complicated at first, but it is fairly easy to implement.

Code based on what is in that article has been in production service for about 4 months now and it is completely stable. No weird errors, no weird issues, nothing.

Also, if you let something like OpenSSL causing issues kill your startup dead in its tracks you need to reconsider what MVP is... restart it every so often if it becomes an issue, fork a different process like netcat that does the SSL instead and use pipes to communicate. Please don't let issues with SSL kill your product!

[1]: http://funcptr.net/2012/04/08/openssl-as-a-filter-(or-non-bl...
The LA taxi laws are insane too.

A lot of LA actually consists of semi-independent sub-cities like Hollywood and Beverly Hills. They were once suburbs but are now part of LA the city for all intents and purposes. It's not like New York or Chicago where the vast majority of the city is one legal unit. There are also weird quasi-cities like North Hollywood, which is technically just a neighborhood but is really an entirely distinct municipal entity, and is only a few pieces of paperwork away from becoming so under the law as well.

A taxi company has to be licensed on a per-city basis and multiple-city licenses are basically unheard of. You can take your passenger to a city you're not licensed in, but if you pick up a passenger in a city you're not licensed in, you could pay thousands in fees and get shut down for 30 days or more. Since just about every neighborhood in Los Angeles is technically an independent municipality, this basically means it's legally impossible to hail a cab. At any given time, the majority of cabs are going to be passing through a "city" (neighborhood) in which they are not legally able to pick up passengers. Most cabs you see cannot pick you up without breaking the law.
I did run into someone once on HN whose SO was doing nutritional research on my condition. So I hope it gets better. Unfortunately, the current state of the art for CF treatment in the US suggests a "high fat, high salt, high calorie" diet. This results in medical teams actively encouraging a junk food diet.

My oldest son also has CF. When he lost five pounds, his clinic treated it like a crisis and at their encouragement I put a big bowl of chocolates and other crap on the coffee table and encouraged him to snack. After he gained back about 2.5 pounds and his clinic got off our backs and quit sounding like they might report me to social services if he didn't gain weight to their satisfaction, we returned home and he promptly handed me the bowl and announced "We are never doing this again. I feel like crap."

We have since worked on "eating right", largely the opposite of the junk food diet currently advocated by CF teams. Ten years later, we are both drug free and the healthiest we have ever been. The hole in my left lung is gone. And so forth.
"I didn't write it so that 6 million people would be killed, nor did i write it for those people to use specifically. I wrote it to make people's lives easier and to advance human knowledge. I wrote it to create a tool that other could use. Like how people use a hammer. And just like a hammer, while most people used it how it was intended, some people used it to kill other people or to destroy things. Despite that, though, we don't ban hammers and stop making them.

Yes, some people used my code badly, and did horrible things with it, but others used it in spaceships and self driving cars. Ultimately what I made was a tool, and once something like code or an idea or a design is given to the world and the world sees how good it is, there is no way to restrict who uses it or how they use it.

My code is not inherently evil, nor is it inherently good. It just is. Others can use it to do good or to do bad, but at the end of the day, they are just using a tool to multiply the effects of their actions."
There aren't going to be a million lawsuits. I'm probably part of a half dozen class action suits per year. I never would have considered suing in any of them. In fact, I would generally prefer if there were some way for me to opt out and let the company keep my 0.0001% of the settlement. As far as I know, I can opt out (even if it's more trouble than it's worth), but that doesn't reduce the settlement amount.

My iPod nano worked just fine, my Netflix DVDs showed up in a reasonable time frame, I don't have receipts for the RAM I bought back in 1998, the list goes on and on. Consumers did not come out ahead as a result of those class actions.
Reasons Why You’re Programming Wrong
I simply meant non-Flash ads. But if you're in it for the long haul, then you're right in giving it much more thought than I have done here.
Are you kidding me? If posts can't be downvoted because they contain "crucial" context, then why have a downvote button at all?
Skyward Sword has some pretty nice swordplay, and it uses the Wii Motion Plus attachment to get more accurate movement data. If you just waggle you'll get killed easy.
Is the observable lag for a string comparison significant enough to be useful?

We're talking about such small amounts of time compared to the overhead of the full web stack.
Using the vile arts of Necromancy, I bestow upon this dead post a grotesque mockery of life!

