skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole point of having a country with a central bank that can print money at will (fiat currency), is to have full control over inflation/deflation. When the increase/decrease of the monetary supply is controlled by outside factors, whether it's tied to shiny yellow rocks, or computed bits, or another country's currency, then you run into problems like this:

- Bank runs. It's standard practice that banks will loan out more money than they have in deposits, because it's unlikely that all their loans will go bad at once, and/or it's unlikely that all their deposits will want their money back at once (this is known as fractional reserve banking[0]). But if your currency is anchored to something fixed, this can happen. FDIC insurance is guaranteed in the US because even in some absurd financial economic meltdown scenario, Ben Bernanke can print out USDs to make every depositor whole, if necessary. The only "cost" to that kind of "bailout" is the potential inflation. But you can't do this as a government if your monetary supply is limited because it's fixed to something you can't directly control. The government can borrow money and then make depositors whole, but those that you borrow money from may impose conditions, and those conditions may exacerbate the problem you're trying to solve. See: Cyprus[1].

- The deflation-debt spiral[2]. Yes, inflation "punishes savings," but deflation punishes debt. Generally, debt becomes a big problem in recessions. If you owe $20,000 on your car, and you get a 20% wage cut because your company can only sell goods at 20% of the price they were previously able to, your debt does not go down to $16,000. It's still $20,000. So more of your income will go to paying off debt, which means less of it will go to discretionary spending, which means even more economic slowdown, which means more deflation, which means more wage cuts, which means debt becomes an even bigger burden, etc.

The only real danger to a fiat currency is whether your government's central bank will be so irresponsible with the money supply that inflation spirals out of control. If you're a resident of a third-world country like Zimbabwe[3], transacting in bitcoins will be great because you'll happily trade potential deflationary pain for not being at the whim of a dictator that will print money to increase inflation to one thousand trillion bazillion percent. But if you're the resident of a first-world country which has a responsible central bank, then increasing the monetary supply to fight off deflation is a very good thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/why-the-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_deflation

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
I created a typescript declaration file for the environment of nodewar, if someone wants to try writing it in TS. https://github.com/JacekLach/NodeWarTyped
The OpenCoin a16z invested in is presumably Ripple (where the parent company named itself OpenCoin relatively recently), not the long-standing and more useful OpenCoin.org (which is an open source electronic cash protocol library).
I'd never heard of it, but just gave it a spin and it's really impressive.

I work for a decent sized publishing co that sends a lot of email newsletters as part of it's core biz. I know this e3 thing is part of your service, but is there any planned integration with something like Exact Target (via API, not just SMTP)? Thanks!
Use the tracking pixel and hold the connection open. When the user goes to the next email, the connection will close and you'll have the length of time they viewed it.
Deflation also requires more collateral, because in case of default, the bank won't be able to sell the collateral for the value it had when the loan was made, which risks insolvency and the loss of depositors' funds.
North Korea May Have Nuclear Missile Capability, U.S. Agency Says
Ummm, no. The bitcoin price can only go up if people are spending US dollars, Euros, etc on Bitcoins, not the other way around as you describe it. You do understand how currency exchanges function, do you not? If people are goign to an exchange, giving the exchange bitcoins, and then taking dollars for said bitcoins, the ratio of bitcoins to dollars within the exchanges holdings has just gone up, lowering the number of dollars it takes to buy a bitcoin....... so if the bitcoin takes MORE dollars, euros, etc to buy, then the opposite must be occurring.

This really isn't very complicated.
One thing a lot of employers and managers don't realize is that humans aren't cogs. The general model of employment is that you replace a given human in a specific role with another human in the same role, just like replacing cogs. The real world doesn't work that way though. In reality everyone brings a different set of skills and passions to the table. And the way person X does job Y is going to be very much different than the way person Z does job Y. And sometimes this can be significant enough to where you can't actually replace person X with person Z directly. What you're doing is building a machine with parts that are all different, and if you have to replace a key part often times you will need to completely restructure the machine to make it work well again. Meaning, sometimes you might replace one person with several people who do different parts of the job. Or you might replace one person with a new person who now also does the job of current employee person W, who's know redundant.

Teams are complex beasts, and they get more complex the more talented people are in them. Managers need to be very mindful of those complexities when they form or change teams.
But do any of those 70+ computers receive RF input? Are there any RF receivers anywhere on the same wired network--or is all RF reception air-gapped from flight control?

(I'm not trying to imply anything, just curious.)
Are you serious? I would say that the opposite is true.
I use NoScript too, but the OP was lead to believe that they were accessing a video or an interactive chat, so they would likely have permitted scripts to run on that page anyway.
Yes, I have no clue what in-game purchases have to do with Bitcoin.
Where does the unspent money go, then? Apparently, in some cases in the US, it goes to the state, but not in all cases. See http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/12/24/number-of-the-week...

