skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The volume of transactions in Bitcoin is growing only slowly, relative to the massive increase in demand for the currency"

The author states this without presenting data. He is wrong. In fact, data shows the opposite:

- The exchange rate increase by 5x between February (low of $20) and March (high of $100)

- BitPay alone recorded a merchant transaction volume increasing by 7.6x between February ($687k) and March ($5.2M): http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bitpay-eclipses-silk-road-i... (and this is just BitPay - there are many more Bitcoin-accepting vendors who make sales without using BitPay - so total transactions increased by a lot more than 7.6x, maybe 10x, 20x, who knows)

Therefore the volume of transactions is increasing faster than the exchange rate. How can a Bloomberg article (edit: opinion piece) be so wrong about such a stupid simple fact that can be easily found? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5499377 is right: a lot of journalists get a lot of facts wrong about Bitcoin.

Edit: BitPay is not the only datapoint. Many other metrics and merchants generally show big increases in transaction volume in the short past:

- Estimated volume of USD transactions (attempting to ignore "change"): http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-u...

- Silk Road going over 2 years from zero to $2 million/month of Bitcoin revenues: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/study-estimates-2...

- A bitcoin casino went from 0 to $0.5 million profits in 6 months: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/bitcoin-based-casino...

- Etc
It is common to store per user salts together with the hashes, often even as a single string formed by concatenating the salt and the hash. Therefore getting hold of the hashes usually means getting hold of the slats, too.

But the other case I mentioned - using the same salt buried deep in your code for all users (what is called a pepper as I learned recently) - will do what you describe until the attacker is able to figure out the pepper used by either stealing the code or brute forcing it.

Finally note that just using a pepper is no good idea and even when combined with a salt needs some careful thoughts. Just using a pepper will yield equal hashes for equal passwords while using a unique per user salt will avoided this. The other problem is that with a pepper you are reusing the same secret for each user. Therefore an attacker has thousands or even millions of samples and may be able to extract information if the scheme is not designed carefully. Combining password, salt and pepper must essentially avoid the same pitfalls as keyed hash functions when combining the key and the message. See for example the design principles behind HMAC [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash-based_message_authenticati...
Thanks for your thoughts martey.

The reddit comment thread you are linking is indeed a bit old. Here is a more recent, really good discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1ao3zf/shoul...

(as an aside: I didn't mean to by too coy about what my extension was or that I'm talking about reddit, I just wasn't sure about the etiquette of trying to publicize something by name here)

As for your points I have to disagree with both of them.

1. No users are ill served my extension. Somebody who posts something to the internet in a public forum and expect that they can delete that information whenever they want are ill-served by a system that perpetuates such an illusion. This often manifests itself as the Barbra Streisand effect.

2. My extension does not increase load on their servers. It does not interact with reddit servers in anyway. I can see why the old thread would lead you to believe that, but it is no longer the case.

I understand this idea is somewhat controversial but it is not immoral or unethical, just different.
Show HN: Free Online MongoDB Training
This is a huge story no? Why does
http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/47217496968 imply there is censorship going on? All the comments I see are 'they are just bitches' - sounds familiar.
Most game consoles launch with far fewer than 165 titles at launch, and with far fewer third-party players in the market than Steam has.
LucasArts old games were essentially perfect adaptations of 90s cartoons that never existed. With everything from the exaggerated art and sound effects, to dialogue that caters to both childish and adult humor, LucaArts games perfectly took the feel of 90s animation and packed it into a couple of floppies.

I don't think it's unusual that games like Day of the Tentacle are still popular today when people still talk about 90s cartoons like Rocko and the Batman, and 80s action movies like Terminator and Die Hard. Media today tries to emulate that nostalgic feeling, but there's this undefinable element that distinguishes the time period. Years from now, people will yearn for early 2000's FPSes and we'll remember how games like HL2 and CoD defined this period.
Limits are often good things, especially when it stretches creator and player alike to imagine things outside the boundaries.

Terry Pratchett said something similar about writing - that the best stories turn on limitations.
Rust is not intended to be a web scripting language at all AFAIK. The fact that JavaScript is a bit slower than a systems language is hardly an indictment of JavaScript.
Fisker Automotive lays off majority of employees
Damn, so back to AeroFS? :) I was quite happy with the syncing (although sometimes the sync started after a long time), but I decided to dump java from my system..

Do you have ETA for os X and Linux of this "java free" versions?
I prefer text to icons. Text has less ambiguity with the additional benefits of being easier to implement and faster to load (at least for html/css). An example is the new Safari [1] and Chrome devtools, which both stem from the old Safari devtools [2]. The new chrome devtools removes the top row navigation icons, leaving only text like 'Elements' and 'Resources'. It's cleaner and tighter than the old UI without sacrificing usability. Safari 6 removed the text and kept the icons. I find myself constantly lost and cycling through the icons. Admittedly, I only use Safari devtools to debug safari issues.

