skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two reasons:

o In a currency crisis, Gold skyrockets in value.
o No counter party risk.

Also, CAPM theory suggests one can reduce their risk/reward ratio by diversifying into different asset classes. By holding some of your liquid reserves in gold, you reduce fiat risk (risk that a currency based on faith only will lose value).

For those in HN interested in a straightforward way of owning and storing gold in Zurich/London/New York - I highly recommend bullionvault.com. It has a nice geeky multi-party audit system as well - so you know your Gold really is there.
Thanks - I didn't even know it was an option. Apparently it is on Lion and above (which is 10.7 for those of us who can't keep their cat's straight).

Here's a link to how it works:
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20082711-285/how-to-use-...
I use it once in a while. My problem is that I want some apps to show up on the current desktop, while others should be tied to a specific one. Because that isn't possible (as far as I know), something like an instant messenger will constantly throw me off by switching my desktop for no good reason.
Bingo. I think there's a lot of vicariousness going on all round here. It's a pervasive problem with the internet.

I tried to replace the last line with one about how I am partly hanging around here vicariously living the life of a cleverer and more highly paid programmer, but I couldn't make it work so I just got rid of it. Hmmmm.
Show HN: Timeboxing app for Mac
I could see people using this to get up and running quickly, but then flushing out their system to integrate directly with carriers once size dictates.

Example: DailyCred lets you drop in authentication on your site, but when you get big enough (or have the time resources), you can dump out the bcrypted password hashes into your own built-out auth system.

MVP/Prototype->Iterate->Grow. These services that are reducing pain points let you get the first parts done fast, so you can get to the growth stage faster.
"Personality" is one thing, but this is just awful.

I'm a developer, looking at the page to find out about a potentially useful tool. I'm not a graphic design student looking for inspiration; I value succinct, direct information, preferably with short examples that I don't have to go hunting (or scrolling miles) for. (Are there any real developers who seriously prefer a video?)

After the first couple of screens of scrolling with no more than a couple of scattered words, I gave up. The information density is so low that I've forgotten what the last screen says before I've read the next one.
Maybe they seemed hotter back in 2009, before the browser, from my estimation, became much less of the platform from which to bookmark from? It's already a pain to install the plugin manually...It must be much more annoyance to have to open up a separate mobile app to use the service (which, on iOS, I assume kicks you into the generic Safari viewer).
If you want sensationalism, read a federal indictment. Their job isn't to paint a fair picture of the accused; it's to make the accused sound like scum.
Need help concatenating two strings in C / C++? Ive written an example.
'The Book of GIMP' Leaves No Detail Behind
EBay And PayPal Expect To Do $20 Billion Each In 2013 Mobile Commerce
Loud, angry, effective.
Yes, according to their "For Developers" page the fee is to the employer and you get a percentage of that.
huh?

still need a monitor and peripherals, this is just a USB stick.

what makes people's brains shut off whenever such PR is posted?
It seems like this example helps highlight the absurdity of requiring experience in $Language for $Years (or other similar too-constrained metrics) when an Able Programmer can just learn that stuff. The general populace views what we do as magic, but understands being able to drive very well. This effectively says that programming is a general skill, and that a good programmer should be able to learn it if they already know something similar. So, your Visual Studio 2012-only shop can hire people w/ 15 years of embedded C experience, and probably get a pretty solid programmer.

We all seem to consider this as true about being a Good Programmer ("Sure, I can learn $language_that_you_use"), but are frustrated by HR departments who don't realize it.
Dominder.com: monitor domains from different registrars
Inside one of the last pinball factories in the world
Grantoo cofounder here. We'd love to hear what the HackerNews community thinks of what we've built. We're a team of game developers frustrated with the options out there for engaging + monetizing players by delivering value, not showing ads, so we decided to take matters into our own hands. With PropellerSDK, we are matching top games with Fortune500 brands who will sponsor tournaments with real prizes (tuition, charity grants, etc) for players. Games get great features + a new revenue stream, players win prizes, and brands benefit from the most effective mobile advertising channel currently available.
The same set of actions from his own network would have been mere copyright infringement. He wanted to make it less likely that he'd get sued, so he did it from someone else's network.

I'm probably misunderstanding you: How could he have done the same from his home network? The articles he was downloading were only accessible from MIT intranet, not from the public Internet, no?
Gold solves a coordination problem we no longer have.

Societies need some form of hard to falsify currency to enable indirect trade, so you don't have to lug around your corn to go buy chickens. Gold is mostly useless, doesn't spoil, and there isn't very much of it on earth. So you can use gold to make some nice looking coins and everyone can relatively easily check they're real and can't just make more of it. The crappy side effect is as you mention that it creates a large incentive to go mine for gold. For the purposes of currency it would be nicer if all the gold was already mined.

