skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've heard from the PLT people, they are definitely interested in bringing these experiences to Racket; hopefully experience with LightTable will provide some insight in how to do that.
> If I have my PC mining and then disconnect it, does the Bitcoin network suffer in any noticeable way?

Yes, there's a computational power threshold to perform certain attacks against the network, and removing your node marginally decreases that threshold.

Is it necessary? That depends on your priorities and your threat model.
When more energy-efficient mining equipment is created, people buy enough of the equipment to use the same amount of power that they used to have. For example, one might replace a 300 W GPU with a 300 W ASIC miner. The total amount of mining is determined by the exchange rate; since the exchange rate is expected to increase due to deflation, the amount of power spent on mining is also expected to increase dramatically.
These weird coincidences along with bitcoin's very strange start (the pseudonym, the fact that it seems like a group worked on it) are really interesting. I'm surprised there's not more discussion about who really created it.
Lots of Cars and Trucks, No Traffic Signs or Lights: Chaos or Calm?
That supposes that the people consuming the product were informed prior to their 'purchase' that the products are not 'intended for them'; both are seemingly marketed as products that all who exist would derive benefit and enjoyment from (edit. not that I am trying to point fingers here - imperfect market and all).

Let the seller beware - though, it's not like poor ratings from the get go from a proportion of the users would really hit these giants much.
No, I reworded 'If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you,' it's an old expression. Nobody got it.
> Another frequent side effect of Asperger's is the impulse to fix things and make sure everything runs smoothly [... ... ...] (some) people who thrive on it go around breaking things. Sounds like a good reason to hire Aspies to me.

The types of people who get themselves into building new computer systems tend to meet the deadlines but what they build is full of bugs. The aspies, i.e. maintenance programmers, then spend years afterwards fixing the system based on issues raised by the unit testers, i.e. live users of the system.
1. Try videotaping or recording his behavior (you would need his permission) and have him watch it. This might not work.

2. Make it clear to him that his behavior is going to be an impediment to advancing (people skills), especially if he is going to lead projects in the future. DO NOT threaten or hint at firing him. That is counterproductive.

3. Try AznHisoka's advice and give him a standalone project, or offer to have him work remotely (again, he would need to work on a standalone project remotely).

4. Try all the above. Then do not hesitate to fire him if they don't work. You have to understand that someone with a bad attitude poisons the environment for everyone else, and since he's a very early hire, it has repercussions that last for years and can affect generations of new hires.
Diversity Messes With Your Culture… And That’s a Good Thing
The status bar with the arrow breadcrumbs is powerline: https://github.com/Lokaltog/powerline

There are bindings for tmux, bash, zsh, vim, and ipython (among others).
"By definition, new accounts are not "speculators" putting in trades to manipulate the price, they are people putting in trades to acquire their first bitcoins."

What definition are you talking about? That sounds exactly like speculation. You do not need to manipulate anything to be a speculator, you simply need to be making a gamble that what you are betting on will increase [or decrease if youre betting against] in value.
"I don't apologize for what I said, merely how you took it."
Charles Carreon Has To Pay $46K In Legal Fees
I understand that. I said it would make more sense than the existing one. It would not be a perfect solution, and I would not have participated in that xCoin system either.
Where's it gonna go? Even if jquery.com and all the CDN-hosted copies just fell off the face of the earth, you'd probably still have a dusty fork somewhere. Worse case: you go digging through your browser cache.

It's certainly good to know about the DOM and have some clue about what jQuery is doing, but getting to the point where you can switch to native DOM at will without losing any speed, just to say you can, seems like a textbook case of premature optimization. Do it if you're interested, but not to solve a business problem.

And remembering which browsers use textContent and which ones use innerText is not nearly as important as understanding that the DOM is there, what it does, and being able to use JavaScript to do things that jQuery doesn't have a method for.

In the unlikely case that the Internet explodes and changes such that jQuery is busted but your old DOM knowledge still applies, or you very quickly switch environments to something where it's not an option, what would you do? Well, jQuery was more or less a DOM replacement with some promises and stuff built in. You'd probably just write that. So why not skip the hassle and just stick to jQuery? Learning how things work underneath is valuable and good, but only when it's really an investment—or you do it in a way that doesn't cut your current productivity.
I know these are just estimates, but 90m monthly actives on android alone seems unlikely for candy crush. Google play claims 10m-50m installs. Sounds like data is being extrapolated from a biased sample, unless play's data is regional.
Twitter Music Will Integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo, YouTube
If there were two blogs, written by sane nice sounding engineers, and they gave two different sides to an unpleasant story?

