skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell that to the people who bought at $15 or $32 even.

The thing is, the first users didn't get all the first ones.

Bitcoin was in Slashdot more than two years ago. It is open source, anyone could download the software and mine on their CPU.

Mt. Gox has been open for even longer. Anyone, anywhere in the world could and still can buy on the exchanges. There's no members-only trading.

If you bought after Slashdot you would have paid around a dime or less. But Slashdot readers called it a ponzi scam and didn't take it seriously.

You could have bought thousands of bitcoins at a dollar when Steve Gibson talked about it in February 2011. But Leo poo-pooh'd it "Not government issued" he balked.

Then again, you could have bought bitcoins at $30 after the July 2011 bubble, and today be down by 66% yet and still be bitter.

That's the nature of speculation. Nobody knows if bitcoin will increase or decrease in value. But it definitely isn't a ponzi. Ponzi means paying dividends to early investors, using funds from later investors. Everyone who held bitcoins yesterday when they were $9.20 could have sold today at $11. Everyone, not just the early miners.

Today, just like a year ago, mining will generate bitcoins at a little more than the cost of electricity to generate them. If you want bitcoins, then mine, buy, or stand on the sidelines.

Just don't bitch when it hits $100.
It's a little more complicated than that. The original movement was plodded and pushed by astroturfers but most people would agree that it developed into a bona fide grassroots movement.

In the sense that populism can be defined as concerned with the interests of the great masses obviously it's always failed that test.
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 4
This is the future for facebook. It will attempt to become the monolithic black hole for all features, and it will ultimately become something that everyone uses to consume, share, connect, etc...

Or -- it will be its downfall; trying hard to be every service on the web it will lack focus, have poor implementations and lack direction.

Personally, I feel it will be the latter, and while it will be around for a long time - it will fail/stagnate in the long term.
Easiest way to receive files from Anyone
That's rich, commissions are built into it so that if it's ever successful transaction fees will come in and grow over time.

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

"The network never creates more than 50 BTC per block and this amount will decrease over time towards zero, such that no more than 21 million will ever exist.[15] As this payout decreases, the incentive for users to run block-generating nodes is intended to change to earning transaction fees."
Blackberry's Bizarre Pivot
oh, the spreadsheet has changed since posted. Thanks!
Exactly. My first thought, in regards to the great number of colors used by some sites, was also gradients.
The trick would be to throw d3.js at it and make it fun and have lots of animated stuff charting voting patterns and policy positions.
This is a burden only if you do not use it. but the same applies to any investment - why invest at all? Bitcoins are capped by protocol - Quoting DeathAndTaxes @ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=80185.0:

(quote)
The method used for determining the reward is to do a right shift on 50,000,000 satoshis every 210K blocks. That truncates any fractional satoshis.
There are some truncation along the way. For example starting in block 6,090,000 the reward is 9 satoshis. In block 6,300,000 it becomes 4 satoshis so the block reward declines by more than 50%. Block 6,930,000 will drop the reward to 0 satoshis however only 2,099,999,997,690,000 so it looks like we will be eternally 2,310,000 satoshis (0.0231 BTC) short of the magical 21M. If Satoshi had wanted it to be an even number the starting block reward should have been a multiple of 2. For example is the first block reward had been 2^32 satoshis (~42.94 BTC) then we would have had 32 perfect halvings of the reward. 2^32 down to 2^0. A bit of trivia, the "21M" appears nowhere in the code. The entire subsidy calculation is just a handful of lines.
(endquote)

Following this principle, eventually you will want to use them, particularly when others Fiat currencies go away - this is but a transition period for the next 30-50 years. The fact that there is an economy (mostly underground) that makes use of the currency as what it is meant to be (anonymous / uncontrollable / as a way to establish a trading baseline) just makes it stronger as tool for the people. As to this being another bitcoin bubble, definitely. But look at the 4 yr graph and you can see that bitcoins are seeing constant positive growth if you ignore the speculative bubbles.
(Disc: I own & am long Bitcoin)
Loyalty email marketing 
What's your opinion on email marketing that tracks to business location and redemption
Like joering, you have failed to specify how the government will magically kill bitcoin.
She gets more from NPR than Spotify.
Thanks for all of the comments. I'll be checking out both PySide and wxPython ( and wxFormBuilder ).

