skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So this is getting flagged (20 minutes ago it was in the top 30 now it's in the middle of the 70), I have a theory that's mainly by avid bitcoin users.

Anyway after the Bitcoin boom I did my research about cryptocurrencies (and after discovering I bought 3000 BTC in 2009 for US$ 1, I still have them) and my opinion is that:

1) Some miners are moving away from BTC mining since it's mainly dominated by ASICs these days, litecoin is theory ASIC proof (did not read why, only what I read).

2) Users had build an identity around Bitcoin which involves political and economical beliefs (/r/bitcoin has links to /r/Libertarian /r/Austrian /Anarcho_Capitalism).

3) Because of that you'll see in bitcointalk.org or /r/bitcoin talk about government and fears of it and some belief that bitcoin can present an alternative reality to current state of fiat money[1].

4) In /r/bitcoin any citation to litecoin get people either heavily questioned or downvoted, it shows that although the users are libertarians/austrians (there probably someone there who is one but not the other, or is neither) they do not see as good the idea of multiple cryptocurrencies fighting each other, which was Hayek's free currency system all about.

5) In the end I believe more cryptocurrencies will appear with different mining algorithms, some will try to be more fair in their mining mechanisms and others just like Bitcoin

6) I believe Bitcoin has only two possible futures, one it will be the cryptocurrency, if that's what's happen and people began to accept it instead of using it as an investment medium then each coin is now undervalued by hundreds of dollars, however if people use more than one cryptocurrency (or none at all) price and demand will set the dynamics, but in this case I believe the current bitcoin price will go down.

[1]: I doubt that, if Bitcoin do substitute current money it would not be different than what we have with the exception that I believe governments from large countries would fork Bitcoin and put large ASIC farms to apply the 51% attack to control their own cryptocurrencies, just like what happens with current fiat money, these govenments will probably only allow taxes to be paid in their own currencies. Also like current money BTC would be anonymous with the exception that the transactions chain permit governments to see all transactions that happened (since this is necessary by the currency), coupled with double book accounting for businesses this would for me create a very different world than what people believe bitcoin will lead.

EDIT: I do not see how political beliefs are at all important if you use/mine a cryptocurrency or not, really the political aspect of bitcoin users gets me baffled, although I see how it developed the impetus for the currency initial diffusion.
The idea is not to print molecules. Instead, you print reagents into a matrix designed to guide a reaction. The reactor vessel itself becomes a template for synthesis.

There's a team at the University of
Glasgow working on this. They published in Nature Chemistry last year [0] and garnered a lot of attention in the popular science media.

0. http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v4/n5/full/nchem.1313.ht...
Yeah, I can sorta see that. My position is just that "it's complicated" and that no one really has the standing to tell others what their goal ought to be.

In my own case, I absolutely want to build a profitable, sustainable company that "becomes one of the tech giants" or whatever. I'm not into the "build to flip" mentality, and we have some very specific goals and values[1] driving what we're doing. But all of that said, IF we reach a point where our company has some value, and the right acquisition offer comes along, it would be damn hard to say "no" when you consider the opportunity to do things like I spoke about above: Buying my mother a new house, travelling the world, etc. And no matter which decision I might make, I reject the notion that you're a "failure" if you choose the earlier exit.
interesting... what domains are these?
Looks like a good app but I would never build anything for Twitter. Just my opinion.
Many modern games take a long time to produce, 3-5 years is not uncommon for AAA titles. I also wouldn't say they haven't released a game 'for years', there has been at least 1 title a year, a ton of DLC for older games, porting games to linux, etc.
> Just saying "a lot of people do it" is not a validation of anything.

Actually, when it comes to linguistics, it's the only thing that validates it. Can you possibly come up with better criteria?
IICNS | Only the best iOS Apps icons
IANAL but US patent law does not have a personal use exception. 35 USC § 271 covers "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells" (with some exceptions).

http://www.bpmlegal.com/patqa.html#1 http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/rights/
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/271
State-of-the-Art UX Design: Attending a Battlestar Galactica LARP
I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it.

The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an issue.
Remote Desktop Backend Merged into Wayland
As someone that doesn't, ever, want to die... the thought that there is no such thing as forever gives me some comfort.

