skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds like a very interesting idea, I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I would imagine that it would be a good way of getting new customers if you were running the business properly, since people can make their own judgment on how well they trust the business owners.

One very interesting effect of allowing anyone to become business contributors is how it could change staff recruitment - you'd have a way of finding candidates who had not only a proven track record of good work, but also have extensive domain knowledge.
chopsticks??? I need to beef up my prototyping!
https://www.youtube.com/disco works a lot better at this point
1. why not just finance the way they normally do, by borrowing (selling bonds), or taking money from the taxpayer?

2. currencies today are already essentially digital. the vast majority of transactions are handled electronically. the value of a bank account are just bits on a disk.

3. bitcoin can't become a reserve currency, there is no such thing as bitcoin bonds. the growth of the bitcoin money supply has been predetermined. government wants to be able to control the money supply, because it gives them power.

4. the usd as a reserve currency will probably be replaced by a global currency, SDR's, to the detriment of humanity.

i don't think it is farfetched to cook up bitcoin as an intellectual exercise. i think it is more likely to be 2, or 3 people in collaboration, because design by committee never works.

government is too short-sighted to have created something like bitcoin.
If I email you, will you tell me in private?

If PG emailed you, would you tell him in private?
did we all just get rick-rolled like that?!!!
I do agree that the inception of bitcoin is probably more interesting than we realize, but there are a few premises here I'm questioning:

1. That the sophistication of bitcoin implies a government effort. I'd actually argue it's just as likely to be a corporate effort. This is more of a gut feeling, but modern government seems much more reactive than proactive, and so if they were to have created this, my suspicion would be that it was in response to something. But since I don't see an obvious "something", I'd imagine some sort of corporate entity is more likely to be proactive about an effort like this.

Or, maybe even more likely than that, some sort of organized crime effort. I mean the classic stereotype of the "mafia" makes that seem funny, but I imagine modern organized crime entities would be very interested in something like bitcoin. Especially since, outside of idealistic libertarians, I imagine the only reason right now to spend bitcoins is if you want to buy something that can't be tracked back to you.

2. I don't quite buy the premise that bitcoin is a bulletproof protocol. For instance: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses .

Some of these are sophisticated problems, but a lot of these things are exactly the kind of problems that could have been caught if there had been a proper peer review.
Very very unlikely (if you ask me), generally a contender is unable to even see radically new technologies after they're up-and-coming. That they would design it, design it properly, and launch without fanfarre is extremely unlikely to me.
Author doesn't seem to understand what a meritocracy is.

You can't get lost in a meritocracy. Your merit determines your rank.

What can happen is that you don't understand how the merit is computed. Or you can misjudge your own merit.
I can't wait for all of Snow Crash to come true (even though it's just an intermediate step).
Possible solutions to Leo Marks' security conundrum
> I imagine the only reason right now to spend bitcoins is if you want to buy something that can't be tracked back to you.

Why wouldn't they have baked in anonymity if the reason for Bitcoin was anonymous purchasing?
How A Young Community Of Entrepreneurs Are Rebuilding Detroit
The creators of Bitcoin were very critical of central governments. The entire project rests on the notion that fiat money is a bad idea.

Like a lot of libertarian activists, or indeed activists in general, they may have overestimated how much governments would feel threatened by their actions. Or, maybe they were prescient. Hard to say right now.
He wants to unify submodules and subtrees? Sounds fishy to me, since these are for very completely different use cases.

Submodules are for tying project parts together, where you have control over all of them. For example, the clang compiler frontent could submodule the LLVM backend. Both are under the LLVM project, so people usually work on both of them at the same time. They should not be in the same repo, since LLVM also has other users unrelated to clang.

Subtrees are for integrating external projects, which are not really under your control, but you probably want to follow upstream developments. Since a subtree includes all the repo data, you can cleanly check out, even if the external origin repository vanishes.
Ask HN:  What factors determine app store success?
A group of Media Effect students, under the oversight of S. Shyam Sundar (http://comm.psu.edu/people/individual/s.-shyam-sundar), is studying what factors determine whether an application is successful in app stores. Please complete the short survey at https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eE6iDimiYgPLokB and watch for the publication of preliminary results in three to four weeks.

Thanks!
I've found a few old SD cards, a hard drive I'd forgotten about, a Garmin for my bike I'd assumed I'd lent out, and a watch I'd mislaid years ago.

But no USB sticks.

They're here somewhere. May be time for a weekend of spring cleaning.
> Perhaps the govt never stepped in to curtail bitcoin because they realized that speculation and greed would ruin this chain (and then possibly be in position to influence the next chain).

