skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't own any Bitcoins, but the concept interests me. (I'm no economist either so these musings are probably entirely wrong or unfounded.) I can't help but feel like all this hooplah about Bitcoin's "price" on the dollar is missing the point of Bitcoin. People are measuring Bitcoin's worth by how many dollars it costs; is that really the measure of worth of a currency, or simply the measure of worth of a dollar?

It would be much fairer for people to measure Bitcoin's worth by (for example) how many gallons of milk or how many pounds of rice you could buy with it. But since we need to somehow know how much this medium of exchange is worth, and since Bitcoin still has very low adoption, we're using the dollar as a way of assigning worth to these imaginary collections of bits, and that makes it a target of speculation and bubble mentalities. In other words, we should tie its worth to something useful you could actually spend it on, instead of just using as it as a Monopoly-money "investment vehicle".

IMHO Bitcoin will never be able to be taken seriously until the price is pegged to some physical product of real-world value. Until then, it'll just be a USD proxy and thus functionally worthless to anyone but academics, speculators, crypto-nerds, and black marketeers who don't understand that Bitcoins aren't truly anonymous. The system has a chicken-and-egg problem of adoption, and right now given the poor PR it's receiving it looks like it's heading in the wrong direction.
Large companies[1] and well to do citizens[2] often pay shockingly low tax rates.

[1] http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/investing/2012/corporate-taxe...
[2]http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
The job I want includes a swimsuit and sipping cocktails on a beach all day... I'll keep the hoodies for now :)
Good post and you had me all the way up until you said "journey". I hate that word. Pre-internet Journey meant something now every man and his cat uses it to talk about the incites they had while doing something, it has lost its impact. However like I said I enjoyed the post until then.
This is very clearly satire. Unfortunately, satire is usually lost of this crowd.

The bit with 'free vs non-free' had me rolling.
I think felipebueno was being sarcastic, just did a poor job of getting that across. It doesn't look like a serious comment to me.
>It's like the GitHub for MBAs when it comes to professional networking/reputation.

I think that's a very good analogy which applies to a lot more than MBAs. In my experience, the site is incredibly popular with people who work by way networking and recommendations.
Memory given a boost by playing sounds during sleep
Author is applying to wrong companies if he is getting lots of language-specific questions. The right kind of company for him is probably one that is looking for smart people who can program and not for Java jockeys.
>I think there should be a third option in the form of a decentralized social protocol.

You mean something like diaspora?
https://joindiaspora.com/
Overall, well said. But IMO there's nothing wrong with BTC being "only" a proxy currency. It'd solve a technical problem. (in particular, it'd be a decentralized Paypal).

http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

Anyway, this is the graph I watch actually. Every bitcoin transaction is public, so it is possible to count every single one, as well as it's value. The more transactions there are, the better it's adoption rate.

BTC price is missing the point. The real story is how many people are _using_ the damn thing.
Alex Krupp has laid out an elegant solution to this problem:

http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2012/09/program-abo...
Password?
> Isn't the onus on bitcoin to prove its stability?

You mean its future stability. It's empirically unstable right now, and I don't think many people will deny that. But you seem to be talking about burden of proof for future events, which seems pointless.
The dollar is more than just a commodity with a liquid market. It is also a store of value that is stable enough that it can be used as a unit of account. Bitcoin can't currently be: its value could double tomorrow, or go to zero.

If the dollar doubled or went to zero tomorrow, Bitcoin would be irrelevant, because there wouldn't be an Internet to transact in it over.

The reality is that every item for Bitcoin-denominated sale has an underlying intended value denominated in dollars; the correspondance between BTC and USD is (a) virtually always unbreakable and (b) wishful and fraught for (depending on phase of moon) buyer and seller alike. The notion of Bitcoin as "money" is counterfeit for the overwhelming majority of its users; for one group, BTC is a P2P alternative to Paypal; for the other, they're virtual tulip bulbs.
App developer
I only sign in to Facebook in an incognito browser to minimize their ability to track me.

