skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I thought the value of gold or silver was always constant"

Value is relative, so if you only value gold then the value of gold is constant. But if what you value is goods and services, then the price of gold is extremely unstable. You can see it graphed here (CPI being a metric of the price of goods and services):

http://www.usagold.com/amk/gold20080315.gif

Gold used to have a stable price in terms of dollars because the central bank pegged the currency to the price of gold, which I think is the reason people like Ron Paul believe that gold has a "constant" price. now the central bank pegs the currency to CPI so CPI is stable and gold floats freely (in dollar terms). This is preferable if you value CPI price stability more than gold price stability.

Also note that gold and silver often diverge in value relative to one another, so no matter what your perspective, it cannot be the case that gold and silver have stable value. If Somebody hits a rich silver vein then silver drops relative to gold.
55 employees before their A round? Either they raised a lot of money in a 'seed' round before this or they put a bunch of their own money in. Otherwise i don't see how they funded the growth to this stage on revenue.
My experience is that even with lots of water you get serious muscle fatigue starting on day 4, and major dizzy spells everytime that you sit down/stand up. Also, the body seems to go into something of a hibernation mode and want more sleep. Besides those factors, I'd say I've managed reasonably well, and I think you could continue to work a desk job just fine -- but the inability to move quickly will kill any exercise patterns you have, or, potentially, the ability to do much more than 5 minute walks. It also makes it far more difficult to get out of bed in the morning.
Bookmarks online: I TUOI LINK CONDIVISI - © 2004-2012 scolaro | ITALY
Particularly, the discovery of the New World with all the gold there caused some huge disruptions in the Old World economy.
Apparently Houston is more diverse than LA.

Re London: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jan/21/britishidentity1

I certainly was surprised by how monocultural the US appeared to be when I visited. Most noticeable was the relative absence of people from Africa (I don't mean African-Americans), the Middle East and south Asia.
I'm not sure what your point is, I've not claimed footnotes to the Constitution. We do have this thing called the Congressional Record and it's got the rules of each house from each Congress and shows how they have been applied over the years and so we can see how often supermajorities were required for normal business and during the founders time is was practically nonexistent and today it is distressingly common.
You could also arrange for your subsea tapping to be at the same time as an attack (IP or electrical) on the shore station, if you really want it to be difficult to detect. Or do a real cut in one place (with a trawler), while tapping at another place. And possibly cut 5 cables at the same time...

Anyone with real security requirements assumes long-haul cables and the general Internet are monitored. Point to point crypto on links is one of the easier problems to solve.

(the harder problem is doing something once you've tapped -- you either need to build a multi-wave analysis box and low-bitrate exfiltration solution over an IRU you've purchased, or run your own big cable to the tap location. Much easier to tap at the cable landing site.)
Court: Embedding videos is not a crime
I always thought that the "humor" in those American sitcoms was that the thought that they found such events funny.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Full Time. Coop/internship also available. We'll cover your relocation cost.

Benbria (http://benbria.com) is hiring designers and developers:

- JavaScript Developers (node.js, backbone, mongo, full stack): http://benbria.theresumator.com/apply/9hwWzq

- Web Designers: http://benbria.theresumator.com/apply/oYxi2c

Benbria is a funded high-growth tech startup buildling Customer Engagement and Customer Notification solutions. You will be working with some of the largest enterprises and organizations in the world. Your work here will positively impact the lives of many.
The scrolling does feel a bit choppy, but less so than Lion Safari IMO.
As wave pointed out a lot of news videos are available on the internet. We at Metadata Labs have a web services which finds and plays internet videos on a variety of subjects including News. Take a look at http://debsnews.com
Rand Paul on Internet Freedom (15 minutes in)
How Facebook Could Save Its Shattered Share Price
Show HN: CodeAvengers, the future of K12 CompSci education is here
>trading volume over a 30 day period is more than $20 million dollars