I'd bet this is one of those situations where it's better to assume human ignorance than conspiracy in the context of government.
My question is why would a crawler think that there are urls in a text/plain document? More to the point, why would it parse it for any formatted information?
I mean I am overstating the case for effect here, and I am sure there are small cliques of competent people hidden within big organizations everywhere, but if this were a government official project, it wouldn't have been done by those people. I knew brilliant people in the military in Iraq, but they weren't brilliant due to their jobs. If we did awesome stuff on the side it wouldn't have been a product of the US government.

Government also discourages small side projects, especially in the classified world, and particularly discourages them from becoming production. They would far prefer to run a program of record, or pay for (well defined) innovation by third parties.
It would also increase the value of raw cocaine as a pre-cursor to highly valuable (from a cost vs. resale perspective) crack. The CIA being involved in, or simply turning a blind eye to, cocaine smuggling when the funds were to be used to fund things they viewed as necessary but those "idiots" in Washington wouldn't fund is not entirely looney. The angle of increasing the value of a fairly easily smuggleable drug is more compelling to me than a conspiracy targeting African-American communities in particular, like the CIA is run by some crude caricature of a southern grand dragon.
Is exFAT no good?
That is a bit like having to register your bank account with the government. The opposition I can envision to that is considerable.

Moreover, what happens if everyone decides to ignore it? After all downloading copyrighted material without a license is a crime.
Sadly the word "econoterrorism" has already been coined (no pub intended). I would have protected that intellectual property and licensed it to DHS for a reasonable fee.
So I'm a hacker currently at MIT Sloan and have been analyzing bitcoins for sometime, so take my views with a grain of salt (I.e.: I not a Phd. I the field)

Basically, no government would like to have a electronic curency like the Bitcoin because it impedes them from controlling the money supply and therefore be able to apply monetary policies. A central bank with no monetary policy is limited in its function, consequently, the notion of a Bitcoin is like you having to program in an OS where you do not have root access or can't change versions of certain libraries etc.

China and other countries have suggested having a global currency that is backed by a "basket of currencies" -- other governments have suggested different solutions, but I can't imagine a Bitcoin to have been plotted by a government.
That's an actual proper use of HTML - formatting a book!
>The primary value of BitCoin is its anonymity and difficulty to trace. That means that the people that made it appreciated those values.

There are many simple things that could have been done to make it more anonymous.

The blockchain contains huge amounts of information that could have been made much harder to analyze, if anonymity was a main design goal.

The rest of the system is almost surprisingly well designed and robust, it seems surprising to me that if they set out to design for anonymity, this is the best they came up with.

Hell, if we put our tinfoil hats on, and go with the line of thinking in PGs post, I'd almost say that from an anonymity point of view, in default usage, its closer to the 'clipper chip', where its just obscure enough to make people think they are anonymous, but really reveals a lot if you look at it properly. Not putting that forward as a theory, though!
Working links:

Survey - https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eE6iDimiYgPLokB

Dr. Sundar's profile - http://comm.psu.edu/people/individual/s.-shyam-sundar
I think you read me as saying the opposite of what I was saying. The biggest problem with entitlements in the current environment is that the younger/working population is shrinking relative to the older/retiring population. Opening the borders means more younger workers coming, and probably having more children, who'll be "paying for my social security."

Of course, the comment was jokingly flippant - it's not really a good reason to throw the borders open, though there are certainly more serious arguments on both sides of that debate.
This has been an indispensable resource for me over the past couple of years. The examples are fantastic, and it's a pleasure to read. Thanks Mark!
All you need is in the GP, expect to spend about a week, maybe two. And it will be a useful way to spend your time, you'll learn more than you ever will otherwise about digital currencies. One thing that came out of this research is that digicash could have easily succeeded more than a decade earlier with significant backing if only mr. Chaum had been a bit more steadfast. I know some people that worked there and I knew there were funny things going on there but never realized how close they got to success.

This is a pretty good starting point:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5951.0
I think he's alluding to the fact that the more people that come and work in the U.S., the more people there will be to fund his social security.
How does a traditional art gallery work? I'm only guessing because I don't know diddly about art, or art galleries. But here's how I suspect it works:

- Artists primarily enjoy creating art, but they'd also really like other people to buy what they've created.

- Lots of people like looking at art and some of those people want to take some of it home with them.

- Some people decide to connect the other two groups together so they create a venue where artists can show their work -- and people can look at, and possibly purchase it.

So would Artix succeed in today's world? Maybe. Certainly, deviantart.com has done rather nicely for itself.

It's not precisely the same thing but I think it serves the same purpose.

Was it bad timing for Artix in 1995? Maybe. But I'll bet that the tiny twist in the plot line between artix and deviantart would have made the difference even in 1995.

