skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My gut feeling is that since it's using a repeatable number-generator (without which it wouldn't be "provably fair" as you have described), it might be possible to game by client-side pre-evaluation of the sequence. Even if the whole sequence isn't finalized until the initial bitcoin transfer is made (I only have the information provided on the site to go on...), it might be possible (for example) to strategically transfer/commit, at a known/manageable cost, but simply not play the hand (abandon the transfer) unless the payout is greater than your expenses, circumventing the game's long-run behavior entirely. We don't have server code to look at (github?), but we all have access to python's libraries and can seed our own PRNG after the transfer in order to evaluate the hand/sequence.
Comments like this make me think that the cost should indeed be borne by single men, exclusively.
Awesome news!

Is it possible to use Stripe to handle third party payments? E.g. A site owner (A) creates a website. A user (B) of that site wants to sell a product. (B) creates a product page and accept payments from their own customers (C). Ideally (C) would pay (B) using Stripe, and (A) would receive a percentage of the revenue received from (C).
it will get there, as distribution gets more focalised on the creator while losing the middle man. so everyone wins.

authors are the tip of the spear because the blogosphere works so well in the current internet, but the rest are following
It can be learned. Observe:

//! \brief Transport diagnostic wrapper
class TransportDiagnosticWrapper {

(Actually, meaningful one-line comments are a lyric discipline of their own, related to haikus.)
Another way to read this article would be as follows:
There has to be something big out there ready for us to build.

Now consider (just consider) that one does not necessarily need a "plan" or a "theory" to build things, one should definitely do so, preferably something (seemingly) useless.
I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any extra work on your part. At some point regardless of your tech, if you are at a large enough scale, you need to control your own destiny.
The real crime is that programmers have so little time for the exploratory work that the career requires that they have to do all of that off-hours.

Doctors can read medical journals and call it "working time". Most programmers have feces thrown at them if they're caught learning on the job. This is just something we have to suffer until we develop a stronger tribal identity and demand the conditions of a profession (including ethical rights and obligations that supersede immediate managerial authority).

Do surgeons spend 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, cutting open bodies? Of course not. No one would allow it. They work a full work-week, but they spend a lot of that time keeping current with the field. That's how professions are supposed to work. Your metered work obligation is ~15 hours per week, and the other 25-40 you spend keeping current, networking, and performing other off-meter, self-directed work that is important to you and the profession.

Now, hackathons. There are two things one should know about that. The first is that the association of programming with the night hours is a bit of cultural legacy. Forty years ago, when computing resources were shared and scarce, night was the only time you could get low-priority (exploratory) jobs to run. So the hobbyists (young people, usually with access through a connection or favor) did their work at night. Now, we have enough in the way of resources that people can work at any time. Some people are most productive between 6 and 10 in the morning. Others are best from 8 pm to midnight. Whatever works.

The second is that hackathons seem, in many organizations, to exist to recapture the college lifestyle for people who haven't realized yet that It's Gone Forever. The hackathon recreates the "good old days" (?) of the 3:00 am, caffeine-fueled coding fests to get that hard-ass final project to work. It's not terribly unhealthy when you're a college student and have that kind of schedule autonomy (you can crash for a week) but it's a terrible idea to mix that lifestyle with the 9-to-5 regular workday. Also, most final projects are Done, submitted for a grade, and never need to be looked at again. This isn't the case for real-world software.

I tend to see most company's 20%-time and hack-day programs as negative spaces that define anything programmers actually enjoy as "not real work" (because they can be tricked into doing it "for free"). I can't even count the number of times I've seen people using 20%T programs to do things that, if they didn't have short-sighted imbeciles for managers, would just be regular-ol' working time.
I'd be concerned about running an online casino with a .com domain. The US government has a track record of seizing domains.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-...
Whether RPython is a good or a bad language is a subjective fact and it should not be related to the fact whether I wrote it or not right? It's good for what it does (writing VMs), or at least better than writing them in C++ including JIT by hand, but it's much worse than Python. Hence using it for a general purpose project is a bad bad idea and you should use Python instead.
ex·trem·i·ty (k-strm-t)

n. pl. ex·trem·i·ties

1. The outermost or farthest point or portion.
Australia is pretty much dominated by Paypal. Was excited to get to use Stripe for a new project but got sad when I realized it wasn't available here.
I'm wondering about the security of the generators and hashes you use. SHA-256 is to my knowledge fine, however the Mersenne twister used by Python isn't (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister, although there may be modifications in Python). You have little plaintext, so I can't really find anything obvious, but given the nature of the site, you may want to use something cryptographically secure.
Sorry, I should have made that clearer. I know and like the division semantics in Python 3. It's when I go back to Python 2 that I get bitten by 1/2==0.

