skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Two benefits are that bitcoins are inherently deflationary and transactions are anonymous. Given the recent slew of fiscal crises and increasing concerns about online privacy, these are two strong points in bitcoin’s favor—or whatever future crypto-currency arises.

This was the funniest thing to read for me. It flies in the face of two of the biggest complaints I see about Bitcoin (the third being the "it has no inherent value, not even status as legal tender").

You mention that Brett Gordon is disagreeing with many people when he claims that being deflationary is a benefit. Even in this same article you see the exact opposite being said:

> Unfortunately, as those familiar with Paul Krugman’s writings on liquidity traps know, Bitcoin’s known and finite supply dooms it as a workable replacement currency.

So there's two completely contradictory positions on that issue. But also on the anonymous transaction issue. Every bitcoin transaction is quite obviously public, so that right adjacent to this quote is Chris Robert's:

> The bubble can just grow and grow, so long as... the fundamental lack of anonymity doesn’t bother anyone.

So in the same article we have economists saying built-in deflation and anonymity are benefits of Bitcoins, while others say deflation will kill any chance of viability as a currency and that Bitcoin has no anonymity. What's a person to think, besides that many economists don't really understand Bitcoin and are probably just as speculative as the people buying Bitcoin at $250 several days ago.
For some reason Hal Finney is missing from the list.
It has received more downvotes than upvotes.
To claim that graphics don't matter to games would be like claiming cinematography doesn't matter to movies. On the other hand, making a generalization that graphics are "60%" of all games would be just as silly as making a percentage claim for movies.

That 60% of Crytek's development resources are spent on graphics seems plausible, and it's working for them. But that's just their games. FTL, Binding of Isaac, Minecraft, or lots of other smaller games are almost certainly not spending 60% of their time on graphics, and most of what they do spend is more likely art direction than technology (The quote in the article did include art direction in "graphics"). That works for them too. "The Game" is a very broad term if you take that statement at face value. We should take it as a statement only about Crytek's games.
I would say just send him the email. Expect to not get a response, but it shouldn't hurt to try.

Most likely he will either engage with you and try to help, or else just think its not worth the trouble, delete your email, and move on. So, there is minimal risk to writing s polite email asking for assistance.
You might have a tough time getting into a top graduate program. But there are plenty of reasonably good graduate programs which are not quite as selective.

Self study probably won't help you get into good programs initially, but if you get accepted to a second-tier program, it will certainly help you get the ground running and get the most out of it, whether you try to transfer out or not.

Good luck!
> So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key?

Yes, by impossible I meant computationally infeasible (at the moment)

> The corollary of this appears to be that you'd then be able to take anyone's bitcoins?

Yes, there's no way of recovering long abandoned coins (e.g. the genesis block coins) that couldn't be used to steal newly minted coins
Based on the way he ends the article, and the reflectiveness with which he wrote it, I'm guessing he finally grew up.
You keep throwing these terms left/right conservative/liberal around. Have you read Hayek?

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-...
Onion: Find The Thing You're Most Passionate About
Following the Money With Apple's Apps
Not a bad idea to respond to visibility, but to solve the blob problem it would be better to explicitly synchronize text creation and text position. This is basic in game/simulation programming: you don't want the rules of the game to change depending on the performance of the computer — it may be slower, but it should be internally consistent.

For example, have a single, explicit 'scroll position' or 'time' variable (they're equivalent in this case), increment it on a timer, and insert new text when (time mod N) rolls over.
Don't mistake the graphics part of what he said as simply referring how realistic the graphics are.

Minecraft is the perfect example of the game where the graphics are integral to how the game plays. The blocky style of Minecraft is part of what makes it so great and fun to play.
>There is no obvious reason other than tradition and cultural goals that a lawyer has to be paid $200/hr instead of $20/hr, ditto no reason a postdoc biomedical researcher has to be paid $30K/yr instead of $300K/yr.

The average lawyer doesn't make $200/hr. You can't compare your average biomedical postdoc to the top law school graduates. A biomedical postdoc is sacrificing pay now because he probably hopes to get a job as a tenured professor some day. It's something like clerking for a judge after law school.

Another thing, law students pay for law school, many of them rack up $150k in debt before they even start working. Most STEM PhD candidates are being paid while going to grad school.

>The supply of STEM grads is too high leading to low pay and the supply of lawyers is too low leading to high pay, but if you can convince the kids to select different majors, go ahead.

