skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You think governments should crackdown on and seek to imprison people because they engage in activities that cause logistical problems for the government? And you think this is one of the few times that a government should intervene? Seriously?

Yes, 100%.

> Every action has an implication. I would have upvoted you if you'd described what kind of implications rather than implying that having "implications" is something that governments should intervene in.

Fair point, I upvoted you for it.
This cannot be stressed strongly enough, and yet is completely ignored (or worse, actively contested) by just about everyone.

Most people assume that something that has passed a "peer review" process has been reviewed independently by several people, and is thus more likely to be true. While the people do not collaborate, this is NOT independence in the statistical sense, and thus the likelihood of being is not as high as one would expect.

And the many examples of 50-year old accepted wisdom being utterly wrong (e.g. about eggs, cholesterol, salt, monetary easing, saturated fat, ...) seem to fall on deaf ears. At least from my experience.
Just out of curiosity do you buy perishables like fresh produce or meet on your unattended delivery order? What about frozen items?
If that was the case, than the last thing this person would want to do is make his currency similar to a dollar. Because the US dollar is the weaker currency you see. Why would he then call his currency the liberty dollar, use dollar signs on it, use designs similar to US coinage, etc. Why would he want to be so similar to the weak currency?

The truth is that the US dollar is the strong currency and his one the weak; and he basically made money by having his coins confused for US dollars.

By the way, there are alternative money (such as bitcoin) that are actually honest about being an alternative. The government has not gone after bitcoin yet.
I'm not arguing about the opportunities money provides in this capitalistic society. I'm arguing about the power it holds over some people's moral decisions.
My 5 (now 6 year old) loves the algebra from http://dragonboxapp.com/ I was amazed. She's still learning to read but does algebra (!) It's incredible what young kids can comprehend. (Made me feel stupid).
This is a misunderstanding of Gresham's law which only applies for multiple currencies that are nominally of the same value. Meaning, if there is a $1 silver coin and $1 gold coin, everybody would be hoarding the gold coin and "getting rid of" the silver coin.

Also, a currency is not something you hoard, it's something you "get rid of" by giving it to someone else in return for goods and services. In your example, the "weak" currency would become the standard medium of exchange, while the "strong" currency would for all practical purposes disappear from circulation.
Ljubljana (and Slovenia in general) is an awesome place, it was definitely the one of the highlights of my Summer European motorcycle tour.

If you ever find yourself in Slovenia, try a Cockta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockta) which is much nicer than Coke or Pepsi. Then see how your Satnav pronounces Ljabljana ("La-Juble-Jana")
Please point me to any code Steve wrote in the last dozens of years of his life. Arguably the years where he had the biggest impact on the world.

Larry & Sergey's last commits are from 2002. And they were hardcore technical guys before starting Google.
Libcurl claimed to be dangerous
Perhaps in regards to conversations, but I think for a one way information exchange like a lecture it really doesn't matter.
Thank you, I didn't notice that. This would be equivalent to year 7 or 8 in the UK system [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_England#School_yea...
>Yes, 100%.

Such absolute certainty is nice to have.

So if I organize a nationwide fun-run where people in every city are encouraged to run a mile for charity you believe the government should seek to imprison me for causing a logistical problem?
There's currently a non-profit in the UK working in primary schools with kids aged 9-11 called Code Club. They use MIT's Scratch to teach children how to programming using drag and drop blocks.

Link: http://www.codeclub.org.uk/

I've been in one of the schools when they have the after school club and it's amazing how much the kids get really quickly. They're making their own games without needing any help from the assistants, the drag and drop element of Scratch makes it a lot easier than getting syntax wrong and getting frustrated. Some of the kids love it so much that they're disappointed when it's half term and they can't do it that week. One kid now wants to be "a programmer or stuntman" when he grows up.

They're in around 300 schools in the UK now and have roughly 15 children per club, so that's an extra 4000+ children in the UK learning to code each week.

Disclaimer: I help out Code Club and develop their site
[Wikileaks] US Military Custody Procedures and Policies for Detainees
Magic is bad, but multiple inheritance isn't magic; it's clear and obvious, the only potential wrinkle being method resolution order when two superclasses define the same method, which is fine as long as it's consistent and documented.

Almost all of the problems with multiple inheritance in C++ are to do with the static type of an instance, and go away in a language where everything is virtual by default, as in ruby.
I did career day at my daughter's school, when she was in 4th grade (ages 9-11). It was interesting that the kids were far more interested in computers than in robotics. They were even more interested in gaming, which I kind of expected (be prepared to weigh in on which console you prefer, and expect to have at least one of the kids tell you your choice sucks).

I'd recommend it for any technical parent - what you do is definitely cooler than being a lawyer. =P
I agree that this guys competing currency is odd. It seems to be more of a political statement to me, than a genuine currency. If he had called it something else and convinced people to use it, then I wouldn't see the problem.