I ammcoming at this from the point of view of a ex-manager who has had to deal with situations where, yes, something and someone has gone too far, but it is far from obvious that there is a guilty party and an innocent party. Just a seeping morass of grey and you get to play referee.

I think I am saying that it's the tiny daily cuts that really deeply wear people down, but it's the big obvious infractions that we can actually spot, call out and deal with.

So as far as I a middle aged white guy understand it, the -isms are mostly background radiation, in some teams and organisations there are great people who act as boron rods, soaking up the crap and turning things into a pleasant place to work. At other places not so much. Work at the former.

Eventually the others will go out of business.
I thought all the food at the Googleplex was free, breakfast, dinner, and lunch.
But Krugman isn't complaining about Bitcoin's monetary policy here; he's complaining about the operation of the network itself. It's a pretty weak argument; he's claiming that the network costs too much without doing any kind of serious cost-benefit analysis, just an inapt comparison to gold coins.
Then it is not a useful monetary system. When people trade money (paper or electronic), they are trading time they invested in doing useful work for someone else. When bitcoins are traded, you are trading wasted computer cycles.
There is a correspondence between the output and the resources consumed. If your output is negligible, then your resource usage was proportionally negligible to the end of providing the network with monetary units.

Your argument neatly cancels out your conclusion.
I worked for two years in Canary Wharf and didn't change my lifestyle so I was able to save some money. I just announced I was quitting this week and I am currently trying to think about what to do next. Which can be pretty much anything. It's hard to decide what to do next when there's no limit.

Most of my friends did change their lifestyles while working in Canary Wharf and when they decided to leave they had no money at all. I'm glad I avoided that.
Actually there is. You can entwine a pair of transactions such that if the bitcoins are claimed by the seller, the corresponding namecoins can be claimed by the buyer.
What's wrong with using reattach-to-user-namespace?
Edit: local college, not logical college.

Hi. I volunteer at my local college as a Computer science Tutor.

Your teaching applied programming, so I would, unless it's a requirement, avoid most discussions of how things work, beyond the fact that the programming language is a way to write instructions that get the computer to do something.

I'd emphasize that loops, if/else, comparisons, boolean logic, arrays etc, are all composable, and you can build really complex things with them by combining them, just as you can build really complex equations by combining simple mathematical functions.

Then get them writing functions. I'd introduce them to a function the first day, and explain that code is broken up into functions, because they are composable, testable, reusable, and allow the writer to focus on getting a specific task correct.

Get them printing stuff the first day, and reading input in from a file, not just a keyboard. These are essential for any scientific work. I'd provide ways to read in files of different formats... I'm not sure what computational biology generally uses, but you might want a csv and a plain text file.

I'd then do if/else which lets you talk about boolean logic.

Teach them about nested if statements.

Then I'd move on to loops and arrays.

Teach loops tied to arrays. They are almost always used together anyway. Teach multi dimensional arrays as arrays of arrays, generally gone through with nested loops.

Post useful code for them to download and read, with comments on what each line does. Challenge them to modify it to do something different but related. Talk about how to debug code.

Talk about binary searches... I'd mention them first as a way to debug code, then introduce them later.

Show how to write function to find a minimum value in an array. Matlab probably has this, but show them it, because the fact that you initalize the comparison to first element and start comparing with the second, and not just initialize to 0 or something isn't obvious. I often see people have this issue.

show how to write a function to exchange values, if that requires a temporary variable in matlab.

show them how you can put those functions together and make a simple sort.

The truth is that for most actual things they will do while working, until they understand MatLab well enough to write their own stuff, they will be googling code and modifying it, so get them in the habit of reading code to understand what is going on, and modifying it.

Teach them to comment their code. Teach them to try to think about the steps involved before they code too much... try to get them writing down what they are going to do, and implementing it.

Oh and finally, have them write code, and then review it, or (easier for you) peer review it. Getting comments on code helps more then merely copying other's styles, because then they learn why you would do something.
If you stop paying taxes in a typically sized country, the country's finances do not suffer in a noticeable way, either.

The network is made of the nodes.
I'm going to go out on a limb and state that there's a bit of a double standard with how clothes are interpreted with men and women.

