skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It probably depends.

Banks are typically capitalized by a variety of assets, of which cash is typically a small amount.

In addition, the bank typically has its cash holdings distributed at a number of different branches.

Your account at the bank is technically it's liability. Essentially, you've loaned your money to the bank with an option to redeem it at any point in time (demand-deposit account, or checking account) or up to some period of time after asking for it (time-deposit account, or savings account).

So, let's say a bank's branch is robbed of $10,000. What happens? The banks shareholder lose $10,000.

Let's say all the cash and physical assets at a branch is robbed. The bank will typically cover those assets with assets from other branches. The bank's shareholders swallow the losses. Sometimes the bank will sell additional shares, or some of its remaining real assets to help provide it with more liquidity so it can continue to cover funds requests by account holders.

Let's say a bank has all its assets in cash in a single branch location and that location is robbed, meaning the bank now has no assets left. That bank is now bankrupt. It goes to bankruptcy court and you are a creditor. Once the banks remaining assets are sold, you may get a few pennies.

This is a major failing of the existing bitcoin repositories. They aren't banks and so aren't regulated as such. They're just storage lockers where you hide your cash under a mattress. In the event of a theft or fraud... oh well! It'd be interesting to see someone get a bank charter and backup those bitcoin deposits with real capital.
US regulators to review Boeing 787
Why can't sites just provide simple cookie-less browsing experience, turning off their cookie-based features? Instead of forcing this click-through just to show the article, they should just show what they can in read-only mode (without sending the cookie). This is such a misguided knee-jerk campaign from developers.

Cookies are NOT OK, I don't want to see them, and just show me the article (or page I originally came to view), thanks. And after I have viewed it, and if I decide to become a user of your site - then you will have my permission to use cookies.

The click through pages are the worst (like what www.games-workshop.com has). The pop-up/notification bar some news sites have (like bbc.co.uk) is somewhat acceptable, while obnoxious, as it allows you to read the content without accepting the cookies, and just go your merry way when your're done.

So this plug-in is going to auto-accept the cookies on your behalf. But why would you want to do this?
"In the US, at least, people still got famous for being bank robbers back then."

What are you talking about? People are still famous for being bank robbers, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_robbers_and_robber... . FDIC insurance has nothing to do with robberies, it insures against banks going bankrupt.
I don't know. Maybe Google or GeoEye, by request of the Chinese government. Google has accepted before to censor some places by request of governments around the world.

From wikipedia: "Censorship of maps is also applied by Google maps, where certain areas are greyed out or areas are purposely left outdated with old imagery." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_censorship
The Normal Well-tempered Mind
"uninteresting here", which is to say, in this context. Yes, they are still fantastically useful, despite having a terrible PR department over the past decade, but in terms of extracting maximal usefulness from things like "this operator is associative" they aren't very interesting, because they are too powerful, or, equivalently, make too few guarantees.
Failure is synonymous with "Quitting" for me.
short answer: you get your money back.
Very valid point. However, wouldn't this be true for all asteroid mining? Meaning if mining becomes a reality, it's something that will have to be accounted for. I'm guessing though that even by 2036 we won't be mining asteroids this big .
A lot of banks get knocked off today

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/bank-crime-st...
Yeah, I just found it in the story! I was an early user of Pheonix but never bothered to learn the history behind the browser.
A pure function does not need to be idempotent. For example f(x) = x * 2 is a pure function, but applying it twice multiplies by four instead of two.

In computer science, another sense of the word idempotent has arisen, which relates to operations on a mutable identity. In this sense, you might say
"UPDATE table SET col1=0 WHERE id=25" is an idempotent operation on databases: applying it to a database in some state results in a new database state, but applying it again to that new database state results in that same database state again (this is the sense in which HTTP GET requests are idempotent, for example).