If he had just minted gold and silver coins with a stamped weight on them, then they would stand a chance of being actively traded. But then maybe he knew they would be hoarded. To be honest, I don't know the ambitions of an aging hippie with links to the 'bunker' movement.

From what I have read on this case (and I haven't read much) the coins do actually contain precious metals as a backstop to their value. Not so the US currency - although I hear the nickel now has a higher metal content than the face value.
It'll be there.
Those links doesn't address the fact that most Saudi oil isn't sold on the spot market. They can be fully committed to maintaining the dollar as the currency of the spot market, while negotiating their sales to long term clients in whatever medium they feel like.
Well, not quite.

NewsBee isn't trying to compete with RSS Menu. It's actually doing something different.

Most news readers create a distraction by telling you much much news you have left to read. I like to think of this as the +1000 Syndrome of Google Reader.

I created NewsBee because I love keeping up with Hacker News. I just didn't want to pop into a browser each time I got the urge to check in. I also didn't want the overhead or distraction of a typical RSS reader showing me all the things I haven't read.

This is why NewsBee shows one feed and one feed only at a time. It puts the focus on the site and leaves the distraction behind.

This isn't to say there's anything wrong with a full-fledged RSS reader. Quite the opposite. There's a place for those too. NewsBee is just something different.
No, you're right, I am saying it is destabilizing for a country to have more than one currency. It does weird things to culture.

Look at why Europe is so messed up right now - they adopted a single currency without a real government to match. Much as I might not like her, Margaret Thatcher was right when she said that "single currency is a federal Europe through the back door". It's either that or big trouble down the line.

I see you're from Denmark, so think of Legoland (in Billund, I assume you've been - it's silly!). Yes, they take all kinds of currency there, but it's very isolated and localized. At a broader national level, there is just the (sic) kroner. I've never once paid with US dollars at a pølsevogn in Copenhagen. :)

The full argument is quite long, but at heart, yes - I believe that the gold standard was a bad idea and remains a bad idea. Going back to it will not solve any of our current economic problems, it's a waste of time.

Thanks for sticking with the conversation btw! It was fun. :)
This is quite brilliant! Good job.
No, Greshams law says nothing about things nominally of the same value. It just states that bad money drives out the good money - meaning that for anything that is falling in value, it will be discarded. For anything that is falling slower, or not falling, it will be hoarded.

Currency is definitely something you hoard. It's called savings, and plenty of people still do it.
Looks nice, a little worried about how low some of the funding options were.

I do wish someone would build an ITX sized motherboard with SATA, actual ram slots, and gigabyte network ports. Perhaps when the 64-bit version is more available someone will.
Think Different Banned
Amen to that.

C++ pretty much ruined that party for everyone.
Since you've deleted your other comment stating roughly the same thing, I'll repeat my question here:

Why should you lock people up for being "a big deal politically"? Rosa Parks and the movement she was a part of was a big deal politically who had huge social and political consequences.

It's all well that you know economic theory, but you might find it useful to share the bits of it that's relevant here.
Okay, yes - technically speaking, there are countries out there who have more than one official currency.

But with every single listing of a country that has more than one currency, there is a political reason why (see Ecuador) and it has real implications for the society to use a currency that you don't control.
Which is paid for by the folks making the software tools unless the OS paid the fee for the codec in which case you're good. The camera manufacture either paid the fee or shoots a format that can be converted on the PC.
I think it can be. Obviously you wouldn't use a system like this to decide who gets to own nuclear weapons.

There are a couple of factors: cost per "incident" and volume of transactions. P2P trust systems work where there is a large volume, the cost-per-incident is relatively low, and, most importantly, the provider looks forward to continued transactions. To me cabs seem to easily fall under this rubric.

You know, it's possible to get a medical license and be so inept as to kill people for decades until you get caught. It's possible to get a hoteliers license and spy on your customers and cheat them out of services -- happens all the time. So we have to be clear that we are not comparing absolutes. There will always be problems with either solution. The question, to me, is "which system is more adaptive?" Some systems adapt quickly as conditions change. Most legal systems do not.

I'd still want legal recourse for bad actors in many situations. But things like taxicab drivers robbing you? We already have legal recourse, yes? So in reality with the taxi situation we're only talking about the cab fare, not a FUD list of possible really bad things (tm) that could happen in a taxi. Geesh. That'd be a huge list.
Pippa Middleton Marketing School
I doubt they would implement something like this. Their business model is likely built on a) having regular income and b) many users not using all their tasks per month (i.e. paying for something they aren't using). It's the same reason services like Dropbox don't offer a pay-for-what-you-use plan - the majority of their income comes from people paying the set monthly fees but not using anywhere near the maximum storage/bandwidth.
Instinctive understanding of programming constructs can vary widely from person to person. I never had any problems understanding loops - it always seemed obvious to me. I was happily coding away in Turbo Pascal at the age of 8 with nobody but a big fat programming book to help me.