No way to know, but it's an interesting question anyway.
Considering that the highest version of IE that Windows XP can support is IE 8 and the large number of XP machines still out there - it will be fairly silly to not support IE 8 for at least a couple more years.
to presume that in 2008 someone would be doing this "with the intention of having it fail" is a little far-fetched, isn't it?
Ask HN: Stock backtesting tools are broken. Anyone thought of fixing it?
+1 for this, also check out Graham's io9 video on the Counting Problem. The solution is beautiful and really got me excited about Haskell when I was first learning:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Func...
I wonder what that translates to in carbon emissions. At Palo Alto energy prices, it looks like order 1 GWh/day, or about 41 MW.

Edit: oops, I see that some of this is stated in the linked article. My bad. I was just working backwards from the info in the title.
For loops have been parallelized for quite a while. Having a dataflow analysis tell apart a "map" loop from a "fold" loop is quite trivial once you have the framework in place (aliasing not withstanding). Heck, Fortran is all about for loops and it's the language for parallel computations.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/automatic-paralleli...
Well, time will tell, eventually. Secrets have a habit of coming out over time there are enough hints and bits of fact here that eventually the people behind bitcoin will not be able to deny their involvement and this will likely happen while they are still alive.
An entertaining thing about articles of the form "How n Economists Think About x" is just how confident most of them manage to sound when making statements that some of the others disagree with.
Yeah. I am really proud of Warren Buffett's charitable work in this space (he basically funds Planned Parenthood)
You've just proved that the monad tutorials you've read are useless. Monads are emphatically not "a way of encapsulating side-effects in a pure lazy language". Haskell's IO type is a way of encapsulating side effects in a pure lazy language. Haskell's IO type happens to form a monad. The fact that it forms a monad is completely irrelevant to what it actually does.

Forming a monad is a very abstract consideration. It has to do with the data type supporting a couple operations with specific properties. It doesn't say a thing about what those operations mean, so long as the required properties hold. It's up to specific monads to insert semantics into those operations.

And so yes, the IO type specifies that its monad operations mean "creating a trivial IO action that gives a specific value when executed" and "feed the result of executing an IO action into a function that returns another action." And that turns out to be a sufficient framework for composing IO actions together, once something else is providing them.

But IO isn't the only monad. There are hundreds of others already defined, and an unlimited number that can be created. What matters is that they can implement a couple functions with the required properties.

So I've said monads are abstract. What's the point then? Well, put simply, a language with the kinds of primitives Haskell has can actually put the abstraction into its libraries. This allows writing code that works at the level of the abstraction, rather than any specific implementation. The monad abstraction turns out to be rich enough to implement all kinds of conditionals, loops and recursion structures, function application patterns, etc.

In fact, work with parser combinator libraries has shown that the monad abstraction is the simplest one that allows you to express any context-sensitive grammar. If you've ever studied automata theory, bells should be ringing about now. The monad abstraction is sufficiently rich to express Turing-complete operations over the kinds of types it applies to.

And that's the real point. The monad interface allows you to specify those kinds of operations generically. Once they've been written, you can apply them to any type that provides the interface (correctly).

The fact that there's an IO type that happens to provide the interface is an accident that's only relevant historically. The benefit is much larger than that.

This kind of comes down to Rich Hickey's "simple vs easy" point. Monads are incredibly simple, but they're not easy for people who aren't used to looking for deep abstractions. One of the insights made in Haskell library design is that category theory contains several ideas that are incredibly simple and powerful as abstractions for software creation. Monad is hardly the only one - it's just the only one getting press.
Funny that they link to butterfly Labs, who still hasn't shipped, instead of Avalon.
The argument that 'everyone has been wrong so far' is not a solid one. The green revolution was basically pouring oil (pesticides) and pumping natural gas (fertilizer) into the fields. As oil flow rates are peaking this is an increasingly costly process, and as EROEI lowers on what's left we run into more problems. Same for NPK inputs - they are getting harder and more expensive (both $$ and energy) to extract. To a lesser degree (but of growing concern) all resources - we now mine 3-5% ores where we once mined 70% ores for example.

Exponential curves don't go on forever in the real world. Ideas don't replace energy, nor do they replace resources. Saying it hasn't happened yet so those who are worried about it are wrong is naive and logically flawed.
The power numbers cited by this article are very inaccurate when considering current mining hardware and software.

"* Electricity consumption is estimated based on power consumption of 650 Watts per gigahash and electricity price of 15 cent per kilowatt hour. In reality some miners will be more or less efficient."

Most serious miners pay less than $0.15/kWh.

An Avalon ASIC does 65Gh/s on 620W (9.5 J/Gh)

A BFL Single FPGA does 800Mh/s on 80W (100 J/Gh)

Even a dual ATI 5970 rig will do 1300Mh/s on 600W (461 J/Gh)

Currently over 1/3 of the network is ASICs (300 * 65Gh/s of Avalons + 7Th/s from ASICMINER) and another 1/3 is probably FPGAs.
http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/marij...