Everything is temporal, we're merely surfing the entropy gradient for a while.
I wouldn't start with Consider Phlebas.
This is only partially true. They have 10 years from the start of the fund, but most don't invest it all in the first year.
55 Point Checklist to Grade Entrepreneurs
After the API restrictions and they way they treated developer you mean?
Consumers shop with their best friend, which in most cases is their smartphone
> And in any event, bitcoin is never going to work as a global payments system. Not only does it suffer from having a slow-growing money supply and a metastasizing transactions file which has to live on every user’s computer, it also encourages destructive computer hacking. The way that the money supply grows, in the bitcoin system, is by people harnessing the power of hundreds or thousands of computers to solve very complicated mathematical tasks, earning bitcoins for doing so along the way. And the easiest and cheapest way of doing that is to do so illegally, by stealth: set up a “botnet” of hacked computers to do your bidding for you. The incentives, here, are very bad indeed.

I'm not an expert, but I thought that these days you basically need specialized hardware/GPUs and a traditional botnet isn't going to get you that far. Am I right?
I built one in Haskell at my old employer as well that works pretty smoothly (the whole pkpass format is implemented on type level): https://github.com/tazjin/hs-pkpass

Unfortunately the tool built around it never made it into production, marketing cancelled the project :(
Or you could just only follow the people you are actually interested in.
I like the part about bitcoin 'not having amy fundamentals to fall back to'. As if fiat currencies are any different.
There is a github repo: https://github.com/edx
It is a pain. However, it can be used, provided that one has the patience to keep tweaking and examining the logs.
Ask HN: Before there were MOOCs - advice for a startup
Fellow Hackers,

I'm a startup founder, and a little over a year ago I set out to build a "Wikipedia for courses". I ended up building a publishing platform - the idea was to make it extremely easy for anybody to produce highly interactive, online courses (without, and then easy for anybody else to learn from them).

Pensieve: www.pensieve.net

From an infrastructure standpoint, the platform has been quite mature and powerful - anybody can come to the site, and immediately create interactive courses, and put in assessments, assignments ... etc. We generally receive solid approval of our product.

However, our success at programming has been matched by our inability to gain traction. Users don't come for infrastructure, they come for content or because of your brand name - without either, nobody will come. Since then, Coursera and EdX rose, and due to their names, academic relationships, excellent funding, and access to a large body of quality content - they are growing at an insane pace.

The last thing I would want would be to be a "me too" type of company. The thing is, that I believe the we still provide a major value which I haven't yet seen replicated. I've seen lots of content distributors, but I haven't seen a platform which makes it possible (and easy) for you or me to make a course that is more than just a youtube video channel / wiki.

I've tried several things (most promisingly targeting the corporate training market), but I'm interested in your opinions - how would you move forward and get traction?
What stops a state from taxing your Mt God account? Or will you store $100k of BTC on your laptop?
Looks pretty cool. You probably want to at least show me what I will receive in my email before making me actually verify my email address though.

What I would really want though is a twitter client that will condense all the missed tweets since the last time I checked my feed (for which my close friends would be an important factor.)

You should probably also consider doing that for multiple platforms, which would give you something similar to Flipboard rather than yet-another-client-at-the-mercy-of-Twitter's-whims.
@mikko speculates that Bitcoin exchanges are getting DDoS'd.
failing that, use lists.
That's true, but I like opening twitter for serendipitous discovery from a large network of people.

but I also want to be more in touch with people who are very close to me
Agreed. I don't see it happening for quite a while.
Nice work, and seems useful. Good luck!
FreedomCP private beta: SaaS control panel for Python & PHP apps on Ubuntu
This is a great question.

Of course, trust is an ongoing concern. Being upfront about how we handle security is a start. There's already a lot of trust in *aaS platforms, and we think JackDB is a great tool for building new data-driven projects in the cloud.

We also offer enterprise and private cloud deployments of JackDB.

I'll personally answer any security-related questions that people have.
According to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas [1], the 6-year old Jesus was regularly breathing life into clay birds, making people blind and killing other children by will, so it seems reasonable that he may have destroyed the Gate of Hell as well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas
Well, fiat currencies have economies running in them where bitcoin mostly has speculation, so yeah, there's a difference.
>A curious retelling of history.

By you, perhaps.

Economic crisis, couldn't pay the bills, so they inflated the currency. Just like I said. Are you really going to argue that there was no war or aftermath, social upheaval or other crisis (like, say, debilitating war reparations) that led to hyperinflation? Crisis comes first.

So often Wiemar Germany is trotted out as the example of what can happen when the government prints excessively. "It can happen to you! Wheel-barrows full of money to buy bread!" The reality, the country and its economy was in shambles. Not because of inflation.