Back to the original topic, I think auto-save and undo obsolete the save button.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/technologies/safari/developer-to...

[2] this site has chrome screenshots, but it's what safari 5 dev tools looked like: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/ov...
It took only 5 days this year...

Past years:
"FY 2010 cap numbers lasted until December 21, 2009. The FY 2011 cap was reached on January 26, 2011, the FY 2012 cap was reached on November 23, 2011, the FY 2013 cap was reached on June 11, 2012, and the FY 2014 cap was reached on April 5, 2013."
Source: http://www.nafsa.org/Resource_Library_Assets/Regulatory_Info...
Unity is probably the most intuitive system for somebody switching from Win7.

What else would you install by default?
Gnome2/MATE/Xfce are showing their age. Gnome3 is even stranger. The only other plausible choice would be KDE.

Unity is actually pretty good as an entertainment oriented interface. The ability to search games, apps, music and movies all from the main menu is very nice.
Not without jailbreaking or proxying the push connection...
Die Git Die
My experience says that the best days are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Trism's rags-to-riches developer details new game and his missing half decade
> Sublime Text just doesn't feel like a Mac app.

Of course it doesn't - it's multi-platform. Which is a good thing if you bounce between Linux and Mac (and even Windows). But it does have a great feel to it.
Saying that people are afraid to talk about the story is just an excuse for poor sourcing[1]. Quite the opposite, people would love to pile onto Arrington and have done just that.

It is weird to talk about a story not being talked about that everybody is actually talking about it.

[1] I know this first hand. I lived with Arrington the entire 3-4 months he dated the original accuser (not the 8 years she claims). Nobody has been in touch with me, or any of the other people who lived in the house at the time. Nobody has been in touch with other friends who know the situation well. Nobody has also been in touch with anybody close to the original accusor, I know this because if they did, they would find out something that makes this story far more interesting but unlikely. I DM'd the Gawker journalist with a tip that he ignored - which suggests he is more interested in an agenda than finding out the truth.

On that note, if any journalist wants to do a real story of getting to the bottom of this, I, and many other people, would be more than happy to talk to them.
China Is Finally Becoming A Lucrative Market For App Makers
'hmmm... probably UPS battery venting' click 'yup'

When UPS batteries vent it has a distinctive odor. It's very pungent and sulfuric, but it doesn't smell like a fire or melting silicon. Any experienced operations guy has smelled it before.

Additionally in most fire suppression systems the Big Red Button is the abort button. A well designed room will dump itself when it detects smoke after a short evacuation alarm. It's precisely designed to keep people from screwing around with a real fire. They must make the active decision to stop fire suppression rather than start fire suppression.
>This is a good question as the answer should be self-evident -- i.e. they were just great, well-written fun games -- but it's not. As pure gaming, they weren't "great" in the classical sense. I mean, after you've finished them, you can't keep playing them over and over because there's nothing really to "play."

And who said games should be player multiple times?

One can conceive of one-time games, and adventure games were precisely that.
Mind-blowing.

It does give me pause to wonder how much of the movie of our day-to-day lives future generations will be able to replay, via goodness knows what mechanism. (DNA testing of blood and hair is another example of this theme.)
But for consoles, there is an expectation that the number will grow exponentially in the next 2-3 years, and that cycle has been validated many times over, over the span of multiple decades.

This is gen.1 for Linux gaming, and I think consumers have the right to be apprehensive about the future growth of the platform. Catch 22 I guess.
I think you are assuming too much about the coupling of the UI. Do people iMessaging me get an alert every time I buy a new iPad?

WINDMILLS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY.
Sad to see a very smart dude let his intolerable vices ruin himself. I used to admire Arrington for his audacity, but not this.
adam.py... :) If only I knew more about bytecode...

import inspect
import pprint
pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(depth=6)
f = inspect.currentframe()
c = 0
while f is not None:
c += 1
if c == 20:
print f.f_code
pp.pprint(dict(inspect.getmembers(f.f_code)))
f = f.f_back
One of the projects Terradex, my company, works on is the collection and mapping of various sources of publicly available environmental data. We're based in Palo Alto and actually spent a decent amount of time getting information on various groundwater plumes in Santa Clara County.

We paid extra close attention to this HP plume and a few others like the MEW plume around the Google campus, drawing them in manually from documents, but the vast majority are created based on convex hull calculations from the well information available on geotracker [1]. They are not perfectly accurate but provide a reasonable approximation of plume locations.