On the other side, I was pair-programming with a friend during an intro to programming course in my first year of college and he just couldn't get his head around loops. He was smart and incredibly hard-working (and went on to complete two MSc in parallel). But loops, the difference between a while loop and a for loop, and programming constructs in general just didn't make sense to him. He had to work really hard to figure out how to use them.

I'm sure there have been studies that explain this but I should get back to now rather than start doing some academic research....
> Going after gold hoarders won't yield much. Also no one in the 30's went to jail.

I agree with that premise - unless hoarding gold becomes a little more popular. It is in e.g. India; It might come to the US as well, especially if Ben & friends keep devaluing the dollar.

I don't remember reading about anyone going to jail, but I do remember reading about federal agents forcibly opening bank safes and such to look for gold. If you have a nontrivial amount, home storage might be problematic.

> Coins from a reputable mint are pretty easy. The tungsten forgeries are only cost effective for the bigger bars.

For now, true, as far as I know.

> If you purchase coins then they can be redeemed for the currency of the day at under the radar levels. I don't see why I should pay tax when trying to preserve purchasing power of my savings.

Well, I was restricting the discussion to a law-abiding regime. If you are willing to break the law, I would expect that there are more lucrative ways to do that, with lesser eventual punishment if caught.

Note that I completely agree with you that this kind of tax is unfair and unethical. Unfortunately, that IS the law. And even more unfortunately, the vast majority of the population in the world does not understand that they pay income taxes of (however much, 20-60% in the western world depending on your income) - and and additional of 2%-5% of their savings every year in currency devaluation.

It's funny, but the government works like a hedge fund: 20% of profit, plus 3% of capital. Except there's no watermarks. And you can't really take your money someplace else that offers better terms (at least not when you area US tax payer, and increasingly in other countries as well)
There are plenty of commercial ITX motherboards with those specs, i.e. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~DH61DLB3 or http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~Z68-ITX-A-E for dual gigabit LAN.

Or am I missing something? (Ah, you probably want ARM rather than x86[_64]).
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/cocktail-2012-720p-hindi-...
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/cocktail-2012-720p-hindi-...
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/cocktail-2012-720p-hindi-...
And the way to game it is by posting "middlebrow dismissals".

As a poster I am often surprised by what gets upvoted. Everyone surely can see this: negativity is rewarded. It only reinforces in my mind that "karma" means little anymore.

You can get karma just by being dismissive. Look at the tone of some of the posters who consistently jump into the top spot, thanks to their "karma". I get tired of seeing those same monikers over and over^1; the comments are often rubbish. No matter how articulate and cogent their commetns may have been in the past, no one is 100% consistent; we should not have to read _everything_ they say. But it doesn't matter if they are on the mark from day to day because they get a top spot no matter what they contribute, based on accumulated karma. You are forced to read what they've said, no matter how silly it is.

1. Unless you need to contact someone, I find usernames and profiles to be about as useful as karma (=not very), but I doubt many others would share my view. My interest is in quality comments that offer useful information, not "reputations". People with great "reputations" often make some very dumb comments. Judging the quality of a comment by the author's username instead of its content is a fool's game. It's also a basis for the HN algorithm.
I think we can safely say that bitops is a product of 'all government is good, more government is better' thinking.

I agree with your statement - logistical headaches? Wow, just wow.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with John Law and the Mississippi bubble would never say such things like centrally controlled currencies are important for political and social reasons.
Probably the last company I'd ever want in charge of my data is one like Google who allows companies run riot and delete data they don't even own on YouTube.
Fear not; I commend you on recognising that your original comment was flawed and applaud you explicitly acknowledging it.
One interesting thing about the Cubieboard is the SATA port, otherwise it's very similar to a lot of other ARM boards out there (e.g. Beagleboard, Pandaboard, etc). This makes it much easier to stick a low power SSD on the device, rather than rely on a hugely slow SD card.

What I'm looking forward to next are Cortex A15 boards, the first CPUs are shipping (In the new Chromebook), so hopefully we'll start seeing them on small hackable boards soon.
This is kinda cool actually.

I had been looking at the ODROID-X (hardkernel.com) and various other single-board machines for a while. Whilst this isn't particularly powerful (ODROID is quad core exynos), it does have an advantage I haven't seen anywhere else - SATA.

Does anyone know of any other boards that have a SATA connector?
Thanks. It's been a while since I've done low level windows - SoftICE was still usable then (barely, but usable. It was Win2K driver development on an Athlon 800Mhz...)

