skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all we know about satashi he/she/it could be working with in-q-tel or any other politically motivated entity.

What really matters though is that whoever owns 7.8% of existing bitcoins has the ability to manipulate the market, due to their 'I got there first with my old gpu farm' advantage. Want to crash the market? Go for it... Of course they don't have the control that the Federal Reserve has, but they also don't have anywhere near the flak. Treat bitcoin like you treat going to the casino, except Mt. Gox doesn't give out free drinks.

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but I would put my faith in currencies that are backed by strong operational second-strike nuclear capability and a developed economy. This leaves USA/FR/UK as the winners, with India/Russia/China as runners up, since they are not developed nations yet. CHF is also a good reserve, but everyone especially the Europeans have been fleeing to it, and the Swiss caved to the USA so their 'banking secrecy' is not what it is advertized to be.
I'm aware of that.

I just can't imagine how a wholly non-technical salesperson could go from validating there is a demand to actually fulfilling the demand without either finding a technical co-founder, becoming technical or else winning the freelance lottery.
Perhaps true in some metros but even as of 5-6 years ago I know of caste based discrimination in villages. People weren't allowed to drink from the village well because of caste and I recall something on the lines of not being allowed to let their shadows touch others.
Doesn't the V8 javascript engine do something like this? Where it builds C-structs instead of hashmaps if it can detect that your objects are being built in a consistent way
I was hoping they wouldn't, this isn't the guy I want to rally behind. He's foul, delusional, at best grey hat, and apparently a pharmacologist on the side. The EFF needs to pick its battles better. Double down on cases like Aaron's, and let this guy hang on his own stupidity.
I don't find this chilling at all. What's the big deal?
Bitcoin was announced on a cryptography mailing list and released to the public at most a week after the blockchain was created, as proven by the headline in the genesis block. The Bitcoin whitepaper was released months earlier. Anyone had an opportunity to mine early on.
Or the seventeen others founded on the same technology. It's important to distinguish the Bitcoin software from the particular block chain in whose private keys naive people are now speculating.
Yeah: your real bottlenecks are going to be 1) getting data out of your database and 2) sending packets across the internet. These are 100 times and 1000 times slower than your program, the 10x penalty to use ruby/python instead of C/C++/go/rust isn't going to matter.
In 2000 would you have said "The US could setup a prison just outside its borders so it could ignore the bill of rights, but it wouldn't - because that would be insane!?"

The US has been doing some pretty insane things... Yes they haven't Nuked half the planet, but that pretty far down the spectrum of 'insane'... Shutting down, or heavily censoring the internet is not...

You do recall what happened to wikileaks in the US, right? Some phone calls, and Amazon shuts their servers down....
I love Magnar's multiple cursors. I end up using it at least a few times a day, and it always saves me a ton of time.
I think I get what this is, but Airbnb for Airbnbs doesn't make sense to me.
PayPal procedure for hacked accounts: lock your account & don't say why
I get a lot of resumes, a large number of them are just not suitable, I think of them as being close to spam. You should think of them like that to.

there is a fair chance the 40 year olds are applying for roles that don't suit them, especially if you are clear in your job ads that it is for a junior/graduate. Sometimes it is because they have just moved to the country or are changing careers and are looking for a way into the workforce.

Even if you give the unsuitable people a chance, you will probably find that they really want to get paid more and will leave you for a pay rise as soon as possible ( perhaps within a few months ), leaving you in a bad situation where you have to then rehire.

You will only be doing yourself and your business a dis-service.

This applies at any payrate
Hmm.. I remember this discussion from before...

Yup. Here's the previous discussion(s).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172837

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4677497
If a tool exists to format the code, it is of no consequence that a check in violates the formatting, as when that code is actually viewed it can (and should be) passed through that tool ahead of time such that the check in which violates the formatting guide lines is never actually viewed as such.
On "little practical use," I mean today. Why does anyone buy a bitcoin today? The only reasons that I can see are (1) ideology, (2) illegal activities (including the circumvention of gambling restrictions), or (3) speculation, hoping to sell it to someone who will pay more later.

