skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
ignore them. The vast majority of people, on this board and otherwise, view the attainment of money as the single main goal of their life[1]. If you look at the comments they made towards you, one basically says 'why would you bash bitcoin when you already have mined bitcoins?' as if as long as you already have your stake, theres no moral ambiguities with the situation. Apparently criticism can only come from the "angst, self-hatred, jealousy" of poor people.

Personally I think you have valid criticisms. If I just want to convert dollars to btc and vice versa, why do I care what chain I am on? Bitcoin is just a brand, but the technology can be forked and new chains can be created. Granted you wont have a convenient exchange to use, but do you really think a Mexican druglord is going to transfer billions of dollars to you through mt gox for btc?

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).

The tech is great but the pyramid scheme implementation is a critical flaw. Does anyone believe that the intrinsic value of having an alternative currency like btc outweighs the money being made by the prospectors?

[1] im libertarian, btw
Not exactly. Since it was a subsidized system, with 'Net Metering', my utility sets the billing rules. Excluding the finer points, here's the gist of how the billing works:

* My utility (Los Angeles DWP) accumulates a 'dollar banking' credit for the present value of net energy [signed power flow integrated over the two-month interval of my utility's billing period] fed back to the grid when a billing statement period is net-energy-productive (i.e. the PV system made more energy than my home consumed over the statement-period of two months). I pay a $22 'minimum charge' (normalized: $11/mo) for, as I see it, my share of utility equipment amortization and operations I'd otherwise be paying as a consumer. Fair enough: I do draw energy when the sun goes down. It's co-operative.

* In the summer, my 5-ton A/C use exceeds my PV system's production capacity; I become an energy consumer during one or two billing periods. My utility calculates the price for the _net_ energy I use per period, then debits the 'dollar banking' account. If that gets exhausted, then I pay the residual, otherwise my 'dollar banking' balance just goes down.
Could bitcoin have been worse from a government's
point of view?

Yes, it could have been designed to be a viable currency, rather than a lesson in basic economics for crypto-anarcho-libertarian-nerds.
> "The danger ... is that they might be in the dictionary"

Randal's entropy calculation clearly assumes a dictionary of about 2048 words, where the attacker has perfect knowledge of the dictionary at her disposal.

Randal's entropy calculation is correct, and the point of the cartoon is that 44 bits of entropy is much stronger than the passwords most people create using common password advice.

Personally, I think 44 bits is way too little entropy for a password, but I would be happy if my grandmother started using 44-bit passwords.
Maybe I am wrong, but I get the impression that the average wealthy person keeps their most liquid assets in an institution where the employees know him or her and there are institutional safeguards against that kind of thing. (ADDED. ATMs for example, have cameras.)

Also, the rich do tend to make a point not to let it be publicly known that they are rich if they can. (ADDED. Officers of public corporations for example cannot hide their incomes from the public because of the financial-reporting requirements imposed on the corporations.)
Ask Scott why they ended up going with Akamai and how they, "reached out" to the campaign. Funny story.
Yes, Firefox/Chrome only for now: https://github.com/mozilla/towtruck/wiki/Supported-Browsers
you could try cross-compiling it with Fay or UHC (haskell to javascript compilers)
A monad must have a `return` function that works on an arbitrary datatype. That includes a datatype that is already 'wrapped' in the monad. For example, `return $ Just 5` yielding `Just (Just 5)`. jQuery does not have such a function. The `jQuery` function can 'wrap' strings, but it cannot wrap, for example, other jQuery objects. If you try, you simply get the original jQuery object back. Accordingly jQuery does not satisfy the monad laws, and is therefore not a monad.
Ultimately, keeping a conspiracy under wraps is an n^2 problem, where n is the number of people behind it.

If it's a government, it is not a constitutional one with democratic elections. Checks and balances make it much more difficult to carry out a conspiracy with elegance and grace. I'm not saying it's impossible, but if the US did it, it will come out very soon. There are too many conflicting interests in government to keep this under wraps for long.

