skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is actually untrue, bitcoin can be used as many things, and unless the price is zero for all eternity, which at this point appears to be extremely unlikely, it can be used at the very least as a wealth transfer medium. There is nothing in that particular use case that particularly benefits from a rising or falling or stable exchange rate, only a non zero one.

As a store of wealth, bitcoin is probably better off sitting at a single stable price rather than climbing exponentially as it has been, so even in that case it doesn't make sense to class it as a pyramid scheme.

Pretty much the only scenario where it makes sense to class it as a pyramid scheme is as a speculative investment. And frankly, if the most horrendous negative externality of bitcoin is that people are able to engage in speculation on distant value and are exposed to the risk and reward thereof, that really doesn't sound like a huge criticism to me.
If there are 1/10 developers, there are, in fact 10x developers.

Guys, math and stuff.

In all seriousness, there's a lot of things being done in the productivity and quality spaces to try and mine data to measure things. I recently joined tenXer (.com) which is trying to both drive productivity measurements as well as quality indicators.

We by no means have any answers, but I think things have evolved a lot in the recent years to where bringing real measurements is becoming a possibility.

I think the important thing here is to realize that measuring people is not solely for someone to manage you differently. You can't succeed in something if you don't have a reasonable success metric, and data makes it far easier to capture those.
Seriously how many people here write programs to solve k-means or n-body problems? Who fucking cares how many lines of code it takes to write k-means, and who fucking cares how long it takes to execute or how much memory it consumes.

Most of us write software that moves bits from an API or DB to a screen. If we're lucky we translate a couple of those values to a color or something.

Why are benchmarks so focused on code no one writes? How many successful YC companies aren't CRUD apps?

Type the problem you have into google, write your stuff in the language that has the most concise stackoverflow answers on how to solve that problem.
Just started this program about a month ago. I'm stronger, fitter, and healthier than I've ever been.

It really simplifies things in the weight room, points you in the right direction, and says "now go do this."

It's pretty much gimmick free, and very straightforward. Highly recommend it.
If you really want to examine whether mathematics is discovered or invented, you very quickly become immersed in philosophy. It's an interesting conversation to have once or twice, but I'm a tad too drunk for that tonight. ;)
ClipCrop: New iOS App to Crop Photos Using Shapes and Characters
FMRI Imaging of Dreams
>Bitcoin is the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without needing a trusted third party.

This is false. Karma was a p2p currency that did this in 2004, 5 years before Bitcoin:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/papers/karma.pdf
Shit, people's perceptions of art are insulted and prejudiced? Who knew?

Isn't the fact that he supposedly said he doesn't consider them art and doesn't want to debate it an indication that he views it as just a personal opinion, and not something he wants to force on other people? He has his reasons, no doubt, but not everybody in the world needs to embrace everything in it. If he was happy with the art that he knew, good for him.
If you have feedback, please open an issue thread or pull request on github
Amazing and inspiring story, thanks for sharing.
Serious question, why does the price of a single bitcoin matter when they're divisible to 8 decimal places? Beyond a psychological barrier people have thinking about the 1:100 thing, it's really irrelevant if your cup of coffee costs 10 bitcoins or 0.00001 bitcoins, especially if the calculation is made at the time of purchase relative to an underlying stable value like a basket of the largest fiat currencies in circulation or somesuch, or just the boring plain old USD.

1 BTC = 1000000 USD To put it in a less psychologically alarming way is exactly the same as saying 1 Satoshi = 0.01 USD.
My gut estimate is that the chance is somewhere in the 1-10% range. I've been thinking about it for around 5 years. Part of why that number is so high is the relative lack of coherent and nuanced counterargument that demonstrates the critic at least understands the issue (not just one aspect, but the whole huge convoluted topic) well. I may end up becoming such a critic myself, eventually, but so far things aren't looking so bad for cryonics.

It is true that chances can't just be "non-zero" and be rational, nor simply based on faith, because that's basically Pascal's Wager. However I think my 1-10% gut feeling is something that I could probably be talked out of if it were really arbitrarily low like people keep assuming.

Assuming that probability range, I think selling to ordinary people is pretty defensible at $50k-$500k rates, because we already spend around $5M to avoid accidental deaths via regulatory tradeoffs. If it is lower (0.1% say) and yet still not arbitrarily low, we would then need to restrict to either very rich or very desperate people (where the ratio of marginal utility of life to marginal utility of a dollar differs significantly from the norm). Arbitrarily low chances literally on level with egyptian mummification or worshipping a random god is definitely not something that should be sold to anyone (except as a novelty maybe).