I think the technology is great. The technology itself gives absolutely no reason for those who don't own bitcoins (in the main block chain) to buy them for any value.
You have a very optimistic view of human nature then :) He didn't do anything much out of bounds, but it's very easy to imagine how a less scrupulous/more obsessed person would be able to use this.
True, if by "break" you mean "break by brute force" (and of course with current, non-quantum computing technologies).
Wouldn't adding goland-style slices to Python be awesome?
Yes, change the way the game is being played, but don't play the game that Google is playing. Change the way people search for things. Right now everything is based on the keyword search, there has to be a better way. Make the web irrelevant the same way that gopher became irrelevant. I really don't want to be using a web browser 10 years from now.
As somebody who has done a lot of research and decided the evidence overwhelmingly shows how bad excessive, simple carbohydrates are for you, I completely agree with your statement about sugar being added to everything. It is frustrating to not be able to buy meat without worrying about sugar.

As far as your comment about HFCS not being different, I respectfully disagree. I don't think HFCS is markedly different than, say, table sugar: both are about 50% glucose and 50% fructose. But fructose is processed differently, and the increased burden that places on the liver causes a whole host of problems, not just obesity. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is now a common disease, and that is the effect of all the fructose being dumped on us.

So, yes, HFCS is a nutritional issue, as well as a political and agricultural issue, but certainly not because it's "unnatural" but because the thing that gives it it's sweetness (without a shell of fiber around it) is toxic to our bodies when consumed in large quantities over a long period of time.

One question to ponder: if there was not sone fundamental difference in nutrition, why would babies gorge themselves to obesity on it? Milk production follows baby's demand, as any mother can tell you during a child's growth spurt. If the baby wanted to eat more, the mother would produce it. But they don't. Instead, something fundamental is different.

I believe it is the type of sugar and I believe the evidence backs that up. But I also think a lot more research needs to be conducted, because the evidence isn't iron-clad.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the studies in nutrition for the last 30-40 years have done little more than massage results to fit the prevailing politics (aka what the government will fund). Nutritional "science"[1] is badly broken, and it takes looking deeper into the biochemistry to start getting clues about what is bad for us and what isn't.

1. My latest favorite is the "top-baldness raises your risk of heart disease". These kinds of "results" are claimed all of the time, with little apparent thought to "is it causal or does something else cause top-baldness and heart disease?
Hal is one of the only class acts publicly associated with Bitcoin.
The Queen’s stylesheets
Yeah, I think it'll all be okay for them. Apple does fine, despite the fact that every phone looks like an iPhone, every tablet looks like an iPad, and every laptop looks like a MacBook Air. Companies have been dealing with knock-offs for ages, the club they wield is Brand. Look no further than the fashion industry to see how effective Brand is at combatting knock-offs.

Regarding Google's self driving car: anybody reverse engineering Google's firmware is going to incur enormous R&D costs of their own. The only way they could avoid these is if they could use a copy of the source code, but that's protected by copyright (which, unlike patents, I agree with, since it protects implementations, not ideas).

My issues with patents are these:

1. I just don't think ideas should be ownable. A primary purpose of language, one of the characteristics that defines us as a species, is to transmit ideas from one person to another. In other words, we have evolved to allow one person to have an idea, then make some utterance which takes this idea and makes a copy of it in the mind of another person, instantaneously. To me, this points unavoidably to the fact that sharing of ideas is part of what makes us human. To put restriction on this fundamental human-ness strikes me as deeply wrong. Or, at the very least, good for a few at the expense of the many (AIDS drugs in Africa, etc.).