An IMMUTABLE function is a pure function, at least with respect to the database, since it cannot mutate the database which is the side effect we care about. It is not necessarily idempotent: given that f is an IMMUTABLE function, and f(2) == 4, I can't say for sure that f(4) == 4.
What is it written in/how does it work code-wise? Also, would you run another version/flavor for a subtopic like visualization?
Or, you know, why their wallet is compromised just because the web interface is.

It's like a CA that creates the certificates in PHP right there.
Ah, yes, past tense, then.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. This makes sense, and I think was actually mentioned in the Mashable article. My mistake.
Legal protest is not the act of preventing access, but being present as a means to be visible or to be heard.

Try lining up outside your local Walmart forming a human chain that prevents customers for entering or leaving. You'll end up taking a ride in the back of a police cruiser.
If anyone has problem accessing the site, it's Vircurex and Cryptostocks.

"Before the wild speculations beginn, the service will be recovered and we pay the losses out of our own pockets."

from this summary: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135926.msg1447905
Wanted: Sr. Software Engineer  NYC Startup
Those are awesome! Thanks for that link.
It should be obvious that the above is a gross simplification on my part and the FDIC and modern banking arrangements make things much more complicated when it comes to bank failures. That said, the simplification gets to the original question of what happens without modern banking arrangements.
Thank you!

Wikipedia says Victory Boogie Woogie is unfinished. Should submissions produce a finished version of the painting?
Paid Internet shill to manipulate opinions onilne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution#Low-mass_star... explains that stars below half a solar mass never manage to burn helium, and can stay burning hydrogen for longer than the universe has existed.

Stars below 0.1 solar masses are estimated to keep burning for trillions of year.
Yeah, Arelius pointed out that the single channel float textures are 4 times bigger than a single channel signed byte texture. I think the convenience of using a float image in gimp though, is that I can easily draw the levels that I want in the texture in a single channel, vs trying to draw the levels in multiple channels.
Please check into the legal implications of this and add some detailed CYA (cover your ass) terms to that page.

The way it is set up now is not legale in my province at least. (and most likely all of Canada )

Sweepstakes = gambling
How Lenovo became the world’s biggest computer company
Yep, that's what I saw as well. I attributed it to display lag or something. It was unacceptable and I had to remove it.
WebKit was open sourced roughly a week (June 7, 2005) before Nokia announced the port to their phone (June 13, 2005). That means that Nokia was able to do the port in less than a week with (presumably) a few competent developers.

As the other person said, you must be kidding if you think Apple worked with Nokia.

Did you read any of the posts that have been flying by?

WebKit was a project shrouded in almost total secrecy until it's announcement as Safari and was clearly done at Apple and based on KTHML/KJS.

Not only that, what would make the mobile version "special" (besides dealing with touch input and screen resolution)? Don't you remember Jobs' comments about it being the "full" internet?

Going further, why on Earth would Apple even hint to Nokia that they were working on the iPhone?
The majority of legitimate people running Bitcoin related services are of a very fringe type. It will probably remain this way for a while. This is because there is so much risk involved. Not just risk of currency or business failure, but risk of harsh legal action. The subsection of the population this selects for ends up being... let's say... not so reliable.

Then worse, you have tons of internet criminals coming up with clever strategies to part people with their Bitcoin. Will these guys reimburse their users or end up giving an excuse and disappearing into the ether? Only time will tell.

That said, Bitcoin itself remains strong and probably one of technologies with the biggest potential in quite a long time. These issues will continue to occur and spawn drama for the foreseeable future. At some point the good Bitcoin news will drown out the bad Bitcoin business news. But that's not going to happen anytime soon. So let's get used to it.
Network of entrepreneurs & investors who form social-financial agreements
Code is just like literature. Too many words on a line and it looses the reader. All of this indeed depends on the density of the language you're using. If your're using extremelyLongVariableNames it may be ok to use 132 characters per lines but if you use shorter var_names, 80 characters is plenty of room to express yourself^W^Wwrite code.

Also, unix. Stop arguing about religion.
3: Hates how f.lux makes the display jumpy and slow when active. (Sorry, it's true, and once you see it, you won't be able to unsee it)
Cool. Looks similar to ronin: https://github.com/ronin-ruby/ronin-asm.