We pulled this data together last year during the summer and haven't done much with it since, but if anyone wants to click around and have a look here's a link that will bypass the login requirement: http://cleanupdeck.terradex.com/target/map_icplume/16/37.424.... You just need to click on the "groundwater plumes" layer on the left, and when you click on a blue plume it will bring up an info panel, most of which will have a link to the geotracker page which collates most of the useful information about the plume.

[1]http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/data_download_by_county...
It's a premature optimization, looking for a problem where there isn't one. The conversation starts off pretty much admitting that it's only an academic exercise:

The Save symbol is years overdue for a rethink.

Based upon what criteria of "overdue?" He doesn't say. The rest of the conversation is pretty much an illustration of masturbatory groupthink, nobody ever pushing back in the slightest, much less to ask, "why?"

So, back to you:

I think this is something that should be done

Why?
> Actually Telenor in Norway recently sold a few hundred tablets for 1,- kr a piece 16 cents US, and this without a contract. First they said, no, no, no, it was a mistake in our computer system, but they ended up having to sell them anyway because they would have such a hard time proving that every one of the customers knew well and right that there must be a mistake.

In this example the customers paid the listed price, did they not? It was for exactly this argument that I spelled out "price clearly listed" in my original argument.

I also chose a vending machine knowing full well that whatever someone says will be a personal choice. No legal system would waste its time on someone "stealing" $1.25 from a vending machine that gave you the soda.

It's a moral question, not a legal one. If someone accidentally sets themselves up to be taken advantage of, would you take advantage of them if no one is watching? All of these hacktivists like to talk about how evil and immoral the government, the business, etc. are. So I ask what would they do in a situation with nothing on the line but their integrity.

If they would take the soda then who are they to ride in on their high horse?

If they would not take the soda, then why is it still OK to tromp through a website knowing that you're not supposed to be there, just because the sysadmin is an idiot?

I'm not even saying there's one and only one right answer, but if there's one thing I hate it's hypocrisy, and I think this is true of most people. I don't think that people mean to be hypocritical either. But if we don't critically examine why we think something is right or wrong then do we really have a sense of morality or are we simply doing what we feel is right?
That's a feature for me. I use it on linux and mac and it feels the same.
Is every website not content-based by definition?
Maybe bitpay is growing faster than other payment processors?
Only if saving also provides infinite undo, and the ability to save to multiple locations.

Saving is often used by non-developers as a poor man's branching and version history.
> Ignoring the moral issue and treating it as a legal issue

It's unfortunate you ignore it. My original question was precisely a moral question. :)
Making decisions at the top is no doubt difficult and requires experience and expertise etc. But can you really say a CEOs time is worth 300x?

My theory; It isn't about difficulty or experience. It is about impact. Apple's revenue last year was $36B, and net was $8B. A CEO who increases their revenues by just 5% would thus immediately justify his or her salary, up to $400M, as he or she increased profits by $400M.

Bottom-rung employees don't have that kind of scope of impact.

Of course, this isn't always what happens- not every CEO can boost revenues, let alone stop them from falling- but it is why you see such high salaries, why they are even on the table.
> I'm not a designer, but I think most of the ideas on display here are fashion-forward dead ends.

This... It seems like these are "design for the sake of design", and doesn't take into account that the vast majority of users really don't care, as long as they know what the button does--which these examples don't really convey.
A SaaS to Quickly Parse Web Pages and Extract Content with Bookmarklet
Google Docs doesn't have a Save function, instead it has an endless revision history.

Which makes me think... if I'm coding and the project is in git repository, why am I still manually saving all the time? Why not automatically save every change I make as a revision, and provide me with endless undo (even if I quit the IDE). "Save" could now instead do a git rebase & squash to produce a neater commit from the many intermediate revisions.
Careful here. I am not saying is true or not. But a facebook comment and then another accusation by the same person under a different name JennNella is not proof that he has a rape conduct.

Doesn't seem right to just trash someone's reputation over a Facebook comment. And the article is just blurry observations, like I believe, I heard....or most of Silicon Valley already knows....
Is it completely free to walk on its own or do the cables assist with balance?
On-body police cams [video]
More people opening mails doesn't mean a higher conversion. Everyone sends out their press messages on Wednesday (or 1 day earlier or later). People are overwhelmed with e-mails and other types of contents on these days so they will just quickly scan through it whereas in the weekends people have a lot more time to actually read the stuff, try it out, etc.
Uh, I'm certainly curious. Want to just say whatever it is that you're alluding to?
Point-and-Click Adventure is my favorite genre... LucasArts made great games but I'd have to hand the crown to Sierra for King's Quest VI.
> are you in an environment where a 10x developer could actually demonstrate 10x productivity? At most companies, the answer is no, because a 10x engineer is doing in hours what takes people days, and nobody notices.

