skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree it's not fun. Probably because type-led programming suits me well, I find it feels like sketching the problem into types and connecting them up with algorithm. When I say type-led, I mean the use of types to define the problem, and the use of language features that make code dependent on attributes of types.

An approachable example of this in another language is Go's "range" operator, that automatically bounds loops to lists or ends them when a channel closes. Similar mechanisms are much more intricate and advanced in Ada.
This was possibly done to simply anchor [1] Whatsapp's value, should it seek to be acquired in the future.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
Yeah, especially now that the tip is Go 1.1 post-beta.

It's pretty common in any language that's seeing significant development, targeting a version that's not going to be too long in the tooth by the time you want to go to production.
I work at a YC startup, and we don't work a 24/7 grind. The VP of Engineering believes that it's not sustainable to work like that, and you can't build a successful company by burning out your engineers. Sure, when there are site issues, it's all-hands on deck, and if you need to get something in for the next push, then definitely you need to work your butt off, but that's just being professional. For the most part, the pace is really great, and we are all very productive.
Whatsapp uses XMPP nevertheless. That's not the problem. The problem is that it modifies it, to make it non compliant, it doesn't federate and it also offers no way to control your user name and password, using phone hardware identity instead.

There are several ways to address XMPP energy drain, some of which were proposed as XEPs. Google uses one of such methods (google queue). Facebook uses another.

Example: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38943
I would argue that paypal was the future tech of its time. It was in 1998 that paypal launched.
Technically absolutely yes, but morally and ethically I find the bitcoin scheme utterly disgusting.
> foam dart / BBQ / bro time

Oh god, all my life I've seen people waste so much time and then claim that they're so busy. It has developed into a huge pet peeve of mine, especially when they get pissed when I arrive to work at 8 AM and get up to leave at 5 PM. And I've done more in those 9 hours than they've done in their last two 16-hour days.
I've asked out-of-town job candidates "How many gas stations do you think are in this town?" but I've not had much success with that. I think for engineers it's vital to be able to do order-of-magnitude estimations and I'm trying to get my kids to learn that but it doesn't seem to come naturally to people.
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ is an example.

Note that the initial values (60,000MHash/sec, and a very tidy profit in 3 months) are appropriate only for one of the specialised hardware options. If you start filling it in with realistic values for a PC with a graphics card (see, e.g., https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison) you'll likely find the calculations running rather less in your favour.

Profiting is also much easier when bitcoins are $188 each than it is when they are $10 each.
If only all requirements were up front and found in the initial discourse.
PPCoin FAQ
Mining isn't free. You will need to purchase hardware if you want to mine in a capacity that's actually profitable. If those coins depreciate, then all that mining is for naught, same as if you had bought them with cash.

If you want to get by with the hardware you already own, look into Litecoin mining, then sell those Litecoins for cash or Bitcoin. Mt.Gox will support Litecoin transactions (indeterminate ETA).

Honestly I think the easiest path is to just buy coins and hope they continue to appreciate. I remember not too long ago buying a few when they were in their ~$90s USD, and then regretting buying them at that "high" price. Now it's more than doubled.
I've added URL validation now. Apparently the way I was doing it before wasn't as robust as I would've hoped. Thanks!
From what i've read, it looks like the server advertises all the TLS it supports, the client picks the highest version, but then an attacker sends an RST and the client goes to the next version in the list. Is that accurate? (The only other downgrade attack I saw was on False Start which has since been disabled in Chrome)

Could (or should) they support an option in the browser to require only the highest possible version of a protocol? Or is there some other fix required to mitigate the attack?
Hey this is really interesting. Thanks very much for posting this.
To be a better UI/UX designer, go to a foreign country. And stay for awhile.

ftfy.
Ancient whales surprise scientists
I made this one because I use it when posting articles. I think a small link looks a lot better than a large one. But I guess that's preference.
How many developers in NYC care about social good?
We're betting there are a lot. At Amicus (http://amicushq.com), you can do good and do well. You can improve lives and work on interesting problems. For instance:

We helped win marriage equality: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/the-social-network-effect-that-is-helping-legalize-gay-marriage/265793/

We're well funded: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/amicus/

We work on interesting problems:

- A realtime collaborative community environment for supporters of non-profits to communicate, and provide each other encouragement. This will involve realtime javascript with node.js, socket.io, and backbone.js

- Machine learning and/or statistical analysis on demographics and how they relate to outreach/fundraising effectiveness

- Open source projects, including our own in house, soon to be open sourced, real time Model View Presenter javascript framework with bi-directional data binding

- Realtime data visualization with D3, including D3's map projection, to create data visualization's to help client's understand the impact Amicus is having on their organization

- And for lulz: A Minecraft mod/voxel.js project for devirtualizing virtualized servers. Basically a minecraft mod that allows you to control AWS instances by putting down/picking up blocks :-)

We're hiring Rubyists and Frontenders.