I know that I can use __future__ to sort that out, but when I'm writing something quickly, I often forget that until I work out why my code is misbehaving.
PyPy speedups over CPython in numeric code are in 50-200x ballpark, it really depends what you do. We can certainly do better, but it's within 2x of optimized C for most of it (unless there is a very good vectorization going on).

For stuff that I tried pypy was universally faster than Cython on non-type annotated code and mostly faster on type-annotated code from cython benchmarks.
I think the answer re tables is the meta-answer for linux generally: copy somebody else who has solved the problem. The Apple IOS-OSX dichotomy comes to mind as something to ape.
Nope. I didn't use dropbox@mydomain but another string that was not guessable.

And how is a random pattern easy to discover? Quite coincidental that of the hundreds of addresses, just the three that are used for Dropbox are receiving spam in the past few days.

The spam I'm receiving is the kind of spam that you attempt to send to a non-tech audience (obvious phishing is obvious). The addresses were harvested, not carefully picked by looking at other addresses I used with my domain. The word "dropbox" is not even in the spammed addresses; they were school addresses. I never publicly mentioned I even went to that school. It are also three variants on the school's name, incredible that they picked just these three to spam.
I agree that Roman numerals would make computers interesting. But if we extend the thought experiment to Greeks + Romans, could they have had some other kind of computing?

It might not have been binary. It might not have been digital, but analogue.

I don't know anything about philosophy but Zeno's Arrow Paradox shows the strength of analogue thinking.

> It's interesting to think about what obvious inventions we may not realize today due to the way we represent certain forms of information.

I've only recently learnt that in Russian there are different words for "blue", and that these are seen as different colours, not just lighter or darker shades of the same colour.

And while it's good that we have so much processing power it does tend to mean that we just throw more processors at something, rather than designing a radically new architecture for specific domains.
Tor Project: Relay Configuration Instructions
If you didn't know, I don't blame you, and I hope I didn't offend you
too badly. At one time, long ago, before HN got popular, everyone around
here knew who RTM is and knew he is one of the people responsible for
giving HN to all of us.

These days, it seems most people don't realize that RTM is the "man
behind the curtain" -- the real wizard pulling all the levers to make HN
work. Sadly, some of those who do know of his efforts and involvement
here act like jerks. They repeatedly bring up that one controversial
thing he did a long time ago because it's excellent vote-bait, and they
ignore all of the more amazing things he's done.

If someone showed up at your party at your house with your friends and
repeatedly talked crap about the one controversial and possibly
embarrassing thing you did eons ago in your reckless youth, then you'd
not only want to throw them out, but you'd probably want to kick their
ass. Even if you're too nice, reasonable, and civilized to actually kick
their ass, you'd still want to do it.

You didn't know, but the repeated submissions about the Morris worm, and
all the people up-voting them are being extremely inconsiderate and
disrespectful. Maybe some people are envious of his success and are
trying to take him down a notch by embarrassing him in his own house?

It's a truly legendary hack, and I giggled my ass off when it happened,
but it's not "news," so why are so many people continuously reposting
and up-voting it on a news site?

It's happened repeatedly, so can you really blame me for being skeptical
of the real intent?
The campaign against living miserably (CALM) on G+
Stripe Connect with collecting fees? - https://stripe.com/docs/connect/collecting-fees
Why can't you use the UK version? With all of the EU being integrated, shouldn't it work across the entire thing?
stripe should launch in India, I'm more than ready to help out with that. The market here, for stripe is huge! A lot of alternatives exist, but all of them frankly su%k!
no way is that average colour (what does that even mean?). it's something like the modal colour with saturation shifted to full.
German parliament passes ‘Google tax’ law: Royalty payments for news snippets
A very interesting article about the overuse of the orange and teal coloring seen in the first example:
https://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-h...
Damn, that's pretty fantastic. Stripe have been killing it.
I think it's a mistake to classify people who don't do this as "cogs." As a self-employed entrepreneur myself, I actually envy happy "cogs." I think they tend to lead much more balanced lives. They have work and a life. Most entrepreneurs I know can't separate their work from their life.

If the statement, "I love my job" makes sense to you, then you should never quit your job to start your own company. It's usually a terrible financial decision and it involves a ton of instability. The main reason to do it is because you look at your life as an employee and just can't see yourself ever being happy.
Thanks for the heads up.

It's finally (almost) here!