The problem is that I currently use Google for real identity stuff. This seems to imply I'll need to do something like all my web browsing in Firefox, and use Google services in Chrome.
Strata 2013: Kate Crawford, "Algorithmic Illusions: Hidden Biases of Big Data"
This has come up several times. The buying power of a dollar has changed very little in the last month but the buying power of Bitcoin has increased, no matter how you measure it.
I think biggest pain in hiring for startup world is availability of candidates who are best, available in market and willing to take risks!

Can your app address that?
An non-jailbreak iOS widget that shows Bitcoin's exchange rate
Bloomberg is giving another view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLPy89gPE0
Great how they have nothing on their home page to indicate this.
very cool idea.. yep, you definitely catch people in awkward positions sometimes hah but we use Sqwiggle every day and it certainly becomes a non-issue very quickly, you just become alright with it.. Naturally we will be building in some extra privacy features but, as-is, it really isn't as intrusive as one might think! Love the idea of picking more flattering stills, thanks for the input!
April 10th: bitcoin days destroyed: 52,694,509
https://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=false

within ~1.6% of previous all-time high, which happened to be the last crash

>>> second = 52694509.0
>>> first = 53532635.0
>>> (first - second) / first
0.01565635616479555
Over forty comments on credentialism so far, and nobody has mentioned the elephant in the living room, Griggs v. Duke Power Company. Pardon me while I feign surprise.
What!? Bloomberg took advantage of Bitcoin's unregulation to criticise it? I wouldn't have expected it!
I have interest in video, cloud and scale so http://techblog.netflix.com/
Those are getting there ... but the GPUs are all weak.

The closest I have seen to what I want is the ASUS u500vz which has a decent mobile GPU, but it's extremely hard to get hold of (at least in my country).
My first thought was "this is really familiar"... then I realized it's because I used to work in Hod's lab :)

I think it's interesting that most of the robots that evolved don't have rigid components. I wonder if reducing the structural support of the "muscles" themselves would favor robots with a defined skeleton.
How do you go from "A: bitcoins aren't a suitable currency today" to "B: bitcoins will be a suitable currency tomorrow" without going through a point where someone somewhere argues that bitcoins will be stable in the future?

And if there's no good argument that bitcoins will inevitably become a stable currency, then why bother with bitcoins ever?
Maybe it's the inner cynic inside of me, but is it just me or does this article only focus on the fact that CEO Dave Goldberg gets to go home at 5.30pm? This line here kind of gives me the impression that Dave gets to leave at 5.30, but his employees don't: "creating a culture that enables the company's CEO, Dave Goldberg, to leave the office by 5:30 PM" — unless my reading has failed me here, not once does the article mention everyone gets to go home on time.

What is this culture that Dave has created? Is it a culture of everyone else does the work and Dave sits back, or is it a culture of everyone gets to go home at 5.30 regardless of looming deadlines or workload? It's a lot easier to go home at 5.30 when everyone else is doing the work.
You ought to 3d print the in-game items and then sell licenses to the files.
Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account.

A store of value is something you could accept in payment for work and hold on to.

A medium of exchange is something a shoemaker can use to obtain bread from a baker who doesn't want shoes.

A unit of account is something with a value stable enough that you can measure the value of arbitrary goods with it; like the Bloomberg article says, it's what enables a cheesemaker to put a price tag on cheese without forcing her to become a currency speculator.

Which of these functions does Bitcoin have?
You don't need to use an exchange to make a payment, though.
But you can't really claim that Bitcoin has any buying power, because there's almost nothing you can buy with Bitcoin where the merchant hasn't pegged the Bitcoin price to USD. Bitcoin has, functionally, near zero buying power; in practice people are simply using it as a USD proxy.
Some would. I know quite a few lawyers in startups. That's why I mentioned 'underemployed JDs' who have an incentive to explore other avenues if they can't get a job at an established law firm or public body. You might not be aware that there's a major supply-demand imbalance in the legal field right now.
A Game Development Love Story
Well, first I want to verify the pain I am going to address, before deciding on a direction.