Sound interesting? Want to change the world for the better? To apply just send an email with a cover letter and either a resume or link to your github to jobs@amicushq.com
Hmm, thanks! That should be fixed from now on.
Thanks for pointing out that UI confusion. I will fix it :)

You pay the equivalent of $74 in BTC according to the live exchange rate. So you pay USD 1 less.

It's not a ripoff, it's a discount. example: Right now, you'd pay 0.3333 BTC.

Again, I see that the UI isn't 100% obvious, I will make sure that it is updated shortly.
Sim City wasnt written in web technology and needed to be online, its possible to write applications using web technology that dont need to be online.

Those arguments have nothing to do with each other, 'the web' doesnt equal 'store everything in cloud based servers'
The author is the one who narrowed the field, and unnecessarily so, to make a point.

He starts the criteria with "billionaires".. 0.000000215% of the worlds population.

Then to narrow it down farther he says they must be working on 'cool sci-fi shit'. Ie: they can't just be doing innovative things, they must be sci-fi things, and even if they are sci-fi, they must be 'cool'.

Of course there are only a few people who meet that criteria.
As far as I can tell it's not available at all in the UK, I had no idea it was included by default on some phones.
This seems like a very misaimed rant, for this particular piece of tech.

It's a collaborative text editor. What point is there to using it offline? All the disadvantages you state are already inherent in the concept of "collaborative text editor", whether or not it's web-based.
I've been using this for 42 days and it's pretty clever - it's mischaracterised less than a handful of events in that time.

Step counting is terribly wrong though - it has me at 100-150spm for walking when the Garmin footpod is reporting 55-60spm. The GPS tracking can also be wildly inaccurate but that's the iPhone, not Moves, at fault there.

Needs a proper export function too.

On the whole, B+, "Would take this app on a dirty weekend but not marry it."
Savings only decrease in value when they're not exposed to some risk. Cash in a safe is going to devalue at the rate of inflation because it's exposed to (almost) no risk. Cash in a savings account is exposed to minimal risk and (at least in the UK and NL) can see interest rates at about the same rate as inflation. The more risk the capital is exposed to, the greater the return.
That was a rather stupid mistake on my part. The environment was wrong. Thanks!
> It was like this: Option A is that I transfer, stay at Google, but may have an early-term smear of my Perf history and might have to cut bribes to people with HR database access in a few years when I rise to a level where even early, cosmetic, irrelevant stuff counts

Sorry but that's complete and utter crap.

If you had transferred to another group and consistently performed well no promo committee would have cared about what happened in your first few months. If anything they would have looked at it and thought something along the lines of "well he had a rough first few months, but since then he's been kicking butt. Either his first team was a bad fit, or he learned and grew since then."

Promo committees (and hiring committees for that matter) have to sort through conflicting feedback all of the time. When you're on a promo/hiring committee you are constantly "reading through" the feedback to look for patterns and trends, and trying to build a broader context to help interpret any outliers. A bad patch early on wouldn't have mattered, as long as your trajectory afterwards was positive.

Many (very) senior developers offered to sit down and talk with you privately. I'm sure if you had taken them up on their offers they would have said the same thing. There is nothing that happened in your months here that couldn't have been fixed by transferring to a group that was a better fit and focusing more on producing great software than on posting to the internal mailing lists.
This is a truth accepted by economists of basically all political persuasion at this point. The best book on the subject is Barry Eichengreen's "Golden Fetters", but you can get a faster sense of things by going to NBER (nber.org), searching for "great depression" or "gold standard" and walking through the results.
Electricity is pretty cheap. The kind of gear required to make the electric bill a significant problem would be a bankrupting level of capital expense. I would estimate it would take a pretty large rack and tens of thousands of dollars to consume several kilowatts at which time hundreds of dollar energy bills would be a rounding error.

Also you need to correct for HVAC.

If its winter a KWh of BTC is the same heat as a KWh equiv of natgas, although the natgas is a little cheaper than electrical, by about a factor of 2. So spend $10 on a absolutely roaring system (About a KW continuously 24x7 which you're not going to be doing on non-dedicated hardware) and save about $4 on my gas bill so the NET is an expense of $6.

In the summer you have to correct for the overall system coefficient of performance, and people who have no idea what a COP is usually assume its "1" (legally mandated by local building code to be a minimum of 10 where I live, your experience may vary). So spend $10 on electricity and add an extra buck or so for HVAC cooling capacity.
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a 2013 dollar has one-tenth the purchasing power of the 1950 version. By contrast, bitcoins have been skyrocketing in value. This sounds like a good thing, but for a currency it's really not. An economy where bitcoins were the means of exchange would have experienced 98% deflation over the past year. No one would be able to repay any loans, or really do business at all. What we want out of a currency is not price appreciation but stability. Monetary economists differ on whether the optimal stability is inflation of 0% or in the low single digits. Nobody thinks 98% deflation is healthy, and all but a small minority seem to think any deflation at all is a bad thing.

