skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin transactions are stored in blocks, which are then chained together by cryptographic hashes. ( That is, each block contains a hash of the previous one.) To build a valid block, a miner needs to verify that all transactions in the block are valid and solve a cryptographic problem, which requires 10 minutes for the aggregate computing power of the entire network. On the other hand, checking that the block chain is valid is a rather simple task, since it only involves checking if all the hashes are valid.

B1 -> Bx -> Bx3 -> Bx4 branch (with non valid block Bx)
\
->B2->... branch with all valid blocks (the miners work on this one)

The trick is then, that the longest block chain (without an invalid block) is assumed to be correct, and the honest miners are all working on this longest chain. ( That is what I meant with 'backed by most computing power.') For a transaction to be verified, there is actually no hard standard but in the Bitcoin paper [1] it is suggested to wait, until the transaction is 6 blocks removed from the newest block, since a malicious transaction could be introduced into the top of the block chain, e.g. at block Bx above. But the honest miners would not accept the block, continue to try to extend B1, and eventually they will find B2. ( And extend this branch.) The attacker ( who is working on the Bx chain) can then perhaps beat the network by luck for a few blocks ( Bx3, Bx4), but assuming the honest miners control most of the computing power at some point they will win. ( It should be noted that AFAIK there are no known deterministic algorithms for creating a valid block. Because of this, who solves the next block is a probabilistic process. So it is not the guy with the most computing power, but some random guy who had a chance proportional to his computing power just like everyone else.)

[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I don't know why the GP said "minority browser", but to be fair to them, it appears that Mozilla removed MNG and JNG in 2003[1], when that certainly was a fair description of the Mozilla Suite and Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox marketshare.

Interesting to see Hixie in there advocating for MNG (or, rather, for a format with 8-bit alpha and animation that's not Flash).

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280
>Why should retirement accounts get invested in anything but government bonds and index funds?

Here (somewhere near the end) Mr. Blank says that this is what got the silicon valley rolling. When pension funds were allowed to invest, control of the valley switched from the military to the VC funds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Probably another reason is that bonds and index funds do not yield enough to keep the pension funds going; people now live a longer life on average, so they need to pay more on each pension; so its all screwed up.

Everything is screwed up; now that probably that has something to do with the fact that energy prices & commodities are high; there is less energy to go round, so other creative means are found to create 'wealth'; these tricks increasingly have something to do with extracting something from pocket A and transferring it to pocket B.
>>pretty bad ADHD/laziness

Is great that you at least admit that your problem is part laziness. I'm sure ADHD must be true for some people but I wonder if too many use it as an excuse for their failures.

<half-joking>Even I've wondered if maybe I suffer from ADHD since is really hard to keep my attention on a project past the prototype stage. That is, once the last 10% starts. </half-joking> All joking aside, it feels almost like pulling teeth when working on that last 10%. Don't really know how to fix it other than to just force myself to keep at it.
Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed. The argument is the implementation of an API is the expression but the API is merely something akin to the table of contents. It's a description of the thing but it isn't the thing itself. This view seems pretty logical to me.

It doesn't necessarily matter that something is an act of creation -- nearly everything is -- that is necessary for copyright but it isn't sufficient. Your assumption is that any intellectual exercise, no matter have trivial or damaging to the commons, deserves protection. But that is neither the spirit or the letter of the law.

Also, this really doesn't have anything to do with open source and everything to do with interoperability. Open or closed source, copyrights on APIs would lock out entire classes of software that we take for granted every day.
FYI, the phenomenon you describe is an afterimage and happens to everybody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage). You are correct that the visual cortex is involved in both phenomena but they are quite different. An after-image is still an "upstream" image on your retina, whereas a mental image is not. Whether the former can be used to increase facility with the latter I do not know. I haven't seen scientific evidence that imagery can be trained at all.

Despite all that it doesn't sound like a terrible place to start.
What?! Anyone else affected similarly?
He's viewing the problem from one lens: runway. Lower upfront costs equal a greater chance of survival for a startup. What's the issue in that? Not all of us have access to gigantic amounts of liquidity for our hobby-shops.
Ah, thanks for the insight and the link.
If the company succeeds, he'll inevitably start hiring more locally. Naturally :)
Business Psychology | Small Business Consulting Group
The question that the author asks is great from a theoretical standpoint but more money provides better access to resources, natural or otherwise, regardless of geographical location. It is true in the African continent as well in North America.

The more interesting take that is almost never discussed in the main-stream media is the high cost associated with providing access to clean water in the Middle East & its implications in the next few decades for the region, and for less prosperous nations that lack capital & resources to secure access to basic human necessities.