I'm curious if there are equivalent tools for doing this sort of thing for other cpu families. Specifically, what do people use for MIPS and ARM architectures?
No, but banks are insured against robbery.
> Finally, it takes significant time and experience to produce (and maintain) code that others can use and expect to work most of the time. That's a waste of time/money for a research lab, and an inefficient use of public funds.

I haven't seen people asking for maintained, (re)usable code. We just want the crappy code that was used to produce the results. There is even an appropriate license, the Community Research and Academic Programming License (CRAPL).

[1] http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
Most Bitcoin exchanges - apparently including this one - only store a small portion of their funds in the wallet on their live server for exactly the same reason. They claim they can cover the loss.
Robert Heinlein makes good meat out of this misunderstanding of banking in his book 'Time Enough for Love'.

The nearly immortal protagonist often ends up being the banker in a small frontier towns. He routinely has to deal with mobs of people who attempt to "nationalize the bank" and are dumbfounded to discover that the bank does have all of the money in a safe.
Thanks, and yes, I've gotten several requests for summaries. I tried doing that before, but I didn't like the results... but I might give that another try. You can hover over the title to get the points & # of comments.

If you like the classics, you'll probably enjoy my other newsletter as well - http://waybackletter.com.
Two "clean room" implementations that achieve the same result is much, much stronger evidence than any degree of code reviews on one piece of code (or reviews of one experiment). Independent reproducibility is a cornerstone of science.
Bitcoin bank developers commonly "do it wrong."
I agree. If I make myself a promise and don't follow through on it, it feels like failure IMO.
Are these different exchanges at least talking to each other and trying to learn from experience?

Is there a Best Current Practice for all steps in BitCoin - for people wanting to buy or sell bitcoins; for people wanting to trade goods for bitcoin; for people wanting to run bitcoin financial services or exchanges?
The fact you can get the app for free and then 10km square tiles for 69p as opposed to having to pay £7.99 for the whole country?
I got a chance to play with a friends Nexus 4 and it's a pretty smooth experience. Thanks for the input.
Yeah, most banks just intentionally try not to publicise the fact they've been robbed from what I've heard - it's bad for business and tends to encourage future robbers.
When my other half was going through her PhD, she was attempting to implement a signal processing approach to construct grids for FEM. Eventually adding some constraints led to an acceptable result. As she presented her findings at a conference the author of the paper eagerly questioned her about her approach. Why? He had never gotten it to work and failed to mention that next to the glowing praise heaped upon the technique.
One question that I have about this research is whether it is possible that the star could have picked up heavier elements in unexpected ways. Sure, the amount of heavy elements is 10x higher than cosmic radiation could explain. But is it 10x higher than could be explained if somewhere in its 13+ billion years it went through a stellar nursery full of metal-rich elements?
Absolutely. For example, the ingroup bias allows a group of related individuals to benefit at the expense of those with whom they are less likely to share genetic material; and the observation bias allows our brain to focus on information that is more likely to be of interest - if I tell you tigers have stripes, you're likely to notice more stripes and maybe spot more tigers.

In general, though, fallacies like this arise because the brain prefers rules that are simple and quick to apply - they may not be optimal in terms of the solution obtained, but they are effective heuristics once cost and time are factored in. It's better to spot a hidden tiger quickly but occasionally get it wrong, than to be the world's greatest tiger spotter given half an hour to think about it. Most probabilistic and decision-making fallacies fall into this bracket - the middle-choice fallacy is actually a pretty good heuristic (as another poster pointed out)- but there are edge cases where it can trick us if we don't think over our decisions rationally when we have the time and freedom to.
It embarrasses me how ego- and emotion-driven European regulators are. The title of this post, the quotes from the commissioner.. These guys see themselves not as inspectors but practically as clergymen. I don't know if its just me, but while the FTC "investigates", the EC "forces" or "is convinced".. Are we kids here? Is this still Salem? The level of hostility some folks have toward tech is shocking. Meanwhile egregious trade abuses, quasi legal subsidies and anticompetitive practices are practically a way of life across many traditional European industries (agriculture, manufacturing, etc).
My favorite thing about this library is that it parses the NASM manual: https://github.com/seattlerb/wilson/blob/master/lib/wilson.r...
Philip, thanks for jumping in and well said. Looking at the state of the web right now where a typical site might have a couple dozen CSS/JS files, I think the rules are still well worth evangelizing. We still have a long way to go in helping people understand the fundamental principles, even if the exact implementations change over time.
I want the world to scroll this way
Food on the Table
I believe this won't work on PostgreSQL, which will always say one row has been updated, even if the new value is the same as the old value.