However, from the PySide web page, "There are no PySide core developers using Windows or Mac and no more PySide build bots, so if you really want to see PySide running on those platforms better you do something."
It does actually rely on agreement. Clients track the network speed and only accept difficult enough hashes.
No. 57 people say that in every Bitcoin discussion.
I won't be surprised that FB be under $5 when the common employees finally get's their turn to sell (after all the VCs and founders who get's to sell first).
Questions mount as Facebook advertisers lose to clickbots
You guys have just been acquired, right?
This is cool, seems like a really underserved market.

An app I think that would be interesting, and could be an addon to this would be Khan Academy integration.

Have a cirriculum planner that is in calendar form like this that has links to Khan vids for a topic, and then links to worksheets and tests.

So you have a full cirriculum wrapped into a plan that can be managed and tracked. This would be superb for home teaching as well. Especially with parents like myself who have their children do the Khan Academy vids at home in addition to their schoolwork.

This would help me track how my kids are doing..
Google will just acqui-hire new talent.
"Now in the past 2 weeks we've seen its value appreciate by 50%"

Wouldn't surprise me if it crashes again after Burning Man.
Pique your interest, just as an aside.
Mining gold also benefits the 'first ones.' Over the next 5 years the number of bitcoins mined is going to double, and those coins will be very evenly distributed.
Either Gatekeepeer is trivial to bypass or it's useful to protect against malware. I don't think you can argue that it does both at the same time, which is what you appear to be doing.
A comic that sums up 90% of the "advice for startup founders" literature
I think a Gmail plugin (Chrome/FF extension) would make this awesome. I'd love a [record] button in Gmail Compose window.
Hmm I don't know about this website design...
This main page says
"Everything you wished MailChimp, Constant Contact & Campaign Monitor were doing... but aren't!"
For a user like me that doesn't recognize any of those, I have no idea what this site does. There isn't even an "About" link.
That's a pretty critical thing you should probably look into, quite a turn off.
... then Twitter will IPO, their lock-out period will expire, Twitter brain-drain will start, next hot startup will gain said talent, and the cycle will start all over again.
Exchange rate volatility is harmful to commerce, yes.

There are metrics showing Bitcoin becoming more widely used, but there's not 100% more use in two months.

Maybe it finally registered that the upcoming block reward (to 25 BTC per block) was coming and people bought some up ahead of time.
That is only a problem if you try and use the currency as a Store-of-value.
Use it only as a Medium-of-Exchange and the fluctations don't really matter.

Money wasn't meant to be saved. Earn and pay your bills in the monetary plane. Save your surplus production in the physical plane.
How do you feel about the property market? With hindsight, people who get in at the start of any bubble always look like they made easy money for no work.
I think with the drop off in usage we are seeing an initial concept that was flawed BUT I think Fanning and Parker are definitely onto something innovative. A few tweaks and Airtime could be a hit. The overriding concern for most folks is clicking the button and having to talk to a complete stranger. Airtime should refocus and offer the ability to chat with specific people and pay them for their time. (e.g. entrepreneur wants 10 mins w/ Harjeet Taggar) This type of strategy instantly values each person's time based on supply and demand, creates a place to earn extra income for folks with knowledge and provides a more streamlined way for people to get advice and start conversations that are important to them. Just my 2 cents.
Why are there different "unit" rates for the same song on the same day on Spotify? Weird.
You're ignoring WinRT on x86. This is where people are upset about Microsoft's sudden monopolizing. I don't consider it a true 'Windows 8' app if it's tucked away in the legacy desktop.
Nice, but I'd rather see them open-source Illustrator, so we can fix the glaring defects in this abandonware. On Windows you can use the far-superior Corel Draw, but Mac users simply have no viable native vector-art program.
How is this different from other apps like blip.me (besides for the obvious web vs mobile platform)? A year ago a bunch of friends and myself installed and began to use blip, but the novelty quickly wore off. Can't remember the last time I used it.
> They leaned heavily on open source for their comeback but did quite a lot to obstruct return contributions or fostering a proper open source eco-system.

