skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wouldn't be profitable for you mine bitcoins. It's too late in the game to do so. You could look into other kinds of crypotocurrencies out there.
> Today you have to have a good reason for your product to NOT be web-based.

For a document that the visitor cannot afford to lose, or for anything in which privacy, security or personal control are issues, a Web-based document is obviously a mistake. Why do you think the big players in cloud-based and Web-based storage and applications are having such a hard time getting people to adopt them?

The answer is obvious -- the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. The risk of losing sensitive content or having it be compromised or stolen is too great.

Even games, a less serious endeavor, suffer when they adopt a Web-based approach. Look at the brouhaha that followed from making the most recent SimCity version work online-only:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-03-15-ea-defends-...

A quote:

------------------------------------

"So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes," Bradshaw admitted. "But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision...The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology."

A number of upset fans in the comments section to Bradshaw's update were not assuaged by the explanation. As one user going by the handle klymen wrote, "With all due respect, to write an article about why the new SimCity has to be always online and not to mention DRM or the anti-piracy measure even once, is dishonest and downright disrespectful. It seems like that you don't think very highly of your audience. Yes, the DRM issue is a sensitive topic, but to avoid it, not to mention it as one of the reason why SimCity is always online, shows absolute disconnect and contempt for your fans. We're not stupid."

------------------------------------

The above is just about a game, not a business transaction or potentially sensitive communication.

As to data loss, consider incidents like this:

Title: Amazon's Cloud Crash Disaster Permanently Destroyed Many Customers' Data

Link: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-28/tech/29958976...

Quote: "In addition to taking down the sites of dozens of high-profile companies for hours (and, in some cases, days), Amazon's huge EC2 cloud services crash permanently destroyed some data.

The data loss was apparently small relative to the total data stored, but anyone who runs a web site can immediately understand how terrifying a prospect any data loss is."

In conclusion, and to second the SimCity gamer's quote above, we're not stupid.
The #bitcoin IRC channel on freenode has a bot command/script that tells you how you will influence the total price if you sell a given amount of coins.
Not sure how this turned into PHP, but yes. It does indeed suck.
Yeah, ok, I get that the article did say there is "only one" Elon Musk, but pointing out the small handful of individuals in a similar space doesn't seem like a very solid refutation of the points made.

And with the possible exception of Branson, none of them are close to doing as big of things, with as much success, and as much inspirational flair and passion, as Musk.
Or you could integrate our API ;)
Would you draw meaningful conclusions from the x64 measurements in-general -- knowing that they don't hold for x86 ;-)
European scientists propose world’s largest quantum network
I'd like to disagree on a few points

#1 Instant

This makes such a currency severely handicapped for general transaction use in an economy, and that in turn damages goods and service preference -- the ability to use it to exchange one good or service for another.

This can be solved by services which provides such functionality and process the transaction later. This is certainly a limitation in Bitcoin but you are not going to process the transaction manually anyway. There will be a third-party that will handle this stuff.

#2 Anonymity

You can buy Bitcoins with paper dollars making you securely anonymous. You can even (probably) trade Bitcoins for some work you did anon.

#3 Pyramid Scheme

Early adopters in Bitcoins benefit. That's downright right. But at least you get to choose if you are an early adopter. You don't chose to take a loan. You'll probably have to apply and go through their process. You don't chose to be in the position of making "Quantitative Easing" or benefiting from it.

#4 Bitcoin is destructible

I'm also concerned with this, but some attention by the owners is required. If enough attention and development is awarded to security in Bitcoins, this will only happen few times to be noticed.

#5 Taxes

Let's say you "buy" Bitcoins (whether for cash or in exchange for a good or service you provide) at a time when they have a "value" of $5 each against the US dollar. You spend them when they have a "value" of $20 each. You have a capital gain of $15.

I agree that's a problem, but it's manageable nevertheless. Companies are managing this already. People can manage this with the assistance of a third-party. You are making a profit, so everything is good :)
I think the part you are missing and what Whatsapp's engineers are referring to is Google storing all your private conversations and data mining them for information to target you with ads. Whatsapp does not store your messages.
I kinda always assumed Larry Ellison would do more to push the envelope (in a evil overlord sorta way).
Cablevision Widens Its Wi-Fi Net
Yeah, it is fairly rare. I think it's because , to some degree,people try really hard to make families conform to a certain idea of family life, so you get a lot of noise like "can you have it all?" - what exactly does that even mean? - or many a fodder for Dr Phil specials. Really the best thing my parents did was treat us like people who had their own lives, not some dogs that were supposed to be domesticated and bred.