This is the most excited I've ever been about a product launch. They've done a fantastic job keeping everyone in the dark and silently hoping. The thought of being able to easily charge credit cards on my sites has given me renewed faith in new business ventures.
Their statement says "EUR coming soon" so it should be a good sign for Euro countries.
Is it coming to France soon? (Apparently there's at least one job opening in Paris so there's hope!) Let's ask him! ;-)

Not really related, but here's a picture I took of Patrick at this year's Startup School

http://bambax.smugmug.com/Other/2012-10StartupSchool/2708004...
Twilio And 500 Startups Launch A Micro-Fund For EU Startups
Office space in Aragatsotn 
Aragatsotn region (in Armenian - marz) is in the central part of the western half of Armenia and borders Shirak, Lori, Kotayq and Armavir subregions. Find information on Aragatsotn and other useful information online.
Tell me about it. I get the same thing with the fake-Greek letters everywhere, e.g. hλlf life (which I read as hllf), GRΣΣK (grssk), etc. It's infuriating.
TED on the Run: How a Conference Copes With Success--and Brickbats
Ah, hmm. I guess it's probably a situation where just coming to the UK is already 90% of coming to the whole EU.
What language features do you miss in C#?
Doctors can read medical journals and call it "working time"

Where did you get that idea? I grew up in a family of doctors. If they aren't seeing patients, they aren't billing. They go to school an unthinkably long number of years and then they're put into a sleep depravation nightmare called "interning" for years before they get to have a career that normally includes "on call time" where they're woken up at all hours of the night to go save someone's life.

Sitting around reading journals is what they do on their off time. Everything in your analogy is wrong.
...or they had a special deal this week: Appoint one, get one free.
I should also have said that this system means that for forums I feel safe enough using the same password on all sites as it will never be linked with the same address. (I still use a different (predictable for me) password for banking/ecommerce websites)
It still took over a decade to get what should have been available from the very beginning. That's a pretty serious problem that repeats time and time again with JavaScript.
Safeguard the potential of the Contingent Workers
"Bitino is a games company based in London."

Then you are breaking the law. UK-based gambling companies have to ensure that customers are over 18. Running a gambling game that uses anonymous payments goes against this principle!
The rebound effect he's decrying is a lot like a slippery slope argument. As things get cheaper you make more of them, which can counter-intuitively lead to more total spending on them. But this can't go on forever, almost nothing has unlimited demand even at zero cost.

“Techno-fixes” alone are unlikely to reduce our impact.

This later part of the document ignores the potentially for decoupling of energy use from economic output that he mentions earlier in the argument. The potential for true decoupling is the reason techno-fixes are so compelling, and there is a history of real progress here. For example, in places with sanitary plumbing, unlimited population density can be reached without corresponding increases of the chances of dying of cholera: this environmental problem has not just been mitigated but eliminated.
Fujitsu prototype 'smart walking stick' to help elderly
Whether it's a win or loss for Dropbox depends on the public's reaction to it. I'm totally with potatolicious here: It's a dropbox site, and these people have a special status (moderator) which I automatically assume is conferred upon them by Dropbox. So their behavior is "on" dropbox- whether dropbox wants it to be or not. Even if my assumption is wrong, it's still on Dropbox.

The only question is, are people going to hold them accountable or not (by finding other solutions). I don't use them (I do my own syncing) and this display warns me off of starting to use them any time in the near future.
>> How often do you need more than one app working with the same OLTP data?

If you are running a modern web startup, it's probably not an issue. But in a typical business... often IMO. And it was one of the original use cases that drove the adoption of databases in the first place.

Would be interested in seeing you blog about the last sentence of your last reply.

Thanks for engaging my comments.
It might be that there is a growing population of companies with strong incentive to move away from the model of the public corporation given that short-term growth trumps all other concerns on Wall Street.

We have seen Michael Dell buying back Dell, companies like Facebook and Zynga getting nothing but grief for having publicly traded stock, Elon Musk making it very clear that SpaceX will stay private so that it will be capable of long-term planning, and now this silliness with Apple that does appear to be just market griping over what is clearly a very strong company looking to the future.
Similarly nasty is the use of Cyrillic to create fake Russian, as in TЗTЯIS (which would be pronounced as "tztyais").
Ask HN: startup which lets test android apps on many devices?
Hi,

what do you think of idea to create service which lets depelopers test android applications on many devices in way that they can remotly control this application and see what is going on in realtime. Do you think it is good idea for startup?

Best,
Wiktor
Maybe it doesn't contribute to dehydration, but it sure does contribute to a lot of trips to the bathroom.
I am totally lost by this post. I've attended several hackathons, but they're nothing like what's described. They tend to be 9-to-5 affairs stretched out over several days. The food at the last one had a lot of fruit, healthy sandwiches, plenty of water, juice, coffee, tea, (and yes, some junk food). We saved the boozing for dinner.