I'm only barely wrapping my head around men's fashions, I don't pretend to understand what it's like for women.
I think gee_totes was probably being humorous.
This should have been a reply. Attacking somebody else's comment by citing him in a new top-level comment is bad form.
Your comment immediately brought this to mind: http://xkcd.com/605/ :)
We built something similar for a party in our dorm one year, only because our waterfalls were completely artificial we were able to add fluorescent dye to the water and illuminate them with blacklights.
Communication is always a good one.
I'd feel bad about it if the "Nobel Prize in Economics" wasn't a fraud.
Summary:

Who's this guy _why? (also known as why the lucky stiff):

http://bit.ly/whytheluckystiff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

--

The site http://whytheluckystiff.net is being hosted on GitHub under this account:

https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/

--

The git repo for the site has seen activity today, and has sparked conversation:

https://github.com/cwales/cwales.github.com/issues

--

The site is serving up files in PCL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_Command_Language

--

Here are the contents of these files converted from PCL into images:

http://www.gironda.org/pcl/SOLICIT.png

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135635255/DESOLEE

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135635189/Trumpets

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135650965/Caprice

http://www.scribd.com/doc/135658986/-why-Homework
My coworker instantly after me showing him this
-> him: quick lets turn our private repos public to use with this
-> me: LOL
-> boss: frown
> Therefore as long as the majority of miners (weighted by their computing power) is honest, you can trust the accounting.

As computing power is a function of the expenditure of wealth, this is equivalent to saying "as long as you trust the people who have thrown the most money at having power over the bitcoin system are honest."
"The idea that Aspie individuals are paragons of logic and reason is misguided."

I certainly agree with this; I was simply offering a positive take on some of the "hyperlogical" behaviors described in the article and elsewhere, e.g. building a snowman inside because it's too cold outside.
I dont think bitcoin is fiat money. Fiat money is.

any money declared by a government to be legal tender.[7]

state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.[8]

money without intrinsic value.[9][10]
What was the 18 month change you effected - and how did you do it ?
Drat, sorry. :(
"One thing I think isn't understood by the women who post things like this is that men are always in competition. It's like a wolf pack where a pecking order must be established."

Not understood? Always in competition? Erm...I think that might be part of the underlying problem she's describing. The whole "boys will be boys" thing is horseshit. Civil, adult people don't want to play the game. I'm a man, and I hate it as much as anyone.

There's no inherent reason that people have to be total pricks in the workplace. Build a social structure where childish behavior isn't rewarded, and childish behavior will be diminished. It works with preschool kids, so there's no reason that adults -- people with fully formed brains and a full cohort of emotional tools -- can't have the same response.
Well, all your concerns may very well be provably correct, from a purely academic perspective.

I just think the question you keep missing is: Does it matter in practice?

Our entire world runs on imperfect systems. Can we really already tell whether bitcoin is worse?

Where is your mathematical proof that the current monetary system is secure against polynomial time attacks? Where is your rigorous security definition for the current monetary system?

Could it be we are witnessing attacks on the current system right now, resulting in enormous concentrations of wealth through interactions that we barely understand[1]?

Could it be we are witnessing the authorities abuse the current system to cut off organizations like Wikileaks[2]?

You seem to demand a system that is perfect in every sense on day 1 and replaces the US Dollar on day 2.

Yet couldn't it be that it is actually the academic imperfections, the pragmatic approach of bitcoin that make it a success?

Who knows whether airtight mathematical security is even the most important requirement? Perhaps the known attacks are "hard enough" already, or will be after a few more patches? Perhaps bitcoin will fail spectacularly in a few years due to scalability instead of security issues?

My point is: We simply don't know. We have no precedent, nothing even remotely close (please correct me if I'm missing it, I honestly can't think of one).

Thus I disagree the case is nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be.

[1] http://baselinescenario.com/2012/11/29/high-frequency-tradin...

[2] http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html
I once tried to write a markup parser with slashes for italics, then I understood why no parser seems to use them. It interferes with URLs, dates, slashes as "or", etc.
I find that it can be really difficult to measure productivity some times, especially when long hours are involved. If I work 2x hours and I get stuff done all throughout that time (beginning, middle, and end) then I'll tend to think all of those hours were well spent. But when I spend the time and effort to really look at productivity I find that typically spending more hours only produces the illusion of greater productivity. Often times I'll easily forget the downsides of working more hours, such as poorer quality of work, less focus and ability to concentrate, more down time between periods of work, greater likelihood of being OK with partial or inferior solutions, etc.

