skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The section on Satoshi's identity found in the Wikipedia article [1] for Bitcoin seems rather persuasive:

Investigations into the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto have been attempted by The New Yorker and Fast Company. Fast Company's investigation brought up circumstantial evidence that indicated a link between an encryption patent application filed by Neal King, Vladimir Oksman and Charles Bry on 15 August 2008, and the bitcoin.org domain name which was registered 72 hours later. The patent application (#20100042841) contained networking and encryption technologies similar to bitcoin's. After textual analysis, the phrase "...computationally impractical to reverse" was found in both the patent application and bitcoin's whitepaper. All three inventors explicitly denied being Satoshi Nakamoto.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Identity
تورنت مسلسل Spartacus الموسم الأول و الثاني و الثالث مترجم
Why the government will not attack bitcoins.
Hayeks - a prominent economist who won a Nobel Prize for his theory of how best to allocate resources in an economy states that deflation is better than inflation:

"It is, however, rather doubtful whether, from a long-term point of view, deflation is really more harmful than inflation"

His argument is quite long of course, but basically there is the argument about taking money from savers. The argument that inflation means miss allocation of resources as higher inflation creates artificial and temporary higher employment, artificially keeps businesses afloat, etc. So when the correction comes its worse than it needs be.

Then there is Keynes. He argues that inflation is better because it encourages investment and makes debt easier to discharge.

So Keynes is the left - i.e Democrats - because higher inflation means the government has more power which means the government is a bigger government.

Hayek is the right. Thatcher said: "This'is what we believe', and banged Hayek's [book The Constitution of Liberty] down on the table." Her idea of unregulating banks was based on Hayek's idea of having a decentralised currency without the issuance of money by the government - so bitcoins really. Though he would have preferred there to be many currencies each competing and each valued by the free market.

So, whether bitcoin should or should not exist is an ideological divide between the right and the left.The right wants it to exist based on the conservative principles of Hayek which aims for a small government and rewarding savers. The left does not want it to exist based on the Keynsian ideas which aim for a big government and rewarding borrowers.

Therefore, in my opinion, bitcoins has a strong backing, and thus a strong voice, in the Conservative/Republican's. That - I think - is a mighty ally to have which in my opinion guarantees the existence of bitcoins as far as the government is concerned.
If people start dying because we are not using enough nuclear power to supply our energy needs I think you will see public sentiment shift VERY rapidly.
He means the hell that immigrant households use welfare and related wealth-transfer programs at higher rates than do non-immigrant households. But of course his comment got the hell voted down by the hive-mind because he was rude enough to notice.
>> That tends to be that people who can build and nurture a forest tree by tree and row by row aren't the same people who can see the entire forest and what the seasons will bring. The forest does best when each person is in the right role.

There are plenty of hackers who can see an entire forest. This is the meaning of abstraction.

It is correct to say that something is best when people are in their 'right' role, but I think it's absurd to say that people that are used to hacking and creating systems are unable to think about systems...

If what you're saying is true, however, that means a weakening of our socioeconomic position, so you better hope that you're wrong, and that we do in fact have the natural ability to learn, think about systems and be strategic.
> I've long suspected bitcoin was created by a government.

Why?

> Bulletproof protocols usually require peer review, yet there have been zero leaks from the reviewers.

Bitcoin isn't bulletproof, it has (and, as I understand, originally had more) well-known vulnerabilities. These are deemed acceptable by people who decide to use bitcoin (almost by definition, as those who don't deem them acceptable are unlikely to also choose to use bitcoin.)

> The part that puzzles me is why a government would do this.

There's a whole lot of reasons a government might do something like bitcoin, but its far from clear that a government did it, much less what the motivation was if a government did. Really, this seems to be looking for supposition to pile on supposition to create a conspiracy theory.
>An Avalon ASIC does 65Gh/s on 620W

Wow! That's less than 1.5 percent of the (average) cost estimated by the OP.
After the last Bitcoin is mined (and actually much sooner than that), the profit from mining will have shifted away from new coins and into transaction fees.

Mining new coins and processing transactions are the same thing. So the hardware can remain useful as long as Bitcoin stays in use.

(Could it get obsoleted by better hardware? Of course, but that's true of every piece of electronics.)
The problem is that most users (home & enterprise) just want things to work, they don't really care much how to get there and to have the best efficiency.

It won't be too hard to have a good filesystem that works over raw NAND flash but it will not work on older OSes, it will not work in the enterprise storage market and so there will be less buyers and thus it will cost more so no one will buy it and it will not be made.

