skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is worth noting that (some of) the people behind Intersango acquired and took over operations of Bitcoinica just before the recent hack that took Bitcoinica offline since May 2012 (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81581.0)

Intersango is currently the second largest bitcoin exchange after MtGox, and the largest bitcoin exchange for GBP (see http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/)

From their site(https://intersango.com/):

"Having never suffered a break in or major technical error, we are confident in our abilities to lead bitcoin into its rightful place in the real world."

Some blame for the May hack could be arguably attributed to Zhou Tong, however, having taken over for 3 months since...
Pora Ora -- an educational MMORPG for kids
This is slightly off-topic but I thought I'd ask HN's opinion on an intellectual website idea I have.

I want to call it "intellegacy", for "intellectual legacy"

I really enjoy reading insightful essays and comments on the internet, and thought it'd be cool to have a website with all kinds of intellectuals with their own pages on it where I could read their essays, see a list of their books, and have conversations with them.

I envision scientists, artists, politicians all interacting on the site. For example, Neil de Grasse Tyson could post his blogs or essays there, and fans of his could get a summary of all his work, books, and what he's currently working on or reading.

Besides the goal of intellectuals having their own space to publish their insights, I also want the public to be able to read and learn on a clearly organized website, by taking their time. Maybe this isn't good for pageviews, but on other websites the content refreshes so quickly that a lot of insights are lost in the shuffle.

The grand vision is to be a huge library of insights, clearly organized and that can be read by anyone who wishes to learn and follow the thought leaders in our world.

We could "best-of" the best debates and discussions and future generations could read everything.
thanks, man!!! same here about you.
Agreed that you are not personally responsible for this particular attack, though I see it as the latest in a series of cascading failures, beginning with the initial attack. It's the lack of consideration of security - that can only be baked in from the outset - that's the real root cause.

If the application had been self-hosted in a physically secured location, the attack that exposed the LastPass credentials would not have happened (email reset of root passwords). It may not be cool, but the cloud/consumer-level hosting is not appropriate for applications handling large sums of money.
That seems to be true for any subject Brooks writes about.
Huh, for some weird reason I always thought iglii were built out of ices. Never really looked into it until now.
Why would a YC company use 99Designs for web design?
I'm a web designer and was talking to a YC company about designing their site. Instead of going with me or any designer for that matter, they put a contest up on 99designs with a whopping grand prize of $200. They kindly let me know that they would love for me to enter. Shouldn't a YC company know better? You would think the most sough-after mentos would tell their startups to invest in good design. Am i missing something here? Has any startup had a good experience designing their site with 99designs or similar sites?
What Lamar Smith Did - and Didn't - Learn from SOPA
So before iPhone came out pretty much every smarthpone looked just like it?
And befor iPad came out Samsung, HTC, HP, RIM, Amazon had their tablet computers business going full-steam?
And do you mind to compare prices of iPhone and Samsung Galaxy S, iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab and explain how are they overpriced?
Or is it just inconceivable to you that Apple does indeed make damn good products for the price that is on par with competition?
Ask HN: What's Your Favorite API Developer Portal?
We're gearing up to redesign our massively outdated Developer Portal and I'd love some examples of API dev portals done right. Folks like Twilio and Tokbox are on the list, who else? Please also say what you like about it and what (if anything) you wish they'd improve.
The Internet Defense League launches July 19th
Learning kanji isn't quite so hard as people often make it out to be... It's not trivial, of course, but you're off by an order of magnitude. :P A native Japanese person once told more she sees kanji as images, so it probably is different, though.
The Real History of the '@' reply on Twitter
I would love to know by what metric 1950s & 60s elites were 'better'. Brook's seems to be ignoring the fact that elites in these times were more effective because they could ignore other interest groups.

He's not basing it on any metric.

His sentiment can be chalked up completely to the nostalgia that all people feel for the era of their childhood. Everyone always thinks that "things were better" during the time when they were growing up - because they were too young to understand what things were like for adults in that time. The time periods of our youth always seem better than today.
http://ted.com - the number and quality of ideas there still amazes me. Pretty much every talk can be a start of an interesting, constructive and deep conversation. Almost every video leaves me with a feeling of wonder. Culture at it's highest.

