skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true, 12.3T represents a large portion of the world money supply. But not an insurmountably large portion.
Chaum's system was centralized. A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control— they can still inflate the currency— they can still selectively deny access. The centralization created a huge operating risk and would make any such effort untrustworthy just from the perspective of political exposure.

The whole point of Bitcoin (http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour... was to build a zero trust decentralized system.

Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful.
Bad assumption. Plenty of ways (too many to name) that can make money online. Some harder than others and ecommerce, drop shipping, and the like comes with its own set of challenges (big or small). It's more on how you execute something than it is thinking something will be a sure or more sure way of working
For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase.

The reason they have a reputation as rockstars is that they can apply this productivity to things that really matter; they're able to pick out the really important parts of the problem and then focus their efforts there, so that the end result ends up being much more impactful than what the SWE3 wrote. The SWE3 may spend his time writing a bunch of unit tests that catch bugs that wouldn't really have happened anyway, or migrating from one system to another that isn't really a large improvement, or going down an architectural dead end that'll just have to be rewritten later. Jeff or Sanjay (or any of the other folks operating at that level) will spend their time running a proposed API by clients to ensure it meets their needs, or measuring the performance of subsystems so they fully understand their building blocks, or mentally simulating the operation of the system before building it so they rapidly test out alternatives. They don't actually write more code than a junior developer (oftentimes, they write less), but the code they do write gives them more information, which makes them ensure that they write the right code.

I feel like this point needs to be stressed a whole lot more than it is, as there's a whole mythology that's grown up around 10x developers that's not all that helpful. In particular, people need to realize that these developers rapidly become 1x developers (or worse) if you don't let them make their own architectural choices - the reason they're excellent in the first place is because they know how to determine if certain work is going to be useless and avoid doing it in the first place. If you dictate that they do it anyway, they're going to be just as slow as any other developer.
You can partially evaluate it for yourself from the recently released SXSW video: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57578072-93/google-releases...
Funny how random HN posters seem to have better reading skills than PHD holding paper authors and their peer reviewers.
Depending on what you mean by the average developer, 1000x is plausible. If you think in terms of reliability, it's the difference between a four nines engineer and a one nine. That guy who pushes untested code that brings the site down for a day vs. the woman who has to roll back her code once in five years because she made a fencepost error is an example of how such variances in developer "productivity" can be measured by an organization, especially one that does not consider itself a technology company.

Think of floor personnel in stores. There are some who start off several steps behind because they have a lot of sick days, come in right at the start of their shift (so end up starting "late"), and take dozens of smoke breaks throughout the day without clocking out. They may chisel a minute or two extra from every break even when the store is busy. On top of this, they may drag their way through their workday. You may need 3-5 of this person to do the job of one, then you need someone to manage them.

They're going to be significantly less productive than the scarily chipper go-getter who wants to be store director, gets in early to start work on time, skips breaks or takes them only when things are slow, is very upbeat and engages customers, and offers to take extra shifts to help out. You can leave this person alone in the store and they'll keep things moving along.

Measuring productivity is a difficult science. In some environments, it's screwing up less than other people. In some, it's a simple measure of something silly, such as function points. Scientific Management has seeded a lot of bad ideas in managers' minds about measuring the value of individual contributors.
From the guidelines: "Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile."

Could you, pretty please, stop prefacing all your posts with your username? It ends up appearing directly below your username, and is kind of distracting.
I'll let you know. Send me an email so I know who to update.
>If I temporarily change my name to a random number

There's nothing temporary about it. Unless you voluntarily publish something associating a particular address with yourself, there's basically no way for someone else to make that association. Making the association is completely infeasible if proper precautions are taken.

>The problem is that all your transactions take place with the same public key or set of public keys.

No, they don't. In fact, with the default client, it tries to minimize the number of times you re-use any given public key.

>Sure, you can add more keys to that mix, but someone can probably always untagle the web.

No, they can't. The "web" is comprised of a lot of cryptographically random probabilistic association, so the most you can possibly say is something like "there is a .0001% chance that this address belongs to the owner of this other address, and a 99.999% chance that it belongs to someone else." Nothing that would even remotely hold up in court, or even let someone associate you with a purchase.