This needs to be repeated until exhaustion.
I do see the huge potential benefits of the system but have a couple of concerns.

I'm concerned that a 'one password' for everything can be more of a liability if your password is stolen/lost and make phishing potentially more lucrative.

Also concerned about a centralised password store - people make mistakes and if there was some DB leak/hack it could be damaging as it would not be contained within one system (if I've understood how it all works correctly).
It's very hard to buy bitcoins - unless you're in the US or a tier 1 european city. You need a verified account at an exchange (mtgox is the biggest one) and then need to wire them money, etc. It's complicated.

The easier ways to get bitcoins are to sell something on bitmit or something like that. Or, you could try localbitcoins and try to buy from someone in your city.

In the US it's fairly easy..
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Mark Zuckerberg and his tax bill
Yelp's database is largely user-driven - businesses do not have to be hip to technology to appear there. The presence of a business on Yelp speaks more to the technological savviness of its customer demographic than the business itself.

That said, I actually know a piano mover in NYC and he's not on Yelp, or any website. His business is very much conducted via word of mouth and physical exchange of business cards.
It's more a failing of mainstream programming languages having nulls.
10 steps to creating a new technology product
He is charging .3333 of a bitcoin for a $75 gift card. Which is fair since a bitcoin is $223
Debate: Windows 8, Can this OS be saved?
jordigh is being sarcastic.
> 1. Applies to most european countries as well.

No.

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/western-europe-vs-rel...

> 2. And what EU member country doesn't have this?

Germany, Austria, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving#Persona_non_grata

Mind you, the man is absolute human garbage, but the entire point of protecting speech is protecting the most despicable kind. It's fairly easy to tolerate the pleasant variety.

> 3. The US has only been invaded by ...

My point still stands. Even if the US throws this one under the bus in the future, my point still stands. It's not about a perfect record, but a good one. The US has a good record on this.

> 4. ... Hell, NYC doesn't even try to gus it up. They call it "stop and frisk".

I live in the NYC area, so I know about this a bit. In each case, the person consents to the search. Yes, it's pretty scary when a cop walks over to you and tells you to empty your pockets. You need to have balls to say "No" and "I do not consent to any searches". But then again, any right given to you is pointless if you don't have the balls to exercise it.

> 5. You have the right to vote. Not all states have to make it easy or convenient to do so.

You don't have a right to a convenient process, merely a process. It's a wonderful thing to reach a point where people have the wherewithal to bitch about how convenient voting is, rather than if their vote is actually counted. Mind you, I'm of the same mind as you, I think we should be able to vote on the Internet. Lately, my home state of New Jersey has made an effort to permit this (albeit, in response to a natural disaster).
Zerply Adds Work Images And Promoted Opportunities To Help Job Candidates Focus
I wonder if News Corp realizes just how many people support Aereo now given this threat.
A much better and less biased article than the 'Bitcon' one. It shows once more that no one really knows what Bitcoin is and what's going to happen to it.

If you must compare Bitcoin to gold, consider the current price of gold, imagine that we didn't know it existed until yesterday and then suddenly it appeared. Bitcoin currently fulfills a niche in the same way that gold did in the past (and still does).
That is a bit misleading. A lot of gold is not on the markets for various reasons -jewelry, hoarders, some electronics.

So you should count only liquid gold (hehe) ... the amount that you can actually buy. I think it is much smaller than 8 trillion.
Over a sufficiently large timescale, I think is an inevitable scenario. However, I have no idea whether that large timescale is measured in decades, centuries or millennia. If it's the latter, then it's probably not a huge problem.
A bit off topic, but I've been learning about languages like ML and Scala, and what does everybody have against static typing?
I feel like if we used type systems better, we'd have a lot fewer problems. You can prove that your programs have no bugs! That's much stronger than unit testing.

When thinking 'static types', does everybody just think C/C++/Java?
Is it upfront costs? My first ML program, I took half an hour to write a function that output all the words in a trie. It gets easier, and more interesting afterward, but I might have given up had it not been for a class.
Are static types too rigid for prototyping? Scala, Haskell and OCaml have REPLs.

Some of the "experimental features of static type systems" like dependent types are really powerful; you can make some strong proofs about the logic of your program. I'd be willing to give up (or at least try going without) duck typing for that.
It attracts only young impressionable shutins to the startup and they feel like if they aren't working 18 hours a day they are slacking.