For anyone interested, a quick google of OllyDbg for linux leads to this list: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=608123&highligh...
Rajat Gupta- Goldman Sachs Trial: Guilty or "high-visibility" Scapegoat
Basic auth doesn't solve most of the problems OAuth attempts to solve, namely not having to give 3rd parties your password, and more fine-grained permissions.
Actors and Threads in Ruby
It seems is all about "context". A user might like an article about current election. But what does that "Like" mean? Does he actually like the article? Or maybe he liked it because it's clearly ridiculous (almost a joke in his opinion?).

Knowing that a user like let's say "Book X" but no context of "What he liked about Book X" sounds less powerful. But at the same time: Easy to quantify.

The "Having a multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes can give a ton of information" needs to be leveraged against the noise the insignificant contexts of people's tastes introduce. That IMO is half what the pitch should be about.

How to quantify reliably these "contexts" of people tastes. How to exploit them in advertisements. And how this approach is better than let's say, FB's powerful ad creation tool based on "the graph" is only part of it. You'd also need to tell, how are you planning to get your critical mass. Your approach needs to be: novel enough, pretty enough, useful enough, and viral enough, for users to get attracted to start using your tool.
I'm not in favor of "business world" OO, but I do like abstract data types. The examples he uses of functional style still make use of abstract data types as their core building blocks.

Modern OO thinking requires that only functions that preserve the integrity of the invariant should be member functions. If you're talking about an arbitrary 3 dimension point in space, that invariant is hugely generous and you'll have no member functions at all. They're three numbers, do with them what you will. The insert method, on the other hand, of a red black tree is so absolutely connected with its data structure that it would be an error to try to factor it out.

The problem, as always, are golden-hammerists. Everything has its use, in moderation and with a light hand, a conclusion I think this article still arrives at ever so subtly.
I learned math before programming. I already knew sequences and matrices written a_i and a_ij, and arrays were obvious.
The only purpose of 'customer service'...
Yep, we call it imperial. Also, mixing imperial and metric is really quite odd. I am not familiar with someone doing it on purpose and would distrust any mixed statement, suspecting that the units may be mislabeled.
EC: Microsoft didn't honour browser-choice commitment
It's been quite a long while for me, so I couldn't be more specific for you. My recollection is that it was very complex, that's really all I've got.
You can actually usually pay with euros in most establishments catering to tourists, including pølsevogne. Like most casual cash transactions in Denmark, it's unlikely to go on the books, though.

Also, I'm not arguing for (or against, for that matter) the gold standard, just that if people feel they're better off transacting in a different currency than the single, nationally sanctioned one, they should be able to do so without incurring a forceful response by the government. For the record, I don't think that freedom extends to producing coins that are easily mistaken for those belonging to a different currency.

> Thanks for sticking with the conversation btw! It was fun. :)

Likewise, although I would still appreciate a response to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4697030
If you go into your account options you can close the account in a few short steps.
I really love how Randians selectively pick and choose examples to support their ideology that just happen to be totally hypocritical.

Personally, I really love how the comment you're replying to recommended a Paul Krugman text. You'd think if he were picking carefully he'd avoid Krugman to support his views? :)
The lower figure of 20W is pretty standard: go take a look at the battery in your laptop. Most Dells are 65Whr batteries - ie. 20W for 3 hours of battery life (to a first approximation, LiIon is a bit more complicated than that).

The ubiquitous small form factor PCs like the Optiplex 780 (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/environ/compl...) use a 235W (max) power supply, which will be overspecced to trade off failure rates for manufacturing cost. Those machines actually draw less than 150W flat out. And they're everywhere. A certain large e-tailer with an emphasis on frugality used to use them as developer desktops(!).

Who knows what's in a typical consumer beige box, but it isn't pulling 500W continuously, unless they're playing, say, Skyrim 24/7 with a big graphics card - in which case of course one would specify the correct (safe) component for the design. I'd argue that they're not typical by that point; most people won't spend £300 on a graphics card (I do).
The proportion of women in software development has actually been falling since the 1980s. It's not entirely clear why this is, but the rampant sexism in software development that is so painfully evident in HN commentary is surely an important contributing factor.
Nutritionists are not professionally regulated like Dietitians are. Therefor Nutritionists are often known for giving psuedoscientific advice in order to push some miracle product.
I think the logistics argument is better than it sounds. It's not just the logistics of payment. It's also about contracts, contract law, clearing processes, the cost of managing risk, hedging, fighting fraud, and ultimately the transparency of the entire system.

Even where there is complete freedom of choice like in commodities markets, one currency is usually chosen and then used by everyone. Otherwise things would simply get too complicated, too costly and too risky.

The argument that governments force a single legal currency onto everyone so they can more easily expropriate us through devaluation doesn't hold water at all. After all, everyone is free to use whatever they like as a store of value and trade it.