Even the enterprise storage folks just want the damn flash devices to just work without the storage folks doing anything with them. It's taken to extremes sometimes and the flash vendors just do whatever they are told since there is a lot of market in whatever the software-defined engineers want. Except the engineers mostly want to deal with high level algorithms and to brag how fast their algorithm is without really thinking about the hardware. Hardware is hard. Besides they can do something with the hardware that is already on the market rather than envision something better.

TL;DR unless someone will hold the stick at both ends (software and hardware) no one will make a reduced layer solution.
Sorry to go off topic, but interesting to see "subscribe via feedly" instead of Reader and "Notify me..." via email done through MailChimp (RSS to Newsletter) instead of Feedburner. Still makes me sad but good to see alternatives starting to be put out there.
Good for whom? One can certainly see how it is good for the powers that be. You'd have a rather harder time financing non-stop invasions of faraway countries if you had to pay for it through overt taxation.
Econ 101: importing labor reduces "scarcity" driving down prices, regardless of paying going rate. It simply keeps rates from going up which would bring more Americans into the "silicon valley" tech labor pool.

See Tim Harford's "Undercover Economist" for TL;DR style of understanding economics:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007NIDW1Q/

If Zuckerberg's is trying to satisfy a labor shortage then he should go to where the labor wants to live, as Google has done which is to establish a major technical presence in Manhattan, where the kind of people he wishes to hire want to live.
Say it's a bubble. People still buy tulips, internet stocks, and houses. Their bubbles didn't kill those markets. As long as a few people value what bitcoins offer, a market will exist for them. You may not value them, but no market needs your personal involvement.

As for economists' views on something they've never studied, I'm reminded of I. Fisher, Prof. of Economics at Yale, saying in 1929 "Stocks have reached what look to be a permanently high plateau." ... and how many people told me with utter certainty and hifalutin credentials how stupid Wikipedia was and how much it would fail. Or Linux, for that matter.

Some things work better in practice, not in theory. Or at least need time for the theory to catch up.
They are doing a make-work exercise which only needs to be time consuming, in order to prevent cheaters. It's mostly throw-away work. The actual computation that needs to happen is pretty trivial. I think it would be possible to fix Bitcoin so that "proof of work" is something that doesn't consume all that electricity, but I'm not sure what it would be.
Meritocracy, it bears repeating, was a word invented in a satire of the idea that you can do it.

Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.
>>Runi Limary, a 36-year-old breast cancer survivor, told USA TODAY that one of the patented genes showed up in her body when she was 28. Suspecting ovarian cancer, she debated having her ovaries removed, but couldn’t get a second opinion because Myriad held a patent on the mutated gene that she developed.<<

What ! ?
And more importantly, what they understand about people that Quora struggled with in the beginning (at least when I was using it for 9-12 months).
As would I...
Case in point for the cost: I looked at buying an OpenSSD (referenced in the article) to write my own firmware to a lowly 64GB device. Was quoted $2000. There is nothing else getting close to this openness on the market.
It is github, you had a fork, so anyone who wanted your feature in those 2 years could use your fork. And of course you got your feature and could easily merge upstream work as needed.

So what's the problem, aside from somebody you don't know not appreciating you? That person still gave you a great help (the rest of the project), and github prevented the difference of opinion from slowing you down more than a smidge.
Since there is a limited number of bitcoins, once all the bitcoins get mined, won't that lead to deflationary pressures on bitcoin?
The biggest innovation in publishing since Aldus PageMaker
If it doesn't consume electricity at a high rate, it's not proof of work, ie there's nothing to "fix".
Sounds like a security disaster, for one. I could submit a rootkit to every project on github.
YC Valuations Heatmap
Less Wat in Javascript's Future, Please
This standard practice at every sane organization and bug tracking tool. Which is not many of them, sadly.
Hallelujah! CloudPull successfully scrapes "tag" data from Google Reader
It gets even messier when you find out one day you have to handle failures, or serialize data to send to that endpoint, or get notified on network events, or cancel an ongoing request, or etc etc etc.
How do we implement persistent login in a single page app without using cookies or http authentication?
Building a RESTful API with Python and Flask
Show HN:Thanks to all your feedback: v.2 of WindowShopper.me - Fashion discovery
If somebody could explain what the new thing Ripple means by resolving things by consensus instead of proof-of-work, maybe that would work.

But as far as bitcon presents it, proof of work is needed to resolve the problem of keeping a honest transaction log in an untrusted environment.
This seems illegal -- for example TOSEC [1] is in there. Unless I'm missing something, the copyrights on the software in that collection haven't expired. (The article author notably skips over this question [2] in the comments.)

[1]: http://archive.org/details/tosec

[2]: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3947/comment-page-1#comm...
You misspelled Silicon Valley.
Ask HN: Does innovation have a liberal bias?
When I look at lists of startup hubs in the US, all I see are liberal bastions, politically speaking. Are there conservative strongholds that are startup hubs in or outside the US?