Best Buy, for example, sets that level at about two years. In fiscal 2011, the electronics company recorded $53 million in income from gift-card “breakage,” or cards that are unlikely ever to be redeemed, up from $43 million a year earlier.
I'm not opposed to "high" interest rates. It encourages thrift and thrift is what built the modern world. The economy can only grow if production is greater than consumption on a macro level. How do you ensure that production is greater than consumption? You encourage savings via a "high" (some might say reasonable) interest rates.
Sounds good, but non-users of Pandora might not get it.
Usually "opting in" consists of daring to purchase something from a company, who will then send you weekly "deals" emails.
Be born rich.
>You didn't respond to my central point: blaming the victim.

Your central point is without merit. The "victim" is a victim, not of MtGox, but their own poor decisions.
[Infographic] What Customers Want from Support Centers
Don't worry, these sorts of companies are just lucky blips. For the most part if you set out to build a new company and you cannot predict where it's revenues will come from the odds are against you.

Keep focused on building a business. It may take longer but you will learn lots more along the way and your chances of success will be greater if you have a revenue model already baked.

There must be something Foursquare are not sharing with us, along with other commenters on this thread I don't know of a single user of their product since 2011.

Edit - typo
It is 7014.
So Gold that was deflationary over long periods was not a 'real' currency? Your economic arguments are simply wrong. Deflation by money destruction will hurt the economy, like in the Great Depresion. Deflation that happens because of increased in production will not destroy lending. The real intrest rate will still be positiv.

The real story is more complicated since I have ignored money demand.

Note that I have not said Bitcoin will become a 'real' currency. There are real problems, Im just saying that your argument is wrong.
What you are describing is a currency peg. This is what the Silk Road does with the black market items people buy on there with bitcoins. This is an acknowledgement by the Silk Road of bitcoins being a great medium of exchange due to the difficulty of tracing them, but a horrible holder of value due to their volatility.
Thanks! I couldn't figure out how to do the colors in the SASS loop.
how else are they going to buy weed, ecstacy, cocaine, illegal electronics, steroids or any other banned substances

With dollars?
Yelp focuses on the "Wall of Text" type of review. Foursquare tips are one-liners.

So instead of:

"My date and I came here a few weeks ago and the initial ambience was great. We waited around 20 minutes for seats and the decor out front was..."

you get

"Try the veal. Seriously."

One is much, much more useful in the mobile context, the other is almost useless. Yelp also over-emphasizes the star-rating system (which at this point is completely irrelevant and pure noise) while Foursquare simply throw tips at you.

Overall I've found that Foursquare Explore's recommendations in NYC to be vastly superior to Yelp. I'd be sad if they go under.
One part of the issue that I haven't seen addressed is the confusion caused by his job title. Much play is made out of "Creative Director" - all this means is that he was A Creative Director, but the story is spun that he was The Creative Director.

I have no idea how many "Creative Directors" Microsoft has, or how many in the XBox division, but in general at MS "Director" in your job title usually just means that you are at a level above senior (otherwise known as principal) and (sometimes) are a manager of managers.

So among other things, this is collateral damage caused by title inflation.
> All the features of HTML beyond that get in the way by obscuring the plain text and the information plain text conveys.

I don't see any obfuscation happening in the emails shown in this article. Rather, the article's suggestions give even more emphasis to the text.

"Grr HTML bad" is not a very defensible position.

> In my mind, email, or text communication, is not about presentation but is about textual content.

It was recognized before email even existed that presentation is fundamental to textual communication. Cf. the works of Jan Tschichold and Marshall McLuhan to pick two arbitrary examples.
http://blockchain.info/charts
If the goal is to make an email feel like it's written by a human being, why not emulate what human emails actually look like? Does the author photo actually make it feel more human, or less? I can't think of a time I've ever gotten a real-person email that included a picture of the sender.
Exactly. So perhaps Amazon might begin to block it in the future. I don't really see that happening soon, however. Amazon hasn't built up enough critical mass to ditch the larger Android ecosystem.
I love this series of analyses — they're always interesting and well-written. I'm not sure who at Priceonomics made the decision "Yes, let's spend time writing about interesting things", but I think it's great.
No, I don't receive any mass-delivered email that opted-in for, because if I wanted to read something generic I would go to the relevant website or blog. I do, of course, receive some 'group email' which is equally relevant to all the recipients, but the sender obviously had all of us, recipients, in mind when writing the email. And I'm not even opposed to mass-emails, it's just obvious that for the most part these emails are not relevant to the recipients, and adding any styling to these advertisements isn't making them any more relevant or useful.
The point wasn't that dollars are inherently valuable, rather that gold is as much a fiat currency as any other, it is just one that is propped up on a shared delusion of inherent value rather than other factors.
I just checked the most recent 5 newsletter or marketing messages in my inbox and all of they were all multipart with a text version. Every message my company sends has a text version -- I think some email service providers generate one automatically whether you want it or not.