Essentially, crypto-guys who don't leak stuff would have to have been acting at the bottom of a chain of command that does leak stuff clumsily, and is opposed by political forces with the incentive to find stuff out. Plus, no major agency of the government has yet commented, which suggests that they are trying to get their heads around the phenomenon before choosing how to act.

All the same, I doubt it's an individual, as you suggested. It's certainly a group or entity with it's own agenda, external to, but perhaps sponsored in some way by a government (perhaps even the US, for the reasons you mentioned).
I'm fairly confident that comic is the reason this thread's article is getting a bunch of attention now.
You don't need the word combinations. Dictionary attackswwill do that part for you (a bit like a brute force, but by cycling words instead of characters)
"the new site, the smoke ventilating equipment installed throughout the glass-sheathed structure is faulty even after lessons learned from Germany’s worst airport disaster"

That sounds like an engineering fault.

"There are deficits in the sprinkler system and a lack of fire protection on some steel girders used for construction."

Those sound like engineering faults.

"Planners also failed to consider that authorities might balk at an experimental nuclear reactor located under a planned flight path. ... “The risk of a plane crash and an aviation terrorist attack and the release of ionized radiation from the research reactor was insufficiently considered,” "

That sounds like an engineering or planning fault, and not a "fuck-up by the political management."

In some sense though, most things everything can be traced back to a people/political problem. The Denver airport baggage handler project some 10+ years ago was due to taking on a very complex task with not enough time, the Hubble Space Telescope problem was due to a decision to reduce funding for testing, and so on. Shortage of building materials could be interpreted as bad planning to acquire the materials and bad management in not allocating enough funds for the task. Problems with the building ground (eg, an unexpected underground stream) could also be seen as bad planning.

So if you want to go that route, then you are welcome. Just be aware that that view means that essentially no project fails due to engineering being at fault.
It is in a way. The department heads were very worried about the scrutiny and tone of the press in covering project narwhal and actively discouraged its use as a codename for the project.
Apple is about to pull my app from the App Store, so it's free until its gone
Thanks! I was planning on pinging you to check it out, but it looks like it found its way to you already. Also thanks for jumping in and finding problems already!
right-to-left application, not composition
The mentioned "Society for Personality and Social Psychology" site is http://www.spsp.org/ but it
doesn't have any information on the study. I've also been able to find the study on the
UWinnipeg.ca site. If anyone has a link to the actual study, or the presentation video
of the SPSP conference, it would be appreciated.
I always thought this was PG's greatest gift to the tech world. To horribly generalize - prior to YC "business" people had a patronizing attitude toward developers. They were expensive assets - comparable to hw/sw and data-centers - that were required to successfully launch and grow a startup. But they weren't invited to the strategic table too often. They didn't get business.

I don't know this to be a fact but I always felt like PG responded with a "I'll show you!" after one too many patronizing comments from the old boys club of VC's or CEO's or SVP's of BD's. And show us he has. Certainly other factors (the lower entry cost to starting a startup) contributed to the rise of the wide spread geek business leader. But PG deserves a lot of credit.

Having said all that I almost feel like developers today are similar to women in the 80's (stick with me I know this is getting weird) Women in the 80's were supposed to have fulfilling careers and still be great mother's/spouses. They could have both! They just ended up with 2x the pressure to be great at what they did vs before. It seems today every developer is supposed to have a real side project that could blossom into it's own business at any point. Come to think of it; non technical startup folks are implored to "learn to code!" So maybe it applies to both devs and non devs in startups.

It's an interesting time. I think it's great developers can now lead companies with little or not stigma attached. In the long run though I believe in teams and specialization vs individuals and doing it all. I think we'll return to a more natural balance. And that tends to be that people who can build and nurture a forest tree by tree and row by row aren't the same people who can see the entire forest and what the seasons will bring. The forest does best when each person is in the right role.
I've read lots of monad tutorials. I get it, they're a way of encapsulating side-effects in a pure lazy language.

