skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This will seem a bit OT, but it is relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...

I'm bothered that we as a society have trouble recognizing the point and purpose of overhead.
1: There are absolutely pockets of absolute brilliance in government. Not big one, not a lot of them, but they are there. Also, Bitcoin primarily a crypto research project, not a software engineering one. The government absolutely has a lot of brilliant crypto researchers on staff.

2: It might just be because I don't understand it completely, but as I understand it, every single transaction in Bitcoin is public and traceable - so if you compromise the identity of a wallet (from computer seizures, wiretap etc) you can monitor a target's transactions. A more perfect (or malevolent, depending on your POV) system would not have this traceability.
At this particular moment, selling 1,000,000 bitcoins would take the market price down to 0.10 USD.

The average price realized would be $14.288 USD, so you'd get $14,000,000. Not bad, really.

Source- "Gribble", the bot on the bitcoin irc channels that calculates these things based on the MtGox order book.
As an alternative currency, Bitcoin is very, very illegal in various countries. For example, I believe the Federal Reserve Act in the US outlaws all non-Reserve currency.
You're going to have to do your own homework on this one, I got burned once before on HN for id'ing someone that preferred to stay anonymous and clearly these people don't want to be out in the open with what they built.

But I can tell you my starting points: there are few threads on bitcointalk that try to ID satoshi, start with those, then read a bunch of papers, figure out who the co-authors are and sooner or later you'll end up with the same set of names. The interesting bit to me is that those two groups are both roughly equally likely but I can't find any clear signs of collaboration between the two.
I believe his argument is that if you have n people in on a conspiracy, than you have possibility of any of the n^2 communication channels becoming compromised, and n^2 more chatter going on. You can mitigate this by having only one person keep track of things, and ensure that no one else knows anyone else is in on it (yay! Star topologies!)
Seems facile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap, etc.
> - If you use the standard jQuery hosted off Google's CDN, most users won't have to load it in the first place. So that overhead doesn't count. Only if you do some boneheaded thing like rolling your own version and hosting it on your server are you going to guarantee every visitor has to download jQuery.

Well, it depends. [1]

[1]: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2013/03/18/http-archive-jqu...
That's why I emphasized "wide spread". And Google and Yahoo bought in "mature businessy" CEO's. And Jobs to me was always a business guy wrapped in the cloak of dev but that's a whole other discussion!
Bitcoin Miners Are Racking Up $150,000 A Day In Power Consumption
Someone cashed out $1 million overnight. Dundundun!
> it was designed to be exploitable

That's a pretty bold statement for which I'm not aware of any proof whatsoever. Bitcoin is pretty rough and ready when you first look at it but on closer inspection it is actually remarkably solid.
Would you mind parroting out the reasons for dismissal of those ``fallacious'' complaints?
That's terrifying...
I spent some time a year ago or so reading Limits To Growth and Thinking In Systems by Donella Meadows - according to those theories, 8-9 billion is too high anyway. Their best case scenario is less than that, with everyone eventually settling into a standard of living that is about analogous to eastern European countries today (which is lower than the standard of living in the US).
Just to tack a few things on to other people's points, I think at least one reason the amount of nation-state warfare has decreased is because of the effects of colonialization and decolonailization. That is, we're left with a lot of countries with political borders that have little to do with underlying social/ethnic/whatever borders. As a result, you have a lot of ethnicity driven/motivated/aligned conflicts (granted, these conflicts tend to have multiple root causes, but surely ethnicity is often pretty critical) that take place within a country, rather than between countries.
Create 3D Social Media Buttons with CSS3
I'd call it video-free youtube
Assuming all this stuff (the original research) was published, perhaps it was a third party that just connected the dots?
Well,

* if you were a gov't who was consistently on the losing end of problems caused by the current regime,

* you'd failed to get relief by diplomacy,

* couldn't or wouldn't seek relief by open warfare,

* and didn't mind the remote prospect of making your situation worse,

Why not?

Personally, I don't think a gov't did it. I've always liked Kaminsky's "it's a group of quants" hypothesis. Or maybe Michael Clear. Or maybe some other Physics/CS type. But I really have no idea, and haven't really looked into it more than reading random internet news.
"I encourage you to give it a shot. Write your next application, library or just code for fun without jQuery. "

Been there, done that.
And it's a pain in the *

You'll find yourself needing a method to add or remove classes eficiently. So you'll rewrite .addClass() and .removeClass()

Then you'll need a clean way to make Ajax and callbacks. You'll rewrite .ajax() and .when()

Then you'll need to fade something in all browser. So you'll rewrite .animate()

Ad lib.

JQuery Minified and GZipped is 35k (not 90 as the op said, ignoring the gziping.) JQuery is cached in most browsers. The performance hit is not worth the pain of re-inventing the wheel.

