skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't listen to the "it's out of control" or "is very due for a crash because it's rising so quickly" stuff. It comes down to a very simple test: do you think that there are significant reasons Bitcoin would or would not gain acceptance as a mainstream currency?

A few reasons I can think of why it would:

* The current banking system is inherently insecure. If you have an account number and a routing number (written on the bottom of every check), you can pull money. Bitcoin is potentially much more secure.

* It's way too difficult to send money today, especially internationally, and fraud is a huge issue. We shouldn't need something like PayPal. Bitcoin solves this.

* If you don't have faith in banks or central governments, Bitcoin doesn't require trust in any third party to function. You aren't dependent on any bank.

A few reasons it might not:

* It requires too much technical knowledge to use and is unapproachable for mainstream users.

* It's too tied up with illicit interests and won't break out of that image, leading it to an untimely demise in culture. A fax machine is no use if no one else has one.

* There are lurking fatal flaws in the underlying technology. Maybe a blockchain fork is much more possible than currently assumed, or there's found to be an error in the cryptographic scheme.

* Mining power ends up concentrated in the hands of few when ASICs are in full swing and transaction fees aren't enough to keep individuals at it, giving power over the blockchain to a few (potentially malicious) actors. There's no guarantee transaction fees will actually pick up the incentive slack.

If you think that Bitcoin will ultimately be widely adopted, buy now. $50 / btc is very cheap in that world. If you think Bitcoin will fail, then any price is too much. Any mumbling that "it's doubled in a month and therefore is set up to come back down to earth" is just hand waving.
My book 'Unlearning to Run' is now live
just curious what, if any, training you did during your primal trial month?
Also give https://www.bitfinex.com a go
Firstly, you don't read a textbook (especially a math textbook) in one sitting. If nothing else, books like that have problems that the authors expect you to go through. They are also often based on lectures for courses that take at least a semester to absorb.

Secondly, number theory is not calculus; it requires you to be familiar with college-level math courses (e.g. abstract algebra) before you can even start making sense of it. It's certainly plausible that an engineer might pursue it as a hobby, but it's rather unusual, and certainly not for the faint of hear (it requires major commitment in terms of patience and time).

The same goes true for diff. geometry, although it may be more approachable (e.g. many undegraduate math syllabi have it, while number theory is usually a postgraduate course).
See Ben Kepes' review here: http://wp.me/p8KWj-3Uj
Facebook's market cap is $63,000,000,000. If the market cap of Bitcoin were just 10% of Facebook, each Bitcoin would be worth about $500. 1% and it's about $50.

Can a global financial system conceivably give the world just 10% of the value of Facebook? Because just ten percent ... and one BTC is $500.

Oh, but clearly society demands Farmville, you say? Clearly we don't need a new financial system ... more than we need to know who Joe Bob hooked up with this weekend.

As if there's no pain being solved here by Bitcoin. As if there are no problems with USD or the EUR. As if Cypriots are just pissed off over spilled milk right now. After all it's only a "haircut".

It's so funny to see how most people on HN are here to make businesses that scale infinitely. What could possibly, POSSIBLY, scale faster and more widely than an open source global currency? The price increase in the last month represents a trickle of people around the globe exchanging fiat for BTC. Just a trickle. Whereas most people are obviously hesitant to invest. That would include most people on HN.

The supply of Bitcoin is ridiculously tiny. Only 11,000,000 in total are in circulation today, let alone available for purchase on the market.

Sellers wanted. I acquired enough BTC to make me happy without being over the top - and I'm not ever exchanging it back into any other ass backwards asset class, gold and silver (and USD) included. Early adopters of BTC are from what I can tell mostly the same way, if crazier than I am.

Bitcoin is valuable because the world desperately needs to escape the current financial system. Individual sovereignty and financial privacy are the most scarce resources on the planet, bar none. It's not too late to acquire BTC, put it in a brainwallet and carry around $10k at all times. Now let's all go back to flinging monkey poop at consumers over the Internet.
> It usually doesn't go well for people that try to harm others and publicly admit it

If you're a federal persecutor, it usually goes very well.
SimCity is probably just "the straw that broke the camel's back".
That's only 4 cores. I'd rather have the cores.
I recently did this also, heres the process in pictures: http://deanjerkovich.com/2013/01/20/getting-my-genome-sequen...

please excuse the technical inaccuracies - this was prior to me going on an adventure of learning exactly what this involved.
Whole new way to interact with others, interesting idea.
Why not just drink diet coke?
My lack of communication skills strike again. Pro programme meant professional degree programme. Doing a Ph.D. for the money is a terrible idea. Anyone who can get into a Ph.D. programme can do another 2/3/4 years of undergrad (MBA/JD/MD) and even ignoring the time spent getting ones degrees all of those will have better pecuniary outcomes than getting a Ph.D. for the kind of person who can get into a programme and especially for the kind of person who can actually graduate with a Ph.D.
It will probably crash. Obviously it has had greater accessibility and hype lately. Coupled with profitable mining becoming impossible for most people riding the boom looks more and more attractive. At some point in the future the buying volume will taper off due to less new speculators getting into the game.

