skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
College is not the time to worry about spreading yourself too thin. It may seem like you're all over the place, but this is all just a drop in the bucket compared to the professional work you will do in the future. Most jobs will give you an opportunity to hammer away at the same code base for an extended period of time, and this experience will be far more valuable than doing a bunch of one-off projects in the same language simply for the sake of mastering said language.

In short, I think you're doing it right and will end up better off than someone who focused on one language because that's what companies appeared to want.
There are a lot of reasons, I think. Here's a quick approach to it, though.

>Is it because there are more speculators in the market than actual users?

It's because you can't _stop_ that from being true.

Bitcoins are a form of money. Money has no intrinsic value--it's what you can do with it that matters, right? _Real_ money has commodities exchanges to track staples of production.

But we treat it with intrinsic value and we can do interesting things with it when we do. It occupies this nebulous space between inherently valuable and worthless.

The part where it's almost valuable by itself is what leads to greed, which is what leads to speculators.

So: Bitcoin doesn't solve the __real problem of money__ (because... is there really a good solution?), it just tries to pretend that decentralized and electronic money is better.
Letter To Jennifer Allen Regarding False And Defamatory Statements
I tried using Facebook and it wants me to create a Profile!

I want to post a tweet but Twitter wants me to create a Profile!
Isn't that the entire problem? They neither know its there, or what it is.
It (usually) isn't a binary decision as to whether or not a candidate adds value to the company, but rather a decision on whether or not the candidate adds more value than the other candidates interviewed for the job. Given the choice between someone who can code sans-Google and someone who needs to constantly copy-paste from Stack Overflow, I'll take the guy or girl who can code on their own.

Of course, this doesn't mean I think programmers shouldn't use Google or Stack Overflow, I use them all the time. However, the specifics of what you're Googling matter a lot. If asked to implement a Red-Black Tree and you have to Google that to get an idea of what it is (or to refresh your memory) that's one thing, but if you have to Google basic loops or "FizzBuzz level" basic discreet logic constructs to implement simple code, then that's a huge problem.
Kind of a strange addition...I'd like to see more fleshing out of the photo and video services it already has, as that kind of content fits in more with the concept of "tweeting" -- discrete bite size content created on the fly. Music tracks don't seem to jive as well, though I guess it'd be interesting to see, over time, the kind of tracks a given user listened (and tweeted about).

[insert joke about the reliability of that API]
The problem with "don't be evil" is that it sets up the company to look hypocritical when it does something that could be construed as evil (or at least ambiguous).

Just like "it just works" for Apple - really super awesome, except when it doesn't - for large groups of their customers.

People may disagree on what's evil (especially when media companies can easily be "hired" to muddy the waters). Hypocrisy is much easier to detect and justifiably besmirches the brand value.
Cool to hear! I've just built a simple HTML5 web based poker HUD. I'd love to pick your brain what you think I should do with it!
I already have a profile both for Google Play and for YouTube. They want me to sign to a different service.

"I want to post a tweet but Twitter wants me to open a bank account!"

Your argument is invalid.

Also: they wouldn't be nagging me if I had no account. Did they nag you when using YouTube while logged out? They don't nag me when I'm not logged in.
Your radio horizon if you're a ground attacker will be limited by your antenna height. Attacked with powerful transmitted in Class B airspace at a busy airport? You're gonna have a bad time.
> And the page views Google gets is testament to the fact that nobody outside of the HN-esque world has any issues with Google.

And every car on the road is a testament to the fact that nobody outside of Greenpeace has any issues with the oil industry? :) There is no good alternative to Google Search.

In my social circles in Germany, only HN-esque people use Google's other products like GMail, many don't use FB either for privacy concerns. I'd even say that distrust in Google is one of the factors that Germans strongly favour Firefox over Google (according to http://gs.statcounter.com). And that's just one country... User groups are more complex than HN/non HN.
tl;dr 'i'm mad and can name at least one thing i don't like about every Google product'

one could make a similar list about every popular product - online or offline. nothing pleases everybody all the time at scale.
I would like to see a demo or samples or something before 'getting started'.
It's a great analysis, but I do take issue with some parts of the argumet:

The result is a broken system that impairs the ability of young producers to make music without taking huge legal risks.

Music based heavily on sampling others' work, for sure - sample clearance is an expensive nightmare and should be cheaper, perhaps compulsory, and more transparent and accessible.

But you don't have to make music that way. You can sing and play a regular instrument, for example - and don't get started on the argument that there's nothing new under the sun, and that all basslines, drum rhythms etc. consist of ripping off someone else's idea. Musical quotation is widespread, but there is a huge different between coming up with your own riff that sounds a bit like your favorite band and just sampling the original. Furthermore, there's no special reason that sampling has to involve others' work. My main tool is a sampler but I hardly ever sample other people, and when i do it's usually a line from a movie or something, and done more for personal amusement. I would never, ever sample another musician's track and use it in my own music. It's not that it makes me morally superior, I just don't want to do that, because it would feel like I was just surfing on what they did because I couldn't come up with something cool on my own. I don't even care for using royalty-free sample loops of drum breaks or pead sounds for the same reason, although I will use one occasionally.