shrug Maybe it depends on the type of stuff you're getting.
Zsh/Bash startup files loading order
Your landing page is confusing. Very, very confusing. I don't have a clue as to what is it that you do. Do you expect people to buy without knowing what is it that you offer? I hate to be this blunt, but you need to re-do all your marketing. Just from looking at that page, I can assume that everything else is as bad as it. Don't take this the wrong way. But the issue most startups fail is because they never manage to send the right message out.

To make it clear, you are failing because your are sabotaging your success with crummy marketing. You have a good brand name, good domain, seem to have a good understanding of design, and it looks to be a good service. But you won't sell much if people don't understand what it is, what it does, and it is for, and how to use it.

Any other idea you might implement that suffers from such bad marketing is doomed to fail.
Funny you should say that. "Gold, Long a Secure Investment, Loses Its Luster": http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/business/gold-long-a-secur...
http://www.madboa.com/geek/pine-macosx/#mimeapps-web
haha, yeah im not looking to score points, just not waste time on things I know are wrong ;)
They'll always be okay, no matter how poor their business decisions and investments.
Do they also have WMDs?
i'm not sure what his definition of a "real" currency is, but to me, a "real" currency is one in which all transactions occur within that currency. if you use bitcoin, but somewhere along the lines of a transaction you exchange mediums, it's no longer "real", you're just bartering.
The difficulty of mining slides up and down depending on the block rate.

As the profitability drops, some miners will stop, the block rate will drop and the difficulty will drop until things balance again.
VPNs are cheap.
How soviet Mars 3 was found on pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Warby Parker Co-Founder Brings Style (At a Discount) to Shaving
"because it prevents governments from increasing quantity in times where hoarding is occurring."

As opposed to a currency which allows a government to deliberately and invisibly transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest in society? With hoarding you can switch to silver or copper. With the current system you have to put up with the decisions of an unaccountable class of people who can manipulate the currency for their own personal gain without repercussion.

It's as if the government was trying to solve the problem of hoarding by printing more money and giving the money to the hoarders.
Yeah, this has fuck-all to do with bitcoins. Same thing could have happened with real money through paypal or a bank's website, except those are probably a few steps ahead of babby's first online banking website in terms of migitating against likely attack vectors.
> And yet despite all the deflation people are conducting transactions in bitcoin.

Deflation is something that happens to an economy; it can be a result of constrained supply of currency in the economy, but constrained supply of bitcoin now, which accounts for a very small share of the currency used in exchanges in any coherent economy isn't deflationary, even if the supply characteristics of bitcoin are such that it would be deflationary if it were a dominant currency.

> How long do you have to hold on to money before it's hoarding? A second? A minute? An hour? A year?

Probably best to say that any money held in cash is "hoarded", and characterize hoarding by degree rather than as a binary quantity.

> The vast majority of money is hoarded because most people don't earn a dollar on one hand an immediately spend it on the other.

People who deposit money in a bank (which amounts to a loan, even though it may be at an effective zero or, given fees charged by the institution, negative interest rate for some accounts) are not hoarding it. And, neither, for the most part, is the bank, who is turning around and investing/lending most of the funds deposited.

If people are cashing their paychecks and stuffing the money in their mattresses, then, yeah, they are hoarding it, but that's not all that typical.
Actually, the only thing the hacker didn't do is ask the dude politely to give him (or her) the money. This wasn't a 0day bug, no XSS. The dude gave the hacker permission to run any code on his machine, therefore it's completely his own fault, and has nothing to do with MtGox.
I appreciate how poorly researched they are in their investments.

"free of politics" made me laugh much more.
Plan your digital afterlife
If you want to go farther down the rabbit hole, this is an excellent 20-minute video about the history of the Amen Break, the "six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures" and the rise of sampling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
Specifically, if you set things up as in the linked article, no traffic or other information is going to Google (unless you think that the Google Authenticator app is leaking info to Google for whatever reason). Specifically, Google doesn't see how many logins your app gets.