Webkit is the premier cross-platform browser engine.

> They also relied on funding from Microsoft for their return.

No they didn't. Apple's immediate cashflow problems were solved by a debenture sale in 1996. The stock purchase by Microsoft was intended to align incentives and was really a minor concession. The major benefits for both parties were, on Apple's side, an assurance that Office would still be released for Macintosh, and on Microsoft's side, an assurance that Apple would not pursue IP lawsuits against Microsoft, up to and including stealing the source code for QuickTime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

> Imagine a desktop as locked down as an iPhone, with "dev boxes" that let you run your own apps for a few hundred more, it's positively stomach churning even at the most basic level, then you have to factor in that they will cave in to all sorts of special interests (and perhaps security services).

And now we've taken off straight into fantasy.

If your comment illustrates anything, it's that when you mix truth, lies, half-truths, and outright fantasy, you can come up with a good flame against any business, be it Apple or the local corner store. Reality is always more slippery than that.
According to the Postgres documentation, CHKPass is implemented on top of the crypt() unix function.

More details would be welcome... What hashing function are you using at Heroku? Short of bcrypt, all it gives is a false sense of security.

As is, it sounds more dangerous than useful.
Sounds about right -- that would put their P/E ratio somewhere around 22, which seems a hell of a lot more in touch with reality than the 111 that it's at right now (or the 200+ that the stock debuted at).
Luck?

Honestly, I've found the return I've gotten on various endeavors to be pretty baffling. Wholly dominated by external factors as far as I can tell, many of which are themselves dominated by random contacts. My most profitable projects have been totally random things I put very little work into, and I could not have predicted they'd be the ones to take off.
Is Protocol Buffers worth it?
Mountain View / Israeli team will build your startup
We are a tag team of entrepreneurs, currently bootstrapping our own startup. We're raising an internal round, but we'd rather help other startups than take VC money.

If you have a startup idea or demo and the funds to get it done, we can help you get off the ground and build your initial product or help with current development efforts until you can recruit that elusive CTO. We have a strong history of building products for other startups, usually for a combination of shares and cash, but either is negotiable.

Who we are:

Adam Benayoun - business, operations and design (UI/UX), Adam studied Animation and computer graphics at Minshar School of Arts and has a very strong design skills that are influenced by user experience and business needs.

Eran Galperin - development, web technologies, copywriting, UX. Eran studied Physics at TAU, and has been building web products for almost a decade. A master of the LAMP stack (P for PHP), he employs and deploys frameworks and design-patterns at will. He is also a great product guy (user experience, product development).

Some of the stuff we've done:

Binpress (http://www.binpress.com) - our current startup

Interlude (http://interlude.fm/) - We built the initial product which helped them raise their Series A.

Readtwit (internal venture, since defunct - http://www.readtwit.com)

Coachya (http://www.coachya.com/)

Afterdownload (http://www.afterdownload.com/) - A funded startup that is now serving over 50M ads daily.

How we do it:

We build web products (including mobile web). We build on a LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP), usually using the Zend Framework (we have a very strong stack for it already) and HTML5 / jQuery for the client-side. Integrating other webservices is a given, and we can build you an API if it's in the plans.

Get in touch with us at contact@binpress.com or through the comments if you have any questions.
Skritter seems pretty sweet, but has no love for Cantonese; it supports traditional characters (so they're most of the way there), but the tone selection is mandarin-only and they only display pinyin and not some cantonese phoneticization like jyutping.