What I do sample is going into the kitchen and making recordings of household implements as percussion, my cats' miaows, sounds in my neighborhood, or my own voice or snippets stuff I'm playing out of synthesizers. For me, it's a lot more fun to come up with my own drum beats or suchlike, sample those, and then start warping the audio to my heart's content.

I'm not saying that this makes me a better musician or a better person than people who build records entirely out of samples - I'm not into Girl Talk but there are quite a few artists who work mainly with samples of others' stuff whose work I admire and enjoy. I'm just pointing out that that you can in fact go nuts with your sampler without ever having to deal with copyright clearance or infringement issues.
Pick someone else's and repeat it?
Bitcoin Bursts: Hacker Currency Gets Wild Ride
Are you the next Tomaž?
When we started our first company, Cloudkick, we put out a call for summer interns. Tomaz submitted his resume, and after 5 minutes we knew we had just spoken with a hacker of ultra high potential. Tomaz had written a library that I was using that day. Tomaz's github contribution graph is almost solid green. Tomaz’s projects always had forks. Tomaz speaks at conferences. Tomaz shotguns incredibly high quality code all day and all night.

He was young, living in a far off land, but we knew this guy was going to go places.

Tomaz became our summer intern. We flew him to the bay area. After he finished school, we hired him full time. Then after we were acquired, he went on to make huge contributions to become a top hacker at Rackspace.

Are you the next Tomaz?

We are building a new software environment that is meant for large server deployments. It is going to turn a lot of current thinking on its head. We have great customer and partner traction. We think making internet infrastructure more secure, faster, and more open is something worth fighting for. We are very well poised to do it.

If this story sounds like a fit for you, please send me an email: alex@polvi.co
I have a Yubikey account with MtGox. Withdrawals require a long-press of the key. If you have a significant amount of BTC in MtGox, I would recommend paying the $20 to get the two-factor authentication key for your account.
I've always wondered if the HN Topbar color option somehow influenced my subconscious...
Startups repeatedly make the same mistake of not talking to customers enough and dying as a result.

One of the most helpful guides is to try to make a mistake in the other direction. Try to talk to your customers too much. No early stage startup ever died from talking to their customers too much.
Since BTC is expected to be regulated like a currency, wouldn't participating in Zerocoin be basically money laundering?

If that is the case, participating in the Zerocoin network itself would be a crime. I don't think this is going to go anywhere. And if it does, then hope that the Secret Service doesn't catch you even touching this stuff...
My friends startup was acquired by LinkedIn, 2 year vesting period that is heavily backloaded.
The question of "Why does it change things if you hash a passwd in the DB?" always lingered in my mind and now it totally makes sense! Awesome and incredibly simple explanation, thanks!
Not really, it's silly to talk about expected value here. There's just no such distribution.
You mean... scoring in Bitcoins :-p
I think that politically this is a awful time for that.

Bitcoin is still largely unregulated, and this allow for all sorts of innovation, yet the media is already scaremongering around because it is "anonymous" and used for laundering and drug dealing.

If Zerocoin attracts true media attention, then you will get a political firestorm of people claiming that someone is making Bitcoin even worse for nefarious purposes. And of course, the paper mention of drug deal does not help with that.
There used to be an icon in the address bar letting you know the website has an RSS feed and that's been removed from Firefox.
Show HN: My pitch to Jack Black, Text Jack Black site. $47 per text, for charity
Wow...this is pretty damning stuff.

I wonder how all the 'pilers on' will respond. I assume an apology is in order.

Edit: I never knew anything much about this Loren figure, aside from the video....but I definitely will never trust anything he has to say again. As for Calacanis....was never a fan of his to begin with.

I get that Michael is abrasive, pushy and can sometimes be a dick to people he works with. I don't know him personally, but it is just pathetic to see how opportunistic his detractors are. I mean....what grade are these guys in? This is stuff you would expect from a middle school crowd. Only to know that these guys are grown-ass men.

shakes head
UberX in Seattle
Tokyo Leeches Sucked My Blood
No such thing: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/14777/why-isnt-there...

Get far enough into Reflection on Relativity and the author makes some interesting observations based on this tidbit: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/rrtoc.htm (But it is quite a ways in there.)
Some percentage of their revenue proportional to the use of the copyrighted material.