There are numerous ways around that, from less fancy to really fancy.

1. use SELECT FOR UPDATE, which will lock the row (I'd say that's the normal way)

session1> BEGIN;
session1> SELECT * FROM goals WHERE player_id = ? FOR UPDATE
session2> BEGIN;
session2> SELECT * FROM goals WHERE player_id = ? FOR UPDATE
# session2 is now hanging
session1> UPDATE goals SET completed = true WHERE goal_id = ?
session1> UPDATE players SET points = points + 1 WHERE player_id = ?
session1> COMMIT;
# session2 now proceeds, sees that the goal has been completed, forfeits awarding the reward

2. use suppress_reduntant_updates_trigger (fun)

session> CREATE TRIGGER suppress_goal_t BEFORE UPDATE ON goals FOR EACH ROW EXECUTE PROCEDURE suppress_redundant_updates_trigger();
session> UPDATE goals SET completed = true WHERE goal_id = ?
UPDATE 1
session> UPDATE goals SET completed = true WHERE goal_id = ?
UPDATE 0
# now you can use the approach mentioned in the article

3. use true serialisability
session1> BEGIN;
session1> SET transaction_isolation TO serializable;
session1> SELECT * FROM goals WHERE player_id = ?
session2> BEGIN;
session2> SET transaction_isolation TO serializable;
session2> SELECT * FROM goals WHERE player_id = ?
session1> UPDATE goals SET completed = true WHERE goal_id = ?
session1> UPDATE players SET points = points + 1 WHERE player_id = ?
session1> COMMIT;
session2> UPDATE goals SET completed = true WHERE goal_id = ?
ERROR: could not serialize access due to concurrent update
# session2 now has to rollback the transaction

There's a few more, but I ran out of steam typing ;) Yay, Postgres!
Dehydration, heatstroke and cardiac risk
Even given I must admit that this was a spectacularly stupid hole[1], I don't think your point is valid. It's not like other frameworks in other languages don't have similar issues [2]. Rails is for what it does well engineered, well tested and using it for what it's intended is usually a solid choice. Rails enables and pushes testing on all levels, thus improving quality of all rails apps that follow the lead. You can argue that rails is not a good fit for a lot of use cases, but that's a completely different argument - and one I usually agree with - but all in all rails and its ecosystem pushes exactly the values that you say are missing.

[1] Auto-Unmarshalling yaml in xml, seriously? Who wants yaml in xml?

[2] I'm sorry to single out spring here, but this is a nice example since it's the same kind of attack: Instatiation of an arbitrary class, in this case by modifying the class loader and loading the class from a remote server: http://support.springsource.com/security/cve-2010-1622
>Most mathematical symbols aren't representable in code, at least until we're able to use unicode identifiers and sub/superscripts in every language.

If the Linux compose key supported more of the common mathematical symbols, I would have so much trouble not using them in all of my JS code. It's already hard not to use names like â to denote unit vectors.