Your turn: point to an economy that was happily chugging along, and hyperinflation came out of nowhere and took it down.
Show HN: jQuery.Feedback widget
Jobs, more than likely, would have survived if he didn't try "alternative" cancer therapies. Banks did everything by the book and his outcome is poor, but at least he tried properly.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/20/steve-jobs-refused-early-canc...
It's circular. You drink because you're depressed because you're poor because you spend all your money on booze. Yes food is expensive, but you can buy a bag of rice and a bag of onions and a bag of potatoes, and eat decent meals of stir fried rice and onions, baked potatoes, onion soup, etc for far less than mcdonalds. Takes almost no time to prepare too. People just don't realize it. That's where targeted education would be really helpful.
The importance of corporate transparency
>""Having your net worth halved" happens in the inflation scenario. Deflation increases your net worth."

Interesting. We've been in a positive inflation environment since I've been born, and my net worth has increased exponentially.

Deflation will increase the purchasing power of your money due to the fall in prices, but decrease the value of assets you own priced in that currency. Something people seem to be forgetting around here are that wages also fall during deflation, and that results in lower purchasing power and unemployment. Your "work" isn't worth as much anymore. You get paid less. Good deal!

What happened when the housing bubble collapsed and there was massive deflation in home prices? Did those people get wealthier? Did it become easier for other people to spend their dollars on homes at the new low prices? The answer is no and no.
There's a strong entrepreneurial spirit on HN and that's why a lot of people are telling you that "It's okay to make money".

Personally, I think it would cheapen the whole thing. Websites that contain nothing but affiliate links to "Products I might like" are already a thing: it's what all those millions of parked domains such as testing.com are.
Source: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

I.e., it's ok to flag bad articles.

The "Fight Club Rule #1 & #2" nature of this guideline always struck me as odd. I hate meta comment threads as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure how else to spread awareness about the guidelines.
I'm sticking to my price target of $2 by late June/early July[1].

Still no sign of adoption by any popular retailers, the majority of demand is coming from speculators, and the exchanges are getting slower every day (MtGox is down as I write this and the queue to open an account is several days deep).

At this point, BitCoin is still more of a toy than a currency.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5324722
How to convert PDF to Excel?
Yeah the preview is a good idea:
Here is how it looks:
http://essenceapp.com/prettyemail

Good suggestions thanks!
And to think I thought they had known where Oracle's headquarters were all along.
Hy: A lisp in Python (PyCon lightning talk)
ah ha - gentianesolutions.com - yup, you're right, it should point elsewhere (and will do shortly when DNS has caught up) - the main product is http://v2.muchbetteradventures.com - GS is just the Ltd company name - cheers for pointing it out.
The article says "That’s by design: bitcoins were created to be the most fungible commodity the world had ever seen". Could someone please share a citation for that?

I understand that both currencies and commodities are undifferentiated and so are more easily traded, so I can see similarities.

But, from a common usage perspective, as well as from an economic viewpoint, a commodity is defined as a good, having value in itself. So the above claim seems rather misguided. Am I missing something?
72 Students and Counting: Dev Bootcamp Chicago by the numbers
I wonder if there is some way to devise a website that implement a copyright protection technology that js injection circumvents.
I know - I had to search for it. This piece includes a bit of video as well:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/travel/news/archaeologists-...
Ask the litecoin guys in litecoin forum, they forked bitcoin, they can explain things to you.
Here's source code for the release on GitHub: https://github.com/SurajGupta/r-source

The R team maintains an SVN repo, but I prefer browsing source on GitHub
I'll have to just disagree with you here. I don't find the following any more difficult then a functional view

class MyView(View):
def get(self):
return stuff

It's one more line, and is much more explicit in what it handles.
< > is a naming convention for types (e.g., classes) only.
I'm still not sure what to think about this whole development.

It looks and feels like a bubble about to burst.

On the other hand it feels different because there is vested interest in owning bitcoins that differs from owning "regular" money, i.e. relative obscurity of spenders identity, etc.
It's right; MtGox has been down/frozen for the past hour (at the time of this post). Bitcoinity is a pretty solid site in my experience.
You can start with anything by Bernanke related to the subject, both writings and speeches.
The USD has the US government behind it. Whatever you think of that, it's not nothing.
I assume you didn't focus on MongoDB first because there's already MongoHQ. How does their admin interface compare to your open source project and to your paid solution?
Report: Hybrid (online+in-person) learning just as good as in-person
> I'm not an expert, but I thought that these days you basically need specialized hardware/GPUs and a traditional botnet isn't going to get you that far. Am I right?

How many computers within that botnet will have the appropriate GPU? That's not counting the computing power of the network as a whole either; Imagine something like BitcoinMiner@Botnet. I think it could easily be lucrative enough to make it worthwhile.
Hm, I wonder why they didn't check out instructure.

https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

It's open source, and there's a paid arm of it for universities to outsource their IT needs.
> They would either need the private key of the certificate holder (which they don't have), or a certificate signed by one of the roots installed on the system, which they also won't have.