There are far too many law school graduates each year for the amount of lawyers demanded. Unless you can get into a good school and graduate near the top, law school is probably a bad idea. While the prospects for most STEM degrees look much better than other majors.
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell [1946]
Supposedly modern and completely harmless reactors in sweden have had varying degress of incidents, where maybe some control systems malfunctioned or staff missed some stuff.

This is the kind of, sloppy mistakes that humans make, and aslong as humans is what keeps nuclear reactors from a disaster, I don't consider them safe, which is not to say that they aren't immensely helpful for the environment and energy production while they are in good condition. But the peoples lack of trust is warranted.
Lots of patented technology starts out at universities via (at least some) public funding. Typically, the university demands a cut of the patent royalties. It's no one's fault but the NIH if their grants don't come with similar strings attached.
If you put every incoming transaction into a separate wallet, and create a new intermediary wallet for every outgoing transaction, then only a minimal amount of Ⓑ becomes non-anonymous with each outgoing transaction. But statistical methods can still probably bear fruit.
parent comment is out of date; git subtree is part of git since roughly git 1.8.
You never use tools like rbenv or rvm on production servers. They exist so that mac devs can be running the same versions of ruby found in the Linux distros.
This is one of the nicest disagreements I have ever had. If we don't already, we should compare notes and find something to work on together, because when two people can disagree but still understand each other, that is where you make progress on complex problems. :-)

> Yes but .gitignore only configures your git client, the gitsubmodules say something about the repository instead.

This feature is often used to configure the repository, and I in fact use it that way. By way of example, https://github.com/new operates under the assumption that you use .gitignore to configure a repository. Perhaps it is best to say that config files offer flexibility in this dimension, whereas a link file is more rigid.

> It could even be delayed until there is another compatibility breaking change.

I believe that perhaps the discussion on the point of backwards incompatibility has been framed in a way that is nonproductive. Of course, once one has decided on a course of action, it is proper to consider how to reduce the impact of that decision. I agree with you that there are a wide variety of harm reduction strategies available here.

But these inquiries only become relevant once one has decided that the patch is in general an improvement in some dimensions. As an outside observer, I do not see an improvement.

I can see the logic that if it is true that git-add-and-friends have omitted support for submodules on the basis that such support is difficult, this patch could solve that problem. But I have not been convinced of the premise; there is no citation of the people who maintain the UI tools making claims of difficulty. Furthermore, Junio seems to argue at least that add's behavior is by design, I do not know enough about it to know if that is a sensible design, but it does suggest to me that the problem with UI tooling is not a function of implementation difficulty, but there is perhaps some design or ideological reason for the behavior of these tools that explains the state of them today.

The other problem that I have is as follows: if I accept the premise that the trouble with git-add is a matter of implementation difficulty, it seems to me that the trouble can be resolved at some other tool layer rather than in the FS proper. So if the hypothesis underlying the patch is correct, it seems to me that one should adopt the implementation that doesn't break compatibility over the implementation that does.

It is unfortunate that the matter of backwards compatibility was raised early and vociferously in the thread, because as you have pointed out there is a lot that can be done about backwards compatibility that doesn't address the real merits of whether the idea is good or bad. (Although I can understand why compatibility would be at the top of any maintainer's mind.) Perhaps this exchange between Junio and Ram. is an example of two people being far enough along their own lines of inquiry that they are having trouble making any sense of one another.
Currently, it doesn't seem so - most of the functions have their volatility declared as stable, not immutable, so you can't simply create an index on the function without getting an erorr. I think long term the postgresql guys plan on supporting special GiST indexes for JSON, but that didn't make it into 9.3.

Many of the presentations on using plv8 to access JSON in Postgres 9.2 (e.g., https://wiki.postgresql.org/images/b/b4/Pg-as-nosql-pgday-fo... ) show the use of functional indexes, but they create a plv8 function marked as immutable.

I imagine you could create a wrapper function marked immutable that calls the provided json accessor functions, but I'm not really clear on the implications of doing so.
Thanks for the answer! I was just playing with Inkscape the other day, I'll make a point of learning it for real next time I need to put something like this together.
Maduro’s Twitter account, official sites hacked by LulzSec
Who cares who controls the majority of the world's assets when global standards of living are increasing, apparently quite drastically? It seems like living in the developed world puts you in a bubble relative to the world that is similar to the culture on Wall Street. It doesn't matter that everyone (still there after the recession) is stil getting paid an order or two of magnitude more than 99.5% of the country, many traders are still ridiculously competitive and hung up on the fact that there are people up the ladder making more than them while entirely taking their good fortune for granted.