What you have articulated has many facets and a billion ways to approach it.
That's because the emergency maintenance is now over. This is one reason why I am opposed to posting short outages to HN; they tend to be over before the story falls off the front page.
I think this is a pretty good idea, I really hate shopping because there are simply too many options and I don't really have an eye for how things look until I try them on. And after trying on the third sweater I'm just fed up. Also I didn't have any idea about clothes until very recently when someone suggested this book to me: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Details-Mens-Style-Manual-Ultimate/d... . Prior to that it was only suits at work and jeans and t-shirt outside of work, no variety ever.

Having someone knowledgable pick out something is a pretty useful option for me. I might use something like this but only if I could get a clear picture of sort of "prior projects" they've worked on because I'd like to match what I want with what they deliver.
Talked to 1,700 potential users and you still couldn't figure out that you were building a shit product.

YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE AN ENTREPRENEUR.
no more public projects? lol someone needs to open their eyes - its non-stop construction around here.
I shouldn't have mentioned Github! ;-) Twitter has nothing to do with tech folksiness. The two most prominent Twitter users are Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga.

It's good for them that LinkedIn is making money. But that revenue comes from recruiters, and is only possible if non-recruiters (ordinary folks) get some value out of the system. If normal people don't get any value out of LinkedIn, they will leave (or become dormant) and the revenue from recruiters will dry up. I'm just wondering what that value might be.

I already see many ghost profiles, people who haven't updated their profile in a while or who create a different profile every time they change companies.

I wouldn't bet the farm on LinkedIn. Although for 90M I would (since the farm is worth much less).
Great story & thanks for sharing this. I was curious about why you chose to go with Amazon Payments... why not PayPal, or your own merchant account?
Isn't this circular? Call the value of 1 BTC "x number of dollars", or call it "the amount of corn x number of dollars will buy you".

The problem is the same whether you do your accounting in dollars or in sorghum: BTC's value is unstable, wildly so, and it's unstable for predictable reasons.
Makes me nostalgic for Canadian Tire money...
Viktor Zykov (one of Hod's grad students) did something like this in 2006 [1][2]. He built a "starfish" then had it learn its own shape through experimentation, then evolve a way to move.

[1] Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msw267lisow
[2] Info: http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/emergent_self_models
The fuhrer.. err I mean Larry Page has declared G+ or die! So expect more to go that competes or can't intergrate G+ properly. Google long ago lost the "Do no evil" moniker.
> Because CloudFlare sits in front of a significant portion of web requests we have the opportunity to, literally, patch Internet vulnerabilities in realtime.

I really do admire CloudFlare, respect the things they do, and I've
even been in contact with some of the great people working there like
jgrahamc. The trouble is, I'm having a negative reaction to the above
claim. I don't have access to the data needed to confirm or deny the
claim of CloudFlare being in front of "a significant portion of web
requests" but as far as I know, any such claim is false. Even the T1
carriers (i.e. backbone providers) can never make factual claims of
such magnitude, and by design, a vast quantity of internet traffic
will get routed over the networks of at least one of the few dozen
T1 providers on the planet.

Can CloudFlare provide data to support their claim, or if need be,
scale back their marketing-speak to avoid seeming disingenuous?
Kinda impressive how many zealots, near-luddites HN

Disliking HTML email makes someone a near-Luddite?
You have to be the signal stronger than the tower. And you need enough channels to talk to all those planes.
Your issue is against using the dollar as the numeraire [1]. Fine, pick gallons of milk, oil, etc. and you'll see that the charts of recent days, when expressed in "real" terms and not in nominal/dollar terms, will look THE SAME.