For example, UAE & Qatar have among the highest per capita consumption of water in the world, and they would probably top the charts if you discount the vast no. of migrant workers that consume relatively few resources but swell up the population statistics. All this clean water is sourced from the sea, desalinated in energy-intensive plants, which take multiple years to build. When I was living in Qatar, fuel was less expensive than water, partly because Qatar (& UAE) have high oil/gas reserves but mainly because they have to expend a lot of resources to build desalination plants, often licensing technology & building materials from western nations. They can probably scale up water production relatively quickly in the coming few years to keep up with increasing water consumption, however other nations, including India, probably might not be that lucky in securing access to clean water for its citizens at an affordable cost.
So, basically, that boils down to:

I have a critical mass of paying users and I
have to disappoint a small portion of them.

I hope I'm not misrepresenting your comment because on the spectrum of problems afflicting early stage startups, them's the good kind.

On a more serious note, we didn't have too much of a problem with it and we had to say "no" quite a few times. We'd just offer to refund their money and explain the situation the best we could.
Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens would have been an excellent candidate.
Define 'slave fee's', he sounds as though he's running a comfortable shop where everyone works within the confines of their local timezone (9-5). I don't see any comments generated by his contractors, and based on what he's saying about their talent I imagine they have jobs-a-plenty available.
There's no inherent reason that people have to be total pricks in the workplace.

there's some economic theory that's inconsistent with that claim.

in short, in the absence of an ability to concretely measure work product, firms are forced to default to tournament style pay. e.g. a > b > c ... a gets paid more than b, b gets paid more than c, etc etc.

where work product can be quantified (e.g. installing windshields) and you can explicitly tie pay to performance (i.e. you get paid per windshield) you don't have a problem. Top performers get paid more, poor performers get paid less and maybe go do something else.

As soon as measuring the value of work product gets murky that no longer works. Hello, tournament pay.

This also explains why backstabbing work environments are so typical. Nothing evil, just normal incentives at work.
If you like writing low level software, you should double down and minor in ECE.
Bitcoin and the nature of money
That's interesting. I practically never use the mouse to switch between windows in OS X or Windows.

The biggest problem I have with tmux is vertical splits don't work with native copy-paste because the selection goes across both panes. Using multiple terminal windows, on the other hand, doesn't have that issue.
depends what your client is. on a desktop, yeah it's going to download once. on your phone, where it really matters, that's going to end up being a saving just about every time you visit the site.
No one screengrabbed the stylesheet or sprite before Twitter took it down?
The Woman With 1 Billion Clicks, Jenna Marbles
I'm teaching programming to an 8th grader now as part of an inner-city mentoring program sponsored by my employer. He seems to be picking it up pretty well, in my view the key is not to overcomplicate things. Pick a language with a REPL, teach them the substitution model, and show them how to teach a computer to do things.

I've taken a fair amount of inspiration from the SICP lectures by Sussman and Abelson. If you are planning on teaching people to program, they are worth a watch.
Thank you for this. Even though I consider myself pretty average now you've made me feel like I have some secret power. It helps a lot when I visualize things. Also, writing ideas out in a narrative also helps. So, I guess I can do both. Genius Here!!! (Standing up, wide eyed, looking proud with an idiotic smile)

p.s. I don't actually believe that you cannot visualize images. Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it.

p.s I guess inability to visualize something could be something similar to dyslexia?
Copyright covers only the expression. For example, in a C program, the header files can be copyrighted. I think it's pretty fair to argue that Sun can copyright their expression of an API. However, you cannot copyright facts. I would argue that the array class having a sort method is a fact. And therefore I should be able to create my own expression of that fact.
That would make more sense, with candy crush being so closely tied to facebook, and currently having ~68m monthly users there (that is of course iOS + android + canvas), I would have guessed 10m-20m on android. Granted this is just one app.
Right, well those are attached as riders to the P&S, again in a very standard (and legally simple) form, since the contract was contingent on the acceptance of the inspection report.