2. Even if you think ideas should be ownable, patents attempt to reward the first person who comes up with an idea, but being the first to an idea is incredibly arbitrary. As an example, I don't get to invent 1-Click Purchase because I just started developing software 2 years ago. Seems unjust.
Well, partly. The argument re scripting language + C is that mostly, the run time is in a small part of the code. Measure to find that part (NYTProf etc for Perl), then rewrite it in C. (I.e. inner loops, not reading config files.) The inefficiency of scripting languages is then irrelevant for many use cases which don't even involve databases.

My experiences of using Lisp compilers is very much out of date, I never saw any Lisp jobs I wanted after university.

Edit: Clarity
This is such a tough issue for me.

On one hand, I absolutely support the cause that the EFF is trying to champion. It reminds me of the classic case in the American free speech vs. hate speech debate: should Nazis be allowed to organize a peaceful rally to further their thinly-veiled racist ideals?

I have had personal interaction with weev for years, and while I don't think he's vile per se, he is most definitely not the ideal that the EFF and other groups should rally behind to bring this fight to the limelight... mostly because he's not likable. It disgusts me to say it, but it's true: if you want public support, you need a likable figurehead.

In the end, though, I can't fault the EFF. As the famous Hall quote states:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to
say it."
Now do it in peak-of-hyperinflation Zimbabwean pennies! I'm not sure if there's enough atoms in the universe for that.
I'm pretty sure your 25 hour quote is definitely wrong and that the true number for many surgeons is higher by a factor of around four.

That said, it's true that doctors in specialties outside of family practice make an absolutely staggering amount of money, far more than anyone can hope to make in technology outside of an executive career path.
Simply put: the system seems to be slightly better than what the situation was in the 1980s

As such yes it is better, but in absolute terms there is still further distance to cover.
Satoshi's motivations are interesting to me. What was he/she/they actually trying to accomplish by creating bitcoin? Were they really hoping to anonymously buy things? Or were they trying to get rich? Or were they trying to get geeks to commit to a pseudonymous-but-public cryptocurrency to prevent a zerocoin-style really-anonymous currency from being developed? Or were they trying to get a distributed computing project going to really test the strength of sha256? Or were they trying to sabotage Folding@home and distributed.net?
That reminds me of a paid Hotmail Plus account that I used to have, back in 2005 or so. I never renewed it because I finally got hold of a Gmail account shortly afterward, but the address is apparently still active after 8 years because every once in a while, I receive spam addressed to my old Hotmail address (forwarded to my "old" Gmail address). Not only is the account active, but even email forwarding (which were only available to paid users back then) still appears to be working.
At the risk of being tautological, I think it's chilling because if he told the 10 girls he "doxed" about what he had done, I'm pretty confident a sizeable number of them would have the chills.

People don't like to feel like they're being taken advantage of, which would be a pretty common reaction to finding out someone had done all of this profiling on you to get you to go out with them.

It's not outright nefarious, because, what is he really doing that's different from a dating site filtering results by your criteria; except that these aren't people who have joined a dating site.

This sounds like the kind of thing Tim Ferris would recommend doing; asymmetrical information warfare in the battle of the sexes.
Depends on the human! (One end of the spectrum is a DSL customized to the concepts and patterns of domain experts.)
> Time of "Getting that shit done" and cost of long-term maintenance are two of the main reasons why people use Ruby/Python, not for the raw performance.

Plenty of other languages "get shit done".

> And anyway, from my experience, Python has never been the cause of the slowness.

Then you're not actually performing performance analysis. Python is S-L-O-W.

I've written large systems in Python. I've profiled them to find the hotspots. I've micro-benchmarked them against implementations in other languages (C, Java). Python lost. Always. By a lot.

So then I had to rewrite critical sections of the Python in C (or accept that we'd need 32 servers instead of 2). Eventually I stopped bothering, and used a different language, because the aggregate cost of a thousand small performance issues (and a few big ones) is actually quite high.
> There's an PRC sanctioned sect of Christianity. Buddhist monks in Tibet need to be registered Communist party members.