The problem is not JQuery, it's bad code. Bad code won't magically disappear in vanilla JS.
Bitcoin has the potential to upset a lot of applecarts depending on how successful it eventually will turn out to be.

Consider me amazed at how far it's already gone, if it goes much further it may very well be extremely wise to not be known as one of its creators.
Designed To Move - An intiative to bring back physical activity to schools
Massive immigration will help make sure I get my social security...
It certainly has worked in the past but it won't anymore as the homo sapiens nears obsolescence.
I'm sorry but four lines of code will never be "just as readable as" one.
Please don't say that "all" of us endorse writing C. Many of us gave up on writing C a long time ago and want to see pure-Python solutions to things.
It is definitely true that all the pieces were already there, and that bitcoin is more of an integration effort than a from-scratch design. And yet, there is a lot of subtlety going on there, more than I would credit an integrator with. This was no accidental affair.
TURK YONETMENDEN MACARISTANDA "ÇAMAŞIRHANE KULÜBÜ"
Any fact to back that up? Any economical analysis? I fail to see how it answers the question so I downvoted (bad me)

Taking a similar example, in 2010 it was unlikely Stuxnet was government made - people talked about the black market and high school students from Panama http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#History

Yet now, it seems to be.

I share part of your opinion, as in "unlikely to be from a government" but I would NOT jump to conclusions and exclude this possibility.
JS performance isn't that important for most tiny apps. It's client side code and distributed.

If JS performance were important, someone would write a jQuery -> js compiler and produced compiled js as output. But they don't do that, because once you benchmark the code, you find out that DOM is very slow, as johnbender mentioned.

I'm still used to hacking in vanilla JS, but when I want to write something longer than a hundred lines, I load jQuery. It's the only sane tool to reduce code size. It does it in a pretty disciplined, lisp-y way, too.

It's liberal use of the $(selector).f(x).g(y).h(z) style, which applies the function to the previous result, which is a collection, helps you code at a higher level of abstraction. No more loop structures!

It's not time to sunset jQuery: it's time to put more support for jQuery style functions into ECMAScript, so you can get better performance though parallelization, lazy evaluation, etc.
Could be the ultimate scam, maybe they're waiting to sell the coins they mined in the beginning? Could be they were afraid it would work (and therefore possibly make them a lot of powerful enemies), and didn't want to be known to be responsible?
Why do some dimethyl compounds penetrate the skin so easily? Dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) will even carry various other compounds into the body as well.
It's very difficult to receive and enjoy the proceeds with traditional assets. Not so bitcoin.
A compact operating system for building cross-platform distributed systems
Rdl is correct. Smart people often get hired by small firms which do contract work for government organizations. It allows the smart people to live outside of the hierarchy imposed by a large institution.

The motivations are very similar to startups working outside of larger companies. You get more freedom in work choices and pay scale.
Divisibility fixes an important piece of the problem of a fixed maximum number of bitcoins. It doesn't address the deflationary-spiral piece (holding bitcoins means fewer in circulation, means you're paid more to hold bitcoins, means there's fewer in circulation...). Freicoin adds demurrage to attempt to deal with that piece; I'm curious as to how effective that is, but it seems plausible that between the two there's then no real issue.
Please. MintChip is not even remotely similar. It's a stored value card with some crypto for signing transactions.
Mozilla is already running Persona free at scale. If they let WebRTC do most the heavy lifting I don't see why they would have any issues running TowTruck free at scale.
but no less anonymous, maybe more so.
I've spent more time on ID'ing the character(s) known as 'Satoshi' than is good for me and think I have a fair idea who they are, but it isn't bullet-proof. Even if I had it I would not publish their names here. HN'ers are smart enough to do their own work without having it done for them, and clearly those people prefer to be anonymous, so if you do figure it out better keep it to yourself.
Great book, always a good introduction to an HTML5 feature I need to use for the first time.
The people I suspect the most are Wei Dai, Adam Back, Nick Szabo, Ian Goldberg, or a few people of that era. Look at people who did interesting stuff then stopped for a few years... (Zooko, Jim McCoy, some Dutch people, Ian Grigg, etc are all candidates too)
Seems more likely bitcoin was created by a big bank:

- Immediate use for it to launder money (HSBC already does this but recently got flagged by the US gov)

- Long term (if it became successful) it would enable them to reduce dependency on governments / regulation. Big banks are already more powerful than most governments and are rumored to cause political turmoil in countries to increase dependency on the bank. Why just control transactions when you can control the money itself?

- Have the financial knowledge / data to design a currency + have the technical expertise to implement it (due to the masses of quants joining banks in the past 10 years)
If he can't defend his idea among project maintainers it's not worth implementing imho. While the first implementation could have been made in a rush, if this needs to be fixed let's give it some thought this time. While they were clearly not supportive, also clearly this guy is not the right one for this job.
Since this was in 2005 I wonder what he'd say now? I believe he has since said that initially, they thought they were looking for smart people. Over time they found out they were looking for determined people.