Today, with reputable central banks you don't need gold anymore. Gold's proponents usually mention that a gold standard would set a fixed money supply that can't be altered by a central banker. Yet if that's what you want you could just change the law to impose that rule on the central bank, just as you'd need to change the law to move to a gold standard. So the two approaches are really same, except the non-gold one doesn't create a bunch of digging jobs in a gold mine somewhere.
Yeah, again, no comparison.
On the other hand, while you and I might know that today's nuclear plants are tremendously safe, they have a terrifically negative public image. In a vacuum the ROI would probably be negative, but most people want nothing to do with traditional nuclear plants and the not-in-my-backyard problem is huge. If you include getting a blank slate public relations-wise, the ROI might become positive. Engineers are loathe to worry about these kinds of things, but in practice they matter quite a bit.
I would recommend steering clear of these guys. They spammed me several times, at work, trying to get me to join their site. Although the founder professes they "are not your typical recruiter sending unsolicited emails".

On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but it is nothing more than lipstick on a pig, plain old recruiters. You're better off using multiple recruiters, who will expose you to many companies and get you the best possible price.
It's nice to see startups tackling shipping APIs - they really are ugly.

What I'd really like to see is something that reaches down to the inventory level, I.e. I'm shipping these 5 SKUs, what's the best price among the carriers I support.

It's a complex problem (from experience) but it would provide real value to smaller shops who want to implement economy shipping but don't want to deal with all the APIs.
So true! Actually I think many more [non-violent] "infractions" should be civil rather than criminal matters. The classical objection to this is that then only the wealthy will be protected, but as Greenspun points out only the wealthy enjoy the protection of our current system. The least they could do is pay for it themselves.
I think the example for that is bad, when you look at what it's trying to explain.

def foo_matches?
@foo == :bar
end

It returns true if it does, and false if it doesn't, as opposed to true or nil. Which is miles better than any of those alternatives.

It also failed to consider that the naming of the method and the usage of Ruby naming conventions is just as important as what goes on in the body.
The Blimp Tech Stack: Backend
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich takes broader engineering role
This looks excellent! And stunned to see that Quickbooks is the first one being tackled here. I just recently started rolling my own API to QuickBooks Web Connector. It's Coldfusion backed and assembling and parsing the SOAP XML going back and forth. It's pretty miserable.

However, there's no way my company is going to authorize or financial data flowing through an intermediary 3rd party.

Is there any other solution?
@rescrv It's my impression that Redis is well-opitmized C code. How can HyperDex be "2-14 faster" ?
Not very. It is something else you have to carry, in addition to your phone and/or tablet.
I'm not completely convinced all of his facts are backed up, but I do agree with his sentiments. Gun control will never be an answer to violent crime, far too easy to obtain illegally. I remember my gun nut friends all had illegal assault rifles during the Clinton ban.

I agree that mental illness awareness is a much better place to spend the $500 million Obama just asked for gun control.

More government always fixes things! .... right?!
So, what does the world start to look like when fully functional PCs are so cheap that instead of buying a PC and getting free software it becomes the other way around?
Reasonable and thoughtful people can disagree about what constitutes abuse. My opinion, though certainly not expert, is that there is nothing unusual about the tactics used in Shwartz's case - they are typical for the agency and prosecutors in general.

This didn't come about overnight. The Feds were sending people to jail for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine based on the argument that two lovers must have shared it with each other twenty years ago - and those people are only out of prison if they're dead.

It's not dramatic. It's ordinary. Prosecutors treat the courtroom the same way some people treat the golf course - as a place to demonstrate their skill.
Yeah, node-http-proxy supports this built-in. You terminate the SSL at the proxy and then forward the request to whatever backends you want.
Back in May 2012, I happened to be on a drive while National Public Radio here in the United States was broadcasting a Science Friday story, "Is Thorium A Magic Bullet For Our Energy Problems?"

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/04/152026805/is-thorium-a-magic-b...

Many of the issues considered in that story are glossed over by advocates of thorium reactors. The author of the blog post kindly submitted here explicitly admits, "My last article about thorium as an alternative nuclear reactor fuel drew way more readers than I expected. I intentionally glossed over the complexities of specific reactor designs for the sake of simplicity, but in this article I want to go deeper." He mentions a number of interesting technical trade-offs involved in using thorium reactor fuel and the latest reactor designs as compared to earlier nuclear reactor designs, but the tone is still largely a tone of credulity, without a lot of examination of non-nuclear means of generating electrical power.

The Physics Stack Exchange discussion of thorium reactors is interesting,

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20034/what-practi...

as is the article from The Guardian in June 2011, "Don't believe the spin on thorium being a greener nuclear option."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nu...