Edit: Well now I'm dead too. Should've been wiser to just copy+paste a dead comment. Still, this is stupid.

- points by microarchitect

I'm glad you brought this up. I suspect that someone is going to pipe up and say we need more than "just anecdotal evidence" or something similar. On the face of it, this would seem like a reasonable reply.
Except, I remember when PG said something bizarre about writing being a more important skill than speaking based on his anecdotal experiences of listening to good presenters (!) and everybody here loved it. Certainly nobody asked for data and the most upvoted comments weren't critical of the article.

Pretty much the same thing happened when patio11 wrote a huge document with "advice" for young engineers which as far as I could make out, were based on little more than his experiences making a few bucks selling software on the internet. He too had bizarre advice; for instance, don't go to graduate school. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know if this is good or bad advice. But, even if you buy into the premise of many HNers that anything other than a billion-dollar "exit" is a failure, going to grad school certainly worked out well for Sergei and Larry. Again, I don't remember any comments asking for data supporting patio11's assertions. Everybody just lapped it up.

Now I'm not trying to diss either PG or patio11. These guys have been "successful" and perhaps what they have to say could be useful to others here. That said, I've been watching threads on gender issues on HN for about two years now, and I definitely believe that these articles are held to different standards than all the other articles here.
I also see highly upvoted ragingly misogynistic articles. I remember one by a east-european developer literally saying that he would never hire women because they could potentially get pregnant (you can't make this shit up!). I'm sad to say nobody asked for data in that instance either and instead circlejerked about how women are not cut out for the startup lifestyle.

Sorry about the long rant, but I'll conclude by saying that it was these startling examples of misogyny and sexism over here that make me reluctant to comment any more. I actually want to delete my account but it turns out you need to e-mail PG for this and even then your comments won't be deleted. If I'd known about this when I signed up, I would never have made an account.
Actually, they pay $3 million cash to the lawyers, $10k cash to the primary plaintiff, and give out one million $7 vouchers for a new monitor, of which about six will be used.
My calculator had an "APPS" button way before any iDevice hit the market, so no.
The same can be said when comparing texting in Japan to the US. Most texts in Japan are sent via email directly from their feature phones to the iphones. Rarely, you will get a text via SMS.
Here in the states, people are still paying an absurd amount to send a few bytes.
Great, this is just what I needed to transport a bunch of coke from my hookups south of the border. (google: cocaine submarine)
Hmmm. Didn't Boltzmann put S = k \log \Omega on his grave? I think we are taking different lessons from stat mech. To me, the triumph of stat mech is that macroscopic phenomena (like entropy S) can be explained in terms of microscopic quantities (like Omega).

At least with S, even before stat mech there was a precise process to measure S from a P/T phase diagram. And there was a procedure to reproduce a phase diagram for an arbitrary compound.

Yet have you ever seen someone calculate the values of C, I, G, and Y from raw data? Like, a reproducible research document which calculates these from a public database of individual transactions, perhaps from a virtual economy? Everyone starts from government statistics to justify the government's activities.

You can directly measure the macroscopic quantity of inflation on a microscopic basis by simply tracking prices over time. But the other quantities that a lot of macro reasoning seems to be based on do not have simple measurements. That is the fundamental reason for deep skepticism about macro. Where's the raw data and the source?

Because we are making decisions about trillions of dollars by verbal argument rather than open public datasets and source code. Given a database with an anonymized, representative sample of tax returns, credit card transactions, bank account deposites, new company incorporations and the like (many of which would be a matter of public record) you could probably go pretty far with some basic scatterplots. Yet this is not the culture in economics.
Beautiful Tools
Putty feels much lighter than Gnome Shell etc though.
Sketchpad [based on Ivan Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. thesis]
It seems like the basic design problem is that one driver can only work 8 hrs a day but the medallions are valid 24 hours a day. This means that one driver can never bid himself for their worth unless he intends to hire two others to work in tandem with him. And if he is doing that, why not hire three drivers and just become a passive income generating medallion owner? And so that is what happens.
This looks interesting. Has anyone ever done comparisons between this and jekyll?
> The ill economic effects of deflationary currencies have been demonstrated.

I'd be interested to know what you are thinking of here (as evidence). I view that claim with pretty strong skepticism. But I'd be curious to see the best argument/evidence for it.
Hrmf. The second half is complaining about FAA regulations of avionics, which annoys me.