If you thought the title was asking a different question, what'd you think it was asking and what would your response to it be?
I guess what I am confused by is that the transaction processing is much easier than mining (ie it's not going to get more and more difficult to do do over time) so you'd need to be processing a very large number of transactions before you'd need an ASIC. If you're a bank or BTC exchange then it's a no-brainer, but I wonder if more than a small number of these devices will be able to do enough work to justify their power consumption as time goes by.
Since it's memory-intensive, scrypt might be a more energy-efficient form of proof of work than SHA.
Do you really think Thunderbird is a replacement for Gmail?

Come on.
Actually, that's what the job of a "maintainer" is. Now, no one has to be a maintainer if they don't want to.
I read pieces like this and wonder if the authors went to the same kind of high-end university as me. The answer seems to be that they didn't - even if it was the same name on the door, it was always for an arts degree. I guess I shouldn't be so surprised that a magazine writer studied English, but I'd be really interested to hear similar criticism from a graduate of a hard science, which really did feel like a meritocracy when I went through it.
I've been looking everywhere for a way to save all of my tags from Google Reader. I can verify that CloudPull preserves all tagged data and the links to the websites that have been tagged.

If you were worried about losing all of your bookmarks through Google Reader, this should put you at ease.

Now I hope Feedly and OldReader and any other Google Reader replacements incorporate tags, so that they can eventually re-incorporate my current tagged data.
So that is about 55 million dollars a year to completely secure the network and process all transactions. I am not entirely sure how it will scale, but I predict that it will scale logarithmically with the number of transactions, especially considering that mining equipment will become more efficient.

Meanwhile the United States will spend 797 million dollars [1] this year in simply printing and transporting physical currency, not including all the other obvious costs in maintaining a modern currency.

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/foia/2013newcurrency.htm
Keep in mind that hashing data and brute-forcing a hash function require different hardware. There are no real applications that brute-force chained SHA hashes.
Prices would go down to compensate for the higher value of money therefore stabilise any deflationary pressure.

But yes, the difference between gold and fiat is that the general tendency in a hard currency economy is slightly deflationary while in an fiat currency it is slightly inflationary. Hayeks seems to believe that slight deflation is better than slight inflation, while Keynes the opposite.

So basically which is better depends on your values. Since conservatives want a small government and to reward savers, slight deflation is better - hence the reason for cutting spending in the UK. While democrats prefer big government and to rewards borrowers so for them slight inflation is better - hence no spending cuts in the US yet.
I knew those people researching quantum computation were up to no good.
Is there any reason to believe that you would not? I would be very surprised if there was any "pure" expression in PostgreSQL on which you couldn't have an index over comparison.
"first you need to make the assumption of a browser baseline. For me it is at least IE8, however that is quickly moving to IE 9 as most should upgrade to at least IE9, even stodgy old enterprises"

BAD ASSUMPTION Just because they should doesnt mean they have or will anytime soon!!!

Have fun convincing my "stodgy old enterprise" to upgrade to IE9. They JUST upgraded to IE8! Yes, ideally no one should be using these crappy old browsers, and I champion this idea and all of the reasons why at work all the time. Rational arguments dont work in the kool-aid world of government. (Does it need to be said that I am looking for a new job?)

A lot of people browse the web from work, and so I dont think it is safe to ignore all of those crappy browsers yet.
This is a faith-based assertion, when data is needed. I am heartily skeptical that, were Bitcoin economy as big as the US dollar economy, that it could ever be as efficient as our system of middle-men, paper forms, etc. US Dollars extract transaction-based fees, whereas Bitcoin extracts continuous make-work in order to maintain consistent value. Say credit cards take a 1% fee on a transaction. At $150,000 per day, and a $2 billion market cap, the overhead is a little over 2.5% per year for Bitcoin. (Not that I think these numbers are completely solid, I'm just going off the best estimates available right now. Also, I'm not an economist, I'm just throwing together a napkin-calculation. Critique away!)

Some things are very amenable to solving with technology. Other things are more amenable to solving with people. Only data will tell for sure.
Most of the hydrogen used in the Haber process (to produce ammonia for fertilizer) comes from methane (natural gas). Most of the hydrocarbons used to produce commercial pesticides come from petroleum. They are not just energy sources, they are raw materials.
I'm not really offended. I'm only noting that you didn't have any arguments from reason to contribute.
In the USA, slavery was outlawed in 1865, with the end of the US civil war.
I too am nostalgic about my Napster days. But if what others are saying is true, that either YouTube or Napster will come after you, I think you could've been a bit smarter about this.