Pretty slick, though.
Want To Support Chick-Fil-A? Buy a Chicken Bobblehead
Present the problem, not the solution
In the view of many HN members, Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. In the view of other HN members, Bitcoin is an experimental crypto currency, the use of which is unlikely ever to expand beyond idealistic hackers, online gamblers, and underground characters.

In my view, Bitcoin is likely to gain wide adoption worldwide over the long haul -- that is, over a period of many years or even decades. Its price is therefore bound to rise far above current levels over time.

I've laid out my reasoning here: http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adopt...
No, I do not have a source to substantiate it; I'm not sure what the study would be to look for. It is based, however, on personal experience and experience of other people I know (disappearing of bad breath coincides with other very positive and welcome changes, like injuries that were healing very slowly starting to heal at an amazing pace, disappearance of snoring, and similar things).

Just a question - would you have reacted the same if I wrote "it isn't bad for you to eat 20 eggs a day", or "eating cholesterol isn't bad for you"? because both of these "accepted wisdoms" (limit egg consumption; dietary cholesterol is bad for you) are unsubstantiated nonsense you hear from everyone (laymen, nutritions, doctors), with no study to support them. And yet they are almost never challenged.
Not for the transaction. The fee is for currency exchange. Should BitCoin be used for more than just purchasing products from Silk Road, it's conceivable that people might one day be prepared to use Bitcoins as a standalone currency.
This argument never made sense to me.

If I were designing a Ponzi scheme intending to defraud people, I wouldn't base it on a 100% transparent network of open source software using public domain crypto functions, where the wealth creation is by design not only randomly allocated, but mathematically capped to a static trickle rate.

It's like the most badly designed Ponzi scheme ever.
Thanks for the link.

> Don't try to learn QM from EY.

Well… I agree. But then again, I don't think he really was trying to teach it. The way I see it, he just lifted confusions you would have if you start to really learn QM.
Protean Echo: Fuse all your cards into one for $80
My guess is that 99% of the non-speculative drivers for BitCoin currency are purchases from SilkRoad.
How would you view your site, in relation to their product:

- Is it articles about that field that point to that product as the best?

- Are you a tutorial/more-info for that product?

- Is it a "Find out which product is best for you" type configurator?

`

I guess what I'm curious of, is what approach you took to make a mutually beneficial affiliate marketing site. Also, do you find yourself spending more time writing code/writing copy/creating graphics? It would seem like the majority of the time for something like this has to be writing copy
And yet, 50% down, its still over priced!

This is a 10-15 billion company at best.

Much like Zynga its the lower ranked staff that will suffer most from this =(
I find listening to the news on the radio to be much more enjoyable than watching the news on TV. Really great to listen to while cooking/cleaning/doing laundry, etc. Plus the programming on my public radio station is just so damn good.
She opened for California Guitar Trio in 2006 in San Diego. It was a tiny venue (an old church) and it was spectacular. I was maybe 15 feet away from her, and the acoustics were fantastic; she just kept layering things over and over. She played with CGT as well, at the end; never heard anything like it. One of the best shows I've ever seen in my life.
I'm not sure what this comment is supposed to add. Maybe to say that you don't need to resolve an image very well to detect a face?

In any event, the resolution of your imaging system is fundamentally limited by it's aperture. That is a limitation dictated by physics. You can play fun games with synthetic aperture provided that you can recover the phase of the incoming radiation, but recovering the phase of 700nm radiation is really hard to do. There seems to be a misconception that a single-pixel detection system is somehow immune to diffraction, but this is simply not the case.
Spend enough money on machines to have 51% of the processing power and subvert the integrity of the keychain, thereby making the entire system untrustworthy.

I cargo-culted that explanation, but it sounds good to me.
I'm the opposite, I loathe TV news. It is especially bad now during election season. Drivel, platitudes, sensationalized crap, and one feel-good story about the local kid who saved a puppy or whatever. I can do without.
Megaupload's bid for dismissal a goldmine for procedure enthusiasts
If platform operators openly stated "anything you develop can and will be used against you - by us" then no one in their right minds would develop on those platforms.