Again - as a currency this is insignificant. I agree that bitcoin is a great technical accomplishment but talking about it's price as it has any meaning outside of a few hackers playing traders is not realistic.
I would be curious to know what you think of our self learning site called LearningJar.com, where we are helping people figure out the best resources to learn skills and follow their progress.
I played the Windows versions of many games before then on Linux and the Linux versions always were faster to me.
oh my god, a troll!
32,000 listens, 10 listens per person, 3,200 people.
The government argued in its brief in opposition to the
motion that Megaupload's position "leads to the incredible
conclusion that a foreign corporation can commit crimes in
the United States and secure what amounts to complete
immunity from prosecution simply by ensuring that it has no
principal place of business here."

"Woah, woah, you're trying to tell me that people in other countries DON'T have to obey all our laws?!"
How would one peg the price to existing bitcoin (honest question)?
>But "money" isn't an investment. It's a medium of exchange.
I disagree, many traders deal solely with currencies.

> deflation inhibits the exchange.
Valid if you deal with fiat currencies - but with a finite volume that point doesn't hold its own too well. if there is any transaction going on (currently mostly underground) then the market levels itself on those. In other words, you can't hold it forever, particularly when it transitions toward mainstream use.

The beauty of BTCs is that it has no worth but it's own encryption. And that worth appears poised to grow as people worry more and more about secure digital transactions that no one entity can regulate. It is a tool to an ideology, that no government can secretly abuse, which is why it isn't seeing much love from that crowd.
Neal Stephenson on cyber warfare & our self-fulfilling sci-fi future
Microsoft and Apple have the same plan to push their walled gardens:

Make "open" into an expensive niche for professionals.

The low-end and mid-range of the market will be running iOS or WinRT, on ARM hardware. The professionals and, in the case of MS, corperate users will run OSX and Win8PRo, on X86 based chipsets. The ability to side-load will cost you at least 999 dollars for Apple ( price of cheapest OSX device ), and something around 800 dollars for a win8pro/x86 device.

The result will be, that those configurations wont be targetted for consumer stuff. This effectively kills of alternative marketplaces for consumer oriented products. Like, say, Steam!
WordPress Launches Retina Support For Gravatar And All WP Sites
"Thats very different from game developpers contributing to the graphics infrastructure, to fix actual problems they have."

I think you grossly overestimate the time most developers have to fix other peoples' problems, especially game developers.

In fact, I'll go out further: if you give game developers the impression that they can go look at driver code, you are opening an entire box of sadness and compulsive brittle micro-optimization that will consume a lot of man hours.

It doesn't matter about the power trip Linux people can have now that the graphics vendors are coming to them. It doesn't matter about the "freedom" to have overworked and underpaid developers muck around in driver code that frankly may exceed what they are competent at doing. It doesn't even matter that the open-source community can now second-guess and snarf about shitty vendor driver code.

What matters is that this innocent little idea could do very, very bad things to developers. "It Just Works, don't worry" is a solid reassurance, and having my game fail because some neckbearded jackass decides to recompile the Nvidia sources but-oh-so-different and push it upstream is unacceptable.

This is a bad idea.

And, for chrissakes, let's start small. How about you give me a stable ABI to program against, and we'll take it from there? Baby steps.
The PDF specimen is on the Adobe site (793K):

http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/1959.pdf
What the Internet Association is Really About
Have you read Red Mars by Kim Stanley? The first 100 people to Mars start to do what you suggest: start over with a clean slate without all the historical cruft.

And this works at first because most of the first 100 people are scientists, engineers and others of that sort. But after some time there are strong political moves made on Earth from countries that don't want to be left out of Mars. Rich oil shiekhs make large contributions to martian mining efforts as long as certain Muslims can relocate to Mars. Then things turn south pretty quickly.
$440 million dollar bug
Keyboard-only searching with Safari 6′s unified URL bar
I think this is really interesting in the context of the HBO story: http://allthingsd.com/20120801/hbo-ignores-internet-geniuses...

