skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really fascinating how quickly someone who believes in the ultimate supremacy of contracts may try to weasel out of their own obligations.
This is what I was going for with my Flash game "Darwin Games": http://www.kongregate.com/games/Bemmu/darwin-games-2012

The idea to use just four types of blocks is brilliant. I tried using only bone blocks, with invisible muscle fibers connecting them to each other and pulsating at random pace. Wasn't so easy to visualize.
And sometimes it's just people taking radium pills.
But, if you start adding keyboards and other peripherals, aren't you essentially recreating the PC?
Start-up Shizzle
Correct. Zerocoin is a way to make it mathematically difficult (read: likely infeasible in practice) to de-anonymize instead of trusting a central party. Cool stuff!
One of his arguments in my opinion is invalid. He tries to suggest that if USA would simply invest in education, especially in middle America, then USA would produce enough engineers to not have to import engineers from abroad.

However, my view is that not everyone, regardless of education, can be good software engineer. Almost all software engineers I know used to be very top at mathematics and science since the very first year of primary school. They didn't receive any superior education, but researched and learned things by themselves, very often against a lot of things that stood in their way, like no access to internet or much more obligations (like helping family on the farm) than kids in America.

Nowadays, when it is getting much easier to learn anything being anywhere in the world, just being born or educated in the USA loses it's value.

Remember, that USA is just about 5% of world population.
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> Why don't you want your YouTube account linked to your Gmail?

Because.

Do I even need a reason?
Interesting. It reminds me of this campaign I was going to start called the Facebook 300 Diet. The goal was to remove all of the non-essential cruft friends from your Facebook account to clean up your network to the most essential 300 friends. I created criteria to help you determine which friends should be removed and which ones should stay. The color #FB300D.
ASP.Net MVC?
Exactly. Besides, it takes very little money and resources to seek out and capture the traders of such materials.
I like the idea of a catalog of mistakes. TechCrunch makes it easy to get caught up in all the success stories, but there's no easy way to learn from the failures, which can be far more enlightening.

I decided to start a Twitter profile to collect all these post-mortems in one place. If such a resource already exists, let me know!

https://twitter.com/StartupGrave
The market is capitalized at $2.5 billion, but what does that mean in an economy with no production?

Does the author define "production" as manufacturing where the exclusive currency used (for raw materials, wages, utility bills, etc.) is bitcoin? If so then I'm not sure of the relevance.

One could make all sorts of clever but offtopic points about a fiat paper currency when viewed through the lens of a P2P currency like bitcoin. "The Canadian dollar is supposedly worth more than the USD today, but what does that mean when
the Canadian network has zero nodes?" The wrongness of such a statement leaps out since fiat currencies are familiar to us. In contrast, bitcoin doesn't need a manufacturing base, but this is less obvious since P2P currency is a new idea
that people (myself included) don't well understand.
Yes, you are. The parent was arguing that PC hardware would become specialized high $ developer only equipment, but as you say all you need to recreate a PC from a mobile device are a couple of peripherals.
>Something does worry me slightly about the large shift to tablets, which are great devices in their own right. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation.

Depends on the type of content.

For writing text, painting, or making electronic music for example, there are tons of extremely easy to use apps for tablets.

For example with something like Procreate people can draw stuff nearly as intuitive as using paper and brushes, something that is difficult in the PC, except if you have one of those Wacom monitors/tablets.
Your historical comments don't seem to have been downvoted. Just comments in the one thread.
Sadly, we still haven't fit this in and no pull requests to-date. A Mono pull request would cause heartfelt cheers.
Nice eye. I think over time the color got subtly shifted by a few percentage points here and there. Nonetheless, the color you see today is directly influenced by that early random decision.
found it. it was http://www.minervaproject.com/
I've had had HDs who died of "horrible death" to especially worry about SSDs.

You have the same strategy with everything: back up the stuff you want. And, even better, back them up twice, in different locations.
"Recent research has shown that placebo works even when patient knows (s)he's getting placebo."

Huh? Why would it be surprising that placebos work when the patient knows they're getting the placebo?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554
I'm not involved with Bitcoin in any way, but I did find the comment "Felix Salmon and many others have pointed out that a currency cannot succeed with a supply that is fixed, or if it grows too slowly." a little confusing.

Isn't gold a perfect example of a currency that has a fixed supply? Moreover, isn't the value of a currency often based on it's scarcity?
You took shots at a hero for many, Jobs. Put yourself in their shoes. Votes are often what folks agree with, not what's right.
Now that you have learned how not to build product, I suggest you take a one month break, and go build something else.Don't build the product without knowing what the market wants. In your case, people wanted an easy way to support their artists.Don't market a product in such way. In your case, learn the basics of online marketing, and pay someone to build a good landing page for the product.Don't take it so personally. Shit happens. It failed. Who cares? The more value you put on failure, the less value you put on iterating. That's where success comes from.I do have to say that your landing page is pretty crummy. That contributed in a huge way towards the failure.
Are you trying to build something similar to DropBox [1] or Box.com [2] ?