Anyway, I agree with you that the process is unfamiliar and can be overwhelming for most buyers. The sea of forms and signatures induces glazed eyes, for sure. I don't think nationally-standardized forms would help there (and it's very likely to be impossible anyway). Any RE attorney can make quick work of the problem (hire your own, don't use the seller's!). It would be unwise to transact with any set of forms without an attorney or equivalent experience.
Ah, that's what it's called, thanks! I read about that a while back but forgot whether it was a phenomenon of the retina or of the brain. What I am wondering is if you can use the after image as almost a skeleton for more advanced visualizations. For example, imagine the retinal after image laying down the basic shape, and then you can consciously add detail on top of that after image. Maybe using the after image as a kind of training wheels..if it's even possible..
Story of a village in India that plants 111 trees for every girl born
When this story comes up, it serves me as a timely reminder to check The Oatmeal for new material.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox
I found the correspondence between the names of the files and their contents extremely amusing.
Luxembourg: The Steve McQueen of Cybersecurity
The culture of hardware engineering stayed stuck in the bottomless pit of proprietary design and secrecy. Engineers come into bloom between 15 and 22, and if they don't have open access to information, it just won't happen. I have a feeling we will see a resurgence in hardware soon though, with things like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino setting teen hardware junkies' brains alight...
Reminds me of people with dyslexia. I wonder if the two are related.
What integration features are you giving up because of not having a Google+ account? It sounds like you want Google+ to _not_ be integrated, and yet you highly value the fact that other services are integrated. In the end, we can't have it both ways.
I would also commend 10.4 for being at the sweet spot of UI chrome. Just enough to keep things separated from the bland and boring Linux and Windows of those days, but not over-the-top like it was in previous releases.

The UI in 10.8 is far too flat for my tastes. In this era of advanced graphical processing and processing, I would expect the trend to go the opposite way.

Oh well; guess we have to do what Apple tells us we want; otherwise we'd have to go to Linux and break compatibility with a LOT of apps.
Based on my limited interactions with people diagnosed on the spectrum, I agree that any notion that such individuals are inherently "more logical" is incorrect and unrepresentative.

Whether a person is logical or not is orthogonal to their position on the autism spectrum. It is useful to delineate between "logic" and "reason" here: reason is arriving at appropriate conclusions given the state of the world, and logic is the means by which we accomplish this. Using logic relies entirely on the premises chosen and assumptions made, which is where the "human element" comes into play. Many people, regardless of psychiatric diagnosis, are quite adept at cherry-picking premises such that, through careful selective ignorance, they arrive at pre-determined conclusions.

So if I had to make a very politically incorrect and anecdotal hypothetical assertion, I'd say that in my experience people on the autism spectrum indeed are more rigorously "logical" but they can also be correspondingly irrational; where someone not on the spectrum might be fine with a few measures of cognitive dissonance, someone on the spectrum might construct a labyrinthine fortress of logic to prevent any sort of uncomfortable or distasteful conclusions, and to reassure themselves that the world conforms to their notions of justice.

This is neither good nor bad, or any kind of judgment. Just supporting the parent comment with anecdata.
It's a good first cut. The real filter is the analyst phase after which only the promising people are offered to stay on.
> Leave and go work in startup, which are usually run by people.

Keep in mind that, in full cynicism, the "CEO" of an SV startup is the VC; the guy who calls himself "CEO" is a product manager. If you actually want to work at a place where you have any chance of influencing things, make sure you can talk to the investors, not just the folks in your own office. (In a bootstrapped startup, the CEO is the investor, so this just becomes tautological.)

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-princ... (there's 19 of these; I'd cite them all here, along with the previous Gervais Principle posts)
You can always setup block level encryption using dm-crypt/lvm in a Linux VM.
I think in a kickstarter-like way, this could work. If you make your users feel like buying in early could benefit them in the long run, and that they get some say in how the product develops, I could see myself paying into a startup service I really felt like I needed.

Of course, it only takes a few of these to crash and burn, or completely not listen to their users and turn against them to make people lose trust in the whole model.
except that it does not work on private repos =(
support for private repos would be nice.
A few times, not nearly enough to experience any benefits of it. I'll try more from now on, promise! :)
If you knew there was a cracker actively using your network, would you not take any other precautions other than changing the one password you know he used?

One could argue Linode was overzealous in resetting all passwords. Reasonable minds can differ.
He is using the vim-powerline bundle for vim, but it looks like you're right about the tmux config.
The person that wrote the paper probably wanted it to go along with the idea of decentralization that bitcoin is all about. More then likely it's someone on the bitcoin.org board or perhaps even a group of people on that board.
The US is a model of reaching the right regulatory balance. No joke. The Asian countries are headed in the direction of more regulation as their economies mature and the naturally explosive growth of new industrialization transitions to a sustainable economy. Meanwhile, after decades of stifling over regulation, in the 1990s and 2000s Western Europe has liberalized it's economic policies and become more like the US. Australia has always been like the US and has been very successful for it.
I nominate the Prenda law firm, which sued lots of people for downloading copyrighted material and is now in increasingly deep legal trouble due to its questionable legal practices. You can read about the saga here:

http://www.popehat.com/tag/prenda-law
Have you looked into image streaming ?