Will companies like HBO make the necessary changes to their business to survive the end of pay TV, or will they go down with the ship, stubbornly clinging to their high margins and tightly controlled distribution channel? Of course, cable companies have, in collusion with telcos, locked down the Internet last mile in most markets by putting independent ISPs out of business...so they may not suffer much in the next few years, unless and until Google fiber comes along and makes them utterly irrelevant.
Is there a plan to put a dot in the center (or something like this[1]) of the zero to differentiate it from capital o?

I ask because I didn't notice any zeros in the code example.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift
The more I think about it, the more out of touch you really seem. The people you label as plenty exotic from NOLA were actually deported from eastern Canada(your "tundra") and St.Petersburg(what they've been calling Leningrad for the last 20 years) is pretty well on the Arctic circle, and yet is not part of your "tundra". (and Yes I realise that St.Petersburg isn't tundra, neither is the vast majority of Russia or Canada)
My understanding is that a generous portion of Rabbinic legal theory is about tapdancing around the Mosaic law.

Because most observant jews would not, I can only assume, want their children to be stoned to death for giving them a bit of cheek. Or have to be beaten up because they shaved. And so on.

What strikes me odd about biblical law is how little of it is devoted to elucidating the big questions. Such as: what about the corner cases to the Ten Commandments? Is killing in a war forbidden? What about self-defence? And so on.
"Oh, hi, Mom."

Next idea...
Python 101: An Intro to logging
Haven't we seen enough of these?

I'm thinking punchd, Belly, LevelUp, Plink, not to mention offerings from Groupon, foursquare... They may be able to profitably acquire businesses now, but isn't it a coinflip as to who will win in the long-term?
Why Remakes Are One of Our Greatest Achievements as a Civilization
Tips and tricks from our voice over talent | Part 1
"in the United States"
Ask HN: Selling Failed/Successful Startup and Personal Projects.
I am looking for a developer who would be interested in building an auction site targeting tech community and tech entrepreneurs who wish to either buy or sell desktop, web or mobile apps.
There are few site out there but they are full of junk.

If interested, email me at imomin@gmail.com
If a user uses your service in an inappropriate way, then stop letting that user send messages. Don't reveal their identity.

Threats of physical harm might constitute a valid exception. At that point, law enforcement should be involved.
Rob Pike: the origin of dotfiles
Seems that this may hinge on what "place of business" and "mailed" can be construed to mean with an online business. MegaUpload's primary "place of business" is the internet. So maybe all the government has to do is email MegaUpload a copy?
http://www.reddit.com/r/watchingcongress/

All bills in the House and Senate are posted by a bot, and editorializing is done in the comments. (The bot is also a github project.)
Sure, automation is a smart move. But by same-y I mean:

* We need a website. It will have these 5 pages. How long will that take?

* We need an iphone application. Here are the dozen or so screens and a few pages of what it needs to do. How long will that take?

Automation is actually a diminishing multiplier on the estimate -- it doesn't make estimation itself as a problem go away. If anything it reduces variance, making estimates more useful.

Take the website example. It might have been that originally you did everything by hand but now you have a collection of templates, generation tools, snippets and so forth. This has brought your development time down substantially -- but you still get asked for estimates. What used to take weeks might now take days; fine.

But the end product still has some degree of size and therefore takes some amount of time to develop, even if that size is a hundred thousand lines of code and the time is however long it takes for your code generator to spit out Generico Inc's new website from the you-beaut inhouse system.
I have created interactive online courses that aim to teach web development to High School students in the most fun and effective way possible. My site also offers great support for teachers by providing live feedback of student progress.

Many people say... looks like a CodeCademy copy. Here is what makes my site different:
* Designed from the ground up for someone who has never done any programming. Teachers have commented that the level of difficulty in my courses is perfect for beginners.
* Examples that are more interesting for School students
* Teachers support - I have had dozens of high schools try my courses in the UK and they love the lessons, and the live feedback!