[Business Writer] What do you look for in people?

[PG] Determination. When we started, we thought we were looking for smart people, but it turned out that intelligence was not as important as we expected. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student."
Making Gmail Task Lists Shareable
There is an existing fundraising infrastructure, an existing polling infrastructure, an existing media market infrastructure, all of these are highly successful and competitive and get candidates elected. When you're introducing sprawling new web based architectures into this mix you've got to prove the efficacy of every minute decision and improvement. There is very little trust.
I'm not sure it's worth stirring this up again, the different viewpoints are already clearly discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059964, and the Debian Ruby maintainers have made several policy changes since then.
Well, they want to make it easier for companies to get good working power, not allow people come and "steal" your benefits.
And how do you solve that if you want to log in to amazon form your computer and from your mobile phone?
I agree there are good cryptographers, but the bitcoin implementation is surprisingly good as well. On point 2 I think you restated what I said.
Bitcoin isn't nearly as anonymous as many believe. The ever-shifting addresses make it look anonymous to average folks... just like a Three-Card-Monte game might look fair. But, with TLA levels of traffic analysis, plus the cooperation or compromise of a few major entry/exit/exchange points, it's probably quite transparent. So I can buy the theory that it was thought to be a 'manageable' variant drawn from the possibility space of all cryptocurrencies.

But also, it may have just been an experiment that grew far beyond expectations. Some deep-secret think-tank group was playing with digital cash scenarios, perhaps as part of scenario-planning about possible futures where a cryptocurrency arises from far-left-field. Bitcoin was one of the ideas that got a lot of review and generated some vibrant internal debate: could this work? A proponent got approval to release it, under a pseudonym, to see how unaffiliated people reacted. So indirectly from a government... but not part of any master plan.

(See also my prior comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501803 for why I think tax collectors may be very comfortable with Bitcoin in the long run.)
> Having IIRC 10% of the GDP used for allocating resources is wasteful when there is technology available to do this very thing.

With regard to that 10%, don't forget that much of it is spent on the salaries of the individuals actually allocating capital (i.e taking money from some source, such as depositors or investors, and acting on their behalf to invest or loan it elsewhere), such as bank managers, fund managers and investment bankers. Bitcoin cannot decide whether a firm or individual has a good chance of paying capital back, and so its role in allocating capital in nil I would say. An algorithmically-determined money supply would however render infeasible the idea of discretionary or near-discretionary monetary policy, which would free up many economists from the ECB, Fed and Bank of England, and so would free up resources in that regard (whether that is optimal would depend on the algorithm of course).

For any computer system to do allocate capital optimally, it would need to have to sort of assessment ability a human has - or else have a very, very good dataset.
Bitcoin does not have anonymity; it has pseudonymity with a public transaction record. Depending on your needs and what other precautions you take, that may be good enough, but it's not the same as handing someone a pile of small, unmarked bills.
Creating badass users
Ask HN: Should I learn to code enough to understand or to deploy?
I am non-tech founder learning to code the basics (front-end and C#/.NET).

I agree with all those advices that I should learn to code, but one never answered question is "for what?". So I hope to get some good advice here.

Should I learn enough to understand and talk to developers, and eventually act as their "intern", giving some junior help on a specific task; or should I learn enough to understand all the code and achieve to completely ceeate a new feature from the ground and deploy it?

Consider that I already have a functional open to public MVP (outsourced) and just need to improve it.
>Personally, I think it was a nom-de-plume of several people

See also: Nicolas Bourbaki for a historical example of such an occurrence (minus the disappearing / remaining anonymous part).
I've seen a couple of people talking this way lately, and while we might be able to start talking about this in five years, the idea that after IE8 (or even IE9), we're past the point of needing a library to abstract away the differences between browsers is pure fantasy.

As is the idea that now that we have querySelectorAll, the DOM suddenly isn't a complete nightmare of an API.
Coyote Tracks - The Default Narrative (Apple)
Frequently four lines are more readable than one.
Layering stuff for legacy reasons isn't anything new. It was a smart idea to connect flat digital displays using ADC and VGA cable and display adapter with DAC. Still many did it, and some people even doing it today. It doesn't still make any sense what so ever.
After trying to install a rails app on Ubuntu , frankly the entirety of ruby and its notion of how a mature language should be packaged is pure amateur hour. Rvm is a mess, the various versions are a mess. For example v1.9.3 appears to be considered the same as 1.9.1, and random bugs appear when moving between versions. WTF?
I've never liked chaining, and I hardly ever find a time when it's needed now:

* animations: CSS3

* templating: I don't do it, I prefer static pages and toggle sections with classes

* element filtering: better selectors (nth-child, nth-of-type, [data-stuff=''], etc)

* form serialization: either use event handlers and build it as you go or just use regular browser form handling

Currently, I use reqwest [1] for my HTTP requests. It's very small and is cross browser. In Dart, I just use the built-in libraries.

