skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And for this particular problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-packing_of_equal_spheres

http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/SpherePacking/

http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_9_98.html (nb: that proof is for infinitely many spheres. For finitely many, the problem is, AFAIK, still widely open. 361 likely is close to infinitely many, though, if your box isn't weirdly formed)
How Wired Magazine Changed the Way We Talk About Technology
Because we people obviously don't have a datacenter in our own basement. And the common mistake people make when benchmarking is running the servers on their own machine and then use the same machine to benchmark the server it's running.

You need to have multiple (powerful) machines for this. And also, spinning up machines in the cloud is quite easy to do and allows people to reproduce the same test results because you have access to exactly the same environment.
I'm not OP, but HTTP Headers show:

X-Powered-By: Phusion Passenger (mod_rails/mod_rack) 3.0.19

So most likely a Ruby app, and probably not Rails as no asset pipeline has been used.
Please make the app free for 1 day ^_^
Thank you. Ad hominem has nothing to do with talking about the credibility of the author. Rather, the fallacy occurs when you rely on that information to challenge the position.
I'll re-run the test with the advised changes and see if the performance improves.
Also, self-redirect bug: http://fry.io/bk
The vast majority of his points are in terms of logic, concepts and arguments. It's not as if he's making all sorts of wild claims about individuals and organizations involved in Bitcoin and failing to provide evidence to support them.

If you think he's misusing a concept, then say so. He clearly names the concepts and describes what he believes them to mean, so you can plug those into Google and see if you agree.

If you think the logic he's using to support his arguments is faulty, then you can simply point out the logical flaws in his arguments. This again does not require any citations or particular outside authority.

Finally, the entire post is clearly presented as his opinion on Bitcoin and in response to people asking for his thoughts. Given this, what is wrong with him expressing his opinion based on logic and his understanding of concepts. Why does his opinion require citations?
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Also: http://fry.io/b2
> the market can stay irrational longer than you solvent

100% agree
good point, we should change that word choice. thx.
How Steve Kaufer started TripAdvisor the interview.
Detecting touch: it’s the ‘why’, not the ‘how’
I used to read Karl Denninger's blog a lot, but I haven't been focused too much on economics lately. However, I'd like to quickly address a number of topics brought up in the comments, as there seems to be a misunderstanding or lack of understanding as to who he is and why he has any sort of authority to speak on this topic.

Karl is not a trained economist in the sense having gone to school for it, but he is a very intelligent investor who profited heavily during the 2008 recession. He does not keep his knowledge to himself; in fact, he was warning of the collapse of Fannie Mae and the problems with Freddie Mac more than six months prior to the events of 2008. He has consistently and accurately predicted the results of various failures of US and international monetary policy, which you can read and critique from his year end reviews.

Karl is an old school hacker, having run an ISP and developed a variety of software. It was the sale of his ISP that allowed him to become a full time investor.

Karl organized the first "tea party" style protest of Washington through the organization Fed Up USA. He views inflation via money printing as taxation and has been working for years to have those who illegally profited from fraud in relation to the 2008 recession prosecuted.

His writing style can be a real pain to read, especially with his liberal use of html tags... but it's well worth it.
Many CDNs charge a lot (10x for all bandwidth, including non secure) for https. If you are fronting one of your sites with these, it is not economically viable to switch over.
Using Objective-C Runtime
"the head of development of WhatsApp, Neeraj Arora, has confirmed to AllThingsD that his company has not started any discussions with Google"

...merely gone along with the ones Google have started?
Hack Your Maps
What is this if not challenging the arguments the author is making? tptacek claims this article shouldn't be on HN because the author is somehow unqualified to share his opinion and therefore it shouldn't be of interest to anyone.

'Well, I don't agree or disagree with what you're saying, I just think YOU shouldn't be able to say it' doesn't seem to be different from an ad hominem attack in practice in this case. It's refusing to engage with the actual content on quality or validity grounds and instead engaging with some unrelated point.

The original post is not arguing 'you should agree with what I'm saying because I'M saying it' and it's also not saying 'these are facts because I say they are'.
Go does slightly better in the 64-bit test (which I think is more apt to link to rather than the 32-bit which you keep using)

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?t...

That said, Java still beats Go quite readily in this benchmark spread, particularly in regex and binary-trees where Go does extremely poor. It should be noted that lots of languages implement their regex libraries in C for speed, while Go's implementation is written in Go. Still, I think it should do better than this.

That Java beats Go overall is not particularly surprising, Java is very mature and it's jit-compiler has very advanced optimizations, Perhaps by Go 2.0 we'll see where Go 'lands' in terms of performance, there's obviously alot more to be had.
So the guy was only Chancellor of the Exchequer - what would he know?

