skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If money does not originate as a decentralized system, then how can we explain the fact that Bitcoin has become so successful? If it works for Bitcoin, why can't it work for gold? My opinions are not ideological: They are based on events that have occurred throughout history, be it in large macroeconomic environments or 50,000 person prison camps, or Bitcoin's rise itself.

There is a lot of both current and historical evidence to suggest that currencies can form in a decentralized manner. The fact that there was a long-standing decentralized gold standard in China is highly documented and written about. We can debate about the earliest origins, but that is not my intention. What we arrived at is the system I am describing, which is not a system that is chosen by a government or an ideology, but the one that is chosen organically by freely thinking individuals. There is a nature and a pattern to it, and I am trying to understand and describe that.
I added 'evil' because particularly in this community, the connotation of 'hacker' is not necessarily negative. Many here esteem hackers as people who get things done by taking cleverly manipulating the system, or, alternatively, value results over process (I'd actually really appreciate a proper neutral definition of the term).
Nokia Lumia 920, "best Windows 8 handset on market"
Same, that was only in 2003. Wonder what CS classes use now.
Maybe its because The Atlantic consistently produces high quality content that deserves to be on the HN front page.
The biggest hole in the presentation is the casual dismissal of deflation as an economic risk for a currency. Advancing demurrage as a solution is sheer madness.
The best way to learn assembler is by writing an assembler, which you can do in pretty much any language you're comfortable with (https://github.com/rayiner/amd64-asm) with just a manual (http://support.amd.com/us/Processor_TechDocs/24594_APM_v3.pd...) . I think x86 is really not a bad pedagogical tool. For all the crap it gets, it's really a fairly clean architecture. And while we think of 32-bit and 64-bit extensions as having "piled on cruft" what's really happened is that they have made the architecture conceptually cleaner and more orthogonal.
I just think it's weird that pointers are made to be so complicated, when the part I don't get, which is header files, get no attention. Header files might be the sole reason why I didn't care for C. I don't understand them and they are never properly explained.
most of the siberia is below arctic circle. where i'm from we've got a lot of soil, but not enough heat to have good agriculture.

what kind of the confusion would lead you to suggesting permafrost occupies most of the siberia and north america? however, your point is correct for antarctica i suppose.
This comes to a question of values. Do you build things because you want money? or do you build things because you enjoy the beautiful end product?

These two are not mutually exclusive, and neither is superior to the other in a vacuum. Obviously, if you are running a business, then you must value the money. If you hope to make your users and fellow engineers happy, you probably should value the beauty.

How much each drives your decisions is ultimately subjective and personal.
Overdue medical bills (specifically medical bills) do not affect your credit score, and are never reported.

Unpaid ones are reported sometimes, but not overdue ones.

This is because a medical event is not considered as your fault, so if you can't pay it it's not because you are a poor credit risk for other things.
I am entirely willing to believe that there are huge problems with the entire global banking system, but I think it is extremely unlikely that bitcoin or any other techno solution is going to be the result of a collapse. IMHO we're a lot more likely to go back to Victorian-era commodity-based currencies. Just my opinion, though.
Hit me up at the above email address
CS50 has sort of taken this track -- definitely a nice way to go about constructing a learning environment.
That's true only if you assume the motivation is purely financial.
http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/03/29/the-rumored-apple-bran...

Settles that.
Didn't say that it did.
.NET MVC is a great first step on the corporate dev path. You'll mostly work in cost center departments (see article). It'll pay pretty well for a day job, but you'll have limited market leverage as a cost center. You'll have to go where the .NET jobs are, and that's mostly big companies that treat IT as a necessary evil.

PHP is a great first step on the indie dev path. You'll work in smaller shops, pay can fluctuate wildly, but at least you'll be a profit center. It takes a bit more hustle to manage your career but you'll be better positioned to hang out your own shingle later if you're interested in doing so.