Actually, this is fairly common for firewalls and other edge devices to do and is one of the problems with the "trust" in the CA system. You can get a "signing certificate" from various legitimate sources (ex. http://www.sslshopper.com/article-trusted-root-signing-certi... ) that allows your product/service to terminate SSL connections and then recreate a SSL connection. The user still sees their "lock" icon and thinks they have a secure https connection to their original site, when in fact they don't.

They do have a SSL connection to their site using a certificate - it's just NOT the certificate that the original site issued. This is why many of us are looking to protocols like DANE that uses DNSSEC to add a layer of integrity protection so that you can know that you are using the correct SSL certificate. (See http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/dane/ )

Note that no new certificates need to be added to browsers. The signing certificates work with the existing root certificates that are already in browsers.
Bitcoin's role the world economy is unlikely to be as a replacement for all other currencies. This is partly because of the properties of the currency inself--a modest inflation is good for the economy--and partly because governments/unions are not wont to give up complete control over their currency.

Instead I suspect Bitcoins will be used as a medium to ease transactions. At present it's both hard, time consuming and expensive to move money around (banks profit on the exchange rates, VISA taking 2.5% cut out of credit card transactions, paypal taking a cut etc etc).

The author is quite right that the incredible surge in price isn't good in terms of bringing about widespread adoption for Bitcions, but the rise in price is also inevitable. If Bitcoins are to be used as a transactional medium, then the value of bitcoins have to reflect some percentage (not all transactions will be in bitcoins!) of the amount of money in transit. At present the entire bitcoin economy is worth about $1.5B. I have no idea what say the value of say 1% of all the transactions in world which are taking place at the present moment is, but I suspect it is a great deal more than $1.5B.
Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled
Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic. It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto. It’s nihilistic.

This is an interesting bit of rhetoric, but I don't follow the logic here. The author contends that banks are built on trust and Bitcoins are built on mistrust.

Don't the pages of legislation and regulation prove that we don't trust banks? What about what's happened in Cyprus recently?

Also, isn't the p2p model of Bitcoin the very crux of trust?

I agree Bitcoin has been volatile, but it isn't based on mistrust.
True.

With list you still need to scroll a timeline, and you don't really know when nothing is new. In other words. You still need to check twitter all the time.

With Essence you get a daily digest. That's it
I agree about using system packages for deploying a stable production system. But tools like perlbrew, rvm and virtualenv have less friction for development when you want to quickly test or switch between different versions of the interpreter or libraries.
What I found from using this product in the past few weeks is that it helped me re-engage with the people I missed their tweets, either by replying or clicking through the links.

Twitter also has the dailiy / weekly digest functions, but it's organized by most popular tweets (https://twitter.com/settings/notifications). Sometimes I just want to know what my cousin back home or an ex-colleague tweeted about, which is useful for.

One thing I'd like to see is to make more than one list, or be able to set email digest for some of my existing lists.
The article uses bank and bank deposits as an example of trust, and presumes that because Bitcoins lack these, it is based on mistrust.

But this is a false analogy. Bitcoins are analogous to cash, not to banks. Those involved in Bitcoin expect Bitcoin banks to spring up.

Those who are trading on Mt Gox are already trusting Mt Gox with their Bitcoin.
So the author just bought his first bitcoins, eh? :D
The first attempt at a social graph?

http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/web.html
Cancer isn't even remotely exclusive to western society. You don't think there's a cancer cost to the fact that 36% of Japanese men smoke?

In Japan, their cancer rate per 100,000 is 1/4 lower than in the US, but that isn't close to the claimed exclusivity. 220 per 100k in Japan versus 300 per 100k in the US.

In S.Korea, it's 260 per 100k, for a mere 13% variance.

How come the Chinese live seven years less than the supposedly cancerous and diseased French in the west? Shouldn't the eastern lifestyle make the Chinese live a lot longer?

Your claim about exclusivity isn't supported by the data. Affluence doesn't correlate to cancer, in fact it's the exact opposite: on average rich people live a lot longer, live healthier, and get cancer less frequently than poor people. In the west, cancer has a high correlation to both obesity and poverty.
Most 'fiat currencies' can be gotten in exchange for services rendered to their respective governments, and also used to pay taxes.
Hackersh 0.1 Release Announcement
Jobs delayed his treatment by 6 months several years before he died. Call me crazy but in a better world, that shouldn't have mattered.
Indian Supreme Court Judgement Copy on Novartis Patent
July 1994: Amazon.com sells first book, "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" -- at http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=iro...

That's pretty cool right there.
The big graph on top looks nice, but it really annoys the physicist in me. There should at least be another in logarithmic scale, so we can actually see how the value is rising.