The world is getting better for everyone and the point of the article is that the luxuries that come with increased wealth (internet, mobiles, greater political awareness, travel) make old power structures harder and harder to maintain, in almost every facet of society.

It's easy to get lost in the massive problems and doom and gloom facing everyone but if you step back and look at the forest, it's not all that gloomy.
Agree, it totally depends on the game.
For Crysis, I might argue that it's more than 60%. Crysis has been used as a benchmark for the performance of gaming rigs for ages...
Minecraft really should have been the end of anyone saying that graphics are more important than gameplay.

It's the definitive example of how you can make a game with graphics that are not only simple, but often quite ugly, and still capture a huge and diverse portion of the market with engaging gameplay.

Honestly, AAA games are getting more boring every year. It's all graphics and story, with no appreciation of the unique power of games (like Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress) to give players the tools to make their own stories.
I was giving this some more thought. Anyone else here familiar with the cast of characters from the book The Predictors ?
http://www.amazon.com/Predictors-Maverick-Physicists-Theory-...

Is there any possibility of their involvement?
Mostly unrelated to the topic, but I'm always amused by things like "teach ce_compare_gitlink() about OBJ_LINK". I've never seen any other project that anthropomorphizes the code like that, and I sort of like how it makes the resulting changelog read.
Keep in mind that it's using time travel to do those moves. In the real world time travel is not currently available.
I'd ask, if you know that IO and monads are different, why your first statement was conflating the purpose of IO with the purpose of the monad interface? If I just totally missed a joke - ok, my mistake. But if you really don't see why it matters that the statement is false, I recommend really thinking about it for a bit.

Now, on to the thing about Haskell that the endless proliferation of monad tutorials obscures.. You don't actually need to "understand" monads to use it. You can get by on type signatures and the most basic parts of do notation for a long time.

In fact, that's what I did. I spent months working on haskell code, understanding the transformations I was making, but not understanding the abstractions beneath them. The first time I really grasped the purpose of the monad interface was when I decided to learn how to use the parsec library. I was a bit unsure how to combine smaller parsers into more complex ones, but just sort of tried do notation - and it worked. It worked exactly how I expected it to. And that's when I realized you could see the monad interface as "The thing you need to make do notation work like you'd expect." Even if I was still fuzzy on the details.

But before that, I was making use of monad transformers. I did a poll in the #haskell IRC channel once. Almost everyone agreed monad transformers are easier to learn about than monads. There's just one simple type signature involved, and it's easy to just fit the pieces together, without a deep understanding of what they mean. They end up doing what you expect, anyway.

You really can use haskell productively without understanding the underlying abstractions, so long as you are good at following the types. They're there to help you - they do the job pretty well, if you take a bit of time to learn how to apply them.
It may happen in the server world. Engineering wins the day a whole lot more often than in the consumer market. ZFS et al are a good case in point.
Great article -- I really identify a lot with the culture the author describes, particularly the way liberal arts students often scorn the sciences and tear down the Western canon without bothering to read it. It's a shame.

As to the drug abuse and alcoholism, Bob Dylan put it really well in "Like A Rolling Stone":

"You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely,
But you know you only used to get juiced in it."

People who go through college the like the author realize, deep down, that they are not getting an education. And some of them also realize that eventually, being a fraud catches up with everyone -- even if it's only in the form of a personal revelation.
In my opinion, far too much time is wasted these days discussing which elements of game design are most "important".

For Crysis, the graphics are absolutely the focus. For a game like Minecraft, graphics take a backseat to the innovative game mechanics. For Team Fortress 2, game mechanics and graphics both take a backseat to unique team-based multiplayer.

Games are a type of art, and art can take many forms. Are Michelangelo's sculptures "worse" than Picaso's masterpieces simply because they are far more life-like? Are modern movies worse than early 1900s films simply because they use high end special effects?

Take a step back and judge a game by its own merits - any individual element of a game's design is dependant on it's genre, art direction, platform, and specific goals. The question should not be "are graphics the most important part of video games?", but rather "are graphics the most important part of THIS game?".
You really need to separate the illegals and family/diversity based less skilled immigrants from the skilled ones, otherwise it makes it sound like it is somehow skilled immigrants and their employers' fault that we have all of the perils you mentioned. http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ois_lpr_... - 2012 immigration stats. Only 14% of legal immigration is skills based.

I don't see how asking for/having more skilled immigrants can possibly be linked to more crime, more unemployment or whatever. Unless you are speculating on what congress might do with immigration reform that will cause it or you want immigration to be completely stopped. (Not sure how that will work out given the illegals situation.)
Yeah, Crytek makes it a point of pimping their engines quite a bit. The problem is that they're not comparing their engine to Minecraft, but to Unreal 4, Frostbite 3, Id Tech whatever, etc..