Indeed. As far as we can tell, Gates is quite the family man. The reality maybe opposite, or it may be in line with what we see. Either way these are people with lives that don't or shouldn't fall into any static schema that we formulate in our heads. I think everyone has a little TMZ in them. While we like to look at the Hollywood and People magazine set and decry them for being trashy, we do the exact same thing; we just have our own celebrities that we pester.
Except Google only acquired Youtube after Google Video failed to attract its users away.
Here's an interesting question: Suppose there's a guy who by sacrificing his family life (I mean really rotten here, messy divorce, kids hate him etc) could bring us electric cars, private space travel, and other "good for the many"s. Would you want him to? Would you be that guy?
The notion of "the positions eliminated were predominantly _fashion buyers_, who most likely were watching fashion shows and aspiring fashion makers on YouTube because travel budgets had been cut that same year."

Would be interesting, but I wonder at sources. An outcry of justification of said-Youtube viewing would probably have been heard or referenced.

The main references in articles are "back office support," corporate, and cashiers:

This article continues the theme (that you will find on most articles) of the YouTube volume [1]

Kramer shared an example: There were 4,800 employees at the HQ in January 2012, and in one month they had watched five million YouTube videos during work hours. He said that 35 percent of bandwidth at HQ was used for "loafing off."
One big consequence was the culling of staff. Now, a little more than a year later, 1,600 of those workers have been sent packing.

Jan, 2013
The moves will eliminate about 5,000 department-store jobs, 300 more at headquarters and regional offices and 265 Eckerd positions — all told, less than 2 percent of the company's work force of 290,000. [2]

The latest job cuts were concentrated in about 100 stores where sales fell the most, and the eliminations hit back office positions. A Penney spokeswoman said none of the cuts affected staff who deal with customers. [3]

March, 2013 [4]
J.C. Penney Co. (JCP) is cutting an additional 2,200 jobs to trim costs as Chief Executive Officer Ron Johnson’s revamp of the department-store chain causes sales to plunge.

The positions to be eliminated include back-office administrators in stores and district offices as well as store leadership positions, Joey Thomas, a spokesman, said in an e- mail yesterday. About 10 percent of J.C. Penney’s 1,100 stores cut their headcounts because of sales volume shifts, he said.

Johnson said last week that 19,000 J.C. Penney employees have lost their jobs in the past year as his turnaround struggles to gain traction.*

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/jcpenney-coo-michael-kramer-c...

[2] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=88710&page=1#.UW...

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/07/jc-penney-layoffs-s...

[4] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-07/j-c-penney-cutting-...
While I agree with you, that article has been written to death.
But how do you buy bitcoins? So far i haven't found a single website that actually worked for me.
As long as people think that bitcoin is going to crash, it will continue going up. In stock parlance, that's called "climbing the Wall of Worry".

It's only after the last cynics have been suckered in, most believe that "you just can't lose" is when it is going to crash.
You're so right. In fact, Walmart actually already does cash checks.

http://www.walmart.com/cp/Check-Cashing/632047
and nick collides are history too with TS being implemented
That's fine that it doesn't. It has other severe issues, about which users aren't notified in Whatsapp PR talk.
Quoting from the article: "So ... bitcoins are without intrinsic value as assets, yet they have risen too fast in value to be much use as a currency. Kind of makes your head hurt, doesn't it? But it also sounds a bit like a familiar commodity, gold, that's also been on a roll, with its dollar price quintupling over the past decade. Gold has, over time, not been the greatest of assets to invest in. It's not the greatest of currencies, either: Back when the gold standard was widely adhered to, nations struggled regularly with deflation. There's persuasive evidence that the primary cause of the Great Depression was a refusal to unlink currencies from gold until too late. Still, gold has held onto its purchasing power over time."

I agree with the author: bitcoins are very similar to gold ("the people's currency"), except they're digital and their supply is mathematically fixed. So ... how much would a Bitcoin sell for if the world ever comes to value it like gold?

Granted, that's a big if, but let's entertain the thought for speculative fun. All gold mined since the start of civilization is currently valued at around $8.8 trillion.[1] Divide this figure by the maximum of 21 million bitcoins that can ever be created, and the figure is over $400,000 per Bitcoin. So the answer is, in the order of a few hundred dollars per milli-Bitcoin.

For reference, all bitcoins in existence are currently valued at $0.002 trillion.[2]

--

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Production

[2] http://www.bitcoinwatch.com
Moves for iPhone - Let your iPhone tell you how much you move
Saying that you want to code while not coding is the oldest tactic in the book. I have been hearing 'gee, I wish I could code' since the 90's. Keep in mind I am talking about people who are hired specifically to create new software, one part of which is software construction. The trick is to maintain coder cred without revealing your true intentions or actually coding. The company doesn't matter. Maybe Google has more than most that are still trying to code, but I guarantee there are a ton of developers who are trying to maintain the appearance.
I think it's a technically interesting topic, but I wouldn't say I've bought into it even though I figure into the upper end of this poll.