Note also that cryonics storage cost is influenced by economies of scale, so mass-produced cryonics is likely to be a lot less expensive per person than the cost you see on the market today. If you could seriously measure a non-arbitrary 0.01% it wouldn't necessarily be impossible to justify even on the mass market and even to relatively death-complacent people -- it would just have to be very cheap for them. Granted, gut feelings are hard to calibrate well to reality at such extremes (hence lottery tickets) so I'm not going to seriously argue that, I'm just saying this to give you a feel for why I think there's a need for fairly strong counterargument before you can reasonably take the position that cryonics is just innately bad/fraudulent business.

I also anticipate various positive externalities from the cryonics business, such as sooner (eventual) development of suspended animation of the damage-free variety, which has potential to save a lot of lives and spare a lot of suffering. These too should be accounted for as part of a robust criticism.
I feel obliged to do business with Newegg and now Rackspace whenever I am looking for something they provide. Maybe their prices are higher than some other companies. If that's the cost of defending against patent trolls, well it's minuscule compared to the benefit.

Also Newegg and Rackspace are incredibly cheap so I haven't found anyone that beats their prices anyway. In fact, unless I miscalculated, after I switch from Amazon to Rackspace next week my monthly bill will be lower.

This is above and beyond the "do no evil" motto that Google pretends to uphold. This is actively fighting to improve society.
Not only bias, but obviously pure ignorance too, at least with respect to Lisp. In his table, Lisp seems to be unsuitable both for meta programming and multiple dispatch, which always have been touted as Lisp's major features.
Your intentions are good so I won't downvote but this type of post should be pasted on more pertinent forums.
Only thing I've found that worked for me was emails. Whatever app I want to use, I'll still get 100+ emails everyday. When I don't have that much thing to do, cool todo apps are great.. but anytime there's a real "get shit done urgently" I just fall back to email mode.. so I guessed why not always use email.
I'm happy to hear this. One of the primary problems with client-side development right now is the lack of commonjs style imports and exports -- something which people are trying to solve using component, etc. It'd be nice if Meteor had something baked in.
Thanks b0ttler0cket. Your comments definitely helped me. Though I am not 100% convinced. I will give more thoughts to your comments.
I'm not contradicting myself: In the same comment I wrote "It is statically validated and purposefully not turing complete".

There is no contradiction between between being very limited and also allowing extreme flexibility. I don't think many people here would agree that CSS is "executable code", and yet CSS is turing complete and substantially more complicated than Bitcoin's script. This is why I said it depends on what you mean by "executable code". There is nothing that is jumped to, no looping, the processor never jumps to and runs anything fed in off the network, etc. Just a simple set of operations for manipulating a stack and doing comparisons. But, even though the implementation is simple the results are powerful.

There are several implementations of script evaluation— I can think of at least 6— now though the reference is by far the norm on full nodes.
I'm skeptical that any engineer can independently be responsible for four nines. HA is a big-picture deal. One engineer can break it, but one engineer can't make it.

Put differently, a good HA organization does not need 1000x engineers- a good system ensures even garden variety engineers will deliver.

There are lenses through which you can look and say "Engineer A was 1000x as productive as Engineer B", but those lenses are things like leveraged work, which is not what people are thinking of when they talk about "rockstar programmers".

When you say someone is 1000x as productive, that means that they sit down and do 3 years of work in 8 hours. (Unless the average developer contributes negative net productivity)
I had no idea Groupon played a role until I reach the middle part of the article.

I too believe building a company should be a marathon and not a 100m sprint. Trying to sprint 100m puts tremendous pressure on self to succeed and could result in suicide. As Dave McClure said, it is a first world problem in those dark days no matter how dark it is. Founders should look to 9-to-5 and build a long-term company.
You don't wait for 2 weeks to get your compiler errors? How do you handle the subjectivity of stack traces then? Dude, that's madness.

But seriously, short feedback loops facilitate learning, and if this shortens the feedback loop, then I'm exited about it.
There is little information in this story that has not been reported elsewhere. PandoDaily has done a thorough job of covering the death of Jody and ecomom in a thoughtful and factual manner. Except for a light spattering of additional financial numbers, not much of this is revelatory.

And the section on Guatemala is just trash. It culminates in an unsubstantiated and innuendo-laden tale, with none other than John McAffee as the sole source. Seriously? Please. (FYI the source who confirmed the meeting doesn't count. Anyone who knew Jody at the time would have heard about that.)

To the central point: It is good to talk about the importance of honesty and dealing with the stress of a start-up. By all means, let's open up the conversation again. But articles with such innuendo (no evidence, mind you) -- suggestions of sinister business activities and a Central American fraud scheme -- don't help that conversation. It makes Jody's experience seem distant and unrelatable.