If he says that the Government was worried that a collapse of RBS, HBOS and others might have led to the banking system ceasing to function in the UK then I'm inclined to believe him.
Seems to me the more valuable bitcoins are, the more attractive it is for vendors to accept them as payment. And the more vendors accept them as payments for real stuff, the more attractive and established they become as a currency.

Also, concluding that bitcoin is doomed because too many people want them seems backwards.
Show HN: Kelp is a server side web framework, lean but rich in nutrients.
Other than the Dragon's Den show that makes a mockery of early stage entrepreneurs, or "cockroaches" as one panelist likes to refer to them, Canada has failed miserably to participate in the tech scene.

From a recent report by the Conference Board of Canada titled "Canada Fails to Put its Money Where its Ideas are—and it Shows in Poor Innovation Grade":

"Ottawa, April 4, 2013—Canada ranks second-to-last among its peers in venture capital investment and business R&D spending, according to The Conference Board of Canada’s ranking of innovation among the world’s leading economies. And the rest of the report card doesn’t get much better, as Canada ranks 13th in the 16-country How Canada Performs benchmarking."

Google the report if you have any dillusions about doing a startup up in Cantada
It's worth keeping in mind in mind that the equilibrium total mining power consumption is proportional to the price of a bitcoin in terms of the amount of electricity it can purchase.

With the current mining rate of 150 bitcoin per hour, a bitcoin price of $100,000 implies around 100GW of power consumption for bitcoin mining (for comparison, a large thermal power station has around 1GW of output). That's a lot of energy to throw out the window...
> given that Bitcoin on MtGox has a volume of USD 20 million daily, this takes a lot of resources

Or $200,000 in yesterday's terms. Doesn't seem so hard to influence anymore.
IIRC, Ubuntu Server does not install X11 and it does not install Apache (unless you chose "Web Server" role or tick "Apache" checkbox in "Custom" role at install time) or any MTA or MDA.
I am not sure. I had this idea that kept coming back and back to my mind, and I would evolve it, elaborate more and more - although I have lots of ideas all the time, this one was the more persistent. Then, one day, as I don't have much attachment to my money, I decided to invest in it, outsource the development and put it in practice. Then I became more and more fascinated by the way of doing business of startups (lean, customer development, all that). So it become a fascinating path of intelectual discovery.

So, in a sense, it would be "for adventure", the learning is incredible, even with failure on this field, would be a essential step I had to had if I come back to my original field of work (non-profit, social impact, social business, etc).

Sure, I dream about fame and money, but I dream about being a great soccer player. These dreams are a way to fantasize the consequences of what I am doing, no the reason behind it.
Looks interesting and I will check it out later. Just an FYI, if you up vote a story on HN it is saved on your user page under saved stories.
Timing of project is, unfortunately, crucial.
It will never do that due to its design.

edit: unless the market is controlled by someone willing to lose money to keep it stable.. so no, it won't happen.
> ...that just seems to me like it would make ALL the resulting BTC suspect.

True. All BTC that has come out of a mixer might be considered suspect. But if you buy BTC for cash, should that be suspect? What if it turns out that the BTC that you now consider yours has been through a mixer some time in the past before it reached your hands?

Take the analogy to bank notes. Are all my bank notes suspect?

We accept this situation with cash. Why should Bitcoin be any different?
Phusion Passenger 4.0 Release Candidate 6
I think you're only looking from a consumer perspective, not a business perspective. What is my incentive to start a business when it's constantly a race to the bottom? Furthermore, why invest in a business? It'd be stupid to put $1000 in an investment when the spending power of that money will only increase over time, and you'll never get your money back.

No, I don't think you'll find many economists who like deflation. It doesn't spread prosperity, it spreads laziness.
> Here's an article critical of Bitcoin that does better than recasting opinions as facts: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/04/03/1425292/the-problem-wi...

From that author's biography:

> Everything she knows about economics stems from a childhood fascination with ancient economies. . .

> She studied Ancient History at UCL, and has a masters in Journalism from what was then the London College of Printing.

I hope this is just an elaborate troll, since this was your criticism of Denninger:

> He has no particular authority regarding economics (he's not a trained economist so far as I know)
Bitcoin transactions are permanent sure, but they have no identity tied to them, unless they were purchased with something that already had an identity associated (eg never buy Bitcoins with PayPal, because PayPal already knows who you are).

If Joe wants to buy drugs, then he can walk into any bank and do a cash deposit to a BitInstant account, which gets dumped into MtGox and he can then move it around any way he wants, including online marketplaces. There's no identity that can be traced back to him except for the bank's video surveillance, and how long is that stored at a bank?