It literally does not get any more anonymous than this in a distributed identity-based system.
My current system is kind of strange but works for me:

- I have a "master view" of sorts in Trello where I keep track of projects/long term stuff in a birds eye view

- I use a notebook (real one non electronic) to keep track of my daily stuff

- In the notebook I write down the stuff todo every day and scribble down 25 minute checkboxes behind each one guestimating the time it takes (this is a leftover from promodoro which I dropped alas I kept some parts that I liked)

- Whenever I start on an item I highlight it with a yellow marker and cross off a checkbox after about 25 minutes...if it takes longer i add extra checkboxes as circles, triangles if it takes even longer (this is to keep track of my self estimation)

- Other than the date and todo items I have a box at the top for each day where I track long term improvement stuff i.e. silly stuff like "got out of bed within 15 minutes of the alarm ringing", "drank 1l+ of water"...I start each day by drawing that box and after a while when those items become automatic they get removed and replaced by other stuff (say "took a 10 minute walk")

I could see adding a layer of 1-3-5 when creating the daily list but it might actually be more like 1-2-3.
Kivy: Crossplatform Framework for NUI in Python
GO RACKSPACE!!!
I find the table to be at the wrong height for typing. Many of today's laptops have very large (as in, sticking out front from the keyboard) palm rests -- so large, they end up pressing into my wrists which are bent because the table is higher than optimal typing height.

A partial workaround for this can be to prop the back of the laptop up with a book. Being careful not to block any critical ventilation slots with the book.

I also find the noise can be distracting, unless its a really busy cafe, where all the conversations can blend into a sort of "white noise". Even then, that noise tires me out after an hour or two.
Oops. Sorry. :)
Not sure what to make of this post.

I'm a 10x guy when it comes to Java/Python/Perl. And I'm also 1/5 guy when it comes to something like a executing a large C project[Which I'm currently working on in my spare time in the nights, totally apart from my day job]. Actually I was 1/10 guy a while back. I'm now at 1/5. I give it another 6 months while I be the 1x guy. And it will take some years when I will hit 10x mark when it comes to C.

However this 1/10, 1 or 10x metric is bull crap. There a lot of people who work slowly and steadily and then come to speed. There are a lot of people who learn by making mistakes, there are people people who take time figure out things and go at their own speed.

My metric of measuring is how to check how much committed the person is, are they deeply into it, are they serious about it, how much effort do they put in. To they persist on their effort despite problems? If they do, you have a winner. Doesn't matter if he can't understand the C syntax or takes a while.

Its worth while to give such candidate some time. Because sooner or later they turn out of be awesome.
Sometimes it's not about the person, it's about the team and environment. I've been both on the competent and not-so-competent sides, and the environment I'm working in made a ton of difference (note: it is a feedback loop, so mistakes and lack of delivery cause your environment to get tougher, and vice-versa).

Perhaps the guy felt he was going to get a raw deal and so was spending the few weeks looking for another job? Who knows. Lots of potential variables that might have turned an otherwise stellar coder into a quivering mess. The plural of anecdote != data.
Bitcoins are not the future. But they're a great start.

Bitcoins have two major problems stopping mainstream adoption; excessive volatility that isn't managed and the fact that is a deflationary monetary system, with the latter being a much bigger issue.

Fundamentally a currency needs to move around fungible value. That's it. If it doesn't do that - it's useless.

Bitcoin incentivises hoarding - the opposite of value transmission - and that's the main reason it'll remain as nothing more than a mere speculative currency, like modern day tulips, and why it won't ever become an actual alternative to actual cash.

Now - this isn't a knock against crypto-currencies - which are awesome - it's merely a knock at the fact that monetary supply in the bitcoin system isn't adaptive. Bitcoin needs a central decentralized bank that will help to stabilise the system and inflate (punish hoarders) as the economy grows in fits and starts.

I'm sure that one day in the not too distant future, another crypto-currency will come about that takes all the advantages provided by bitcoin, and combines them with stability/incentives of a nation-backed currency such as the US dollar. When that happens, we can finally end the monopoly held by large financial institutions that so clearly have literally no idea what they are actually doing (see Deutsche bank just recently).

Bitcoins are just the beginning of a whole new financial world, free from restriction, fees and abuse (hopefully :).

But they most certainly are not the end.
It seems to me that some entrepreneurs in some masochistic way likes the stress. My memory of my last startup was pretty painful, but somehow can't help going at it again. Some of us may not be made for living a simple life, instead we need that freedom, that constant possibility to fuck it all up.
If you only have two big things you need to get done, that is probably part of your problem. In that case, one of your todo's should probably be to subdivide one or both of them into smaller tasks.