Last of all...
It was created by ONE person in NZ as a side project. No funding, no backing, just 1 guy, staying up all night writing code... then testing the lessons on his siblings and wife.
I think FB should charge for the mobile app since more than half of users are visiting via mobile. Since FB can't make money off mobile users why not change $3 per month to use the mobile app? If FB started to charge mobile users it would change the dynamics of free mobile apps. If users don't want to pay, then they will need to use the FB website.
Ask HN: How can I start executing on side projects?
Dear wise posters on HN,

I am struggling with a situation I am sure many of you have been in. I have a comfortable full time job at a large tech company. I have dreams of entrepreneurship, but I am not yet financially stable enough to leave my job. My goals for the next year are to increase my savings and pay off my debt so that I can be free to choose my own path.

I would also like to execute more on the various side projects and ideas I have had kicking around since forever. Specifically, I have been learning iOS programming as I figure even if I do not produce a highly profitable app, it is a skill that I can monetize through contracting.

However, I find myself lacking some impetus when it comes to following through on any of these ideas. I know I need to start executing, rather than getting caught up in an idea for a week and then dropping it for something else, or worse, dropping it and spending the next week playing a videogame in my spare time. One of the reasons is that my full time job leaves me feeling tired and uncreative at the end of the day.

How have you managed to successfully execute, to completion, side projects while employed full-time? What motivated you? How did you keep going after the shine had rubbed off?
Bitcoin looks pretty liquid to me in relation to its float.

According to the latest stats at http://www.bitcoinwatch.com, the market value of all bitcoins currently in existence is just under $100 million; so, trading volume of $1 million per day means that around 1% of Bitcoin's entire float turns over every day, around 30% of the float turns over every month, and the entire float turns over about once every three to four months. That's more liquid than a lot of publicly traded stocks with similar float.

PS. moonchrome, I'm not sure how your comment relates to my post, which is about trends over the long run ("many years or even decades"). Why are you responding with a comment about current trading volumes?
NPR is far from unbiased.
From the Notes tab of the spreadsheet: (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkasqHkVRM1OdEJ...)

"I thought it might be helpful for interested parties to see what a DIY artist receives for plays of their music on Spotify and elsewhere."

and

"My financial picture would be worse if I was on a record label. Some people say that if I was on a record label, I'd have a larger reach and therefore would be making more money. To this I'd like to point out that I make instrumental cello music. There is about as much chance of my music becoming mainstream as there is of me being elected President of the USA (hint: not possible, I was born in Canada and there are naked pictures of me at Burning Man). While it is probably true that the right label could help with the reach part, I don't think they could help me enough to offset their cut, and you know what….no label has ever approached me and the ones I've approached said no, so I'm guessing they think the same thing."

As best I can tell, she is someone without a record deal who made it. And I don't think shes's even relatively big but she seems to do OK for herself.
Good Copy, Bad Copy. Subtitulado en Español
Great way to get some buzz... I went to look at their jobs site, took the test (got an 87%) and tried to look at job listings. Clicking on the job titles did nothing.
For most Congressional sessions in the past several years, I would much prefer no bills be passed than what we actually got. I don't think it would be a huge tragedy for an entire year to go by without a single bill being passed.
The source code for the Tarsnap client (https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html) is some of the best-written C I have ever seen. As far as I can tell it was 100% authored by cperciva.
Oh zune.
Realistically that's the growth curve experienced by even the most popular and addictive games (grow quickly to large # of users, slowly decline into mediocrity) -- the trick for Turf will be to figure out how to become more than just 1 game. There's no reason they can't launch new games within the game (just off the top of my head, think scavenger hunts or group battles), and get people engaging in all sorts of gameplay.
Conceptually: I like the idea of giving some personality to the "type here and see something happen" code-learning toolkit, at least for the HTML/CSS course. Not sure how well this specific concept will go down with the entire range of K-12--I see this working well for grades 4-8 boys. (I teach programming to grades 8-11.)