Without the surveillance, there's no way to tie any transaction Joe does back to his identity. The wallet, the address, the marketplace (if done right using tumbling and encrypting all messages) all leave no trace to a transaction.
Even my iPhone 3GS feels much more updated than Lumia 800
Lesson 13: Vector Interface Design
Yet another example of the the lean startup methodology applied to everyday life and business issues. The Minimal Viable Event. Great concept. As always, go lean.
The usability error you don’t know you’re making
Any BTC<->cash exchange would either be illicit or have very clear, robust records as required by the country that issues the cash currency. Isn't this already the case with the services that let you exchange BTC for USD?

Also, any BTC you possess having been through a mixer in the past - yes! That seems like it could be a real problem. Here's how I see it: If I end up buying a used car, and it turns out the guy who sold it to me stole it, that doesn't somehow protect me from the consequences of the original theft. I certainly won't get to keep that car. Bitcoins aren't cars, but I wouldn't be shocked if governments decided to go overboard and say that trading in any BTC that came out of a mixer is illegal. After all, you can check the history of the BTC yourself and decide whether it's legit.
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

The number of bitcoin transactions per day has remained roughly constant since February. The price of Bitcoins however, has risen by 1000%.

Do you have any evidence to suggest that people are actually using Bitcoins? Because the hard evidence I've got seems makes it seem like Bitcoins are getting traded like crazy, but not necessarily used.
As someone who works at a Toronto startup, I suggest that you consider more than one person's opinion. No city is perfect but there are tons of talented people here and there is substantial government funding available that, in my experience, has nothing to do with nepotism.
I've got a really strange problem with Hacky, I haven't seen something like this before in Mac OS development.

When dragging the window, it 'jitters' a lot. I have run it a few times and it happens each time, and no other windows currently open are having this issue which leads me to the conclusion it's a bug in Hacky. This is using the current master from GitHub.
First, if you look where we are on this thread, you'll find that we are on a branch that started by asking who Karl Denninger was.

Next, if you look carefully at the post, you'll find, I think, that it's a mix of two basic rhetorical approaches:

1. Recapitulating shopworn arguments about Bitcoin as if they were fresh points, sometimes using jargon that conceals their banality, such as the "privilege of Seigniorage" that boils down to Bitcoin having no central bank.

2. Idiosyncratic attempts at first-principles arguments, like the "entropy" (helpfully defined in the article) in comparison to gold coins lost off the side of a ship.

There's nothing wrong with writing a post like this. Denninger didn't ask for his post to be nailed to the top of HN. I just don't find the post particularly credible.
What grandparent (almost certainly) means is that gold is a "monetary asset": although there are industrial, cosmetic and personal uses for gold, if people were not using gold as a store of economic value, its price would be much lower than it is.

More to the point, even if gold's industrial, cosmetic and personal uses completely disappeared, it would probably continue to be quite valuable because people would probably continue to use it as a place in which to "park" some of their savings.
If you allocate more memory, programs will use it. Web browsers are notorious for abusing this, but it applies in lots of other places, including system cache.

In other words: if you allocate 1GB of RAM to a system and 256MB to another, the first will appear to use more RAM. You're reducing memory usage and performance at the same time. Whether you want that or not depends on what you want to run.
You can reproduce them? So you can match the loads running on all the other VMs on the same host then?
Does anyone have a link or justification in any way for the rise in the conversion rate?

Yes. Nearly two years ago I wrote an essay with my thoughts on Bitcoin's potential for long-term appreciation at http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adopt... and the essay is holding up pretty well so far, particularly given the recent reported spike in adoption by people in Spain[1] and Cyprus[2].

The TL;DR summary of my argument: the more people who adopt Bitcoin as a store of value or medium of exchange of last resort, the more demand there will be for it around the world. Supply being fixed, this growing demand will be reflected in a rising price. Should Bitcoin continue to work as intended, in the long run nothing prevents it from eventually gaining as much credibility as, say, gold.

--

[1] http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/20/bitcoin-spain...

[2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57576928-93/bitcoin-hits-re...
Now I'm not one to promote petty revenge (unless it's VERY amusing), but there are a few scripts and images that they're loading from the hellowallet.com servers, and from filostudios.com, who I presume did your design.

If someone were to change these files, they could dramatically alter the look and behaviour of themattressboutique.com quite easily...
Drinking to forget
How alcohol helps when you have to go to a rubbish camping trip
Did you read the post? It does not rely on the author's credibility.

(55 minutes pass)

I'll take that as a 'no'.
Great job! I love that strategy, you could either pay for it or if you know how - fork it on Github.
Neo4j 2.0.0-M01 Released
To rephrase the other question: So what "magic" does Erlang do then? How does it work?
I work in the security/abuse department for one of the largest web hosting companies in the world and we see these types of complaints regularly. The best way to go about this would be to email the abuse@ email for the IP which is abuse@pronethosting.net. If you can't get a hold of them that way, contact the colocation company directly. Their website is http://www.cyberverse.com/.

You can find out more about this process at:

http://rising.blackstar.com/how-to-send-a-dmca-takedown-noti...