But Haskell doesn't sink in unless I use on a regular basis. The time that I've felt like I was able to see a light at the end of the tunnel (i.e., that I might be able to be useful enough in Haskell that I could keep using it regularly) was when I simply memorized the expansions for the do, <-, return sugars.
Alternative hypothesis: Bitcoin was created by a group of quants at some investment bank for a laugh and/or money.

Bitcoin has well-known built-in weaknesses, e.g. the limited supply; it was designed to be exploitable, and we see this being done in the real work as we speak. You find the knowledge how to work markets at investment banks.
There's plenty of movie plots about "leave a large suitcase full of cash at location X or bad thing Y happens" but I guess large quantities of cash are more difficult to hide and large withdrawls from a bank account would raise red flags.
This thread is a mess... and i'm not sure statements like this one "'git add' should not go past submodule boundaries. I should not be able to 'git add clayoven/' or 'git add clayoven/LICENSE'" are a good start. Gives a simplified description of what he want to do without going too in-depth about why that path was chosen and starts coding right away.
It's bigger than that. You are separating the how from the what. Sure you could compute a map with a for loop. Or you could compute it in parallel across 1000 threads.

Not only that, map is composable. Something a for loop never will be.
North Korea tells its people how Americans live today [video]
Google Glass was prototyped in one day - with chopsticks
Botnets and the war on bitcoin
I think the problem isn't distributivity but decentralisation.
It's way more traceable than cash.
I don't see the motivation for a government whatsoever. It's easy to envision a person or group of anonymous people creating it. There have been a countless number of individuals coming up with digital cash schemes.
I haven't yet fully formulated what I want to say so this is still just speculation on what the 2nd edition might contain. I can see a lot of room for improvement, especially in the latter chapters. Overall, the way I would frame the problem is much crisper now, and I think I have figured out how to better explain and implement my controller-averse approach, as well as server/client hybrid rendering and routing.

The community is more sophisticated about packaging these days so I would spend more time going beyond the basics and it's obvious what the most popular frameworks are (from ~8 contenders to ~3) so I should bring those in concretely to illustrate points. When I wrote the book, many of the frameworks were pre-1.0 and hadn't figured things out.

I also wrote another (to be released) book just on distributed systems which has helped with my thinking re: backend integration/caching/offline though I'm not sure how that will be directly reflected in this book.

Finally, I'd like to audit my use of indefinite articles, particularly within chapter headings.
I've started the thread on Linus's first reply, and the guy is completely unconvincing. He was after a quick feature improvement (I don't really know what but Linus seemed to) and implemented it, but he gave little thought to the overall design (either his or Git's).

Big meh, and I'm normally interested in the evolution of Git.
That url is 404, maybe this is the one?

https://github.com/sdiehl/haskell-warp-rest/blob/master/warp...
Smoke ventilation/sprinkler systems: the requirements for the airport changed multiple times due to politicians changing stuff around.

Nuclear reactor: environmentalists and local interest groups forced changed flight routes, there was no way to predict this...

Certainly, there were engineering problems. But these happen at every project, it's management job to make sure there's timing buffers.
Selection bias. The ones still doing chemistry and not code (i.e. Most of them) aren't on HN but working at a place with a decent safety culture.
The middle class in India is growing quite fast. I can't imagine a programmer behaving this way, so I'll say no. The example in the article is very indicative of behavior in and around New Delhi however, it'd be hard to find that kind of behavior in say Mumbai or Chennai. (I currently live in New Delhi btw)

Areas around New Delhi suffer from an acute nouveau riche problem. Most well educated (programmer like..) people wouldn't act out in such a callous and insensitive manner. However, they will most likely still view people from lower classes differently, this may not be evident in the way people act but you can catch onto it if you pay attention to certain remarks that people may make. (eg: I can't ride with those smelly people in the Delhi metro)

Again, these are generalizations, not everyone is an asshole. Most people aren't. However, there is a great deal of prejudice and I believe the only way forward is for people to acknowledge it in the first place.
One should travel, Kamaal. Perspectives change with travel (Even within India, but not the temple hopping travel). You will understand so much more of the world from travel than from being in front of the screen for 19 hours every day. Life does not begin after you retire.