And the hackathons weren't a distraction. Yes, some people ran around and talked a lot and there was definitely socializing going on (if you're not a people person, a hackathon may not be for you), but really: a lot of the talk was with people who were experts in the problem area we were gathered to deal with and this made us so much more productive. I've been to five or six hackathons now and generally just about everyone turns out plenty of great stuff there.

We got a lot of great stuff done, had some fun, caught up with old friends and got to visit a new country (well, not me. The hackathon was here in Paris).
Yep, I guess тетрис doesn't look English enough.
I have also been a loyal BE customer for many years. Its sad to see this happen as the service is likely to suffer because of it. Time to find a new ISP.
I don't think it's even worth beginning to invite participation for a project like this until you have at least built the minimal mandatory user interface: a map-based interface that at least shows which locations have entries.
Pin [1] just launched last week. It is a similar all-in-one payment solution (no merchant account needed), but homegrown in Australia.

[1] https://pin.net.au
What exactly is a C pointer, if not a memory address?
Where is Europe’s hottest tech startup scene?
"What would be a fair distribution considering he is joining with lower risk?"

In my opinion, this is entirely the wrong question to ask. The equity for your new partner should be based upon the value they bring to the company - e.g. What is a fair valuation considering the risk of the company failing without the new founder?

To put it another way, you are bringing customers and traction to the startup. And that is your job. The work you did previously is sunk cost.

If you start your relationship fighting over percentages of $0.00, don't be surprised if the relationship doesn't end well. If you don't want to see your new partner succeed equally to you, it's better not to make them a founder.

Good luck.
Good for him, he is quite brave regarding how much he uncopyrighted. But still, I checked just now and - correct me if I am wrong - not all his books are free, for example "The Little Guide to Un-Procrastination". Also, he is selling courses.

As I understand it, he is selling some products, and uncopyrighted some others for marketing purposes. Interestingly, some people will pay also for those works which are uncopyrighted. Still, it isn't the case that everything he offers is free and can be paid only voluntarily.
Anyone else here on the Causeway for the launch?
EU isn't (yet) integrated in that sense (I wrote something on this issue some time ago: http://jonasbentzen.com/stop-generalizing-about-europe/ ).

We /might/ be able to use the UK version - let's hope that's the case. But then there's currency conversion issues (the UK uses pounds, some EU countries use the Euro, the Scandinavian countries use their own currency, etc.). On top of that there will probably be extra fees for transferring funds from a UK bank/entity to a Danish one, etc.
How to get buy-in on your design process
All of which leads me to think there should be some third party arbitration for this sort of thing.

There are companies that do this - in the US, we have the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and they handle this sort of thing for offline companies. The problem with this approach is one of cost - if I want my company to appear "In Good Standing" with the BBB, I have to pay $800 per year regardless of whether anyone files a complaint or praise with my company. Ouch. Good luck getting that to work on the web.
Is there supposed to be a purpose to this? Personally, I don't think (accurate) Colour Analysis can be accomplished simply by taking the mean shades of every other horizontal line on the screen. A massive component of how cinematographers and art directors use colour to illustrate a story or reinforce the strength of a moment is through the alteration of colour. For instance, there are specific scenes in Up wherein a shift of mood is often conveyed through the adjustment of saturation.

Here's where this effect is most prevalent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvgVsVmusPg

Pay attention to the colour alteration present in Carl's face and the furnished surroundings after he reads Ellie's 'Stuff I'm Going to Do' scrapbook. It's subtle, but it means a whole lot of difference to viewers and filmmakers alike (the former on a relatively subconscious basis, of course).

Your methodology completely eliminates that variable, so I don't really know what you're expecting to get out of this.
Even a non-paying customer does not deserve to get treated like that when a security issue is involved.
For a (slightly technical) in-depth guide to training RBM's: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/guideTR.pdf

It discusses how to choose a learning algorithm, selecting hyperparameters, number of hidden units, etc.
Ratnet, A clue to the next level beyond Pair Programming?
Does this auger the opportunity in the next 20 years for hackers to link brains?
But this is what is really interesting about it. If the US government moves to shut this casino down, are they admitting that bitcoins are money?
Unless you're specifically trying to build a network with rather interesting temporal characteristics, there's no reason to try to map neurons to cores. Update rules are typically just matrix operations - no need to break out entertaining physical architectures for that.
Startup Manager 2000
The design world is going flat, and that changes a lot of things
Oh, I don't blame you at all! I really did want to be clear in my intent, not trying to knock you down a notch or anything, either. The example about inviting people to a party only to overhear conversations about your controversial/embarrassing "thing" strikes home for me, as I have some recent experience with that.

Thanks for taking the time to reply with details, by the way. I appreciate it.
Groupon C.E.O. Is Out