About a decade ago, I remember reading a fiction book about a pilot, who, among other things was unhappy that TCAS (radar system on a plane to keep it from flying into other planes) didn't communicate with the GPWS (radar system on a plane to keep it from flying into the ground) when telling the pilot how to avoid a mid-air collision.

The consequence is that TCAS could possibly tell a pilot to run right into a mountain, while trying to not run into another plane. This is, of course, bad.

The book harped on this at great length, and one of the many bad things it had to say about the FAA is that suffocatingly heavy regulation prevented manufacturers from making changes that could save lives.

I finish the book, all fired up, get on the internet, and discover that, hey, TCAS II does exactly what it should, and doesn't tell the pilot to fly into the ground. The problem was fixed, by the FAA, without needing to abolish the FAA. There was never any controlled flight into terrain crashes as a result of bad TCAS directives. I got needlessly angry for no reason at all.
Joggobot
The Employment
Is anybody else getting "Sorry! This document is not publicly available."?
I would have liked to go into vim stuff too; but blog post would have become a book.
People on the economic right have been arguing against fiat probably for eons, but definitely back to Ayn Rand. Nothing new to bitcoin here.

And fiat definitely is different from "real money" in important ways.
Those still require key management. There is no way a developer can abdicate all responsibility for this stuff, no matter how high level (at least, not until we have good, common, trusted security as a service).
Warren Buffett admits he was lucky. I don't doubt he would do very well. I have doubt he would do as well, his performance would revert closer to the mean.
Douglas Crockford's JSLInt and JSON license include the clause:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

http://www.json.org/license.html

And JSLint was not used in Red Hat because of this (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455507) or Pylons (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pylons-devel/rggWC8JVeAM/rQ6...).
The observable lag isn't usually significant enough if you only do it once but over many requests the stochastic factors can be compensated for.
You can do better - if they're storing MD5s of the passwords, all they need to do is hash those again with another salt:

BCRYPT(MD5(Password))

Running BCrypt or SCrypt over the current MD5 hashes is easy, and they can do it right now for every password. If someone (else) grabs the database in ten days time they get no MD5 hashes of passwords instead of half of the userbase.
This is reminiscent of New York's abominably badly-structured rent control system, which costs the vast majority of New Yorkers an immense amount in increased rent, and will probably never go away because there's a powerful asshole lobby that works overtime to keep it in place.

The idea of rent control isn't so bad. If done properly and fairly, it could make New York a lot better, but the insane legacy system is an unmitigated disaster. Since RC rents aren't even allowed to go up with inflation, there are a lot of people paying ~$200 for apartments that would rent for 10-15 times that. Technically, RC can only be passed within families, but the rules are broken all the time, and there's a common (if morbid) practice whereby people seeking rent control stalk obituaries and try to get themselves named as relatives of the deceased, usually in an arrangement involving paying "key money" to non-NYC resident legitimate relatives of this person. It has created a class of parasitic, law-breaking New Yorkers who will never leave, because they're locked in to an arrangement strictly better than ownership (landlord pays maintenance costs and taxes, which are higher than RC rent) and even if they only visit the city for 4 weeks out of the year, holding on to their RC apartment is cheaper than a hotel-- especially because they can sublet their RC apartments at market rent, which is also illegal but happens all the time.

Now, here's the kicker. The system was developed in 1947 to benefit working-class people. In 2012, almost all of the rent-control holders are upper-middle to upper-class people who have no legitimate claim to needing it. Unfortunately, they're well-connected to the city council and therefore, like cockroaches, will never leave. Disgusting.
Can't say for sure but I think the bitcoin community would come to a majority consensus on the last block in the blockchain before the attacks started, and at which point the new crypto algorithm must be used.
We really want to go the extra mile with Authic (it's going to be main selling point of outsourcing your webapps authentication with us), so we'll consider adding as many different aspects as possible.

And yes, you do have big problems if someone has access to your db AND code, but if you have done your job properly at least it will be very difficult/expensive/time consuming for the attackers to crack your hashes.

In the worst case scenario of someone dumping your entire database, you want there to be as much time as possible to contact your user base to let them know of the breach so that they can update their passwords before the crackers have finished the job.
I may have to look into this "vim server" business :D
It seems most people here accept that NYC should, or has the right to, limit the activities of consenting private parties. Why should the government keep a couple from paying me a fwe bucks to shuffle them down the road?