Over time I've come to the conclusion that except for "it's broken, and time is money" or "I've found inspiration at midnight" situations it's pretty much never a good idea to consistently work long hours on software projects. It's better to work smarter and more efficiently and to have the resources available to do big refactoring / redesign / performance improvement projects when necessary than to just work flat out and always be in an "ok, that's good enough, moving on" state of mind.
Try starting with some random nonsense phrase you repeat in you mind for a period with your eyes closed. This clears your immediate references. After a period, you'll drift into an alpha brain wave state where you can willfully enter into a state of lucid dreaming. I got into this via an interest in trancendal meditation (sp?) and continued into other meditation styles. These days, I find that I can use this to visualize scenarios in my software projects at a depth that is difficult to explain with words.
Mining prevents double spends, that's all it does.

That is the level of security in the bitcoin network. It might be a design flaw to assume we can act like responsible adults, I agree. But if you're looking for something that makes end-runs completely impossible, I'm afraid you are asking to much and you won't find it in anything that exists.
I think the exact process is going to evolve, so I don't necessarily want to bound myself artificially.

I think I'll attempt 10-20 minutes per day to start and slowly ramp it up. Maybe I'll update the post as I go along.
Code Hard or Go Home
3.5 million gallons of oil spilled from pipelines each year, or 2% of what consumers were leaking from their gas tanks until just a few years ago. A drop in a bucket is .000625%, so I can't use that phrase and "two thousand drops in a bucket" doesn't have quite the right ring…

criminal? You publicly defame me as a criminal‽ Maybe you meant to say irresponsible or something similar that doesn't so directly involve libel laws. Let's save criminal for where it belongs, like BP's Deepwater Horizon spill.

I reject your assertion: we don't, as a country, do a very good job of holding oil companies responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of their equipment unless you can provide evidence. The EPA oversees cleanups which are notoriously expensive, deterring pipeline companies from accepting leaks as a cost of doing business. (The one I'm familiar with cost about $1000/gallon of leaked oil (mostly to experts and analysts, not so much to the guy with the shovel and buckets). Small leak, probably makes it on the high side per gallon.)

For another data point, when BP blew out some lines in Alaska in 2006 they spilled about 6000 barrels and were ultimately fined $20M. I'd like that fine to be higher, 20 times the value of the spilled product seems low.

Forgive a paragraph where I read about the Alaskan Pipeline, it's Saturday, the official day of HN meanderings:

I wanted to put a number about what percent of the Trans Alaskan pipeline oil leaks out, but I'm not finding a catalog of spills. From 1977 to 2010 it moved 16 billion barrels of oil, but I'm not finding the other half. There is a list at wikipedia, but it misses the 2006 BP spill, so I don't trust it to be complete. In 1978 someone blew a hole in the pipeline and leaked 16000 barrels, in 2001 some drunken numbnut with a rifle shot a hole in a weld and leaked 6000 barrels. He got 16 years in jail and was sentenced to pay $17M for the cleanup. I'm guessing he's still working that off. Unless they find more oil, or figure out how to make the pipeline work at lower than designed flow rates, the company that owns it has to remove all traces of the pipeline. Current projections suggest 2032 as the year for that decision.

Back on topic:

• Keep leaks to a minimum, but don't panic.

• Oil seeps are natural phenomena. The planet has survived millions of years with them.

• A pipeline leak screws up the local environment, but can be cleaned, and make sure to fine the pipeline folk enough that they don't want it to happen.

• Trucking the oil instead of using pipelines would be worse for the environment (I boldly propose without bothering to check the data).

• You know that car owners and farmers used to use their used motor oil as weed killer, right? Kept the weeds in the ditch down by dumping the oil in the drainage ditch. We have survived that, which was probably several times more oil per year than pipeline leaks. Heck I drove a Ford that leaked oil faster than my share of global pipeline leaks.

On barely related good news: The local gas company is finally addressing the methane leak they've had going in my yard for two years. It got big enough to attract their attention.
It should read "no profits is a good thing." The subject is the singular "no profits", not the plural "profits".
I am going to address some of the sentiments expressed in this thread.

1. This is not a choice between having a minor and not having a minor. This is a choice between having a minor and having a certain amount of free time slots available for any combination of 1)random electives, 2)part-time internships/employment, 3)freelancing, 4)side projects.

2. As far as your career goes, a minor will have very little impact. It will just be a line on your resume. However, side projects and work experience is going to be much more impressive.

3. If you are interested in certain fields (philosophy, economics, business), then you could consider just taking a selection of interesting courses from each, rather than tying yourself down with a minor.
What the Brain Can Tell Us About Art
See-through brain - CLARITY new imaging technique
brainporn