A few years of enterprise work can be a fine starting point for transition into more indie dev, but you'll have to be honest with yourself about the trajectory you're on from one year to the next.
Tour of YC's former office in Cambridge
The Price of Wine
Honestly if you are starting a startup to get rich, just quit and get a real job because you'll get richer quicker. Unless you are a consultant (and thats not really a startup), you will most likely not end up rich, and stats show this. You may bring in a modest salary of 100k+ (That you can pull in anyways in the valley as an engineer), but you'll work far harder for that cash than that other engineer who just has a job. Find something you are really passionate about, and work towards either working on it or start working on it if its possible. I get it, I'm 23 with a wife and kid, but I don't let it stop me from making things, and I certainly don't complain about the choices I made. Yeah, a kid takes time, but that doesn't mean I can't make time. A wife takes time, but I still have 2+ hours per day at least to work on my ideas/read and workout. Thats with a job that eats up 9 hours a day. Being an entrepreneur is a mindset rather than an occupation. If you want to build something (and I mean really want to build it), nothing will stop you.
CASIS and MassChallenge want to help you conduct research in space
The same thing happened years ago to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a college town that produced some very successful artists in the past 2 decades: Lifetime, The Bouncing Souls, Thursday, Gaslight Anthem. Around 2006, the cops started scouring Myspace for shows and permanently shut down a number of popular house venues. Since then, the punks have responded by moving all info to the sneakernet; you can't find out any show details unless you're actually friends with someone who already knows a band or the house owner. Even physical flyers don't have addresses or exact times. It's effectively killed most of the output that this cultural hotspot used to produce.
As you say, if you know that the font you're loading has different metrics this approach will work, but if you have to make that sort of assumption it's not a generalised approach.

If you know that one font has zero width dimensions and one does not, then it greatly simplifies matters.
Off topic, but from that paper's abstract:

"Our central finding is that, when listings are not tied to brokerage services, a seller’s use of a broker reduces the selling price of the typical home by 5.9 to 7.7 percent, which indicates that agency costs exceed the advantages of brokers’ knowledge and expertise by a wide margin."

Whoa.
Ask HN: What are the best Hacker Houses in SF?
Do you believe someone able to maintain Rails code in a sufficient way would have trouble maintaining Sinatra code after reading the documentation? IMHO this is the strong point of Sinatra. You do not have much magic going on. Reading the docs and looking at the code should be everything you need to understand what is going on.

(In this case the code is well documented and from a technical point of view below CRUD.)
I see. From the description it's quite obvious that ZFS handles most of the fault cases automatically. Still admins might want to force it to recheck all the blocks, this command achieves exactly that. Frankly I don't know what exactly fsck does and I guess it's different for every FS. For ZFS scrubbing seems to be an adequate alternative.

Hence if anyone asks you whether ZFS has fsck it's easier to say yes it does and it's called scrubbing.
It's your responsibility to clear technological changes with the client, or at least mention them. If the client never states a preference, use your own judgment.

The biggest fix is to have good communication--clients should be willing to explain why they want a particular framework ("I can find Rails devs more easily than x"), and providers must explain why they want to go against stated preferences ("This is a really, really dumb API endpoint. Sinatra is the simplest way of getting there from here.").

If people won't be open, well, that's when bad things happen.
Bitcoin seems to be in another bubble, so I'm going to wade back into this insane discussion.

There are two main goals of "money". To facilitate exchange, and to store value.

Bitcoin is moderately good at the first one and atrocious at the second one. It is not designed to be a stable store of value. It is designed to _appreciate_ in value, but this encourages intense speculation that results in wild, sickening swings in the exchange rate. It's at best a goofy but terrible idea, and at worst has all the red flags of an outright pyramid scheme.

If you want to read Rothbard and convince yourself that "currency debasement" caused the fall of the Roman empire, that modern monetary policy is going to lead to a Zimbabwean dystopia, and that you can solve all of these problems by dropping us into the hard-money currency policies of the 1800s [that, for the record, didn't actually work all that well], go right ahead. There are subreddits for this sort of thing.

But if you're going to stand here and imply that Bitcoin is a superior store of value to the US dollar, well I cannot abide that sort of nonsense, sir. Not one bit.
If you are looking for an open source stack looking to solve a similiar problem, you might want to keep an eye on PouchDB (http://pouchdb.com) as well as CouchDB / TouchDB. (disclaimer, one of the PouchDB authors)

It is nowhere as near as 'out of the box' as firebase is, but every part of the stack is open and I dont think it will take a long time until it is as ready out of the box as firebase is.
LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion quits
How did Google mess this up so bad?
I don't think it's proven yet that Bitcoin is or will be successful as a currency.
I'm curious what exactly it is about pointers that makes them so hard to understand.

Many new programmers seem to warm up to Java "references" just fine, and they have mostly the same semantics of C pointers.

Maybe it's because passing by value is conceptually harder to grasp than passing by reference, and in C you must understand both in order to use pointers?
Kudos for the Discourse team, the code is great, they are updating almost daily with fixes and features, and also building a community. I recommend visit meta.discourse.org.

In my opinon, the tool is very adictive.
Because it's there[1]

[1] http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badger.shtml
Inflation transfers wealth from savers and creditors to those with first access to newly created money. In our system it is the banks and the federal government that have first access to newly created money.
It isn't hard to make yourself anonymous with your spending.