You can, and a lot of people are buddhist in china without any interference from the state.

> It's questionable how much Marxism actually existed from the beginning. I don't think that Marx envisioned famines starving the poor in his "worker's paradise."

That's like saying "It's questionable how democractic USA is/was given they had slavery."

And to nitpick, they starved the rich as well ;-) (which is a bit more marxist)
Stone tools helped shape human hands
So it was basically a piece of concept art meant to stroke the egos of the executives, right? and never should have been released to the public?
Unladen Swallow never released a version 1, let alone 1.1. Also, clearly, Google did did not _need_ Unladen Swallow to succeed...
I grew up in Carson City, NV, which is between San Francisco and Denver in latitude.

When the Russians decommissioned Mir, there was this strange red splotch in the sky. People came out of their houses to speculate on what it could be. (A bunch of people thought it was related to the satellite - some people thought it got nuked.) Turned out to be an aurora borealis. It was only visible for a couple hours, so by the time my dad got his camera out and drove into the mountains, it had faded.

I grew up thinking auroras were these neat things reserved for Scandinavians and Alaskans - never thought I'd see one in the lower 48.

I bet they're more impressive up north, though.
Yep. People who serve the upper class wear suits. When the upper class was the nobility, they wore piss-stained tweed (yes, it's actually manufactured with urine). Now they wear whatever they want.
Are we talking about "anyone" buying a bitcoin, or some people? The latter is what truly matters, as it's not immediately useful for anybody. It'll have to grow into its niche.

Want to transfer value to someone half-way around the globe without dealing with Western Union, paying huge international fees, or giving your personal information out? I invested in a Chinese company which went on to pay my investment back and I still collect weekly BTC dividends. I never had to pay more than a dollar in fees the entire time, or give anybody my information (except the tax man).

Circumventing government controls is part of the value, the other part is removing the balkinization of finance which has made a global economy impossible or extremely unaffordable. Imagine being able to 'settle' a gold transaction with someone within 10 minutes, knowing it's not fake gold, half-way around the world, and being able to spend it immediately after back in the 1800's. What is this USD you speak of?
I just tested this with native copy-paste, and - at least on OSX - as long as whatever you're pasting has the same number of lines as you have cursors, you'll get that same line-to-cursor mapping.

That being said, let me also recommend my favorite clipboard history tool, Jumpcut (http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/).
A rich man or the bigger car banging into a smaller cart, especially in a poor neighborhood, will get swarmed 9 times out of 10.

You drastically misunderstand the level of righteous vengeance and drama centrism in such a situation. On top of that many people will look at a richer person as someone who is likely to have connections and hence escape justice.

You are more likely to be swarmed than not.
India is a banana republic in every sense of the word; where the mighty have their way and even basic amenities are denied to the poorer 80% of population. But do stay tuned - the Indian class war is yet to play out.
Good summary. But I disagree with the author that immutable strings and ubiquitous hashes are merely unfortunate idioms of python - to me python is about simplicity, and those things are what make python conceptually simple. I don't have to worry about clobbered buffers, nor about datastructure semantics besides simple hashes.
ALS is the single most terrifying disease in my view. I'm so sorry to hear that.

Tony Judt, a great historian, died of it a couple? of years ago, and he wrote a harrowing tale about it here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jan/14/night/?...
Awesome. Gonna try it.
My Professor was just going over this in class. He links to Manuel Blum's "classic" paper on the subject http://www.mathunion.org/ICM/ICM1986.2/Main/icm1986.2.1444.1...
Yeah, I've been enjoying using Clojure for this reason. The strengths of the JVM and Java libraries with the development time and functional style of a Lisp.
BTW, this is beautifully tidy bit of shell programming.
Kamaal makes a valid point. He is simply stating things from the perspective of a poor person, and is describing reality. It would be a big mistake for a poor person to rely on somebody else to improve his situation.