Network Information:

DNS Zone source: http://leafdns.com/index.cgi?testid=329C603D
DNS Zone source: http://www.intodns.com/themattressboutique.com
IP WHOIS: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-209-151-224-224-1/pft

Let me know if you need any other information.
Off topic here, but MCS was a hell of an ISP. I regretted when Karl sold it.
I'd like to see Hipache tested against these as well. Hipache https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache
Well stated, thanks. I don't think I disagree.
I did not "claim this article shouldn't be on HN".
the real test of a bubble is to see if people are buying to hold or merely flip. their time horizon is also an important consideration.

if they're buying to flip with a short horizon, it's a bubble. the first buyer to feel they might be the greatest fool walks away, and the bubble pops.

> speculation driven

speculation is a normal economic mechanism. taking risk in expectation of reward.

> you can't have an exchange-based economic system without some expected stability in the value of the exchange

yes you can. especially if the value of the currency is only going up. probably not if it's going down.

currently the ratio of stock to flow is rather high. since there is less flow available, and lots of fiat chasing it, the price rises. since the value of the currency rises, people who sell in that currency benefit (especially if they keep the difference in bitcoin).

money is a shared societal delusion. it's a giffen good, where rising price acts as a signal that more should be owned. misesian/mengerian theory requires only an initial direct barter exchange, the rest of it is bootstrapped by historical events (given certain basic properties, which bitcoin has in abundance[2]).

we are living those historical events today, thanks to the ECB & Cyprus.

at the moment bitcoin is a transient medium of exchange (usd->btc->silkroad) on both sides and a few risk-takers are betting on it holding value, where few is relative to world population. most merchants (at least thru bitpay etc) don't hold it either.

for the price to drop consistently, bitcoin-busters would have to take a large position, driving up the price, and then consistently sell enough to trigger other people's latent limit-sell orders. the problem is that naked shorting is not possible, so on the way to building large positions, they will send out the rising-price signal, which will make downward price-pressure quite hard later (aka high prices will be sticky since people's expectations have been reset). [1]

when the price gets high enough, the realization will sink in that the only way to accumulate bitcoin is to participate in the economy with one's labor (ie, sell things for bitcoin).

that's the ultimate win for bitcoin.

[1] oddly, one of the criticisms of btc, namely that Satoshi holds a significant amount, will provide downward stickiness as long as that large cache isn't sold.
[2] bitcoin has a lot more properties than most other monies, principally anonymity & distance-agnosticism, and also invisibility via the use of darknets/tor
The problem is that we (the tech industry) seem to only offer two choices, do it a) the wrong Excel way b) do it the huge giant IT initiative way...

And even when b) is chosen, when users log into the multi-million dollar CRM system, the first thing they reach for is still the "export to Excel" button.

I see it as a failure of education. I have no CS background and when I was starting out at my first job, I would love to have known then what I know now about databases and database-driven application programming. I would love to have had a proper class or two about it in school. But I didn't, so all I knew was the bad, wrong, "e-mail the spreadsheet" way. At my old company we had people whose entire job was basically to take a huge Excel file, turn it into a pivot table (basically a simple cross-tab query) and e-mail the result to people periodically.

I love Access forever because it sucked me into programming. I heard that it was a database but I didn't know what that meant and didn't have anyone who could teach me, so I learned it just by poking at it when I was bored at work until it started to make sense. Then I used it to mash two customer data sources together and tie a sales lead tracker to it--basically a quick and dirty replacement for our slow, over-engineered Oracle CRM system that no one actually used. I know now that what I made was also wrong in many ways and would make a real developer recoil in horror, but it was great fun to make and people actually used it. And it got me interested in databases, which got me into making LAMP apps, which got me into Rails, and so on...
Can I use it offline? My wife installed it a long time ago and never signed up for an account. Back then offline usage seemed to be possible. I copied her profile to her new laptop and it never required signing up which is great (why on earth would she put her literature database in the internet??? The tool shall just index the papers on her harddrive).

When I wanted to install Mendeley desktop for my brother, it was impossible to start it without an account. Is that on purpose? Can it be skipped?

I just backuped a fresh download before Mendeley gets modified more, but I wonder whether I have to take her profile to seed a new computer so that it gets running without internet access.

Of course it's quite obvious that Mendeley or Elsevier have no interest in supporting anybody who wants to just USE the programm, instead this social stuff shall be pushed...
The mining difficulty is driven by the value of the bitcoin (and the efficiency of mining hardware), not the other way around. If bitcoin's traded value were to drop precipitously, the least efficient miners would become unprofitable and eventually drop out, resulting in the difficulty decreasing.
Your word is your bond
I know a couple of CS security students at my university (myself included) that would LOVE to look into those if what you say is true.
Looks like they're using Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com/) if the above erroring pages are anything to go by (http://fry.io/b2).