One of my most effective ways of overcoming procrastination in particular is that when I don't want to do something, I force myself to at least spend two minutes splitting at least one task on my todo list into a few smaller tasks. Sooner or later I have enough really small, trivial tasks that it is easy to push through at least some of them.

Sometimes that ends up with stupid levels of details. But often it ends up revealing that part of the reason for procrastinating was that I didn't really know, but maybe had a nagging suspicion of, the level of complexity in a task...
> Some rules, though, are social. For example, why does everyone try to extend the longest branch in the block chain? Sure, the protocol says it's the rule, but why should that mean anything? People don't follow rules because they want to. They follow rules because it's in their enlightened self interest to do so.

You're taking a fundamentally confused position here. Consider: You have UberCoin— it is whatever spherical cow cryptocoin. EvilPal(Inc) then forks UberCoin and replaces its insides with a frontend to their EvilPal website (which then also copies in all the UberCoin ledger). By reduction, all digital currency systems are "social rules". It's not a useful description.

The longest chain rule is a rule that comes about for creating consensus in the system. If you change it in yours you will eventually break off into a private universe. The behavior actually does work by construction— but like my EvilPal example, that doesn't stop a stupid user from changing their own software to break off into another universe.

If you would like a longer formal analysis of the consensus mechanism in Bitcoin please see: https://socrates1024.s3.amazonaws.com/consensus.pdf
The receiver can't be sure that the Bitcoin hasn't been double-spent without waiting on changes in the block chain to propogate; that's not easy in the middle of a nuclear wasteland.
We're now arguing about the definition of the word "is."

Not even an hour ago you were claiming how the embedded scripting language added extreme flexibility to Bitcoin implementations. Having thought that through, you now claim the very same embedded scripting language is so crippled it, come to think of it, might not even count as executable instructions at all.

The technical reality of Bitcoin has not changed in the past hour. It still allows transactions to include arbitrary content. They still embed executable code. They are still executed, by design, network-wide on an implementation monoculture.

To paraphrase a tptacek comment: I hope to make the starburst of points which immediately follow this by implication as opposed to having to state them explicitly.
High frequency trading is a different game, though: quoting from an excellent article [1]:

"Most HFTs run a market making strategy. What this means is they play both sides of the table - they take no position on whether a stock will go up or down. Instead, they try to offer securities both to buy and sell. If you want to buy, they will sell to you at $20.10. If you want to sell, they’ll buy from you at $20. As long as their buys and sells match don’t get too out of whack, the HFT will collect $0.10 = $20.10 - 20.00."

[1] http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html
> Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures.

I think the problem is people sticking to a particular process, thinking it's the definition of "Agile". Rather than responding to change and the individuals in the team.

As our team was growing to the point where planning sessions were taking several hours we switched to just in time planning. A couple of developers could give a lightweight estimate of work at any point. Planning became just a 30min discussion with stakeholders to prioritise work, and we'd dig into implementation details as a team when we actually started working on something.

This would obviously not work for everyone. My point is that we responded to the problem and adapted our process to change in the team and environment. It's the 4th point on the agile manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org/

Retrospectives should give an opportunity for teams to do this if done right.
I didn't know Jody, so I won't comment on him personally.

Speaking as a former investor regarding the financial situation though...never ever ever ever.

Financial controls aren't important just because VCs are greedy: they keep companies alive and keep you out of court (or jail). I've seen situations in which cash didn't quite reconcile to what was expected; in some, the people involved made restitution and were fired. In others, they went to prison. A company with no effective financial control is flying blind and, someday, will run into the mountain in the clouds.

The article identifies some key warning signs.

1. "...not even sharing the company's financial information with his co-founder, Emily Blakeney. Sources admit that was strange in retrospect.
...
Sources say Sherman was the only person with access to the company's bank account and invoices. Only he knew how much cash Ecomom was using up every month."

In many startups, any payment over $X requires dual signatures for exactly this reason. Also, contract bookkeepers aren't expensive (contract CFOs can be, but they're worth it). A second set of eyes--and hands--on the corporate checkbook is crucial.

Also, why aren't investors aren't looking at the cash position every month? That is the one critical number--the only one with sudden corporate death at stake--for every single Board meeting until the company is solidly and predictably cash flow positive.

2. "'There wasn't ever full disclosure, and that leads me to believe there was a reason he didn't want anyone to have full disclosure,' says a source."