Advocacy groups are already mobilizing to cast doubt on thorium reactors, with webpages like "Thorium Fuel – No Panacea for Nuclear Power"

http://ieer.org/resource/factsheets/thorium-fuel-panacea-nuc...

(with a link to an interesting fact sheet,

http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/thorium2009fac...

that gets into the practicalities and economics of using thorium as a reactor fuel).

It's not clear yet that thorium offers any economic or political advantages over the uranium that fuels the nuclear reactor that provides much of my home electricity. The two nuclear reactors here in Minnesota result in lower-than-average cost for electricity here, compared to the rest of the United States, and have had a perfect safety record. Ongoing concern about where to store high-level radioactive waste on a long-term basis has made many politicians here reluctant ever to approve another nuclear plant in this state, despite the perfect safety record and inexpensive electricity we enjoy with the current plants. Minnesota, as a matter of state policy, is strongly promoting wind energy, fitting the wind-swept prairie geography of much of the state. I'm not aware of any part of the world where local politics would make a thorium plant more likely than another wind power plant or natural-gas-fired power plant. So maybe thorium power generation is a technical solution looking for a problem.
"no one is building new fission reactors of any sort"

They are building one in Georgia http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=first-new-n...
Cinnamon is not installed by default (it is based on Gnome 3 that it is the default), you need to run:

yum groupinstall "Cinnamon Desktop"

Check the release notes: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_N...
Would this work like Remote Desktop or VNC or something? If the USB stick has built-in wireless and bluetooth, it would be a really neat toy to play with. That said, I doubt many people have a solid enough home network for something like this to feel as responsive as a Chromebook. Not only would the USB stick need to function as a very solid Wireless N adapter, but you'd need a DOCSIS3 modem, a high end N router, and most likely a 50Mbps connection or faster. That's $200+ of hardware and a $70-120/mo connection.
I'm not any kind of nuclear expert, but it sounds like the author is comparing Molten Salt Reactors to 1970s era traditional reactors:

"and the decay heat from these products requires continuous cooling for weeks even after core shutdown. That cooling process also must be human managed and actively powereed."

My understanding is the reactors currently under construction in the US are being built with passive fail-safes that make them much safer than the 1960s/70s reactors. Is this incorrect?

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.html#New_build
I strongly believe that we should start treating user data as a physical object. A law should be passed that would restrict scope of online vendors. Vendors should be free to stop providing services but not violently cut off users and delete all his/her personal data.
No good explanation. They only had so much gold in NYC because of the small but real threat of the Soviets invading. The only reason to bring it back is the tiny threat of it being stolen by the US or France.

and to have the ability to sell gold quickly If needed.

Eh, they can sell it while it's still in the vault. That's how it's always done.
Interesting: With the whole 'marketing' page I expected a hosted service (and was looking for the pricing page), not an opensource project. Looks great!
Only a select group of content companies have access to that system. Everyone else has to file notices to the DMCA agent as anywhere else, and Google has to honor those notices and counternotices or it can be held itself liable for the infringement.
Great article, I would love to see more of this kind of stuff on HN.

The 350 million dollar question is why the government has to be the sole source of funding. Obviously the cost is very high, the regulations are very intense, but where are the VCs willing to tackle this kind of "startup" (in reality it would likely be more of a public/private partnership). It's a longer view with higher cost but the payoff could be massive. Big innovation isn't going to happen if it requires congress to agree on supporting it for 10-20 years.
A reason to hold gold instead of oil, bullets, bacon, or liquor is that gold is used to make jewelry. Since jewelry is purely a luxury, there isn't really some line that people cross where they have "enough jewelry", theoretically the appetite for gold is limitless ... at least when compared to our earthbound supplies.
The challenge is that even a community that is 99.9% rational and intelligent people, leaves hundreds, maybe even a thousand irrational and outspoken people participating.

Add to that the scourge of people who circumvent community guidance demand that their speech be heard, even when there are clear indications from the community that it is unwanted. Poses something of a challenge to the system as a whole.

Side note: Are you, tcuk, really making all of these judgements based on being a member of this community for less than 48 hours?
'Aaron's Law' Promises To Reduce Hacker Penalties
You're missing the point (intentionally or not, I can't say). So to take a bad analogy even further...

I'm a lock troll. I like to go around breaking people's locks. I never steal anything, I just break locks because I'm a prick like that.

This guy I know, Franky, broke a lock the other day in order to save a child from a burning building.