It's not the cure-all you think it is, regardless of the douchebags in charge.
Not clear how the creators would, or could, be blamed for any perceived misuse of the currency. Publishing some software and specs isn't illegal, and if the creators have any further control over the bitcoin trade, that in itself is a dealbreaker for bitcoins-as-currency.

A culture of anonymity and unaccountability may be a good thing with respect to the users of a currency, but not for its creators and backers, IMHO.
This is really pushing the limits of hn relevance.

There are likely many good reasons to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, but that it's useful for militant groups' propaganda must be way down the list. Surely the second it's closed, the emphasis of the recruiting pitch would simply shift to something else. Drone strikes, for example.
Outside of a fringe group of Austrians, economists essentially agree that having a flexible money supply is a good thing.

One of the first pieces of evidence is typically that those countries that left the gold standard earlier also recovered from the Great Depression earlier.
“Live prototyping” – a glimpse into the future of mobile UI design
In a previous discussion in a subthread started by you there was a concise reply with the most crystal clear example I can imagine about the stupidity of inflexible closed allocation from "russell" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5177884):

This describes my son's experience at Google exactly. He is a computer engineer with strong software and chip level design experience. He sought and was offered a hardware design job at Google. When he got there he was given a job writing python scripts to manage hardware, not the same thing at all. When he tried to change jobs, he was told he had to wait 18 months, so he quit.
What is the "fold" variant in Ruby? Maps are trivial either way, but folds are a pita in my functional programming experience.
Seconded. I also haven't been able to find an easy to use backtester.
The VC World Returns to Its Operating Roots Ben Horowitz
"...to get good working power..." You forgot "for much less money".
Assuming that they actually work.
Android provides this for some features but not all.

The problem is if an app requests too many permissions it gets messy to just show a pop-up dialog for each and every one.

This is the reason why Google Chrome and Firefox started working on web apps that essentially are just fancy bookmarks those bookmarks provide permissions before hand for the web app so that they don't need to be requested later.
The server is super-simple, it just relays messages between the clients, it doesn't interpret or change messages at all. We're keeping the server simple so that we can do things like replace it with WebRTC data channels, or... just basically keep our options open. It's also great for development or freezing – since the changes are almost exclusively in the client there's no special coordination you have to do to switch versions, you just make a copy of the client code.

I'm guessing at some point we'll have to make the server a little more sophisticated, like maybe for authorization. But maybe not! We'll try our best to find other ways.

Also of course it's completely open source, so we can't actually pull a Reader ;)
You're right, we see this a lot in tech, because start-ups are easy to start. But in other places / industries people who want to innovate have no choice but to work in R&D at a big company. For example, in India, it's really hard to start new companies, so big companies (like TATA) continue to out innovate everyone and disrupt themselves. It's really hard to start a new bank, so if you're smart and interested in innovating in finance, you don't really have much choice but to work for a bank. Plus governments are really the incumbents here, so it's less likely for them to start a currency to rival their own than it is for a bank
With regard to that 10%, don't forget that much of it is spent on the salaries of the individuals actually allocating capital

This, in itself, is worth considering. This 10% doesn't disappear from the economy- a good part is distributed to salaries, which are in turn spent on the economy. Not as efficiently as it could be of course, but still.
Yeah, cypherpunks were worried about being extrajudicially killed in the 90s just for developing the code for something better than btc.

Far worse to be an operator than a software developer.

Also some people are at more risk, even if they wouldn't be killed or even arrested for creating ecash. If you were at all legally questionable for drugs, taxes, politics, or had a day job with a clearance, a company with pr exposure, etc....
I read Tuna's comment as disagreement with your claims, not nitpicking. Do you have any reasoning to support your claims that we'll run out of phosphorus or energy?
I did not find this at all intuitive. Possibly because I have never worked with Scratch before. No idea what I was supposed to be doing and no obvious forms of help.
Not much, other than the fact that its really small and takes two lines to implement. For a node.js app it may be faster than the [node-livereload] because it uses socket.io instead of polling.

[node-livereload]:https://npmjs.org/package/livereload
Hmm yes good point.
I was actually thinking of going with this since it seemed to focus on the foundations of lambda calculus and is also fairly condensed. I was thinking I might try "The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia" as a follow up just cause it sounded satisfying.
What the miners are crunching is well documented as part of the protocol specification and a clear case of "nothing up my sleeve".
Slightly OT: How does it work? Who gets to vote and who can run for project leader? I never realized that there were open source projects where that many people were involved in voting a project leader.
A lesson of Public e-Policy