There is a comparison of the two services on ibtimes today [3].

Colin Percival (hn:cpercival) has a similar service called tarsnap [4],
and at least some of his source code is open source, possibly all of
it (I'm not sure).

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/

[2] https://www.box.com/

[3] http://www.ibtimes.com/dropbox-vs-boxnet-battle-boxes-362734

[4] https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html
As a passive consumer of the benchmarks/info, I've got to say a huge "Thanks" for this! I've been a watcher of the Debian benchmarks game for a long time (since its inception), but, after using Python, Ruby, Haskell, etc, had written off JVM languages as either slow (e.g. Groovy) or non-expressive (e.g. Java)... This benchmark has got me seriously interested in JVM languages again. (Note: I don't want to use Scala^H^H^H^H^HFrankenstein)

Given the computational ability of browsers, the "front end" is rich and the "back end" is shrinking down to just the API. I'm not sure that the extra verbosity of Java is too large a cost for the performance it offers.

I currently have an application doing 1500 requests a second on Django and it's using 3 servers. I could have used only one server if I'd used Java or Clojure? Hmmm...
As far as I understand the posting, this depends on the total minted Zerocoins. Since you can not tell with any certainty that a specific Zerocoin is already redeemed ( except if all are redeemed, more on that later), the probability that a specific Zerocoin belongs to you is 1/n, where n is the number of addresses which have ever generated Zerocoins.

However, there are some assumptions in the argument, most importantly that the number of Zerocoins is always rising. Dropping this assumption ( and mentioning that I did not double check my argument), the probability that the last redeemed Zerocoin is also the last minted is 1/min( n(t) + m(t)), where n(t) denotes the number of addresses which generated Zerocoins since some time t and m(t) is the number of not redeemed Zerocoins at t. At least from the perspective of an outside observer who does not hold any Zerocoins. In the case of an attacker with f Zerocoins the probability would be
P=1/min(n(t)+m(t)-f).

The worst case is then, that your adversary holds all Zerocoins just before you mint your Zerocoin. And a attacker with large resources can continue to mint Zerocoins until he runs out of funds, simulating a working anonymising ecosystem. Therefore you should wait until a plausible attacker runs out of funds, that is for a attacker with total funds f0 (using the above formula at the time of your minting of a coin t=0 with m(0)=f)
P0 > 1/(n(t) - (f0-m(0)).
where PO is a parameter describing your desired anonymity level. And therefore you should wait for the minting of
n(t)> 1/P0 + (f0 - m0)
Zerocoins before you redeem your originally minted one. Simple corollary, you should mint when there are many coins in existence and you should pick poor enemies.
The point was that current interview processes have no mechanism for measuring the second sort of individual. They don't have a way to measure tenacity and the uncanny knack of discovering the best way to do something when starting from ignorance(1).

tl;dr: A Google-like company would not have hired (someone like) Woz.

(1) Its double-hard because there are no shortage of people with tenacity who have the knack for doing things in a terrible way over and over. They all think they're in the former category.
Winklevii say they own one percent of all Bitcoins
We like to call ourselves "zap-ee-er" but I'll accept any pronunciation since that means you're talking about us!

Fun side note. We integrate with a lot of European and Australian companies. Most of the time on intro calls they default to the more "French" sounded version ”zap-ee-air” whereas most of the US companies seem to default to a more "English" pronunciation "zay-pee-er".
Here's the problem. You're talking about traders, but where is the capital? You can't have a financial market purely based on currency speculation. If we're going to talk about bitcoins as though it were an asset (store of value), rather than a money supple (unit of account or medium of exchange), then we need to verify which properties of an asset it possesses.

Do bitcoins provide a consumption utility stream? Do they yield dividends. What sorts of productive risk-taking do they represent? When I buy a stock, it will perform well if the risks it takes in providing mutually beneficial exchange with business and households are successful. For bitcoins, there is no systematic market risk, because there is no capital stock. Why? The same reason as always. Deflation increases the burden of debt which decreases investment, even though the economy is awash in savings.

Our national economies do not possess cycles as you describe them. Here's a good article about macroeconomic business cycles: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/is-business-cycle.... While the level of inflation fluctuates in our economy, it does so on a much smaller scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation_An.... What really jumps out from that graph is how the best economic prosperity the world has ever seen coincides with fiat currency ending the threat of deflation.
I'm still unconvinced that Amazon has any need to try and take advantage of their current popularity. They have sufficient capital and brand recognition to develop this system without riding the coattails of a still (in mainstream) largely not understood or recognized virtual currency.
Part of the reason that software isn't pushing up against hardware limitations as hard anymore are the relatively old and underpowered current generation consoles. Games were traditionally on the front of the hardware curve, but over the last few years only a small proportion of the game market has had fundamentally high hardware requirements.