I don't mean that as a pat answer: that's the actual formula I'm proposing. Usually laws are written in dollar amounts for infringement which then affect the licensing fee charged. I think that assessing infringement or licensing on a percentage basis is much fairer, and that way artists who sample can do so without worrying about big licensing or legal fees, because they won't be liable until such time as they start seeing profits, at which point some fraction of those are shared with the other 'contributors.' This isn't a perfect system (I can think of many reasons against compulsory licensing, and the idea of price controls for copyright holders is also problematic), but at least it means that there's some linkage between clearance fees and actual economic benefit.
I used DejaVu for a math symbols app, and it covered every symbol required http://mathsymbols.net/

The main problem was Apple products, surprisingly. It's crazy the iPad and iPhone don't have better Unicode support!
Perhaps, but I think we're missing a crucial point of the article, which is that the culture needs to match the employees. For a startup that wants to hire a bunch of college grads, company trips + ping pong tables + Call of Duty + Friday keg sessions may actually increase productivity. Conversely, for a company trying to hire older, more experienced employees, such perks are considerably less appealing.

I think the general takeaway here is not that X is inherently bad, or Y is inherently good. Rather, it's that you need to know yourself, know the culture you're trying to create, and know the people you're trying to hire, rather than trying to imitate whatever perks happen to be trendy at the moment.
>would that truly be less preferable to Bitcoin or similar?

No idea without more detail on what that would look like.

But the ultimate goal of BTC and hopefully its forks and descendants is to replace that centralized (corruptible) human authority with a decentralized, transparent, fair, robust and reliable system instead.

It's not there yet, and may ultimately be impossible, formerly undecidable even, but it's opened a new avenue for research and experimentation that has never been possible before.

Whether Bitcoin itself succeeds or fails, that alone is a huge win imho.
It sounds more like you had a bad manager rather than Google is a bad company.
This would depend on the distribution of times at which other people are minting and redeeming Zerocoins ... but under reasonable assumptions, you'd probably want to go with something like the exponential(1/N) distribution, since that's the maximum entropy distribution on [0,∞] having mean N (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_entropy_probability_dis...). This has the somewhat surprising property that the most likely time for you to redeem a Zerocoin is immediately after minting it!
You guys in this thread whining about google:

It isn't google that has changed, it is the whole world which has changed.

Look at the things that some of you champion; the iPhone, the iPad...anything running iOS, anything made by apple computer, the company that is pushing the hardest against openness on the internet. Oh, you want some basic browser functionality like uploading files? Spend time learning objective C, writing an app, submitting it to us (can't let anything edgy get through! Don't use any APIs we don't like!) and then selling it in our closed off app store so that people stay in our warm walled in garden of shiny plastic.

You talk about "growth hackers" or "hustlers" as if these people are anything but parasites on our creative culture.

Yeah, google does some shitty things. Google+ is obnoxious. Some of the stuff happening with youtube is obnoxious, but google remains as one of the coolest companies in the world, still funding the coolest things in the world just because they can.

If a little bit of annoying google+ talk is the price that humanity has to pay for things like google driverless cars, google glass, and google fiber FINALLY holding bandwidth providers to task on bringing fiber to the curb, then GOOD.

I will continue to take that deal. The people whining about google+ will too.

Oh hey! You know we could just give it all back.

Back goes chrome! Remember when firefox leaked memory like a sieve but we all STILL ran it because there wasn't a viable alternative (unless you were double super extra hip and ran Opera)

Back goes android! Enjoy choosing between Apples complete joke of a mobile operating system and RIM, or palm.

Back goes google glass! Maybe Microsoft will sink the money required into developing a viable headmounted display.

Back goes google cars! Oh! Maybe Mercedes will license some garbage developed by a defense contractor in the 90s and sell it on their most expensive luxury cars.

Reading this thread reads like I'm reading the comments of a bunch of spoiled children.

If you seriously hate google+ this much, then good! Use all of these wonderful, world changing tools we have around us and "hustle" and "growth hack" your way into a brand new web browser and suite of free mail, spam filtering, document storage, and search.

I look forward to see it!
Not sure I understand the point of this article.

Is it that trying to improve reform regarding immigration with work visas in tech is too limited?

It rambles a bit at the beginning and then alludes to hard labor jobs, but doesn't really have any clear organization or discernable purpose.
I'm an electronic musician whose entire setup is oriented around my sampler, and I wholly agree with him. Don't project all your frustrations with the existing music industry onto his comment, you're blaming him for things he never actually said.
It is more like a credit balance though, and not a virtual currency. Purposefully, I imagine, to make accounting/taxes more straightforward.
I find it interesting that Facebook wont hire a kid with a degree from a community college here in the US, but will fight tooth and nail to hire someone with a degree from an Indian college that Mark probably couldn't pronounce the name of.
TL;DRzr (Weekend hack of a Summarizer) Open Sourced
But that's not what the article says. This sentence seems to summarize the thesis:

> This level of volatility, along with the difficulty of buying Bitcoins in the first place, and the substantial security risks, is what will stop Bitcoin from being a true alternative to state currencies

He is clearly predicting the future of Bitcoin here, all the while willfully missing the point that of course something that is truly a new form of money and can't be understood strictly by existing economic models is going to first see uptake driven by speculators and can only hope to become something akin to traditional currency much further down the line.