I'm pretty sure everyone on HN knows what TED is, but just in case someone doesn't, here are some of my favourite talks - they show the breadth of the topics covered:

- http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_weird_or_just_differen... - 2 minutes about how things we thing work in some way may be completely different somewhere else

- http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_... - how technology really improves lives

- http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eythor_bender_demos_human_e... - exoskeletons, with wheelchair woman standing and walking live on the scene

- http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sam_richards_a_radical_expe... - a talk about empathy

And of course, the obligatory one,

- http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/ken_robinson_says_schools_k... - how school kills creativity
Agreed. But for many cases you don't need something that secure like when you're posting pictures of cats. And many web based logins are not providing a great deal of security either - this approach may actually be an improvement as it makes identity theft via brute forcing redundant.
You might find interesting Anna Wierzbicka's essay on her own experience of bilingualism (http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/pdfs/double-life....). Wierzbicka is a Polish-Australian linguist specializing in semantic universals and their cross-cultural manifestations, so it's kind of an insider's account, but charmingly personal at that.
Reddit never seemed to have to bother trying to make any profit. They still haven't.

Digg wanted to make money.

If Conde hadn't bought Reddit, then it would likely have been a far closer race.

When your competition isn't interested in making money, you're always going to be at a major disadvantage.
Reddit did not kill Digg. Digg killed Digg. Reddit's big break was Digg v4, when most of the community finally jumped ship.
We do this, but make the later date dynamic. So it will always say Copyright <year>-<current year>
Extending People’s Lives – One Artificial Heart At A Time
It's necessary to have a framework that makes taking the correct action more rewarding or less punitive than taking incorrect action.

We mostly rely on government to handle this. It's not perfect and it works in some folks' interests more than others, but I feel comfortable saying that it does increase the cost of most socially undesirable activities beyond their worth to most people most of the time.

Is it possible to come up with similar protection for Bitcoin without such an authority? I think you have to find a way to introduce risk for people handling Bitcoins they don't own, where they've got an amount of their own Bitcoins held as a security that could be forfeit if they fail to meet obligations.

But then, who holds the security? Who determines if it's forfeit? This doesn't have the feel to me of a situation that can be handled without human interaction, but I would definitely be intrigued if somebody figured it out.
Pitching: One year on
Actually, IMO Hacker News killed Digg. All the news here would have been in Digg otherwise :)
I argue these are all things our society today would simply not be able to do if placed in the same circumstances. We are less effective.

What is this based on? Our society today is still capable of great accomplishments - look at what Google has built in 10 years, the amount of knowledge organized there.

I would argue that we seem to be able to accomplish less because as a society our ambitions are smaller. Large government programs get nowhere today because everyone fears socialism.
I agree on that mobile phones are good authentication method. Not exactly in the way TFA describes, but eg how Google QR code authentication worked (sadly it was discontinued for some reason).
Instead of being lazy, why don't you google the question? Even a simple query like 'jewish discrimination college' will give you materials to work with, ranging from US immigration policy restricting Eastern Europeans to the SAT being devised for reducing Jewish enrollment in elite universities, and if you go far enough afield, you will find gems like the 'Jewish questions' (compiled in a paper on ArXiv) that Soviet Russia used to block any but the very most brilliant Jewish mathematics students from higher education.
Toward Achieving 1M Times Increase in Computing Efficiency via Spintronics
AFAIK Mozilla MemShrink was started around that time:
http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2011/06/22/memshrink-pro...
Look, this isn't 4chan: the set of posts in order is not totally changing itself every five seconds. In that context, what you have described would be different and perhaps even useful, but that's just not our contribution model here.

Given that, the expectation is not for "the next batch of stories in line", it is for "the current stories ranked from #31-50 inclusive", the way that simply visiting news.ycombinator.com gives you the current stories ranked from #1-30.

Someone prematurely optimized this aspect of Hacker News and it became a bit of a nightmare to use in the pursuit of "correctness" -- this would be good if the notion of "correct" were in fact correct, but it is an ideological purity having nothing to do with the needs of the community at large.
I'm not so sure. Digg was pretty much already dead when that deal went through.
Then your knowledge of American history is sorely lacking.
Help Underserved Kids Learn To Code
Do YOU believe any kid can be the next Steve Jobs? We do! CodeNow is in the last day of our campaign to raise money to teach kids to code.

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I wish the site made it more clear what ICFP was, without having to Google it. I had no idea!
Recce, A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also A Gaming Platform
I'm bilingual in English and Japanese (When I am in Japan, people can't tell I'm not from Japan until I tell them).

I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page).

I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.
I agree that more should be done with regard to the financial crisis and corruption, but I'm also very skeptical of comparisons made in the middle of it, trying to answer the question of "how did the government perform during it" before the final outcome is known. I realize that that's an unsatisfactory answer in many ways, but government often moves slowly and I'm not sure that's a bad thing—i.e., I don't want the outcome of this whole mess to be the TSA of the financial industry.
Thanks for the link to longreads! I've been reading longform for a couple months now and absolutely love it. The articles may take 20-30 minutes to read, but it feels so much more fulfilling than skimming over all the image macro memes you get exposed to on things like reddit and facebook news feeds.
Agreed. I'm going to be blunt, with a site looking like this, most people won't bother creating an account. Just use bootstrap if you're out of money. Heck, I didnt sign up because of this!
To be more accurate, mobile apps delegated the 'login' to a primary login service, such as your phone number, email, facebook account, device ids and so on. Nobody wants to remember 50 logins for the 50 apps they've downloaded just to try them out.
I'd use something like this, but there's the chicken & egg problem. Thing is: the content already exists, but it's spread and fractured across the net. Try making a content aggregator first, with a layer of UI + comments on top, then slowly introduce your own "hosting".