Is someone going to choose to play Crysis 3 because the graphics are a bit better than say the Frostbite 2 engine in Battlefield 3, or whatever Call of Duty is using? I don't think so.

I do applaud Crytek for being pretty developer friendly with their Crytek SDK, but maybe they should look at how Dayz really helped out Bohemia and release a game SDK too.

I'm not sure what engine Far Cry 3 is using, but I'm sure some developers could create some real interesting mods with an SDK.
I have to agree with this. Yes, most people don't understand the enormous amount of data Facebook has, but in the next decade, it'll be common knowledge.

Between Glass and other projects, individuals will quickly realize how exposed they are and will either care (and these companies/groups will be forced to refocus on privacy like Facebook a year and a half a go) or everyone will just be 'OK' with it (like I am, I'm an open book, go for it).

I think sociology hasn't quite caught up with technology, and it'll be interesting to see where we go from here.
Some alterna-coins may not rely on the same sort of processing power as Bitcoin. For example, Bitcoin mining has migrated to specialized GPUs and ASICs. Litecoin specifically chose 'scrypt' memory-hard hashing, for which the same GPUs/ASICs provide no benefit. Other 'proof-of-stake' proposals for maintaining the ledger emphasize staying actively connected to the network – pulling your own weight in verification and distribution – rather than raw hashing power.

Bitcoin's proof-of-work-during-verification trick is neat, but may not be the only way, and thus viable alternatives may emerge that don't face the barrier of an early miner decision to redeploy computational power elsewhere.
It's definitely way more nuanced than the author suggests. By developed world standards, poverty is not much better than extreme poverty (but fed is better than not), many of the stats regarding international commerce and investment came with unforseen social and political consequences, and much of the social progress in the middle east has resulted in the unaffected countries to become more paranoid and governments that are different, but not necessarily much better.

But this is an upward trend going for three decades now, let's hope it continues.
What exactly does that mean, the level you apply/qualify for? Does it depend on your education or merely on how much your employer put into it?
Because 6 years waiting for a green card, after which another 5 years before you can apply for citizenship and keeping in mind the economy changes trough the years.
It's bound to divorce rate, that differs greatly between socioeconomic circles and ethnicities. End of the day it's tied up to the time parents dedicate to their children's education, and for divorced or never married single parents on a single income this is a tough proposition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-...
The author clearly regrets the way he wasted his time in college. That's the whole point of the piece.
China Has Risen - The Gold Rush and Fire Extinguishers
The notion that the US dollar is intrinsicly valuable due to it's ability to pay taxes is flawed at best. In several foreign countries, the primary means of exchange is USD, yet taxes are still paid in the local currency.

Multiple currencies will coexist, and if bit coin somehow overtakes USD, that won't say anything about what you pay taxes with.
Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster for a 1MW reactor with a lot of waste fuel stored on the site is rendering the Northern Hemisphere (where almost all such reactors are) inhabitable.
501/1000 pregnancies completed (amongst black women) is absurd. I had no idea US had so many abortions.
Based on my reading & observations, skill at the upper end of a creative/intellectual domain seems to range from about 5-20% talent and 80-95% practice-related factors. A lot of people don't realize how important different types of practice are. The Talent Code cites a study where researchers found that students who believed they would practice an instrument for all their lives learned nearly 4 times as quickly as students who thought they'd play the instrument for a few years-with the same amount of practice!

The one consistent element of natural talent that comes up in intellectual/creative pursuits is working memory. The average person can hold roughly 7 "units" of information in their brain[0], which is why phone numbers are 7 digits long. When sightreading, pianists with a high working memory effectively have an advantage of a few extra years of practice[1]. I would imagine that a high working memory is also helpful in programming, as it determines how large a program you can easily hold in your head.

[0]: it's a little more complex than just 7 pieces of information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory#Capacity

[1]: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/7/914.abstract
It's not that extensive at the moment, just a side project fueled on my curiosity.

I have to evaluate my knowledge of economics before I can commit to creating value up to the amount it would cost to the crowdfunders, but then crowdfunding could be an option.

Meanwhile, I can certainly accept BTC donations to jauge public interest on this project. Click on my name to get the BTC address, since I don't want to "spam" the thread.

[In fact, I'm very selfishly more interested in discussing the proposed explanations than taking commitments at such an early stage.]