Want to buy a gift for your wife?
Send BTC to a coin mixer or a new eWallet, then pull it out to a newly created separate, anonymous, address. Use that address to purchase.

Use the reverse process for receiving money, if you want to keep your main account private.

New addresses can be created on the fly, so it isn't much different of a privacy nightmare than current card transactions.
It costs $ but I really liked this pragprog book:

http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux

Really good introduction, and the included config file is a good start.
Wouldn't that violate Facebook's TOS and therefore the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
I've always viewed statistics as information about aggregates. Anything can happen when N = 1
I use that one, I love it!
Unless you want instantaneous transfers. Which requires you to use either a Bitcoin Bank (ie: Flexcoins), or an intermediate trusted 3rd party (Green address).

Which is the entire point of this thread of discussion. People are not liking the restrictions on Bitcoin (ie: wait X number of hashes before the transaction is complete), and are recreating "alternative currencies" for Bitcoin. Which to me... seems against the point of the medium.
Something about rats and sinking ships. Hope all the talent there is planning their exit before the company exits for them. LivingSocial is not long for this world.
Emotiv's EEG headset makes a brain-controlled wheelchair possible
Well in this instance it looks like he lied to his client.

But as a broader point, how much information should you be giving your clients about technical decisions?

I mean, RoR is rails is omakase so there's a bunch of stuff you could change around to make it quite a different framework. Like switching the template library or ORM around. This might make it difficult if they had a second developer in mind to pick up the project in the future if they are not familiar with these.

I've had situations in the past where I've developed software with PHP5 and taken advantage of the features and then had clients who got annoyed when they tried to migrate to a cheaper web host who only supported PHP4 and not PDO etc.
Follow on development, and available talent pool.

You wrote a super fast OLTP system in forth? Great! You're a god, but no one can support it or extend it to meet future needs.

Perhaps Bob had reasonable expectations that he'd be able to organically grow this app over time. Not being technical he chose a platform which seemed to have a pool of talent available to him.

In the small, this was a trivial technical decision. In the large, business picture, that decision might have major negative effects. Bob should have been consulted, and had the decisions explained to him.

On the other hand, Bob could have explained his longer term intent to his subordinate and allowed her to make a reasonable decision as long as the tradeoffs were communicated back to him.
Continuous Delivery at Google
Gotta love TechCrunch's diligence
If the "good" police officers wish to be respected, they should start doing things like outing and arresting the corrupt cops, speaking out against victimless laws that only make everyone a criminal, routinely compensating innocents for damages caused by false arrests/raids/seizures/imprisonment, etc. Until these things are commonplace, it's only proper to consider all of them representatives of their misbehaving organizations.
Thanks for the insight, it seems promising. I'll certainly give the exercise a try.
1. Thank you for the feedback. We will check on the About page shortly.

2. If you are on location and do receive email, you'd be notified and you can arrange with the finder to get your keys back.

If you have left the location, our customer service agent would take over and arrange to have the keys (or phone) shipped back your registered address, at no charge to you.
All The Things That Pull And Push
Well, we can all agree that the $69.99 title-in-a-box model has reached something like saturation, yes? There's no reason to believe anyone wants to enter this market, least of all Apple which years ago lost the knack for selling software titles at $25+.

I think the future of consoles depends a lot upon how large the exploding Freemium/Recurring models can grow. That pie is growing, and there's no reason to believe it can't work in the living room as well as it does in the pocket.

So my argument is that Apple can have the biggest slice if they want it, and that that slice alone may be worth more than Consoles As We Know Them.
Fair enough, but I've never lost anything (knock on wood) and so don't know about the difficulties here (I don't know what I don't know).

If you have data about grocery store return rates, sharing that information would help turn people to your cause.
Whoops yeah I mean War of Art.
IOS Kernel Panic on iPAD
Cheers Sláinte Prost Kampai Yung sing Salud
This is why consumers should be made literate in financial laws. Those bills don't need to crush your life. They come in the mail, toss them in the trash. There's nothing they can do. When you're that broke, why do you care about your credit rating (they often don't end up on your credit anyways, because collection agencies lose all their leverage once it does)? In many states, even if you own your home, they can't take it to pay the bill. You don't even need to declare bankruptcy because you have no assets to divide up amongst creditors -- there's no point. Not paying debts it not a crime! It just doesn't make sense to worry about those bills when it's a choice between eating and starving.