Also, have you considered using the Grooveshark API?
I got the feeling the article discusses the topic in the context of Boston/Cambridge startup scenery, not necessarily nation wide. As Boston is trying to define its own ecosystem, it needs to find a place where startups can grow. That place might be Kendall Square.
>So you'll rewrite .addClass() and .removeClass()

Or, you'll use element.classList.add()

>You'll rewrite .ajax() and .when()

XHR isn't really too verbose.

>So you'll rewrite .animate()

Or you'll do elem.style.transition = ... and use elem.addEventListener;

Really, the plain DOM isn't that bad. If you make one or two sugar methods, they'll be far, far, far smaller than jQuery, and probably far faster.
Well, we could have, say, evolved a hand shape optimized for carrying our young, despite suboptimal tool weilding. But we didn't (according to this research anyway). So the headline correctly states the claim of the research.
Botnets. School computer labs. Kids in their parent's basement.

No rational person who bears the full cost of their actions would mine on a CPU anymore. But 1) not everyone is rational and moreover 2) not everyone bears the full cost of their actions.
Wouldn't - if bitcoins was to become mainstream - wouldn't there be a need for bitcoin debit or credit cards though and atms and banks. So realistically we are only limited to comparing it to actual transaction costs.
I'd imagine that's because the admissions criteria colleges use (things like the SAT), does a much better job selecting for people with the right aptitude for hard sciences, at least at the undergraduate level, than it does of selecting for people with the right aptitude for English Literature.
Nearly all pesticides are made from oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

Many synthetic fertilizers are synthesized directly from natural gas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer
> - Immediate use for it to launder money (HSBC already does this but recently got flagged by the US gov)

Actually, considering the circumstances, I don't see the incentive there. Cash is much easier to move (if you have the power of a bank that size) than bitcoins are. The HSBC example proves this point.
It's even better with modern JS:

document.querySelectorAll(selector).forEach(function (elem) { value = somevalue; });

Which is more obvious in intent and more flexible.

Except this doesn't work, because that's not a real array, it's a stupid NodeList. :(

So you'd have to do:

Array.prototype.slice.call(document.querySelectorAll('thing'), 0).forEach(function (elem) { value = somevalue; });

ugh.
In a perfect mining market the total amount of money spent by miners each day (cost of electricity/bandwidth + amortized cost of hardware) will always tend to converge on the value of the mining rewards (minus some profit margin), which for the next 4 years is about 3600 BTC per day (25 BTC/block * 6 blocks/hour * 24 hours/day).

If the value of Bitcoins go up, so does the number of miners securing the network, which makes sense. It's pretty ingenious.
Ridiculous.

Oftentimes, on HN, discussion entails personal anecdote, personal opinion, and an onslaught of agreement and disagreement, usually completely unrelated to the article in question.

I think, however, that it is unanimous that the patent thing is completely spiraling out of control. Not only are patent trolls completely stifling innovation, but patents, as indicated here, are proving to be more harmful than good.

Intellectual property is not property. What you think is not something you own. Nobody owns ideas; trying to patent them is as absurd as you can get.

A quote from the late Aaron Swartz sums it up brilliantly.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000829
Myriad has a patent on a medical test that uses the presence of particular mutations to screen for cancer.
Sure. How about "Everyone is using it as a commodity instead of a currency?"
Show HN: Weekend(s) project, minimal iOS podcatcher
A Reader-First Internet — I don’t know a thing. — Medium
Ugh another thing I really don't want in the database. Seriously, stuff like this will knacker your scalability over time.

I only say this because I've been there, with SQL Server's XML processing stuff, then spent nearly 2 years getting rid of it.
> Wei Dai published his work originally on crypto-currency in 1998 (in fact some suspected that Wei Dai is Satoshi). Moreover Szabo was mirroring lots of the same thoughts with his bitgold proposals.

I've been saying this for a long time (http://www.gwern.net/Bitcoin%20is%20Worse%20is%20Better), but people don't seem to usually agree with me.
There is an underpopulation problem, but it's not a global one. There's no danger to the human race if we enter a prolonged period of population decline. However, the local demographic problems can be severe. Many countries, particularly ones that don't permit a lot of immigration, are seeing their pension programs becoming insolvent because there aren't enough working people to support the retired people. And those who are worried about racial purity are always concerned with population decline, because it's always the immigrants who have higher birthrates.
To play devil's advocate: what incentive does a private company have to do all the lab work necessary to identify a particular gene sequence as being predictive of cancer and make it publicly known? Without patents, Myriad would've just kept the gene sequence in question secret instead of publishing it. Would someone have rediscovered the proper sequence before Myriad's patent term would've expired? What would be their incentive to share it?