And the 40 year olds who haven't accomplished anything yet, and hear the clock ticking, and realize they are running out of "at bats".

The reason this meme exists is that there is a huge economic benefit to (some, not all) founders and VCs to perpetuating it.

Yeah, I mean for a founder. I wouldn't expect an employee with minimal or no equity to go all that. What the heck would be their incentive to do it? I do it because A. I actually enjoy it in a way, and B. I stand to become very wealthy if we succeed.
That's exactly the whole point of Operational Transformation. It's the "algorithm" that powers Google Docs, and stores data as a sequence of transformations that can be applied ("can operate") on a previous document state to build a new one.
Speaking of a better bitcoin, why can't the proof of work aspect be something that's useful instead of a huge waste of electricity?

Perhaps solving hard problems like protien folding, or a big virtual CPU that people can send processes to?
I do see your point, but the vast majority of Go production code runs on Linux/amd64, so yes, that is the most meaningful result.
You're missing my point though.

The operator passed on personal information without knowing if a Hetzner employee might be the bad guy. Hetzner passed on personal information without knowing the server owner might be the bad guy.

If the operator had contacted the server owner directly to let him know his box was hacked, the result would have been the same.

Why did the operator have the expectation that an uplink of the server wouldn't just forward the mail to the server owner?
I hope the author spends some time learning about programming languages and programming language research. The core point is simply false, and the evidence to support it ranges from flimsy to nonsense.

"The plain truth about programming languages is that while there have been many small gains in the last 20 years, there have been no major advances"

There have been many major advances. The fact that they were not included in java does not mean they do not exist.

>There have been no new paradigms

Arguably there have only ever been two paradigms: imperative and functional (object oriented and procedural simply being minor variations of the imperative paradigm). It is not reasonable to expect entirely new paradigms to be discovered on anything other than an incredibly rare basis.

>I'm not even aware of major new language features

The first thing this should do is trigger your "I should research new language features" instinct, not your "I should assume there are none" instinct.

>beyond some aspects of static type systems

So, he does know some, but chooses to ignore them because why exactly?

>The core of virtually every extant programming language is largely similar.

No. And it is entirely possible for new things to replace old things, programming languages are not required to take the C++ approach of accumulating every possible feature that has ever existed.

>Some of the things Haskell and Scala's type systems can express are astonishing; but I have also seen each type system baffle world-renowned experts

That is an awfully bold statement to just pull out of nowhere with nothing to back it up. Who are these experts, and what baffled them exactly? Haskell has been a hotbed of programming language research in the last decade, with a large number of advances being made and being put into actual use, then more advancements being built on top of those. Dismissing the entire concept of type systems based on an unnamed "expert" who was somehow "baffled" by some unmentioned aspect of the language is insane.

>Verification techniques and tools have made major advances

Yeah, like those crazy type system things you just dismissed as being unconvincing, oversold, and baffling to experts. Go learn agda and then tell me nothing new has happened in 20 years.
In solo mining, chances are that the difficulty will increase faster than your GPU can increase the odds of solving a block. Statistically, it would already take years to find a block and collect just 25 BTC (and by that time the reward may be halved again to just 12.5). But right now, you can join a pool and still get some fractions of a bitcoin over time, and get some profit. It costs me $2.70 to run my GPU for a week and collect 0.05 BTC, or ~$10 at today's rates.
This is brilliant.

One problem with today's chip manufacturing tech is if you want to build system with multiple manufacturing technologies(digital/RAM/Flash/Analog) it increases your price by much because you have to package each part(which also limits your designs), test it and assemble it on a relatively large pcb. So in order to save money, you manufacture everything using the same un-optimal process.

So this is why microcontrollers like the arduino have relatively low memory.

Now if you could easily and cheaply assemble miniature electronic components - suddenly you get the optimal composition of your circuit, by picking an matching low cost components.

So you want to make an arduino cpu with megabytes of ram and flash ? now that's possible and very cheap(probably in the cents). Even something like microcontroller that could run linux and python would seem possible.

Can't wait to see it deployed.
Navy to deploy lasers on ships in 2014
A Conjecture About Good Software Design
Yeah, for example, there are web services whose design goal is <30ms completed request so they can guarantee their client timely data based on a SLA. If this "real-time" project can't guarantee time of transactions, it's not "real-time".
Krugman has been doing it for 10 years now ... no effect.
I wrote the article. In it, I clearly outline that the topic of discussion is -- specifically -- childlike wonder and what happens when it mixes with wealth. Not "that every wealthy person should behave in a particular way."
Interesting. (Ironically, the site is broken - clicking the links doesn't seem to do anything. Perhaps it is "Optimized for IE"? ;))
Persona should add two-factor authentication.

For that matter, any open-ID or similar technology should add that.