The situation is very similar in South Africa. The poor makes up such a large proportion of the population that their situation cannot be improved significantly without major wealth redistribution (combined with a massive reduction in government corruption, preferably). Neither of these things are likely to happen (unless there is a revolution), so a poor person can only realisticly rely on himself to improve his situation.

Kamaal's point does not contradict the OP's. It's just a statement of reality from the perspective of the poor.
Ok, this is only tangentially related, but does anyone know why it's "background-repeat: no-repeat" instead of "none"? Or why it's "text-wrap: none" but "white-space: nowrap" or "white-space: pre-wrap"?
Isn't that a useless comparison? Chinese, Tamil and Estonian are all extremely human read/writeable, so much that children can write them. However, it's likely at least one of them is indecipherable to you.

Perhaps the metric you're more interested in is the difficulty in learning to read/write decent code in a particular language. Of course, this difficulty can vary based on what other languages the learner is already familiar with.
It's both exciting and disturbing. Does every culture need to be connected? I feel like this sort of proclamation is akin to saying, "and they will all worship our god."

Surely that's somewhat of an exaggeration but this is something I think about quite often. Watch The Gods Must Be Crazy if you haven't.
Your example is incorrect

"transparency: 1" != "opacity: 1"

We use transparency in the US. Transparency is how much light passes through an object and Opacity is how much it blocks.

so:

"transparency: 1" == "opacity: 0"
This might just be what gets me onto the backend JS boat.

Any problems with setting up to use mongo?
Indeed, the salaries in medicine can be so absurdly high that $250k of debt is truly not as much as it sounds.

If a dermatologist starts at $234k, then you could easily pay back $100k/year and still have a very comfortable chunk of change left over. And that's ignoring salary increases. In a few years, you'll be debt free making $350k. And you could see numbers of that magnitude even in cheaper rural areas where you'll live like a king.

And I completely agree with you on job security as well. Once you start practicing, you're pretty much made for life.
In the US slavery was outlawed over 200 years ago and we still suffer with the socioeconomic consequences of it to this day, and for many days to come. To say the caste system was done away with 20 years ago and think it doesn't have a strong influence today I think is folly. I say that having no experience with India but knowing precedence strongly implies this to be the case.
You conveniently forgot a key bottleneck: the amount of RAM on your server. That's what determines how many concurrent sessions you can keep running before performance degrades and you need to add another server.
Regardless of the cash value, I think it's interesting that so many people continue to accept that "Satoshi" was in fact a single real person, who created bitcoin out of an ideological desire.

Given the famous quality of its cryptographic design, it seems at least plausible to me that bitcoin is in fact a research project out of academia or a national government, with the Satoshi mythology a brilliant marketing wrapper.
auto playing music on the web is a bit 90s no?
Dude I live in Brazil where we have dish washers and washing machines for decades and here the upper middle class really never let their maids go with a fair salary or even said they were unnecessary once these stuff became available, I doubt they will disappear overnight, just like they did not over here.
It's because you're able to define all the background styling in one line:

background: #000 url(pic.png) no-repeat;

So having background-repeat: none; would conflict with background/background-image: none;
I am quite sure I'm not the only one that read the text with a brit accent in my mind.
I considered your points. You pretend as if the claims of early adopters are to blame for fueling the recent "frenzy". Really? Are you really saying a group of early adopters are entirely to blame for a market appraising a formerly unknown asset?

If you lacked the vision, the luck, the timeliness, etc. of an early adopter, fair's fair. Pay them their respects. I still kick myself for not having my wits about me when I first heard about Bitcoin.

As for your alternative, I don't see why not. You could create a clone of Bitcoin today, why not do it yourself? They did that with Litecoin, too. In fact the author of Litecoin created it because he felt "wronged" the same way you do now. He felt as if too many people missed the boat with Bitcoin, and clearly people should have a second chance of early adopting such a revolutionary concept.

I don't feel the same way.