It'll be interesting to see what upcoming console releases will do for the the hardware market.
Life must be especially complicated for you, considering that each of your assertions are flat out wrong.

Facebook, Google, and Microsft not profitable? Seriously dude, just google them; they're very profitable (technically MS lost money last year, but that was entirely due to a one-off asset writedown, and they've made gobs of cash every other year).
>I cannot see how a device like a tablet could top having dozens of tools literally under your finger tips.

Can you see how a physical mixer, with faders and all, beats a virtual mixer on the Pro Tools screen as an interface in some cases? A tablets beats the keyboard and mouse in the same way.

Not to mention that most people don't work as experienced shortcut automatons, so sparing the tedious use of mouse and/or the tedious keyboard dance for immediate, visual, feedback on a touch screen is even better for them.
Ah, got it. My question/comment was essentially your point.
That requires the driver to manually shift around an area though. Something that automatically hyperlapses through the whole next street or so would be neater.
Your startup may have failed for other reasons.
Just saw the promo video on your website, am not impressed. It actually looked like a parody video. And the reference to drugs (are you saying that all musicians take drugs?). NOT impressed.
Product with maybe a good idea but seriously poor execution/marketing.
Be more serious when doing a startup (unless your intention is to be less serious, ala 9gag) or risk being a terrible parody joke.
I think we can do a lot better too. It's a classic problem: how would you sell Excel if it were a web app?
Who benefits from unpaid internships and how much? Not paying for internships eliminates students who cannot afford to work for free.
Low acceptance rates, commercial publishing... scholarly communication [pdf]
Both can accomplish amazing things. You'll never hire one of the second kind. The second just isn't going to be able to show you pointer arithmetic on your whiteboard in your pet language.

Maybe you won't hire the 2nd kind (as you say). Doesn't mean someone else will see the value in such background. Though there is an implicit message in your post. That all college trained programmers are the same. Which is downright wrong, due to there being a lot of different types of programmers. There are people who I wouldn't let near a database, but can really write some awesome C++. Or those who are awesome at writing web crawlers, but suck at making effective CRUD apps. Or maybe that guy who is a genius at VB.NET, and carries the weight of a whole company on his back (maybe he taught himself). You wouldn't hire those? Then you wouldn't hire yourself.
Because each coin transaction entails a 40KB zero knowledge proof. So a Satoshi will require 40*10^8 KB transferred for a 1BTC transaction.
The article addresses this:

> For the more paranoid, there are services called 'laundries' that take in bitcoins from a whole bunch of users, mix them up and shuffle them back out. In theory this makes it hard to track your money. Unfortunately, laundries suffer from a few problems. First, they only work well if lots of people are using them, and today's laundries have relatively low volume. More importantly, you're entirely dependent on the honesty and goodwill of the laundry itself. A dishonest (or hacked) laundry can steal your coins, or even trace its inputs and outputs -- which could completely undermine your privacy.
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tl;dr: "most journals are sold under “big deal” contracts in which publishers in effect give libraries all or nothing offers to subscribe to their whole catalog in a given field rather than allowing librarians or consortia to chose their subscriptions journal by journal. See the work of Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee[1] on this for more details. What the exact incentives of the publishers are here is not entirely clear. They seem to care weakly about the over-all quality of the bundle, but they get little or no extra revenue from increasing page counts. Thus, the decision to starve journals for pages in light of strongly increasing submission rates is driven by the commercial interests of the publisher and is entirely contrary to the mission of fostering scholarly communication. This is a new, and I think compelling, reason to try to reclaim scholarly communication back from commercial publishers and into the community of scholars, and is the main point I would like to be taken from this letter."

edit: additional summary

The letter starts with the position that journals have become irrelevant for scholarly communication, which has been my experience in Economics, although I get the impression from other people here that that's not universal across fields. But (again from TFA), despite being irrelevant for communication, journals are important for promotion, hiring, etc., and that their low acceptance rates are causing serious problems. It then argues (and this is the quotation I pulled out) that commercial publishers are a big reason for those low acceptance rates, so they've got to go.

[1] http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/BundleContracts.html
Using the analogy of spoken languages ( a stretch I know ), I'd say there is a big difference in knowing enough to get by when traveling vs being fluent.

When a company is hiring, would they rather hire someone who can get by or a fluent speaker?

I think there is certainly a breath and depth balance to be had and I think you are correct in seeking more depth. A deep understanding of one language will allow you to more quickly gain depth in other languages.