If BTC had anything actually underpinning its value we could work out the ratio of how overvalued it is. Unfortunately it doesn't - even the fact that real transactions are made with BTC doesn't change anything, as the value is so elastic that a T-shirt selling for 1 BTC 6 months ago would sell for a fraction of the BTC now.

If the currency is stable now, what exactly is making it stable? Where does the equilibrium come from? Isn't it unstable by definition anyway since it's rising uncontrollably?
I can "confirm" that double the ram is coming, they were handing out flyers at SXSW stating as such. Here is a photo I took in high resolution: http://code.mglinski.com/X3ps/30zoh6Yf
Of course it is all still plans, but after talking with them directly about it I feel very confident they will be doing your ram junkies sweet justice once they have had the chance to move everyone over to the new E5 boxes.

They had a demo of Longview on the show floor too, from what I gathered it is a package install based daemon to monitor processes and the like, something like the server part of NewRelic but sitting directly in their datacenters.
So you want to write an interpreter? [video]
Can you elaborate? I'm not too familiar with the bitcoin market, just viewing it from a normal (amateur) financial perspective.
I think the "max block size" issue is one of the biggest ones at the moment. Oh and the censorship of S.Dice sets a terrible precedent too.
I'm harping on this word choice because most non-technical people do not understand what technical people mean when they say "hack", yet every newspaper article on this is using the word "hack" or "hacker" in the title and coloring peoples' perceptions about this case in a negative and unfair fashion.

If you use the word "hack" in front of normal people, they would probably view it as some neckbeard breaking passwords and bypassing electronic safeguards in a dangerous fashion. They would view it as equivalent to that scene from Mission Impossible where Tom Cruise is dangling from wires to break into the CIA or that scene in Terminator 2 where young John Connor gets easy money from the ATM. I use those popular references because that's what most people think is involved when you use the word "hack" when that's not the case here.

This case, if I understand it correctly, literally involved somebody visiting a URL. Whether he did so by typing it into his browser or using an automated program or not doesn't change the nature of the action to me.
You are incorrect. When the "price fell to zero" in June 2011, it was the result of bogus trades from a hacker: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=55 No one had enough bitcoins to crash the price that low for real.

As of today there are so many bids on MtGox alone that selling 100k bitcoins is barely sufficient to crash the price to the low $30s. Anybody owning that much is obviously long on bitcoin. It will take a lot more than a "few large holders" to crash the price to $30 or below. It would take a massive market panic.
I don't question the premise here, but I question the research and specific formulation.

I'm more specifically intrigued by the formulation behind something like Chori bar. http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Chori-bar-nutritious-pu...
What's the difference between an enterprise-class SSD and a regular SSD? Is it performance or reliability? Is an enterprise-class HDD even more performant and reliable than a regular SSD? I thought SSDs are more reliable because they don't crash and have better access time than HDD because they don't need to seek.
"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent." - John Maynard Keynes

Two things you're not taking into account: 1) There are no fundamentals in the bitcoin market and 2) Margin calls

Based on the price action of just the last few months, it's easy to imagine you might need to cover for BTC at $250 or more (log trend), yet your max upside would be $50.
Well, clearly nobody could ever do it then.

Wait, no, people study those things all the time. They're difficult, but maybe he has unknown prior background in math, or is gifted in that regard.

It's not as though he achieved something that no human ever has before. It's a reasonably routine though difficult task - akin to perhaps completing a marathon.
You're assuming a low barrier to entry. That is clearly not the case for a business requiring the licensing of multibillion dollars worth of wireless spectrum. Moreover, the availability of service without a contract doesn't break the cartel, because that provider has no incentive to induce a price war by offering it at a more attractive price point than on-contract service from competitors. They can instead offer off-contract service for a premium (or offer lower-quality/coverage service for the same price), which is worse than what you would get if long-term contracts were prohibited and all providers had to compete in the market for off-contract service.

You would know if there was a wireless company offering an off-contract plan that was actually more attractive than their competitors' on-contract plans because everybody would switch to it -- customers don't want to be locked into a long-term contract, they only do it because the providers have the incentive to make off-contract plans more expensive.
Is that a real Jason Fried comment or a troll?

Yet another freak'n patch again. Ridiculous!