How would you propose a black and white system handle this? Do I get to run around breaking locks with impunity, or are we going to punish Franky for the method of his good deed. I mean, the good deed's nice and all, but irrelevant to the matter at hand right?
I worked R & D at a big consumer packaged goods company and ran into a lot of these 'excel messes' especially dealing with raw materials specifications. Here are my suggestions:

The 'R' programming language is pretty useful for statistics and could be used to aggregate a lot of files (and its free). Also if you want to generate dynamic reports using templates then you should look into sweave which is a package in 'R'. (http://www.stat.uni-muenchen.de/~leisch/Sweave/) You could build beautiful PDF reports that you simply run a script to generate if they are easily created into a template. But that would also require learning Latex for creating documents, something that is used heavily in the academic world but I have yet to see it in the business world.

Another approach which I would try is to use a programming language to dump it into a relational database and then use SQL to access the info (which is heavily used in business setting). This option also also allows for others to use it with familiar business tools. My unconventional tools of choice would be Ruby and using Rails to build an interface.
Hey! Angry Sudoku!
The way to break gun violence is to teach people that the way to solve differences is not to make sure you're a bigger bad ass than anyone who might come in conflict with you.

Americans don't have a love of guns, they have a love of confrontation.

That was the most difficult cultural thing I had to learn when I moved to Japan.
Why are recruiter fees so ridiculously high?

I've been on both sides of the equation. I've used recruiters to try and find people and have used recruiters to try and find work.

On the receiving end it is always shocking to see someone ask you for a $25K fee to hire a $100K employee. I'd rather give the employee more money.

At best a recruiter should be perfectly happy with a 5% finder's fee. Why are they asking to get paid the equivalent of what a person will take a quarter of the year to earn?

This is particularly true in this age of database-driven recruiting. It costs them just about zero to have you in a database.
12 guys killed 3000 people with nothing but box cutters. Obviously we need less boxcutters as well.

I dont really think people that like guns are the problem though. I would not classify myself as someone that "likes" guns. On the other hand i know people that "like" guns, and it's not that they likes the power a gun has, but they certainly understand and respect it, and therefore take extra care. They like them because they appreciate them for the same reason that people appreciate works of art, or sportscars. For the Craftsmanship, for the minior details that went into the design of the gun, for the historical value of the gun.
And you can dynamically add backends based on urls or subdomains?

That sounds great if it is true. Do you know how well it scales?
Mamadou,
Just curious, are you going to continue to refine Empire of Sudoku, or are you going to move on to other apps, like LiberTweet or perhaps other ideas?
If you are not convinced of his facts, check the relevant websites yourself. There's a great drill-down on the statistics in this video and you can go to the same (official) websites and pull the stats yourself: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ooa98FHuaU0
Sooo what you're looking for is the Github readme, available from the button at the top of the wiki page. Wikis are for first looks, readmes are for the skin-and-bones usage guidelines.

https://github.com/Shopify/superdb
It currently has clients for Java, Objective-C, Ruby and Javascript. So it most likely supports any application you're working on as long as that application has a git repository. Feel free to contribute a Python client.
Can't seem to edit my profile. Hitting submit returns me to /profiles with a 404 page (Obi wan kenobi)
What do they mean by "long-lived waste"?

Things that are highly radioactive stop being radioactive very quickly. Things that are lowly radioactive stay radioactive for a long time, but at low levels so you don't worry much about them. There's a middle "unsweet spot" of things that are radioactive enough to worry about but not radioactive enough that they quickly burn out.

So where does thorium fit in that taxonomy?
I'm a bit worried now reading this post, since I want to run a webseries[1] on YouTube too this year. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening to me? YouTube would be the easiest way to get it out there, being its own source of traffic in its own right. However, would Vimeo be a better option here? Obviously I could also run it from the website directly (e.g., cloudfront), but free services are always good too... :-)

[1] http://www.baznsnags.com
In my experience producing web video content (especially if you plan on eventually selling ads against it), it's best to aggregate it on one platform. And traffic and visibility-wise, YouTube is the place to do it.
It's complicated, high level nuclear waste can be reprocessed and it becomes cheaper to do so the longer it sit's around. Low level waste is fairly cheap to deal with. So, it's really a question of what to do with the mid level stuff and they both produce similar amounts of that.
...Wait. It's free? Were you expecting to make it up in volume?
No, the models are already built. However they need someone to comb through a company's financial records and plug the appropriate numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.

It's a glorified data entry position, but interns will gain knowledge and experience.
0$ -> $0
I've come to assume that, like Paypal, they are trying to go as long as possible without implementing customer service.
from what i understand http://flibeenergy.com/ shopped around at VCs in Silicon Valley, but apparently it didn't work out?

i think the trick is to find an angle into the business that doesn't involve govt approval up front. some aspect of the problem that can be solved to show momentum, without hitting regulations. maybe the chemistry side of things?