Also: how is this different from a subreddit?
You are probably right - At first I was frustrated, having to rescan articles starting at the top, but then I decided it reminds me I am spending too much time reading HN and not enough time doing...

-Edited to be more accurate of the inside of my head/thought process
broken for me after signup
Ever been to r/politics? Someone's paying college students to patrol some threads to make sure everyone agrees with the hive-mind. It's fun if you can find a good community.
I'm just going to fess up and say that I didn't read the linked post, just the comments.
Way to turn a decent post in an Apple vs. World religious war.

I for one use "What would Jesus do?" as a saying sometimes, and I don't need to be religious to do so. Similarly you need not be an Apple fanboy to get the reference. Move on.
Parse's portal gets a great melding of form, function, and philosophy. http://www.parse.com

FullContact's portal has some nifty navigation on the documentation: http://www.fullcontact.com/developer/docs/

An honorable mention should goto the creativity behind Twitter's Field Guide: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/platform-objects
Two books I've found quite useful are:

The Elements of F*cking Style: a helpful parody. http://www.amazon.ca/Elements-cking-Style-Helpful-Parody/dp/...

The Yahoo Style Guide http://www.amazon.ca/Yahoo-Style-Guide-Ultimate-Sourcebook/d...
Reddit's burn rate was probably 2% of Digg's. That allowed them to not be as focused on short-term profit.
A tiny bit of Googling would answer this for you. There are several studies showing that diverse groups are much (much much) better at problem-solving than homogenous groups. e.g. http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385.full

Also, having more diverse groups of open-source developers makes it more likely that the product will appeal to more end-users, and also attract more developers :)
YC companies are told to launch an MVP with a design that's good enough as fast as possible and iterate from there.

Spending months obsessing over a pixel-perfect design before you know you've made something people want is the wrong way to launch a startup.
Lessons from the Penelope Trunk Affair
I like your answer, and maybe, just maybe, that's what Brooks wanted to say. I also agree that "Brooks doesn't justify it coherently". But that's because you're making the distinction that Brooks did not.

Please take over Brooks position as editorial writer.
Agreed!

I'm not sure that HN has dramatically improved my writing so much as it has gotten me in the habit of only posting when I have something worthwhile to add to a conversation. I appreciate how many users seem to follow this rule of thumb on HN.
"We have created this diversity statement because we believe that a diverse Python community is stronger and more vibrant. A diverse community where people treat each other with respect has more potential contributors and more sources for ideas."

Source: http://www.python.org/community/diversity/

Universal Design, the idea that produces "buildings, products and environments that are inherently accessible to both people without disabilities and people with disabilities" is the same idea when in the context of diversity in programming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design

Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.

Plenty more on Diversity just within Python: http://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython
The article defined "elites".
Pusher has a great realtime console, Stripe has stellar documentation and Foursquare has great developer features like testing recent push notifications.
Dude, thanks for linking to Dr. Keith Devlin's column. Probably the only thing I read religiously in the MAA.

BMI is just one of several mistakes attributed to the great mathematician Quetelet. You can credibly implicate Quetelet for a variety of modern day statistical crimes such as profiling ( attempting to figure out if a person is a criminal based on statistical analysis of race/sex/height/etc...),"normal" age of marriage, statistical rates of divorce in different countries and their implications on fidelity, and such other sociological nonsense.

Dr. Devlin labels these things "junk math, numerological nonsense". But you can take a more charitable view - given that Quetelet practically invented both statistics & sociology ( which he called "physics of society" ), he came up with a number of formulae that seemed true at that time ( mid 1800s ). On hindsight much of this stuff is just silly mathematical manipulation ( Instead of dividing weight by square of height & multiplying by the constant 703, you can square the weight & divide by the cube root of height and put in some other constant...)
If you are interested in the kind of statistics practiced in Quetelet's timeframe, here's some wacky references.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume...

http://statistiks.net/wp-content/plugins/downloads-manager/u...