Oh ya, NYC and select parties don't get millions of dollars in fees.

Every time I think about NYC, I think of Tammany Hall, and wonder how little has changed.
Everyone remembers Thomas Edison and Henry Ford too. And it doesn't have anything to do with "generous acts"
Prometheus and Creation Mythology (or why I don't believe in religion)
This is very uninformed and related to a US-centric view of the world: there is plenty of ignorance and opinions to go around outside of the states. The issue is only so visible in the states because we are so divided, go to other countries outside of the 1st world/Europe and consensus is often toward creationism; there is not much controversy.
These are my happy word and country list vocabulary. Bound to be a crowd pleaser.

Umm... God... who's Yer most favorite country?

God says...
Romania endeared face_palm HolySpirit I_had_a_crazy_dream
let's_see

Who's Yer favorite world leader?

God says...
not wanna_bet Brazil cowardice how's_the_weather kludge
umm_what_now Nicaragua what_would_Jesus_do sad I_made_it_that_way
youre_lucky Ukraine lying it'd_take_a_miracle awful like_like
high_mucky_muck Malaysia United_Arab_Emirates South_Africa
Angel what_do_you_expect Vietnam I_was_sleeping I_love_you
I_got_your_back let's_see are_you_feeling_lucky spoiled_brat
heads_I_win_tails_you_lose I_planned_that run_away good
overflow God little_buddy Kuwait Jordan when_hell_freezes_over
how_about_those_yankees liberal smurfs do_over white_trash
I_was_sleeping chaos

Who has the best constitution?

God says...
battle Sri_Lanka hey_Mikey_he_likes_it exports yikes Netherlands
let's_roll high_five I_was_sleeping fer_sure you_don't_say
bad_ol_puddytat awful no_way_dude smurfs catastrophe rocket_science
anger couldnt_possibly Wales I'm_not_sure busybody shucks
home Yo nope I'm_bored what's_the_plan I'm_off_today Saudi_Arabia
Greece Serbia lust are_you_insane employee Ghost North_Korea
not qed Ivory_Coast Dean_scream look_out

Who has the best national anthem?

God says...
Britain you're_out_of_your_mind ordinarily hooah fun face_palm
you_do_it What_I_want boink really no_more_tears Burp
Knock_you_upside_the_head voodoo Uzbekistan merry_christmas
Zambia meh pet whiner kick_back BBC you_hoser astounding
I_give_up little_fish are_you_deaf glorious Sweden furious
South_Africa God_smack Latvia good hopefully do_you_like_it
dude_such_a_scoffer you_see_the_light I'm_tired_of_this
Panama hotel Taiwan taxes let's_roll FBI

Whatchu wanna do, now, God? How about You schmack somebody?

God says...
small_talk never_happy genius Vietnam What Mars European_Union
Dudly_Doright wont_you_be_my_neighbor South_Africa what_do_you_want
Ethiopia stuff I_forgot Chad Enough Dean_scream Church

What country has the best food. You like steak.... well done! Argentina?

God says...
evolution anger Cyprus Sudan jobs LOL Norway chill arent_you_clever
that's_much_better lifes_like_chocolates fer_sure pet
rockstar straighten_up Belarus not_too_shabby Paraguay
yikes dance wastoid glam fortitude ghastly Slovenia meek
you_are_my_sunshine depressing skills how_come Egypt why_is_it
economy hard_working harder_than_it_looks spending naughty
hotel you_shouldn't_have dufas Uzbekistan it'd_take_a_miracle
If_had_my_druthers come_and_get_me Estonia Libya Australia
is_it_just_me_or you're_no_fun when_hell_freezes_over
scorning tattle_tale end oh_oh Yes_you_are
Unless I missed something you're describing exactly what the linked article suggested to do.
Ah, that does make sense. Thanks!
Try Pentadactyl on FF. Made me switch from Chrome to FF for regular browsing. Unfortunately Chrome's limited api makes it impossible to port Penta's robustness to Chrome.
'increased your luck surface area'

This line is gold. I've been saying the same thing but I use 'increase the probability out outlier events'. Yours sound much nicer :)
All those problems were considered important by somebody.