And have fun!
But isn't every number the sum of two primes?
They started pulling that nonsense on me too. About every tenth video has an overlay and there is no "just leave me alone" option. I end up using an incognito tab instead. For the life of me I can't tell what choice they are trying to force me to make and what is wrong with how things are at the moment.
They dont have a store, but you can control html and javascript and more.
Yes, I noticed that as well. My question is more of a general nature, not me specifically. I've only noticed this behavior in the last few weeks. Previously people would actually engage in debate or conversation, now it seems that the downvote button is regarded as argument enough.
Why isn't the answer P = { Inf -> 1, otherwise 0 } ?

Axiom 1:
P(E) elem N => P(E) >= 0, for all E

Trivially satisfied

Axiom 2:
P(Omega) = 1

Satisfied:
Omega = N
{ Inf } elem N

Axiom 3:
Sigma additivity. Trivially satisfied since it either includes { Inf } or it doesn't, making the outcome 0 or 1.

Where is the problem ?

I think it's pretty clear that this is the only possible solution, because since N is not closed, there is no way to keep a uniform density other than 0.

This does not seem like it's a very useful solution, but it does seem to satisfy the axioms.
Two quick remarks. First, there already are many virtual/digital currencies, some of which simply peg their currencies to the dollar. But nobody really cares. Why? Well, what's the point? It's just a slightly less convenient form of a dollar.

Second, we all already do use digital currency. Actual, physical currency (and deposits at the Fed) are called the monetary base or "high powered money". However, most people transact goods using debit cards, which is called "inside money". These are privately created dollars, and they change hands digitally. So, we're already there. (I'm avoiding credit cards since those are technically loans, not money).
I am also a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It's not that you won't get hired. It's that you won't get a nice salary, as you will have 'junior'-level skills for any field you apply for.

There are some positions where this obviously does work in your favour, but in general, you can be a junior in a bunch of jobs rather than a senior in one.
Ask HN: Coffeeshops in SF, what do
I've committed myself to do this Thursday SF coffeeshop days. Recently, I've visited Ritual and Bluebottle, not sure where my next destination is. Any suggestions?
money laundering or black market trade

Moving money across borders is an use for Bitcoin as well. If you're living in Iran (or North Korea or Syria or Palestine) Bitcoin could very well solve your liquidity problem, in the same way the TOR network helps to solve a government-imposed-firewall issue.
>I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol

I haven't looked at it in a while but take a gander at tent: http://tent.io
Why do you assume Heroku wants you to know who they're tipping? Or that it's a positive thing for us to know? Perhaps they are just trying to help the community and don't need credit for it, other than the indication that they are giving.
This is definitely true. The smart people will be on a community like this, Reddit, or forum, post a link to the video, and discuss it within their own community. Only the idiots will post comments directly onto the video's page.
I find it hard to justify $150/month ($1800 per year) for analytics :(
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> Which word didn't you understand?

I understood all of it, I just think you're wrong. And unless you ever address what anyone is saying, all I can do is keep on thinking you're wrong.

Nobody - nobody here, nobody on TFA - said anything about sustaining a reaction. It is a one-off explosion much like a weapon. An explosion like that is hard to use for generating electricity, just like a bomb, but great for pushing things around. Why isn't this feasible? Please explain. Why can we detonate a hydrogen fusion bomb, which generates a lot of energy (but no electricity), but we cannot initiate a tiny short term burst with a carefully designed fuel pellet?

I'm not saying they have everything figured out. I'm just saying I wouldn't be so skeptical to think it would be some amazing breakthrough if they do it. If this rocket works, we still don't have usable fusion electricity. That problem still needs to be solved. But it is not the same problem.

> Yes, they are the same thing. They both require break-even

No, electrical generation means you need to need to somehow use your energy to heat up something and turn a turbine, or something like that. Which means you need some kind of ongoing stable and contained reaction. There are so many difficulties with that, it really WOULD be a big deal if they solved that problem. Just making a small explosion? Not as far fetched.

> I know this subject, you do not.

And don't try to argument-from-authority me. You're a random account on the internet just like me. As far as I know you're some crackpot pseudoscience crazy. Not that I believe that, but I don't know better.
Etsy has a great engineering blog-- http://codeascraft.etsy.com/
Internet is indeed serious business.
> I could have used only one server if I'd used Java or Clojure? Hmmm...

Use Clojure, but keep in mind that if you're not caching aggressively you can saturate persistence-side quickly - making your choice of application language irrelevant.
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> buying multiples

Plus there's stuff like using off-by-one values for fractional exchange. Eg 79 points for 99c, or vice versa. If you step to 80p / dollar it's easy to calculate a sufficiently-good approximation mentally, but lots of people aren't used to mental shortcuts like that.
I would like to see a simple CRUD blog built with different frameworks. Building a blog is like the "Hello world!" for dynamic web development.
Mt Gox went back online about 80 minutes ago. So about 40 minutes before your timestamp.
I did not like it.