If you're trying to sneak up on a market, or if for some reason you're trying to hide from Google the number of active users you have, you might see this as an advantage.
Bitcoin as payment is a novelty. And it's difficult to point to activity on the exchanges as evidence for bitcoins acceptance as a currency, since it's not possible to separate out the speculators from those that honestly think bitcoin has a future.
But then you aren't really borrowing/loaning bitcoins. The transaction is taking place in whatever currency you're agreeing to pay it back as. Say currently 10bitcoins = 1oz gold. So I agree to loan you 10bitcoins, and you agree to pay me back their equivalent price of 1oz of gold +interest in 5 years in bitcoins. The loan is being taken out based on gold, and bitcoins are just an intermediary, but they are essentially acting as a certificate for that gold.
I love Pulse, it's my favorite mobile news reader by far.
They have control of the nodes and vectors through which the money flows, which is I think what the parent meant by control over "currency".
Having politics done at the local level by people who live in and are invested in Scotland is the #1 reason I'm going to vote for independence.

Not being a viable target for nukes is just the icing on the cake.

It's a shame all polls suggest we're rather content being ignored by the status quo though.
It's not primarily about income. It's about issuing new currency. Let's say the US government doubles the number of outstanding dollars. All other things being equal, once things settle out your dollar is going to have about half the purchasing power it had before the extra money was issued. It's a wealth tax.

But let's say you saw this coming and put your money into hard assets or stable foreign currencies. When you sell those assets or currencies, you have a huge paper gain which the USG is going to expect you to pay income taxes on even though you haven't made anything at all in constant dollars. Again, a wealth tax.
While you're taking editing suggestions, there are 2 points that are missing in the narrative:

- Alice and Bob must have identical copies of the dictionary. Different editions could have slightly different definitions. The risk is not large, but it throws off all confidence.

- Alice tells Bob her procedure. Either they do it in real-time together or she tells him the procedure along with the encrypted word. But nowhere in the text as written does Alice communicate the "algorithm" to Bob.

Also, Bob does not know if Alice completed the puzzle until he completes the puzzle (or the solution is published) [actually that one clue, but Alice could've chosen any clue, possibly the last one that Bob finds]. The story made me believe Bob would know if Alice completed the puzzle immediately, so by definition of the problem, before he completed it. Is there a protocol that would allow this? [I think that's where we need 3rd party trusted sources]
tweet version of the comment> "buy BTC to buy gift cards to buy Amazon coins to buy in-game currency to buy in-game items to sell my character on ebay for USD to buy BTC"
In my lifetime the economy has been quite fragile too. I'm not convinced that the booms and bust of old are any worse than they are today. Sure these days they're smoothed out more but the pain lasts longer.

When removing a bandaid do you simply rip it off all at once or slowly peel it back? Which is the superior method?
> And yet despite all the deflation people are conducting transactions in bitcoin.

Did you know that prices in Silk Road are pegged to USD? As it should. Either way, that's called argument ad populum. "And yet despite no revenue sources people are buying dotcom stocks"...

> How long do you have to hold on to money before it's hoarding?

This is called moving the goalposts. It's also a stupid argument in many other ways, by the way, and you should know better. "Evolution does not happen because not every single organism gives birth to one of another species"...
Communication can include colors, images and videos. I don't see any reason why these can't or shouldn't be available inside an email.

The more ways you have to convey the information, the better, imo.
See my comment below. Inflation is a tax.
I would not offer a plan of less per month - that's where everyone will head.

Go for three tiers, with a carnet or book of tickets approach. Yes it's harder to implement but in think that if people pay for say hosting for talks in blocks of three or five then you canngrab the folks who just are doing one talknand want to look pros.
I always thought it worked for Walmart because they have disgustingly high volume? (And therefore could have razor thin margins.)
> That graph shows that inflation and deflation largely canceled out for many, many years here in the US.

Which doesn't actually support the position it is offered as defense for, that similar levels of inflation and deflation have the same harms. Them tending in the long term to be equal (leaving no long-term net inflation/deflation) doesn't mean that variation from 0 on each side is equally harmful.

> And the world survived those times or else we would not be here today.

The world survived the times when chattel slavery, autocracy, de jure religious prosecutions were the norm, too. That doesn't mean that those things are good, or even no worse than the features of the modern developed world that have replaced them.

> One of the arguments that people make re:inflation is we're modern and look at all the good things the modern world has.

As its not one that either Krugman nor anyone in the exchange leading up to your post made, that's a strawman.
What happened to the Rails 4 Queue API?
Use Lucene.NET on Azure pushing the index to Blob Storage
Filters should be created and maintained based on their efficacy, not on how easily they can be applied.

Yes, it's impossible to interview every applicant, but a company focused on minimizing time spent and resources used instead of maximizing recruitment of employees who can create the most value is doing it wrong.