(It something like brainstorming with your eyes closed and describing all of it into a tape-recorder . Feels really akward .)

http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm
Exactly. Apple is just worse.
Even if that's true, there are still many other HN readers watching the conversation who may be more open to logical arguments from either side.

So I think it's still "worth it" to respond in a meaningful way, even though you may not convince the original poster.
Somebody, but not me.

Me, I'm busy with the hand over fist endeavor.
Right now there's a strong incentive to be born in to the right family.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/09/22/are-we-entering-the-a...
Yes, 3D printing allows people to get interested in DIY by letting them make these parts without much effort. Most city slickers have no idea how to get into DIY.

For a long time, 3D printing will be useful as a "close-enough" alternative to more expensive models, parts, and replacements.
The coverage of this story at the Popehat blog is also interesting:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/12/charles-carreon-encounters...
One of the comments[1] on that post has an interesting idea:

> "A server that I use for mail etc., deals with protecting its users from themselves by regularly attempting dictionary and bruteforce attacks upon its own password file. Any passwords that get broken get expired (forcing a change next login) and the user gets a (mostly polite) email explaining why their password was expired and how to avoid it happening again."

Thoughts?

[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/04/password_secur...
Instabug - Revolutionary In App Feedback System [Invites]
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/09/22/are-we-entering-the-a...
> dismissing their experience (provided as an example, not as a sum total of the problem)

I think a lot of my problem with any sort of social justice commentary is exactly this: providing singular anecdotes with the implication that they're "proof enough" of a trend. I don't want to hear examples--all they do is incite emotional debates[2]. What they obviously are aimed at is getting people thinking about the solution (and being part of it.) Anecdotes, as a tool, are the worst possible means for this; without a better reference frame, other people can only compare a single anecdote to their own anecdotes (which have extremely different context), so conversation devolves in the most literal Babylonian sense.

If you want your example to serve a purpose--if you really, really want to change things--then go out, find other people with similar examples, and wrap it up into a study. Then you can cite it, and people will actually derive useful conclusions--because you've now created a reference frame within which the anecdotes will be compared to one another.

Otherwise, admit to yourself that (at least insofar as you are a rational being whose desires can be introspected), you just wanted to rant, and you just wanted to rile people up, without causing change to happen. (This is more directed at the generic "social justice blogger" than Rachel, who is a noncentral member[1] of that group.)

---

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

[2] Well, these articles also serve to give me heartburn in the middle of reading my morning tech RSS. I read HN to get into an aesthetic (commonly thought of as "hacker") frame of mind--I find that it really does increase my mental "elasticity" to read about things like 3D printing and quirks in the Win32 API before starting work for the day. But stories with a moral quality knock me out of it. It's sort of like interrupting a flow state, but emotionally. I have a feeling that establishing this particular hacker emotional state ("aesthete state") is the true service that HN provides for a lot of people, and that this may be the reason posts like this rile people up more than anything else. I really do wish HN would split, like MetaFilter, into separate "focus on hacker ideas" and "focus on the hacker community" subforms; it'd clean a lot of this up.
Well, at least in my case, they're pretty closely related. It's complicated, and rather hard to explain, but I might say I'm addicted to distraction. It's very hard for me to do something I don't get any stimulation out of.
Here is a way to fix this: https://gist.github.com/bgrins/5108712. When you call `log` it will preserve the line number.

Here is a demo: http://jsfiddle.net/bgrins/MZWtG/.
I think your rental prices are a little off. Have you looked for a place in TO recently?
You're probably not saving a million in four years. First year analyst is like $120k or $130k all in. First year associate (fourth year in, -ish) is like $250-300k?
This is the whole reason why I went into computer science. I watched all of my repos twice today, then I started picking repos at random. Even my non-techie "I can't work an Apple Magic Pad" big-boobed wife thinks it's super cool. Well done!!
Polynomial in terms of what? It's linear in terms of the current hash rate. 'Polynomial' implies some kind of direct assault on the protocol with difficulty not based on other actors.

And 'forking the blockchain' is also misleading. You can fork the blockchain with even the smallest slice of power just by always working on the previous block instead of the current one. The proper explanation is that if you have 40% of the power you have a 1/2 chance of forking a 6-block-old transaction. This does not scale in any unexpected way. If you wait 12 hours for a transaction then it becomes nearly impossible to fork with a minority of the network. This is not a clever insight in any way. It's obvious that since blocks are randomly timed that there is no sharp transition between 49% and 51% between no control and total control. So an attacker only needs to get close to 50%. This barely changes the math wrt taking over the network. Perhaps it adds a factor of two, being generous.