Essentially, I fear that an article like this hurts the open conversation because of how crazy the story sounds. An unusual story allows the listeners to reject the valuable truths therein contained.

The reality was a lot less mythic and far more heart-breaking.
I think you are misinterpreting that advice. I have always heard the full saying as "hire slow, fire fast" and if you are seeking to build a good culture, you probably want to keep turnover reasonable low. Seeing many people come and go will wear on the people you chose to keep, and it will be counter productive to building a good culture. Obviously good is a bit subjective when it comes to "culture" but I assume you are aiming at least for an environment where people are somewhat happy and strive to be productive.
That's the right lesson. The difference is actually even more stark than that: if you extend it out to picking the right project in the right company in the right industry, there're positions where you can be easily 1000x more productive. Project selection probably determines more of your productivity than almost any day-to-day coding decision.
I just had that happen at my company.

New Dev hired by the CEO without input from anyone else. She was not bad, but terribly sloooooooooooooooow. She indeed took 10x longer to do common tasks compared to other devs.

It's not that she wasn't smart or reticent to learn new things, just that her way of working through problems was incredibly long winded for some reason.

It's not something that you can easily re-train someone to fix, it's a fundamental problem and that combined with other issues made us let her go.
When an 'anonymous' purchase gets mailed to your house, that creates evidence that you are the anonymous person.
I don't smoke it - it makes me introspective, paranoid and miserable.

I also laugh like a jackass at George Carlin and get the munchies, but the other stuff happens too.
The grids comparing language features are mostly incorrect, generally towards a stereotype that's common but incorrect, or very dated.
The original story was told by his best friend at Jody's memorial, in a lighthearted way. And it happened when he was a teenager. I'm a little shocked that the writer used this as evidence of fraud.

Of course, the same friend told a story about Jody giving boxes and boxes of clothing to homeless people during Christmas. Yet this tale didn't make the cut.
The article seems to whine more than the grad students they refer to, claiming a lack of earnings, cheap labor, and whimsical prospects for a job. Yes it's cheap labor, yes it's hard work, and yes it can be a grueling experience, but if money is the only reason in pursuing a PhD then yea it's totally not worth it.

I guess i'm biased because i'm in the process of getting my phd, but doing a phd has push me to my mental limits, learning and doing more than i figured i would ever be able to do. Comparing this with a masters degree seems like apples and oranges in terms of expertise, motivation, and general knowledge of the field. Anecdotally, from most of my experience when i view/work with/take classes with/talk to/interact with masters students i generally see three types of people:

1) those who are using a masters to get into a phd program

2) those who just want to raise their salary in industry (already in industry)

3) those who are having trouble finding a job so they go back to school

Each of them are interested in expanding their knowledge and solving hard problems, but somehow all three types seem more overworked than many of my colleagues who are in the phd track. Of the three types, (2) makes the best partners for projects and often know their stuff pretty well. Though, with exception for the work that goes toward a research lab (masters student working with a professor), again, from my experience, the quality of the assignments, projects, and papers (sometimes including conference) from (1) and (3) is just completely lacking. Often showing that the student really does not have a grasp of what exactly they are doing. Then i look at any second year phd in the same class/project (because lets face it, as a first year it takes time to get your feet wet) and i'm often blown away by some of the cool stuff they can come up with (even as just a class project outside of their research). This may have been a bit overdrawn to state my point, but the most valuable thing you get out of a phd is a solid understanding of the topics you're interested in. Over worked with low pay is just the price you pay to get it - even if you spent all your time at home doing coursera and open source projects, you're pretty close to being in the same boat.
The problem is that many possible format conflicts in ways that make resolution impossible without cross-referencing with other sources.

Which date is "10/3/5"? Is it March 5th 2010? March 5th 1910? March 10th 1905? March 10th 2005? October 3rd 1905? October 3rd 2005? (or another century entirely, though the 20th and 21st would be most likely). And don't think the "/" vs. "-" as separate is sufficient to tell them apart.

Aand you'll find a lot of other variations - I'm used to writing 10/3-5 for example... But I'm not even consistent, I might write 10/3/5 or 10-3-5, or 5/3/10 / 5-3-10; anywhere I want to be explicit, I would write 2005-03-10 exactly because I'm used to seeing so many ambiguous dates that can't easily be resolved.

What about the value 5.123? Is it a floating point value with "123" after the decimal point, or the integer 5123? The "decimal point" is "," in many countries, and the thousand separator is usually, but not always, "." in countries that use "," as the decimal marker. If you treat things as "just text" you are going to have to potentially deal with dozens of different combinations of decimal points and quantity markers (depending on country, the markers don't all occur only every 3 digits to the left from the decimal marker...)