At this rate, you might as well just make an official "patch Monday", so that we can expect to have weekly security bugs fixed.
This is really a matter of taste. You should at least be aware that you're monkeypatching, and code and test accordingly. Many people have good results from monkeypatching, and even more have good results from calling well-written-and-tested libraries that monkeypatch.
Sorry this made me think of this:
http://www.xkcd.com/1172/
This comes up on most Bitcoin threads, and you'd think a google search could answer that, but the results are pretty unclear. Apparently Bitcoinica used to but no longer exists. The lack of a direct answer would suggest no, unless someone here chimes in otherwise.

Shorting isn't possible within the Bitcoin protocol itself, since there's no mechanism for the lender to compel the short-seller to cover and return the borrowed bitcoins. And Bitcoins are usually not kept in custody with a broker that could lend them, since doing so would defeat the purpose of the protocol in the first place, that only you can spend your coins. (Any lending or any other means of paying a bitcoin is spending it as far as the protocol is concerned.)

Such an exchange could exist, if it established its own trustworthiness outside of the Bitcoin protocol. It would have power to spend depositors' bitcoins on their behalf, like a bank for fiat currency does, but unlike a bank there is no higher authority such as a government to appeal to if the bank breaches its trust. The exchange would have to do something really really compelling to entice Bitcoin depositors and earn their trust. This set of problems would appear to be deep enough that a Bitcoin short exchange does not currently exist.
Not a real Jason Fried.
>I claim you are getting more subsidies than you believe.

That's an interesting claim. Completely without merit, but interesting.

>You may have noticed that there is something called a requirement for a super majority such that and you might also recall that the other parties stated agenda, see Mitch McConnell, was to block all legislation.

There's no supermajority for the budget. And no, the Republicans do not have a state agenda to block all legislation. I imagine whatever comment you're referring to was taken out of context, but even if it wasn't Mitch McConnell doesn't have the power to make that stick.
Do any of the largest Wallets have known owners?

I found https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=h72gmr1luhb169j1...

which shows that the top two wallets are gone now and the 80,000BTC Wallet has grown to 111111.11

The top 400 goes down to about 3,000BTC. A bunch of those could be the former largest ones broken up.
PHP 5.4 - A picture is worth 140 chars
> Even a "hide feeds with no posts" would help (I don't know if bloglines has that).

I dunno about Bloglines then or now (whoever bought it threw out all the old code and started over), but at least in Google Reader, there is an option to, in the sidebar, omit feeds with no updates. I checked that option. It saves a lot of space for me.
Do you have a reference link about what you mean by censorship of Satoshi Dice?
If you really want to bet on BTC going down, you might consider a put option, rather than short selling. You can bet that a financial instrument will go down without borrowing money to do so and risking a potentially indefinite loss. You can always let a put option expire, and just lose the fee you paid for it. And right now, you shouldn't have any trouble getting people to accept such a put option, because most people want to bet on BTC going up.
if you didn't understand what he said then you shouldn't be short selling
Yeah, just noticed it in the other announcements. I guess I never look at the comments. Nevermind!
I think it might still be vulnerable to people editing one of those old answers though.
Do you mind sharing a link o your MVP and maybe some ideas on ways you can monetise the service? Thanks!
The point here being that you should not delegate cert management to an addon. Addons have no business being exposed to any of that, they need to be sandboxed in and restricted.

And yes, they are so bad to the point they are harmful, but the only reason they are in there is because Firefox has it's own certificate store, more of a portability quirk than anything.
We need to put our cameras away
The supply of Bitcoin is ridiculously tiny. Only 11,000,000 in total are in circulation today, let alone available for purchase on the market.

Bitcoins can be divided to 8 decimal places at the moment (it could be expanded). So instead of 1.1e7 units, isn't it 1.1e15 units?
> Bitcoin is valuable because the world desperately needs to escape the current financial system. Individual sovereignty and financial privacy are the most scarce resources on the planet, bar none.

Someone needs a way to sell firearms, ammo, and canned goods for BTC. That sounds funny, but I'm dead serious. Local laws against shipping arms can often be worked around.
ARMBRIX Zero's bubble bursts
Wait, no, people study those things all the time. They're difficult, but maybe he has unknown prior background in math, or is gifted in that regard.

Sorry, but reading a textbook like a novel is not studying. I've met a fair number of mathematicians but I have yet to see one that can tackle a postgraduate textbook in one sitting (unless they are already intimately familiar with the subject).
agreed, new icon for the next update ;)
in fact if you mouse to the top of the screen you can move away from full screen also
Interesting concept, unfortunate design.. Sorry. In this day and age of web design, you need to be at a different level than this.
This is an interesting comment, prompted me to look up what that term 'fragilista' means.

So you're saying he fails to anticipate a future negative consequence of present behavior? I guess we'll find out!
http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/images/clientmap_16t...