[1] - https://github.com/ded/reqwest
Some Chrome apps aren't just a few specific browser features though, they're literally full packages that you download that have the ability to go through your files, run native code, access to bluetooth, USB, the ability to embed a WebView (like with Android), access to everything extensions can do and more.

Even some of the "bookmarks" add extra functionality to a site that wouldn't have been able to be granted otherwise, like unlimited storage, access to the clipboard and the ability to run in the background.
Generally, n can keep a secret if n-1 are dead.
The Pragmatic Haskeller – Episode 2, Snap
Bitcoin is a money trading game in the guise of a new type of currency. Most of Bitcoin is being hoarded by traders and speculators who think they actually own something. Bitcoins could never effectively serve as an currency as there will never be stable liquid.
Yes, your argument is fair, but I just wanted to give you a fair idea of writing code in Jquery vs plain JS. Also, think about cross browser support - Why re-invent the wheel? There will always be some missing features that will not be compatible uniformly across browsers and hence the need for frameworks like Jquery.
deflation - Hayeks

volatility - infancy
So, can these be mixed with functional indexes to index on json fields?
Kendall Square: Still the place to be for start-ups
Go is by far a replacement for C. C was made as a language for writing operating systems. C++ tried add more abstraction making it a better choice for more regular applications. Go was made for writing distributed systems.
I recall this being debunked (at least for airline tickets) completely in a stack exchange thread that was posted here a while back. I'll add the links if I can locate them.

Edit to add links:

[1] http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/2952/flight-ticket...

[2] http://blog.getinvisiblehand.com/2011/04/08/ryanair-manipula...
you are two or three years out of the loop, buddy
Here's my conspiracy theory:

BitCoin was created by a group who found a way to reverse SHA 256. They considered how to monetize this invention. The idea of building a currency around that secret was originally a joke, but a proof of concept got taken seriously by one member.

These people can compute bitcoins directly instead of mining, and will therefore control the future money supply. And by enforcing a limit on the supply of Bitcoin, they also figured out how to avoid the inflationary problem inherent in owning an actual currency mint.
i had similar thoughts and the possibility that bitcoin was written by the us government seems conclusive to me.

two more possibilities :

* maybe it can be a way to liquidate the overwhelming national debt.

* what are these numbers all miners are crunching -> maybe decoding military stuff.
I love these stories. Please update if/when you find them. :)
They could store music locally using the File System API and Encrypted Media Extensions (to make the labels happy), but seeing as no one has done this before it probably won't happen for a while.
Are we overestimating how much crypto is involved?

I'm not a crypto guy, but as I understand it, the crypto in Bitcoin is relatively simple and well-understood. The genius idea was how to verify transactions using proof-of-work in a peer system. At least this is what an acquaintance of mine, Paul Bohm, says (http://www.quora.com/Bitcoin/Is-the-cryptocurrency-Bitcoin-a...). Bitcoin lets other people worry about performance and implementation; the protocol just poses a problem. And apparently the first miners, produced by the entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto, were really slow.

So maybe one person, or a small group of people, could have made that conceptual breakthrough?
Setting aside whether the two groups you name are likely suspects, the fact that both public identities and open institutional affiliations does not contradict the hypothesis that a government did it.

For historic precedents, see for example Wikipedia on "Project MKUltra", or the book "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power" by Seth Rosenfeld.

PG remarks that there were probably peer reviewers but none has stepped forward. Either of the two examples I gave illustrates how long and how tightly private-sector collaborators with secret government projects can keep their mouths shut.
I followed the discussion and read it exactly opposite. Ram was putting the cart in front of the horse ("I really need you to start reviewing the code now." see replies [1,2]) and everyone else involved in the discussion wanted to understand the benefits first. Junio was never dismissive of the idea, he just requested a coherent argument of the benefits so that real issues could be discussed. It is understood that submodules are not a smooth workflow in many cases, but Ram's proposed change would be very disruptive and most stated "benefits" of his design are red herrings.

[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22...
[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22...
New Zealand programmers battle it out in third Hacktivate
Sorry. I should had explained better. That company solution didn't need plugins to work. Plugins were just an addition to the solution. And the solution also works on any mobile device with JavaScript. Funny that the company solutions is called "Cobrowse".
True, jQuery is still kind of nice niche tool for when you have to do lots of DOM manipulation, but it's no longer required. As an IE compatibility layer it did well, but I won't miss the $.unreadable($.mess()).