At t his stage, dollar inflation and depreciation against other currencies is just measurement error when compared to BTCs fluctuations.

The second bit, I didn't entirely got. We can't PEG BTCs price to anything, as its price is market-determined.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Num%C3%A9raire
Winklevoss twins claim to own 1 percent of all Bitcoin
You can opt out. You can use something like ghostery that will block scripts. Google doesn't give away your information like Facebook does.
Great article. I've recently been looking into doing parallel optimization with python and found this article on convex optimization useful as well: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-optimizep...
This is a failing in job interviews in my view - selecting for skills that might not matter in practice. If you can build decent working code by Googling stuff as you go along (I know that approach works for me at least, besides the poster), there must be some real value to that which interviewers are missing.
Try !sp in DDG.
Wow, if typing "brb" put you in away mode automatically that could be really neat - great idea! Love that kind of frictionless interface
> sadly other browsers such as Firefox have followed their lead and removed RSS notifications by default.

? I am on Firefox, no addons, and I have a menu item Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page which detects RSS/Atom.
Why? Helicopter money, as explained in this excellent post by Slate's brilliant Matthew Yglesias:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/...
Ghostery [1] can block most of those.

[1] https://www.ghostery.com/
killed all my Google accounts. Can't stand G+ at least with FB most of the people who have accounts wanted the account. G+ most people don't even want the stupid thing.
Anatomy of a Startup One Week After Launch
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if merchants selling products for Bitcoin simply peg its worth to USD (like most merchants today to) then nobody can ever be sure how much you can actually buy with 1BTC.

Bitcoin is unstable in part because this habit of using it as a USD proxy creates uncertainty as to the medium's real worth. This in turn encourages speculation which perpetuates the vicious cycle of volatility.
Bus tokens and coupons are also virtual currencies. As a merchant, you're free to accept payment in bus tokens, if you like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

Every currency or instrument of value can only be spent in certain venues. Try spending USD in a small French village, for example.
Hm. Maybe that's why I don't particularly enjoy working remotely as much as some people. I don't feel like I'm a part of any kind of team, just a guy hiding in his room clicking his keyboard.
I second that emotion. It can happen very easily (well, it did to me) if you're feeling "down" or particularly unsure about the future.

And yet, why would we need to be "Master" of anything?

One thing struck me in Hery's post: He did things. He accomplished. And many of these things he seemed to enjoy doing. How many of us here, with our fancy degrees and self-taught knowledge have lots of projects "on the side", always thinking "I'll do it when I got time" but never actually DOING anything? Like kids in front of a box full of LEGO, rummaging through the pieces, putting two of them together then going through it again,... In this age full of distractions (let's look at your reddit karma again, and are you sure your inbox is empty? maybe someone tweeted something interesting in the last five minutes), the value of your knowledge ain't "jack", your value as a developer lies in what you can accomplish.

Don't mind the bullshit job offers asking your for "ten years in java, 20 years in ruby and 50 years in BASIC (knowledge of COBOL a plus)", most companies would KILL to have someone as devoted (and versatile) as you.

Keep on!
Sorry, but leaving at 5.30pm and then logging in again that night doesn't count.
Hmm, I thought I tried using a Math function without success, but I must have done something wrong. Thanks for steering me off the wrong path.
Parent wrote:

"Any two identical literals"

The second 'a' is not a literal.
Once you sign up, you can click the headshots of each stylist, to see their profile page, which shows client before and after photos and client recommendations. You can also message any stylist and tell them what type of style you are going after and then they will reply within 24 hours with their thoughts and you can see if they are the right stylist for you. You can also jump on a phone or skype call with them if messaging back and forth is not your thing.
Curious, without HTML do you expect everyone to
copy-paste confirmation and password reset links?