I just happened to have multiple high-end GPUs and discovered bitcoin about the time GPU miners were coming to the fore.

I expect the stream of stories, particularly those which are little more than price reports have more to do with those who have "bought in" seeking to spread and re-affirm their bullishness than any technical merit or interest.

The type of story and the nature of comments within are virtually identical to what you'll find on traditional trader forums during any strong trend.
You can only load verizon/actiontec signed firmware via the UI. I suppose you probably could reflash it directly if you connected leads to the smt chip on the board, that is assuming it's not on the SOC and assuming the stage 1 loader doesn't verify the signature. It's mostly to prevent rollback attacks where a known vulnerable firmware is flashed to take advanatge of a flaw.

discussion of the firmware enforcement process: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27282376-Actiontec-Rev-I-fi...

(technically it's implemented by an automatic process that verizon runs that logs in via their TR069 carrier management port and then does various (unlogged things) including enforcing that you're on approved firmware.

yeah the box has two antennas each one attached to the radios. Almost all of the other actiontec customers use it as a 2nd channel to get 300mbit, but for whatever reason verizon's is set to only use 1.

https://www.actiontec.com/products/datasheets/AEI%20MI424WR%...

datasheet for the product, verizons feature set is slightly different but it's just firmware differences.
Kiddies are DDoS'ing to annoy other users and to prove that they are capable of taking down the nodes.

All servers on the largest IRC networks are very well connected to the internet and servers that are not, wont be able to last long on these networks.

Some IRC servers wont allow you to create new IRC channels during a network split, so an attack where the network is being split constantly can cause quite a lot of annoyance for the rest of the users.
Sadly? Not for me. Here is one big reason I prefer services like WhatsApp (I don’t actually use WhatsApp itself): I do not want the presence reporting.

I want to send a message to people and they read and respond whenever they want. I want people to message me and I read and respond whenever I want.

I don’t want to deal with ping, hey, you are online why are you not responding. This is why half my Gtalk contacts are always “away” even if they are at the keyboard: presence status has become useless, let’s just get rid of it.
Yeah, that's my point. OP criticized the US policy and presented the Canadian system as an alternative when it isn't.

In fact, the only benefit here seems to be for founders, but given the comments about the lack of angel/VC money in Canada, fulfilling the requirements looks to be difficult.
Uh.. you gonna back that up with some proof or reasoning? Or are you just trying to spread FUD? What's your gripe with data mining anyway, and you can always use OTR.
SO 74 Bitcoins are worth 75$ value Amazon giftcard? How is this not ripoff? I mean 1 Bitcoin is like 140$ and if you buy Amazon giftcards in bulk I assume one can get some sort of price reduction.
> Inflation is an incentive to spend your money on stuff you don't really need

Most of the purchases we make are not to satisfy core needs, but wants. You buy slightly more expensive delicious foods instead of cheaper boring foods. You strive to live in a decent environment rather than a mud hut because the former is more pleasant than the latter. You buy things or experiences that are unnecessary to survival, but bring some form of happiness. (Research, has, however shown that buying experiences leads to greater happiness than buying tangible goods!) The list goes on. We do this in part because because we have dopamine. Eliminate dopamine and we not only struggle to feel pleasure, but our brains also stop functioning properly.

Nobody ever says it, but inflation is really a good thing because of the way our brains are wired up.

> you're just killing savings (which are the best safety net there is)

Some savings are good to smooth out the bumps in the road, but when people save too aggressively people reduce their spending and the economy also slows. When the economy slows, you're more likely to find yourself out of work and having to use those savings so you don't end up living in that mud hut!

> and inducing a misallocation of productive resources

Your conclusion is a non sequitur.
Seriously, you make good counterpoints, but the adhoms are not called for. Not cool.
And yet we have still have "Mobile UX experts" who can't code their "UX"
If you are from Europe then https://bitcoin-24.com
Make a SEPA transfer, it costs 1.24 euro, then you can trade and withdraw any time. Beware, withdraws usually take couple of days.
Funny, I run into the exact same problem on the exact same platform. It's what I dislike most about working in .NET.

One thing I've found that works fairly well is using the Pomodoro technique, where I force myself for 25 minutes to just work. That means even during those 15-30 seconds of compiling I can't load up Hacker News or Reddit. It helps, but it's also a little tough for me to enforce (on myself).
Plus, since my money is constantly increasing in value, I can buy something "useless" every month and still have the same amount of money. Inflationary money I stick in deposits so I loose a little less than usual, deflationary - I spend.
Zequals: the new symbol that will make us all better at sums
If this was Reddit this would pretty much be /thread, however I propose the following question:

While this may be a good estimate, what about businesses not on Yelp?