btw, much of what we do today in quant finance is suspiciously similar to what Quetelet suggests :) We build statistical "factor models" that credibly relate earnings of a company in california to the price of chicken in China :) We take a rigged number called the LIBOR & price interest rate derivatives on the spead between this rigged fixed rate & the floating rate. Then the public loses money & we scream - hey who the fuck rigged the LIBOR in the first place ?:) Talk about bootstrapping... honestly, we are no different from Dr. Quetelet. Might as well base Google's quarterly earnings on Page's BMI.
In light of recent password leaks events, I feel much safer leaving my phone on the table than giving my password to any of the major websites. Also this point was addressed in the original article.
For the iPad it's no problem - we have a universal app but you're right - it's not a pretty approach and we have quite a few customers asking. Mostly it's the "desktop bound" ones that want it e.g. the receptionist at the dentist.
yet some still need to read it.
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PHP has references, because once upon a time it didn't have pointers. If the only way to pass pointers is by value, then you are severely limited. So it got references, following (I assume intentionally) Perl's syntax and semantics, though with its own reference counting foibles.

Then it got pointers, and references suddenly weren't needed that much anymore. But it kept the old semantics, and still needs references for passing arrays around, since arrays are not objects, and PHP assignment is still by copy.
Everybody's Got a System: Card Counting
Isn't this.... pointless? I already log in once on my device, click 'save password', and I never type it in again. So "removing the login" is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

If anything, this post only highlights how we need more security on our mobile devices.
Because with Google Latitude your friend needs to have the app themselves and there is some setup needed on there part.
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-com-history/1998.jpg
Really? I don't remember seeing any pro-microsoft trolling - perhaps it was hidden by the much larger Apple fanboy contingent.
FBP seems to be getting more attention. Here is a recent thread where there was discussion about real-world implementations:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/flow-based-programming/j7U...
I didn't assume anything about your motives, but I didn't mean to be harsh. You do come across as an "apologist" for the community though. There are of course many communities that behave similiarly, but that doesn't make them healthy.

Look at it this way - imagine you had a conversation with a group of people 4 years ago, and they acted like dicks. Now, four years later someone challenges you to explain how they were dicks. It's really hard to give an answer better than "i dont know, they were just dicks alright" :(
the phone is the last device i trust to be secure

i never log in to my bank, broker, or anything else i deem worthy of security from my phone. i never used any of the apps from the banks or the brokers, which is good, because many of them were eventually found to have numerous obvious security flaws

maybe one day the phone will be the default trusted access portal, but thats a long way off, and i am waiting for all of you to help expose the flaws with your own personal data before i take the plunge
Stripe does a great job with their portal. Mashery as well has a great interactive portal that I like to use.
Warren Buffet blogs at http://project-syndicate.com
Although I don't buy the whole article, I think this is an interesting viewpoint.

One could argue that the brand of libertarian politics often espoused in american hacker circles is pretty much the politics of this "meritocratic elite who can't admit they're an elite".

I worked hard to earn it, I deserve it, I resent the idea that society should impose on me any responsibility towards those who didn't/weren't lucky enough to. (A cognitive bias where one discounts the role of luck in one's own success is perhaps quite important to this viewpoint.)
Does it support WebGL?
Offline: hard to binge - The Verge
CloudMine (https://cloudmine.me) recently updated their dashboard, and while I haven't had a chance to really work through it all, it looks pretty nice.s

Since it's backend as a service, allowing access to view/edit/troubleshoot the data is key.

Also, CloudMailin's (http://www.cloudmailin.com/) 'Try it Live!' is a pretty nice demo of the API.
Henry Rollins Life-Changing Decision
How to Stop Theft of Your Apple In-App Purchases
Ops. Sorry 'bout that.
Probably so people didn't go to the restaurant and heckle him?
That’s why the article states:

> Of course there's a whole bunch of cases I'm happily ignoring, like banking apps, the App Store and pretty much anything with money changing hands.
> In fact, most of the banks MADE money, in the form of TARP (and cheap loans from the Fed).

Claiming the banks made money off of TARP is like claiming I made $600k last year because I took out a mortgage. TARP provided loans to banks that were paid back with interest.
Infrastructure is a Relative Term
Is there any objective indicator (or "proxy") for this sense of responsibility? I'm thinking there isn't, but maybe someone can suggest measures that show it.

I can offer a specific counter-example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/20... Looks like someone on the inside of the CIA's coup-planning process made a killing in the stock market, as well as in Guatemala. That's not aristocracy with a sense of responsibility, it's cold hearted money grubbing.
> Think about it, if Apple had a woman's input, do you think it'd be named iPad?!? For f*ck sake, it's the most ridiculous name ever, reminding half the population of the embarrassing trip to the drug store.

I'm sorry, what? Do women get "embarrassing reminders" every time they pick up a note PAD, or use PADmapper, or discover that someone has PADded their resume?