You've seriously never used an email client that makes plain text URIs clickable?
Looks like a normal search page for me. I see nothing weird and no reference to "english"
Well, that's a comment that betrays a lot about you and, potentially, why your startup failed.
I have never used eBay, so maybe this is a stupid question... by why in the world would you have sent your credit card number directly to the seller?
Men can get the same style as those featured on this site by simply doing all your shopping at J. Crew.
I went up and had a look, but haven't turned it up yet. I'm supposed to be getting new shelves in the next week or so and getting all those books up onto them, so I'll keep an eye out.
It depends on the nature of the problem, but you are actually very solid with language skills (you know at least 4 or 5 different languages with sufficient skill that you can develop subtantial apps with them and not trip over yourself in language minutiae) it might not be a bad idea to gently twist the truth, assuming you can pass the technical tests.

Lest anyone think this is unethical, do remember that the large majority of job postings are made by people who ask the impossible (a level of experience in new languages that basically make it accesible only the language developers) or the irrelevant. Use your own criteria to determine when this makes sense.
I believe the argument was that the 'name' Amazon Coins is meant to capitalize on things like Bitcoin, Litecoin, PPCoin, NameCoin, FreiCoin, DevCoin, etc.

The function is clearly something more similar to MS Points.
Just to play the devil's advocate here, it's not like Google Play is necessary for an Android device to work. That's already an extreme improvement over Apple's store, which is even less free, open, and modular and also requires you to create an Apple ID (though thankfully Apple hasn't tried fumbling with a tied-in social network or similar web services).
Music is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest industries to be successful in. Props to them for continuing to press on, hoping for a break and smart enough to throw in the towel and move on.

Also, happy to hear you didn't mortgage your life savings and burn out in grand fashion. You're wise beyond your years.
I've never used Surveymonkey nor do I have any affiliation with them but this is such a crass and insulting comment.

Pretty much every web app is a "take input and stick it into a database".

Could a rough prototype of a survey system be made in 4 hours? Possibly, but to state that the entire app could be built in 4 hours by a "junior programmer" and claim their executive team is selling BS is offensive and asinine.
Great way to short sell BTC!
Work through the latest edition (4) of Sedgewick's Algorithms book and do the algorithmic challenges on Interview Street.

This will fix the problem of having a wide range of hacker skills and a portfolio of projects but not being able to make it through a Google inspired interview.

There's probably a Coursera or OCW course that might help but the key is you have to actually do the exercises.
While Google has certainly been pointing this out to people and telling them to get their backlinks in order, I am not sure that people are actually being penalised currently?
I think the opposite problem is also worth considering. No matter how bad the idea some people you trust will probably say go for it.
Bitcoin is an option for marijuana money in Washington state
Wait, you're not a Google fan anymore because you have to use Google in order to use a Google service? You're complaining that you have to use Chrome in order to use a Chrome add-on? And that you have to use Google+ in order to get Google+ notifications? You can add Google+ pages to your circles without this add-on; you don't like Google anymore because they're offering the ease of doing this in a single click in a particular browser, but you have to send them some data?

If the content you're interested in is only available through Google+, that's not Google's fault. Complain instead to the website owner who decided to have content on their Google+ page.
The word has been hijacked by mainstream meadia and means "computer break-in" in the public eye. Not a cussword, but I understand how a company could fear being publicly associated with that word.
The choice isn't necessarily between:

1. dabble in everything and master nothing

OR

2. Specialize in one thing and never touch anything else again.

There's a bit of a middle ground. Have one (or two, or three) things you specialize in and develop great depth, coupled with a tremendous breadth of general knowledge of related things.

You could strive to be a "generalizing specialist" as they say[1] or a person with "t-shaped skills"[2].

"T people" are very highly valued, in at least some contexts[3].

[1]: http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists....

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

[3]: http://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-...
re PIL. It's "friendly fork"/successor pillow does support python 3.x https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.0.0
There is no need or reason to change or add any bytecode instructions to support proper tail calls.

Take standard class files and execute them on a runtime with proper tail calls. Done. Works.