Interpreting small text fragments is fraught with a near infinite number of obnoxious details like this, and part of the problem is that even few people know most of them and will be unable to quickly resolve ambiguities without cross referencing with other data (or worse: they think they know, or don't even recognize that there is an ambiguity in the first place)
someone should tell everybody that it is not us or them, but we.

unit test help us but not them? How can that be true if they pay your salary. If tests make you more efficient, so becomes the/their team (we/them as you please). In the end even the customer is influenced by good unit tests, or any other improvement for you.
Bottom line: stop thinking us vs them, think we.

p.s. Not a manager, I am a programmer like you.
Microsoft creative director "doesn't get the drama" over always-on xbox
you were implying that arbitrary public addresses could be cracked with a 20k budget, and i am saying that it is not the case.
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The Rise of Feminine Values in Business
In latin, discoverer is translated as inventor. They means the same thing. In French, somebody discovering a treasure can be called "l'inventeur du trésor".
>(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks is wrong? That should be fun to watch.)

Well, no? You and the earlier posts missed this:

>Many other passages of equivalent similarity appear throughout the two documents. Indeed, side-by-side comparison of his 2004 document with CPBR’s 2012 version shows the texts to be virtually identical.
Feedback is extremely important, even negative/dissatisifed
feedback, so if you agreed to be contacted, then you should
expect to be contacted.

Spamming people? (i.e. without consent) No, never. It just makes
people angry.

On the other hand, if people agree to receive messages from you,
then by all means, contacting them can be mutually beneficial.
For example, you said you "didn't get" their app initially,
but there's a chance it does exactly what you need but they failed
to communicate that to you. Figuring out where they failed, and
figuring out what you want (so they can provide it), is beneficial
to both.

If you're curious, you should read just about everything from Patrick McKenzie
(hn:patio11) on his blog: http://www.kalzumeus.com
Long term guy
The doctor and the spy
Information marketing is easier than e-commerce. No physical products to ship
Qt5 uses V8 for QML and JavaScriptCore for QtWebKit.
I don't need marijuana for any of those things. Lucky me?
Got this when I attempted to install it:

"This item cannot be installed in your device's country."
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2
FriendCode - Reinventing coding one release at a time
Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3818...
Who’s Going To Buy The Facebook Phone?
> Do you even Bitcoin?

No but I lift, .... mostly functions, sometimes they have multiple variables ;-)

> One of the main features of Bitcoin is that it can't be manipulated by a central authority

Q: What can a central authority with power to imprison and/or garnish your wage manipulate? A: anything it damn wants.

Yes the Fed Gov. can't print more bitcoin it sure can come after you with a rubber hose expecting to get some sales, or money exchange tax some rather-made-up-new-law-tax. A few high profile case about bitcoin used for terrorism, drug, illegal porn, money laundering and these new laws won't be hard to make.
Samsung Electronics first-quarter profit guidance beats street view
Later, he wrote about a different movie:

"I was reminded of Mad Dog Time (1996), another movie in which well-known actors engaged in laughable dialogue while shooting one another. Of that one, I wrote: " `Mad Dog Time' is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time." Now comes Frogs for Snakes, the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of Mad Dog Time."
It's really good for analog HiFi cabling. Plus it's sparkly.
C# does fit many needs and molds and could be used as general purpose language of instruction. However decisions are seldom made on how 'good' a language is.

Java, C++ have plenty of free, multi-platform tooling and resources. C# requires lots of (hard to get or costly) Microsoft products and tooling like Visual Studio.

C/C++ has the additionally advantage that students are exposed to memory management issues.

Not to mention that C/C++ and Java are the top 3 languages on the KIOBE index and have been for the last decade. C# is newer than all three has risen in popularity over the last decade.

Matlab is much higher level language, usually targeted at (non computer) engineering disciplines because its is easier to learn, and provides lots of tools and libraries for simulation/computation/statistics.
I actually miss it. I kind of think Google made a much worse product out of it, overall.
Isn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).
wow, cool blog. Let me share with some friends.
The deflation argument is brought up a lot around here, I wonder if you've read this article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/12/23/fear-not-d...

> Contrary to the central banking and political class insistence that deflation must be prevented at all costs, an economy with a monetary unit that increases in value over time provides significant economic benefits such as near zero interest rates and increasing demand through lower prices. Let’s look at some remarks from leading thinkers on deflation.
Viral FB Formula
Google analytics is amazing and is only getting better day by day. I worked with some clients that refused to switch to GA because Adobe's Omniture "had more prestige", those were the words they used.
But at the end I realized it was more of a job security thing.

Beautiful article and inspiring.