Some specific issues:

- I'm a little worried about how the site throws a lot of (presumably unlicensed, at the moment) brands at the user. The Avengers logo, Samsung-branded phone in the HTML/CSS course, the DC Flash icon...

- Some essential lesson navigation elements ("results" in the JS course, "next" in both courses) are quite far down the page, which isn't great for users with small screens. A browser maximised for a 900px-height screen seems to work ok, but any smaller and the learner will have trouble finding the "next lesson" button, which can't be much fun.

- HTML/CSS course: Getting the learner to hit "check" immediately sometimes hides the result that would have shown up in the "browser". This could be confusing.

All the best!
Fittitor, I take it?
People like to leave >5 minute messages. Actually listening to them is a different thing. ;)
LevelUp Now Has $21M To Take On The Squares Of The Mobile Payment World
What makes you think it is good code? Specifically.
Search replace? :)

Agree that if you've got well defined color variables setup the preprocessor route is potentially simpler.
This is truly a shame and probably explains why Microsoft chose Windows Phone OS instead of Metro OS. I wonder why they didn't attempt to license the name or fight it (since it's unlikely that using the same name for a UI style and a retailer would cause any consumer confusion).
Have you checked Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds ?
> Anyone with a passing knowledge of computing history knows Apple is neither a hardware or a software company, they are a lifestyle marketing company that has invented very little indeed.

If Apple doesn't actually make any hardware/software and are just a marketing company then what does that say about the sheer incompetence of their competitors.

I mean seriously the marketing departments in the likes of Samsung, Sony, Microsoft etc must be the laughing stock of the industry if they let Apple who doesn't actually make anything become the world's most successful IT company.
I think one day we will come to terms with the fact that there are only 3 meals in the life of each one of us per day. How many different restaurants can we have?
You're giving to much credit to Madison. There were a couple of other Fathers around. Plus the Senate has evolved a lot since those days.

Overall I think the gridlock is overrated. If we get some bone headed politicians actually passing laws maybe people will start to care again who gets elected.
'Good code' is more of common sense than personal preference. Maybe you should have a look at one of the cited examples ;)
I was once told by a very excellent programmer that the way to do it is to make your best estimate then double it and move it up to the next time unit.

So - 2 hours becomes 4 days and 3 days becomes 6 weeks, get it?
do you have 20 credit cards for 100MB of free database?
Huh. The Metro Group is much, much bigger than I imagined when I saw it was a German store. Wikipedia says they're the 5th biggest retailer in the world, 67B Euro in revenue in 2010.

Surprised this American, that's for sure. I can imagine why Microsoft would rather just let this one go.

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_AG, naturally.
Knowing the space a bit, I'd guess most of the 55 people are a bunch of sales people on a commission-heavy structure, vs your 100k+stock devs.
Category Theory for Computing Science is now free online
I love Hacker Dojo. I can't say I've visited any other hacker spaces, so I don't really have anything to compare it to, but the community is so friendly, inclusive, and inspirational. It's an example of silicon valley at it's best. I really hope they can raise the money that they need.
I haven't seen anyone proffer a reason to deviate from majority-rules decision procedure. If you think it benefits the Senate, then you should be able to articulate what those benefits are and explain why they other governing bodies wouldn't also benefit.

So, can anyone explain to me why corporate boards shouldn't adopt a 60% majority rule as well?
MS is like the Keystone Cops of the tech world sometimes.
So I went to the link in the reply above that goes directly to goodwillion and I have no idea what the winning bidder gets? Frustrating...
PayPal lets you generate one-time use credit card numbers, don't they?
http://llvm.org

http://www.webkit.org

http://clang.llvm.org

http://www.trollaxor.com/2004/02/thank-apple-for-freebsd.htm...