Caste system is not just reservations/backward communities. It includes the different sub-castes (Ex - Different sub-castes in the Brahmin caste). This is very relevant in vote bank politics. A candidate belonging to sub-caste X will not get elected if the region has majority people from sub-caste Y, even if the candidate is known to be capable.

The main reason for the terrible infrastructure conditions in India is politics and corruption. These are strongly rooted in the caste/sub-caste system. Money has always been flowing freely in politics and it is what makes politics attractive.

The terrible infrastructure I refer to is basic - water, electricity, medicines. Malls, fancy cars cannot substitute water. In India, People are dying for water these days. This will only increase exponentially. There has been research showing that 24 hour water supply is possible with the current fresh water resources in India, but it won't happen, thanks to politics, corruption and the caste system.

The SUV situation brought up in the article is not caste based. It was money based and money is the new, bonus caste system on top of existing ones.
> You keep thinking of dictionary attacks as being based on a verbatim English dictionary and I keep telling you that they're not.

That has never, ever been my assertion. I keep saying a dictionary attack is a variation of a brute force attack (in that you're not looking at the hash itself), but adjusting the order in which you try words based on a priori guesses about what passwords are likely to be more common. My point has been that Randall's approach ASSUMES THIS KIND OF ATTACK. It, in fact, assumes a much more targeted one, where the dictionary the attacker has is completely accurate. IN THE FACE OF THAT, these passwords have the computed amounts of entropy.

(There is a separate discussion to be had of just how much entropy is necessary, but that's obviously going to increase as time goes by.)

I couldn't agree more that a maximum character limit (that's anywhere in the range anyone might conceivably type) is idiotic.
I think its a pretty insightful point that Android as enabler for third parties is so good. That point is often missed, even when Amazon showed you could create a nice new product with it. According to the age poll most people here won't remember back when MS/PC Dos was mostly a command line and people like Norton made a "visual shell" which gave you behavior like windows. Later Microsoft added APIs for windows and then people wrote their own environments around that too. Similar to the Unity/Gnome/KDE/... differences on Linux, heck even on the same Debian distro. Historically, its been hard to stay the leader if other systems can innovate and your system can't. (granted with exceptions)

Bottom line is that the point that Facebook didn't have to make a phone to make a phone experience is much more interesting than the actual app itself.
Although the wording is different, that line comes from the 1920s writer Coleman Cox, who specialized in producing pithy quotes like it:

http://books.google.com/books?id=lXlnyqNjN7AC&lpg=PA63&#...

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/
jQuery supports custom builds today:

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/e80117adb49eff8f82140b...
The truth is that the groundwork for bitcoin was laid down long before it appeared as a specific project. Bitcoin is a classic case of all the threads hanging there, but needing someone to come and tie them together.

Wei Dai published his work originally on crypto-currency in 1998 (in fact some suspected that Wei Dai is Satoshi). Moreover Szabo was mirroring lots of the same thoughts with his bitgold proposals.

From an economic perspective, the Austrian school has been gaining more and more creditability as it becomes increasingly clear that monopolistic control of currency is unworkable in the long-term.

Therefore, there was nothing specifically revolutionary about it. It was really just one of those things that it was just waiting for someone to come tie these things together into a coherent project (I'm not at all minimizing the work satoshi did).

This all does beg the larger question; Who is Satoshi and why would he disappear. Personally, I think it was a nom-de-plume of several people who intelligently made the decision to 'disappear' (even though they may still be active on the project using different names). Leaderless projects are very difficult for the various state monopolies to fight.
"We fire up that video the second we start reading an application, usually."