There is a difference between "using something against you" and a platform keeping their options open.

But, to quote Tim Bray from 2003:

They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.[1]

My point is that no platform has ever behaved differently to how Facebook are now, and Facebook are at least offering money to companies they are planning on competing with.

People will continue to develop for these platforms, though, because they offer the incredible lure of money - they are were the users are, and where the users are the money is too.

[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
Google can buy talent, twitter (being a loss making venture) can only offer imaginary riches.
I wonder if this the idea that got them into YC or a pivot they made during the cycle. It's kind of disconcerting that this is in YC when there were probably better people/ideas that didn't even get an interview.
Reminds me of Heytell. The threading of messages is a massive improvement, but still too difficult to find an old message judging only by time. Would be great to have a rudimentary speech-to-text
It's pretty slow compared to Mountain Lion Safari. Probably comparable to Lion Safari though.
Also, there are tabs at the bottom to view different pages of the spreadsheet. (Sorry if I'm saying something obvious; I didn't catch it at first myself.)
We see two main differences to existing voice applications. First, VoiceGem is meant to be usable by anyone (without having to install an iPhone application, for example). This is the kind of service you can use with your parents, non-tech friends, or customers.
Secondly, and maybe even more importantly, we try to enable longer, richer conversations. Whereas blip.me/Voxer focus on walkie-talkie applications (and do a great job!), the messages we get and send are often 5+ minutes long.
It's my understanding that being a Ponzi scheme was an explicitly stated feature in the design of Bitcoin. The idea was that setting up a very large first-mover advantage overcomes the chicken-egg problem of a currency whose entire value is based on network effects but initially has no users.
I love these guys. Started using VoiceGem in beta a few weeks ago and can't stop. I am now using this with my family, who often try to reach me with no luck. The benefits are obvious - you don't have to respond to voice calls. There's an expectation on the sender's end that you will respond, eventually, but you can be in control of your time. Unlike a regular voicemail, this also allows you not to talk to the other party in real time, thus delivering your message to them, but on your time. Seriously, just try it, you'll fall in love with the app.
How would you suggest solving this problem?

Fire Larry Page. [i.e., it ain't gonna happen]
Did you read the actual Valve blog post, or just the sensationalist ExtremeTech article? If you read the former, you'll have to point me to the part where they did the smearing. I must have missed it.
The 'everything' in our power comment is particularly weak. It suggests there are ways in which the users identity can be revealed, even if they aren't abusive.
I don't have any off-hand, but one well-studied case in point is the concept of "billable hours" in law firms. Attorney were expected to bill 1200 hours to the client. They were still working 40 hours per week, but the other 880 were spent on continuing education, meeting clients, etc.

Today, the expectation is 2000 billable hours. That makes for about a 60-hour work week. If you're a 7th-year associate trying to make partner, you have to bill 2000 hours (metered work) and drum up business on your own time.
Great stuff. I'd love to have some influence on the mix (-obama and mitt, +europe, +technology, etc).
The Lean Community
Applying principles discussed in the Lean Startup, and applying it to community building for companies.
There are plenty of reasonable options besides bcrypt, including PBKDF2 and scrypt.
Definitely not quick sort -- getting it to be an O(n log n) worst case is very hard, and usually enough to disqualify it as "quick" (if such a title is ever warranted, given the n^2 worst case).

Any reason why specifically radix sort, rather than (say) TimSort (super-optimized merge-sort), which has better memory locality than radix sort, and can accommodate non-lexicographic orders (useful for e.g. non-normalized unicode) unlike radix sort?
My favorite is fuzzystrmatch. It gives you the soundex function which lets you match things that kinda-sorta-sound-the-same. Example: https://postgres.heroku.com/dataclips/inpkhuzaczuwoppmudbles...
How to Find Good Freelancers For Your Startup