At most companies a 10x developer will be noticed by other developers. 10 of them will quietly agree to gang up on that 10x developer and backstab away because their own 10 jobs are threatened by that 1 person. Maybe it's just an unspoken agreement between developers all acting in their own interest.

If a 10x or 5x or 2x developer decides not to do things too quickly in a new job so as to "maintain good relations with other staff", they will still know. You won't find too many >1x developers around most businesses because they've all left to do something else, like a PhD program in the OP's case.
I'm not sure if I should mention this here, since it looks like an ad, but that also happens to be on sale this weekend (along with a bunch of other D&D games) at gog.com. It's $1.99. I'm not sure if that's the price for it by itself or if it's in the bigger bundle.
> "I wouldn't have guessed there was enough data left in the picture of the
> gramophone track to recreate audio from it."

Ah, well the thing is that the needle isn't straight, it has an angle i.e. as the tracks get deeper they also get wider, so you only need to be able to see how wide the track is. http://www.vinylrecorder.com/stereo.html
there's always: http://www.reddit.com/r/fullmoviesonyoutube/
The games you played as a kid will always be the best ones.
In my opinion, it's a case of just being unwilling to take hearsay as reportable news for a matter of this gravity. These are serious accusations that could put people in jail, and the story, right now, is pretty one-sided. Tech reporters are happy to report a rumor or whisper on an iPhone feature, but this is a well-known person being accused of rape and assault.

I know that there is a serious problem with abused women being unable to come forward because of both fear and because people will just dismiss them. We need to make sure that is not the case here. These charges are real and serious and deserve attention. But Arrington also deserves a chance to respond, which I imagine will come about soon in the form of serious legal challenges to the charges at hand.

I don't take a position on the subject, all I am interested in is seeing the whole truth, something which is not yet on display.
Do we need a framework for that? Or hurry up PHP-FIG
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Security
What a gigantic piece of FUD.

> How do governments collect taxes on transactions in Bitcoin? The answer is they don't, and they can't. Crypto-currency's strong protections on anonymity make it impossible for any state to know who is buying what, who is paying whom, who earns what, and who has what in savings.

BS! The state seems to be surviving just fine with its "inability" to track who is buying what with cash, and it could easily require and enforce documentation of large purchases (such as houses, cars, etc. as it already does btw).

> 2. Police:It would be almost impossible for states to detect certain crimes. One of the major alleged uses of Bitcoin -- though, of course, one can never truly know -- is buying illicit drugs.

Ohhhh noooo!! Cry me a river!!

You mean the batshit insane war on drugs that has destroyed countless lives will become even more ineffective than it already is?!? Please oh please, don't throw me into the briar patch!

Every one of these points applies equally to cash. Might as well write a second article titled: "Cash: An Existential threat to the modern liberal state"

BTW, there's nothing liberal about the war on drugs, the very existence of which is a cruel affront to basic human liberties.

> In a world where many transactions are anonymous, it’s unclear how governments could even compile accurate economic data, without which macroeconomic policy is impossible.

How exactly does having a public history of every transaction ever made somehow make it "impossible" to glean any useful economic data from it?

Add to it knowledge of certain transactions (such as those that go through companies), and you start to get a pretty clear picture of exactly what's going on.
How NationBuilder Made Democracy More Democratic
I always wondered why nobody else seemed to follow the lead of Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows. Use "save" and "load" icons that portray arrows pointing to and from folders [1]. Never have to worry about a floppy again.

Turns out, these guys just did that. Except with documents [2] and clouds [3] instead of folders. Guess iOS did away with those.

[1] - As seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lotus_1-2-3_9.8_Windows.p... , upper left corner

[2] - http://branch.com/b/redesigning-the-save-symbol-let-s-do-thi...

[3] - http://branch.com/b/redesigning-the-save-symbol-let-s-do-thi...
I've always wondered this myself. I'd love to see someone with video editing skills put some of the low res crappy meme and self shots that appear on most facebook feeds.
So, what is the magnet link?
TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington's History of Abuse Allegations...
How is this for data?
http://blockchain.info/charts/market-price
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

There is a big discrepancy between number of transactions and the value
It's certainly a valuable part of a diversified portfolio
"how many steps i took yesterday
"valuable information"

ah. :P

I think this will just end up in a popup nightmare anyway. "you have 50 notifications - 45 requires a reply"
inline or not: yay.
A very simple and elegant way to handle inheritance is to give each object a pointer to another object -- let's call it "prototype" -- and delegate any failed member variable or method lookups to the prototype. This is how JavaScript's object system works.
I think I actually hope my odds of eventually getting cancer are ~100% over my lifespan, because it seems to be a natural consequence of living long enough. I also hope that by the time I have cancer of any size, it is something you can treat fairly successfully.