Totally 100% unacceptable. The key execs and the board should be looking at the financials, at least at the bank account/quickbooks level, every month and management should be reviewing them more frequently yet. Especially in a metrics-driven business like e-commerce that requires cash investments for inventory and advertising.

3. "He put the company's inventory on his credit card, a black American Express, which caused him to go into deeper personal debt. He refused to get a corporate card, despite complaining to colleagues when AmEx would call and question company expenses."

A huge red flag. If there is intermingling of corporate and personal finances--whether this extreme or just the CEO's sister's law firm does the legal work--investors and co-founders need to fully understand and ensure it's arms-length. Then they need to disentangle the two right away.

If you own 100% of the company, feel free to run it "out of your back pocket." But with outside shareholders, whether employees or investors, such a practice is indefensible. In my experience, intertwined personal and professional finances is often the tip of the iceberg in terms of accounting shenanigans.

I don't mean to imply that investors should have seen this coming or that Jody set out to do this. But every experienced investor who's been burned this way--and many have--makes financial control issues a topic at the first (and every subsequent) board meeting post-investment until adequate controls are in place.
I sure hope so. I'm already getting sick of the "Show HN: Only Works In Chrome (only works in dev version of Chrome)" links that were starting to show up.
mindcrime is a total cunt
Take me to eat Thai

fuck you, arsehole
That's hilarious, do you even realise what you're saying? You consider it a feature of a currency that there is a violent extortionate power engaged in parasitism of the monetary base.
It would be strange to claim to have invented something that already existed, but whose status exists only because people were unaware of it prior. People did not say that they invented gold when it was discovered for instance.
> I used to think this too. The only difference between bitcoin and gold is gold has uses aside from being a currency.

Well, the other big difference -- and one that drives a lot of the interest in physically holding gold against the threat of a general economic collapse -- is that physical gold plausibly could retain some value as a currency in the event of a general economic collapse that disrupts the viability of major social institutions.
> the 51% attack, which is pretty serious flaw even if to carry it out is unfeasable

There isn't anything magical about the number 51, the original Bitcoin paper gives a program that can be used to compute the success probability for an attacker with a given share of the computing power to reverse transactions to a given depth... At >=50% the probability becomes one but at that point only if the attack is of infinite duration. But, for example an attacker with 40% hashpower can reverse six blocks with a 50% success rate.

Any kind of consensus system is going to be vulnerable to a majority attack of some kind— otherwise you'd have "minority imposes a wrong outcome" attacks.

At least in Bitcoin the "consensus" only controls transaction ordering: a majority attacker can't inflate the supply or spend other people's coins... they can only DOS and remove transactions from the fixed consensus (and thus replace their own). Which is powerful but still limited.
What I learn from this is, they key to being a 10x developer is to work on problems that have 10x impact and not necessarily writing 10x more code.
Early 2012 interview with Marty Cooper
Before you downvote please take into consideration that I'm just being realistic. Of course you should seek help and calm your mind back into a logical state. Still about 1 million people commit suicide each year. You and I are not going to change that.

If you're seriously going to kill yourself, please do NOT use a gun or pills or jumping or cutting wrists or arteries. It's bad enough you've chosen to and finalized your decision to end your life you don't need to traumatize your family and friends with a gruesome death. Use an "Exit bag". It's instant, painless, blood-less, non-gruesome, and peaceful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWfWl-xJnnY

Created by a right-to-die group Exit International it's a bag that goes over your head with a tube connected to a helium tank you can purchase at a local party store. Fill the bag up completely with helium, pull it over your head and take a deep breath. You'll pass out instantly and leave the earth in just a few minutes. No blood, no suffering, no bullets. It's bad enough you're committing suicide, you don't want family finding you with your brains splattered all over the place, or your body in a bathtub full of blood. Just because you're hurting yourself by ending your life doesn't mean you need to hurt those that love you anymore than you already are. They'll find you tucked away in your bed, peacefully, and for the last time. They'll appreciate that a lot more than finding you in a pool of blood. The one thing they'll have is the knowledge that you just left the earth peacefully and calmly.

Just keeping it real.
Isn't a central decentralized bank an oxymoron?
(TDAH) relacionado con el plomo de los teléfonos móviles
Apple iPhone sales stutter as Microsoft Windows Phone market share creeps up
I'm of the same view.

I think there is some fuzzy logic going on here: If the majority are 1/10 developers (as the op asserts) and thus form the baseline x, aren't the 1/1 developers by definition 10x developers?