As a new applicant, it makes me curious. Does that mean that (usually) if I haven't seen views on the video yet, the application hasn't been read yet?
The Al-Quaeda (or Mexican nationalist) plan is a long game that has a track record of success.

In the US, formerly marginalized groups like Catholics (Irish/Italian/polish) and eastern european Jewish immigrant came to wield considerable power in the mid 20th century, owing largely to burgeoning numbers. The Catholics actively organized colleges, universities and fraternal organizations that brought young Catholics into the civil service ranks.
Your rates are too high by one order of magnitude.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6108a1.htm
I had Lucas as a C++ TA in my 2nd year of undergrad (Grenoble, France), while he was a PhD student (and yes, when we saw his name on the curriculum, all of us who were slightly involved with the Debian community freaked out).

Really smart, nice and friendly guy– can't think of a better leader for Debian.

Thanks Lucas :)
And I won't be surprised if Facebook OS is a fork of Android.
The flip side is, when you're naturally good at something, it becomes fun to do. So you do it a lot.

I tried for 2 years to get good at guitar. Never got good. But didn't practice very often either.

Then one I sat down at a drum set and was immediately better than the drummer in my band. I had a knack. It was so fun to play those beats that I practiced almost every day for many years, and still do. And have gotten pretty darn good.

Natural ability turns into learned skills.
Enough Already With The "Death Of The PC Era" Garbage
Interesting. It seems this may be one of Mozilla's first(?) forays into a potentially paid service: hosted TowTruck accounts.

Since it runs on a central server, that server will either be Mozilla's or yours. I know I don't want to deal with that hassle -- I'd much rather pay someone else to run the service -- and I can't imagine Mozilla's going to do it for free at scale.

Mozilla hasn't yet pulled a Reader, as far as I know, but I would be worried about their dedication to a hosted service like this.
I'm making no such assumptions; I don't think I'm making the argument you think I'm making.

As for "money has already exchanged hands," that can be true of any Ponzi scheme as well. When we talk of "old" and "new" money in a Ponzi investment scheme, we don't mean two literally segregated categories. You might have some old money and some new money at the same time.
You're really not getting my point. You don't store a trillion phrases nor a literal dictionary. You store a table of commonly used words and build phrases from that. And it does pick off low hanging fruit. Often as many as 60% of passwords from an average dataset in fact. I suggest you have a read of http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/08/passwords-under-assa... as it puts its better than I every will when on a phone and nursing a hangover. :-)
Learn Haskell if you want your mind blown. It will make you smarter.

But there's a real danger that you will not be able to look at your own code the same way again. It can negatively affect your ability to code with your peers.

I'm not kidding. It's a blue pill/red pill kind of thing.
Even though it's true that "web based" software will be the future I personally think it's a bit sad(unless if that term doesn't solely mean software on a server that you connect with a bloated browser to).

Besides that, interesting and good interview.
How I stopped showing and started sharing using Path.
But yesterday's home runs may well have a psychological impact on both you and your opponent in today's game.

Not resting on your laurels is fine, but putting what happened yesterday totally out of your mind when you come to today's game/task isn't always the best thing to do.
Hah, I thought you quoted a maintainer, but this is from the original submitter. Cheeky.
That is tied to poverty, ignorance, likelihood of victimization, and cost. Birth control has not been readily available, but abortions are paid for by Medicaid and other programs.

When you don't have any money, $150 for a doctor visit and $30/mo for birth control is a lot of money.
Thanks. Good perspective.

(I also get the reference in your username, btw. I don't know if it's obscure or not, but I don't see it often.)
Git PubSub for instant fetches
Yes. Rubygems is the project that was run as amateur hour, not Debian.

EDIT: And before anyone mentions it: http://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114652287210110&w=...