Next time if a Chinese IP hacks you, it a botnet node in China hacked you.
Nor do I. Everyone at Ars knows better too, yet they publish this kind of garbage all the time.
Your analysis holds true if you are treating bitcoins as purely speculative.

You are correct that I don't fully understand supply/demand economics, because as an Austrian theorist, my concepts relating to booms and busts use dynamic models and not the statics you are using to prove your point. In a static situation, increasing demand of a finite resource does drive the price up, which can drive up demand even more, but thats if you ignore the effect of substitutes, which for both the exchange and speculative value of bitcoins, there are several.

Do I really think that it has doubled? No. But I don't think that people expecting a large crash like before are doing so because they understand the fundamentals. I think, as in any market, you do have speculators, but I also think that the legitimate demand for bitcoins as a means for exchange has gone up since the previous crash providing a more solid basis for the higher price.
Would you fly an Air Taxi?
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Fair point. The larger picture is that while the number of CVEs certainly matters, what matters most is that the maintainers of the software maintain a record of quick turn around on patches and a welcoming attitude toward security researchers.

IMO, Rails has done a better job of this recently, and that makes me really happy.
Okay, yes, that contradicts what I said.

And maybe this stuff will become the new atoms that we build applications out of, and I'm just balking at all the unfamiliarity. I can't be sure, but initial impression is that they are not that - that they're just too oddly shaped to be generally useful.

Today, though, Rich's keynote was about the necessity of the restriction of choice to allow creativity to be possible. I don't know how to integrate that idea with the idea that very large cardinality isn't a problem. (Some of his examples of bad design were pieces of hardware with too many knobs or inputs)
Bitcoin new all time high, above $50 / BTC
Other HN thread from a couple days ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5369778
I think the standard counter to this is that, if it can be reasonably assumed that you're not welcome to do it and if you're not being entrapped, then the ease with which a crime is committed should have no bearing on the severity of the crime. Stealing someone's car doesn't become moral if the person leaves the car unlocked and running, even if it "only" involves opening a car door and driving a car. I don't see why computer systems should be different.

However, breaking into someone's car in order to roll up their windows and leave them a note telling them not to do it is perfectly good in my book. So I think it's better when people focus more on the severity of the actual crime committed, rather than on the ease of committing it.
What is the proportion of BTC volume due to speculation vs. due to buying transactions?
The certificate UX for other browsers is no better.
No, we know that there is some fuzzy nebulous number of bitcoin millionaires which may be centered around 25 - more based on how many have coins split across many addresses, and less based on the known fact that many earlier miners didn't store their coins safely (because it was just an interesting crypto prototype they were playing with) and many tens of thousands of coins have been lost. (That Polish exchange running on Amazon without backups took out, IIRC, something like 10k all on its own.)
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Off topic: This was filmed in the Bahen building at U of T! Go DGP!
The cutthroat attitude may be good for businesses, but this arrangement sounds miserable for users:

>Platform-to-platform in China is war, and it is fought viciously and bitterly. If you have a Gmail account and send an email to, for example, NetEase163.com, which is the local web dominant player, it will most likely go to spam or junk folders regardless of your settings. Just to get an email to go through to your inbox, the company sending the email needs to have a special partnership.
I don't think you really mean that. If your bank were open to an XSS attack that "only" required crafting a particular URL to allow access sufficient to transfer funds, I don't think you'd be consoled that the "hack" that drained your account was, at heart, only a matter of visiting some URLs.

Obviously this "hack" was simpler, and AT&T's security was lousy. But the simplicity of an attack is not an excuse for mounting it.
Every Viral-Marketing Blog Post You’ve Ever Read Is Bull
Yes hes a terrible person. This news article should still be about AT&T being fined a bazillion dollars for not safeguarding that data (of course that never happened).

Any technical person of course understands that what AT&T did is akin to dumping money on the sidewalk, but you would never know from the cloud of uncertainty and ignorance that permeates these articles. We can't get more specific laws if the understanding of journalists can't rise above the word "hacking".
Here's what I got:

<code>
3072+0 records in
3072+0 records out
201326592 bytes (201 MB) copied, 5.52118 s, 36.5 MB/s
</code>
On a more serious note, Hoogle[1] does something similar for the Haskell standard libraries: You give it a type signature (essentially a sort of specification of what the function should do) and it tells you if there are any functions that match it.

[1] http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/
A problem with linode is they don't charge by the hour.
This is true, of course (and a pet peeve of mine when people naively calculate e.g. how much it would cost to replace all coal-fired power plants in the world with solar). However, these days MtGox's average daily volume is in the $1m range. I think you could sell $1m BTC over a couple of weeks without anyone even noticing.
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Couldn't you just buy Ensure or some other meal shake at the local pharmacy?
Harvard, MIT thwart effort to cap research overhead payments