As a side note, I really want to make a JS library called "Eta" for creating progress bars (puns!), where the global namespace is under Η (the Greek letter), but I think that might piss people off, even if I did allow the visually identical H as an alias.
I absolutely agree. I also have about zero faith in untrained scientists ability to perform a clean room implementation. (That's neither here nor there though.)
Unfortunately. It's a real shame that despite the security features of the client and such, nobody seems to use them.
By read, means somebody clicked on that page?
D3.js and Node.js Multi-user Force Directed Layout App
You're disparaging C for focusing on "dangerous low-level operations", but you should be singing its praises for delivering us from what came before it: truly low-level languages like assembler, dinosaurs like FORTRAN, and tentacled sea-monsters like ALGOL 68.

> nobody is willing to put in the effort needed to get rid of C

This statement is wrong on multiple levels.

1. People are willing to put in the effort to move beyond C, and it's been happening for four decades. C++, Java, Python, C#, Haskell, Ruby...

2. Getting rid of C for new projects universally is not really desirable. It's still the only thing I would choose for writing the majority of an OS kernel, where dangerous low-level operations are necessary. For the same reason, we will never ditch assembly.

3. Rewriting old C projects in newer languages is often ill-advised. Source code contains the knowledge of those who worked on it, it is used to describe solved problems. Rewriting code means solving those problems over again, relearning the encoded knowledge, and making bugs that were fixed long ago.
More-or-less off-topic, but if you live in SF you should check out the house near Ocean Beach that's painted like a Mondrian:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlbeanlarson/6184099446/

I forget the exact cross street -- somewhere between Judah and Taravel, overlooking the beach. A good excuse for a walk on the beach, if nothing else!
Show HN: QR Wallpaper for iOS. Thoughts?
"It is a kind of demoscene contest, where beauty come first. You do not have to produce a one-on-one copy of the painting. The jury rates on quality and creativity of the used algorithms."
Jabber can serve the same purpose as irc. But my experience is that irc tends to not like people sitting behind certain kinds of firewalls, and I personally avoid it.

Anyways the point is moot - I don't use either. Gmail is good enough for my purposes.
This might be what you're talking about https://www.gramicon.com/pages/howto, it was posted on HN a while ago
The bookmarklet & chrome extension are partly based on readability.js.

The code is open source and available at https://github.com/rdwallis/MagicScrollWebReader if you want to have a poke at it.
At first I thought it took Apple 232 years to approve it.
I don't see why you'd do that header with webgl instead of simply serving a static image or svg at high resolutions.
I often search for songs (in google) by some of their lyrics. Maybe you can add that ability.

Also searching for a movie based on actor would help.

When I searched for Scarface, I got 3 hits. Mousing-over I was able to see the year of movie, but maybe a picture next to the hits would help.

Looking at the list: http://sweetsoundtrack.com/Movies/scarface-1983
Maybe you could add a link to lyrics?

And finally, it might be good to have a little song-preview next to each song, so that if user isn't sure by the name, they can listen to a part of it. (not sure if there are legal issues with this)
ACTION REQUIRED: Rails Security Vulnerability
I wrote a custom Ruby/Sinatra app that helps me build it out each week and use that to hand-pick each article. The app scraps HN (although I'm about to convert it over to using the hnsearch api I think) and allows me to filter all the links each week in various ways. I then use MailChimp (and it's great api) to send it out each Friday.

I'm working on making the app more generic in terms of the source and I have a couple other topics that I want to do, but just haven't had the time to finish yet. Look for another one in a month or so though.
Database Configurations
The main reason I use a map and compass in the mountains as a primary means of locating position is that I want to stay competent in navigation - being on foot in mountains in winter is risky enough and while I have plenty gadgets I don't completely trust them with my life and navigating in a white-out with a compass and map isn't a skill I want to re-learn when I need it (it is very difficult).
France v Google
McDonald's to become UK's largest book distributor with Happy Meal deal
Kale - this has had fantastic value for me and saves me a lot of time.

I agree with sazary that a line or two editorial about each link (similar to how Peter Cooper does it) would add even more value. Perhaps not necessary for all links - that could get overwhelming - but maybe for a few of your top recommended links.
It would be nice if the title mentioned it was rails focused.
Could it be that hipsters are unaware they are hipsters?