To your question, yes the onus is on bitcoin to prove its stability, but not through rhetoric. It will either happen or not in due time.
If you believe that then I have a lottery ticket to sell you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Firefox used to have an RSS icon in the address bar when a page referenced an RSS feed. This was an easy way to notify the user that a particular page supported RSS.

The icon was removed in Firefox 4, causing much annoyance among people who use RSS (c.f. http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/01/firefox-4-ditches-the-rss-b... )
That has not stopped Apple.

Going public does not mean you abandon the ideals your company was founded on.
As promised on previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523538 :)

Have fun, be good, enjoy! :)
How to become a Soundcloud superstar, one fake fan at a time
Knockoff Banana Strawberry Jello Salad Found on a Chinese Buffet Recipe
I'm really wondering how Chen and Gawker will be able to spin this. Really should have done this background work to begin with for such a serious allegation.
I came in to say this and didn't want to get all the heat. Thanks for stepping up. :)
I think I know how to Google. I never had any problems with Google products. I use Gmail, Analytics, Google+, YouTube, Chrome, Android and it all works bloody perfectly, and I am not even a Google supremacist.
Acknowledged. Mostly a facetious comment, as any known distribution could be found (over infinite time) and you'd only become pseudononymous (which is exactly what the original comment wouldn't like!)

On the other hand... It would be secure :) never withdraw. Anonymity through one way function/flow.
About half the wallets on this list now have a zero balance, so big wallet holders are moving coins.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/06/22/the-bitcoi...

Plus the gambling sites are making a lot of coin, and I cant' imagine they're just sitting on them http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2013/01/22/bitcoin-ca...
Merchants today don't peg BTC to USD. The value of BTC in USD floats.
Really? Why in the world would they do that? Effectively zero of the smart people I know browse YouTube.

Most of my programmer friends listen to podcasts, but I honestly have no idea what smart people do with YouTube.
The newly minted money is given to: the banks. Who benefits from that new money? The banks! Who benefits from the banks benefiting? The rich! The poor have to pay higher prices and see their raises lag the increased prices. The poor get poorer while the rich get richer.

Once your income substantially outstrips your daily need for food, water, shelter, etc inflation hurts you less as you are able to invest. The poor are always behind and thus pay the most for inflation.
You have anything to back that up? Don't they have an interview process that purports to determine actual candidate viability? are you saying merely being from the US AND having not a big name uni degree precludes you from even getting that far? Seems oddly weird and short sighted of their HR
>Google has overstayed the web's welcome.

Then stop using their products. Switch to bing, switch to Internet Explorer, get an iPhone and shut up about it.

No, google has not "overstayed the web's welcome", google has overstayed the welcome of a few entitled silicon valley golddiggers who will continue feeling wronged for the next 10 minutes until they realize what wonderful things google has created in the world for them to use.
There is nothing Google Glass does that my smartphone already can't.

And how is Apple waging war against openness? WebKit is open-source. They're pushing HTML5 against Flash (open vs proprietary). Darwin (OS X without Quartz and DPS) is open source. A few of the apps included with OS X are open-source.

Google cars? Driverless car research has been going on for years, both before and alongside Google.

Look, I'm not badmouthing their accomplishments. All I'm saying is that they're just not the company they used to be.
I can't speak about programming specifically, but for more general system engineering/administration I think I fall in this category and it has yet to hurt me.

I've had an interview or two over the years in which I surely lost out due to my inability to rattle off some bit of trivia about one thing or another, but it's probably for the best.

1) If the job was really so narrow that such a specific, rote depth of knowledge mattered I'd probably find it terribly boring.

2) If the interviewer is willing to write me off based on canned questions without actually conversing with me - the place where I feel I shine. I probably don't want to work for/with him/her.

Yes, there are surely exceptions to this, it's not a hard and fast rule, but as I said above it has worked out fine for well over a decade now.
Can I play as many times as I want?
Ruby’s Missing Data Structure
> Then stop using their products. Switch to bing, switch to Internet Explorer, get an iPhone and shut up about it.

I use Yahoo (flame me all you want), I use Firefox, and I do own an iPhone.

But I am not going to shut up about it, because Google is forcing me away even though they're the best at what they do.

I hate them because I care.
ya that real names thing is starting to piss me off. i get prompted for that way too often and it's way too hard to make that prompt go away. it seems designed to make you end up misclicking at some point trying to close it. and once you do every random possibly inappropriate video you ever liked or commented on will be tied to your real name? seriously?