"Professional Piano tuner" doesn't seem the most technologically advanced profession, so I think it's safe to assume that there are several, if not dozens more in existence in the NY area.
Yes, but a lot more of people marry than try to put rockets into space!

Also, it's not like Elon its doing all the math and engineering, he has people that does that for him, which is the hardest thing in the putting-rockets-into-space business
Technically, the whole point of OT is to allow for "some advanced [...] peer syncing or something"; any OT peer can actually synchronize state against any other peer. The original OT applications were all peer-to-peer apps. It's very similar to git, actually: everyone is on a particular commit[1], where each commit has another commit as its parent; clients can create regular commits, and thus move apart in state-space; and then they can accept others' commits to move back together (creating a merge commit in the process.) Very decentralized.

Ever since Etherpad/Google Wave/Google Docs, though, OT has been consistently mangled into a hub-and-spoke design, where there's a server who keeps a canonical state, and the OT tie-breaking algorithm is always decided in the server's favor.

Used in this fashion, it's not much different (actually a bit higher-overhead than) just having the server arbitrarily accept and temporally-order input operations in a way it likes, and then send back a single overwriting transformation to all clients to move them from their last server-known commits to the new server-canonical commit. (In other words, what any multiplayer game's logic server does.)

[1] One major difference is that OT "commits" are referred to by their vector-clock, instead of by their SHA. Cryptographic hashes are nice, and would give OT even cooler properties if it could use them, but they're a bit too slow for something that gets regenerated with every character typed. CRCs might be fast enough, but in an actually-distributed peer-to-peer system you'll get real collisions fast.
If you're curious where these rivers are, take a look at a Map of California Rivers that I made a few years ago[1]. Note that nearly the entire Sierra Nevada range drains through the San Francisco Bay. Also note the small blue globs along the rivers (e.g. Yuba) - these are reservoirs, which provide some degree of flood protection, though probably not enough for the size of event described.

1. https://sites.google.com/site/calirivermap/
> society would be better without such schemes.

This is still Hacker news right?

crypto currency could be one of the most exciting things to come out of this decade.
Was Musk actually a billionaire? My impression is that he got a few hundred million from Paypal but never corrects anybody when they overestimate how much he got. He nearly bankrupt himself with SpaceX and Tesla apparently.
"Do you think you would have wanted to know everything from the start (before you even did anything on our site)?" - Yes.

For what it's worth, I'm interested, but not sufficiently interested to sign-up for yet another account until I get "enough" information ("enough" being like porn - I know it when I see it).

-

"Can I choose which companies I am shown to?
We'll show your profile to all participating employers. If you aren't comfortable with that, please email us at info@hireart.com and let us know which companies you're interested in." (https://www.hireart.com/edchallenge)

I am selective about companies that I apply to work for. The thought of having to send an email, instead of just having check-boxes next to each company that I'm interested in, is an extra, unnecessary step.

-
Edited for clarity
It's time everyone understood a fundamental precept of startup acquisition rumors:

If an acquisition price is leaked before the deal is completed, the acquiree has no intention of selling.

In a private acquisition, there are only two parties in a position to leak: the acquirer and the acquiree. The acquirer, which has shareholders, competitors, and lots of money, has no incentive to leak the price on the table, or even the fact that there is a table. It gives away too much information to competitors and creates an unwanted news cycle. So in fact they'll be pissed if information about the negotiation is leaked.

If the acquiree actually wants to do a deal, they don't want to piss off the potential acquirer, so they'll keep their mouths shut. But they might have plenty of reasons to leak the negotation price, particularly if they're a company that is losing money and wants to inflate the company's valuation before another round of private financing. Going before investors saying "We turned down a billion dollars from Google, maybe you heard about it" creates a nice focal point for the ensuing discussion about the company's valuation.

Negotiating in bad faith like this happens all the time, most famously with Facebook/Yahoo! (2006) and Groupon/Google (2010). So the next time you read another news story about an acquisition rumor that includes a price tag, ignore it, because the story's not for you; it's for a future investor.

(Note that the foregoing logic does not apply if the acquiree is publicly traded, because the deal must be approved by shareholders, so the acquisition price is always "leaked" before the papers are signed.)
A symptom of this: we have Object Oriented languages that can't produce UI elements that are objects. And that's because we can't figure out how to let objects live from one web request to another? And that's because despite all the new database paradigms, nobody has made a widget-object model that can be saved to the database and reloaded transparently, and that's because our models of serializability of objects are brittle and unsafe (see the recent YAML bugs), and that's because we have no good systems for seamlessly migrating data structures from one version to another
XMPP performance on mobile platforms, especially on subpar networks, is pretty bad. It's designed for always-on networks and is a huge battery drain even if you can maintain that connection.
The issue was driving me and my friends crazy. I figured I could solve it!