And, student loans are available from the government. Use them!
Aw, sad. I'd have bought it. Ouya then!
Waze Mapping App provides roadmap of the future for app makers
There's this: http://pragprog.com/book/bhtmux/tmux
So, basically what you're saying is:

Bitcoin:

* funds transfer: instant

* fraud vulnerability window: 1 hour

* fraud exposure: reversal of transaction

Credit card:

* funds transfer: 24 hours

* fraud vulnerability window: 60 days

* fraud exposure: reversal of transaction + $25
People keep comparing the "value" of the Euro against the USD. If Euros were a truly useful currency, then there would be no need to value them against another base currency.
The bailouts represent money printed and deposited in the accounts of banks. Kind of a fusion of the worst of right and left ideology: devalue everyone else so that the richest get richer. The full magnitude of the money printing is actually much greater than the public has been led to believe, and came out quietly in late 2010.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/01/news/economy/fed_reserve_dat...

The Federal Reserve made $9 trillion in overnight loans
to major banks and Wall Street firms during the financial
crisis, according to newly revealed data released
Wednesday. ...

The amount of cash being pumped out to the financial
giants was not previously disclosed. All the loans were
backed by collateral and all were paid back with a very
low interest rate to the Fed -- an annual rate of between
0.5% to 3.5%. ...

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who had
authored the provision of the financial reform law that
required Wednesday's disclosure, called the data that was
released incredible and jaw-dropping.

"The $700 billion Wall Street bailout turned out to be
pocket change compared to trillions and trillions of
dollars in near zero interest loans and other financial
arrangements that the Federal Reserve doled out to every
major financial institution," Sanders said.
One of the unfortunate things I did not add to the slides were Gift Economics, and I apologize for that. This was indeed the first form of economic exchange, predating bartering for sure.

The problem, of course, is that it only works when you have a small number of trustable people (I'll leave Dunbar's number out of this, pick your favorite). When you get into the realm of billions of people, it's a system that just doesn't work. And there's plenty of romanticism out there from people that would love to go back to such a system. But -that- to me is ideologically driven economics. I'm not saying that Bitcoin is morally superior, or that gold is better than paper money, I'm trying to relay the verdict that large numbers of decentralized people have arrived at. Which could be a worse system in many ways.

But I'm not so sure, for the reasons you bring up. I do agree with you that governments capture these systems and control them. And the principal reason for this has been to wage war. War is so closely attached to control and devaluation of money, that you can almost predict monetary instability based on it, as these governments use it as a form of taxation. We've had quite a few currency devaluations in our own history, beginning with the colonies during the Revolutionary War (printing money to pay the soldiers, that they would take home and discover was essentially worthless).

This is where Bitcoin becomes interesting: It becomes a form of gold that is so liquid, that it is arguable if a government could even take control of it. You certainly can't stop someone from going through customs at the airport with it (or are we going to require a scan of all computers before leaving the country now?). If Bitcoin prevents/disrupts governments from amassing war chests, I see that as a potentially very positive development. Time will tell, as with all things.
Magnetic putty absorbing a magnet
Obviously, software will make or break this console. I have a feeling it'll initially be for indie devs, by indie devs, but I think it's possible it can get a small but loyal following that will buy enough games to sustain many indies.
I'm not part of zfs on linux, I just looked at their github milestones[1]. It looks like they're reserving the 1.0 version for when it's "Fully functional and feature complete native ZFS implementation for Linux." Right now it's just usable and stable. Their previous milestones are also interesting. v0.6.0 had several RCs before being released as stable.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/milestones

[2]: https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/milestones?state=cl...
Good Business Tips You Should Consider For Your Start-Up Business
It really depended on where your priorities lay and how much they intersected with the OSS developers at the time.

For example , we might not care about using a more "minimal" chat client but for my sister that would have been a deal breaker "I can't have my animated pink cat avatar?!?! This thing is USELESS"

This problem is mostly alleviated now as the dancing cat programs have moved to the web and mobile.

The problem with Stallman's approach was that it basically said "you should value freedom more than dancing cats". Try telling that to a teenage girl.
I took the AP CS exam in 1992 or so. My CS classes in high school were in Pascal, which is what the exam was in. I always thought the syntax in Pascal was a little easier to understand than C.

Variables are declared like this:

name : type;

for example, here is an integer i and a pointer to an integer p:

i : integer;
p : ^integer;

^ reads like "pointer to" here.

If you want to point p to i's address:

p := @i;

@ reads like "address of" here. "at" also makes sense. By the way := is the assignment operator.

And if you want to assign a value to what a pointer points to (in other words, deference it), you can:

p^ := 42;

The equivalent C would be:

int i;
int *p;
p = &i;
*p = 42;

I guess it's not that different.
No, they use Play's JSON lib. It's kind of a moot point because Play's lib is in fact a wrapper for Jackson.

Here's the source: https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/blob/mast...

So the question stands: If Play & Netty are using the same JSON serialization code, why is Play seven times slower?