skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How useful is a "currency" if it 1) has volatility like a penny stock and 2) raises the stakes on 0-day defense to something ridiculous?

When I hear interviews where people (bitcoin founder) suggest that you don't transfer into bitcoins any state currency you aren't willing to lose... it sort of peels the "inflation-hedge" covers off the whole thing. How unstable and unsecure does a currency have to be to be nearly worthless? USDollars look pretty safe again.

This is so much a game of hacker gambling. A great experiment. Too bad it consumes so much productive time and energy.

The beautiful narrative of the reclusive, open-society, eastern hacker that designs this thing which grows to be the godzilla it is... The story arc on bitcoin is borderline trite. Michael Bay is all over this in a year.
By no means am I a securities or legal expert but the SEC has authority to regulate any marketplace, exchange, or "investment opportunity" to ensure investors are protected from fraud.
I'm not sure you read the article. They compared both from the source to the wheels.
>If bitcoins were overproduced, say during a bubble, they could well remain low long-term - there is no particular pressure driving them up.

Well if the cost to produce them was higher than the price, people would simply stop mining. Perhaps my understanding of bitcoins isn't correct, but I thought that if there were no miners then transactions would stop being processed and the currency would basically stop working and die.

I know right now bitcoins are still being created/produced by miners, but at some point in the future that will stop happening and miners will be compensated through transaction fees as a percentage of each transaction. At that point if price of bitcoins falls below the cost to mine we likely will see people stop mining and transactions ceasing until the price rises enough for it to be worthwhile.

Of course bitcoin is a bit special in that there are a lot of fans of it that will likely be completely willing to accept a loss to keep the currency going. As we all know humans don't act as perfect economic-minded rationalists.
But I still think the cost of production is a good bottom metric to keep an eye on. If the price falls below that we will know that the currency is in rather dire straits and being artificially propped up by those with an interest in keeping it going.
Coinbase with its ACH stuff isn't really that workable. It takes too long. The opportunity is there, but Coinbase isn't meeting it. Bitinstant has turned into a Ponzi scheme and is well on its way to failing. If Coinbase or someone else started accepting Moneygram and cash bank deposits, they could quickly capture a huge pot of new business. On the selling side, no one is faster or more reliable than FastCash4Bitcoins.com. If someone could perform like they do on the bitcoin buying side, they would win a ton of business.
My father bought a Franklin Ace and we used it for 5-6 years. It was a great computer (better than the Apple IIe) but mainly because I was running CP/M on the Z80 adapter card that came with it. Why use the Apple's 40 character mode when there was the CP/M 80 character mode handy? And CP/M had WordStar!

In any case, thanks for reviving some great memories!
The problem is the true answer to light environmental impact does not fit very well in either side's political ideology.

Pick whatever mode of transportation that costs the least, and the chance is very good that it's environmental impact is also the least of the available options. This provides a good rule of thumb. A small gasoline car (there are no small electrical cars) will easily win out over all alternatives, in some cases even over public transport.

Even human power (ie. bikes, walking) is not as green as you'd think. Humans eat expensive multiple times reprocessed food. Especially meat is expensive. And moving does actually cost energy. I wonder if anyone's ever done a rigorous calculation of that. I did some back of the envelope calculations, and knowing that a trained athlete's body can approach efficiencies of 25% in some cases (normal people, 10% at best), and that food has to be transported > 100km on average, I found walking/biking is only barely more environmentally friendly than an efficient, small car (assuming equivalent distance, of course, and assuming 5liters/100km). Using energy gained from eating meat to walk is very likely to be less efficient than driving (yet that's exactly what athletes do, although they have their increased efficiency).

Of course that's not to say walking/running/biking doesn't have other advantages. But humans burn fuel to produce co2 + work just as cars do, it's just much less visible.
PLTTS - Find your perfect color palette
If you build a to-do list app and see why it fails, you also gain understanding (hopefully).

A lot of the stuff I built in my spare time as I was learning to code failed. Afterwards I questioned why and took that knowledge with me. Probably not as much as working with real business problems, but it is not for nought.
Nibletz's interview of ATL-based startup Body Boss Fitness (us)
I felt sorry for the guy up to this point. You have the notoriously insecure Java plugin enabled in the same browser you use to access your digital cash, and you click on random links in a chat full of people with accounts on the same digital cash site? No, that's your fault, not Mtgox's.

He goes on to say, "First because their site is not secured against such rudimentary attacks as has been demonstrated today." I can't fathom how they're supposed to protect from users' computers being taken over. The only real way to do that is to have two-factor authentication... which they offer, and this guy did not use.

It sucks to get robbed, certainly. But blaming Mtgox for this is uncalled-for.
The promise of tenure is the carrot that feeds expectations that can only be met by talent and hard work.

... and luck. Many talented and hard working people don't get tenure.
Wanted to show you a project I was working on the last few days. I did the design just in-browser. I didn't opened Photoshop/Sketch for this project. Everything in CSS.

You can search for some palettes from ColourLovers API for your current project. Easy and hassle-free. Just sign-in to keep an eye over your favorites.
Try out now!
Thankyou!!!

I'm going to test this on my 2 lovely kittens (almost a year old now, so not really kittens anymore) and see how it goes.

It would be nice if Google (and maybe Facebook) enabled something like this by default, considering the meme-level quantity of kitty photos they must deal with. I'd love it if Google+ tagged my kitties automatically :-)
Worked for me in Mac chrome, but I did see others complaining about it killing chrome.
Predicted TSA response: ban Android phones. (I'm only being half sarcastic.)
And no one saw it then, but did now and upvoted it. In general reposts aren't a problem or frowned upon on HN, if it is upvoted people want to see it.
Such condescending tone for someone that hasn't done much for himself (or even lived long enough to do so). You might wanna lay off the sage advice until you actually become a sage. Or, maybe you could express your opinion on the matter without the snide remarks and presumptuous attitude towards those that disagree with you.
like using Voronoi diagrams to see which restaurant chain 'dominates' an area

That sounds incredibly cool. Would you mind going into more detail?
You can write a lambda calculus interpreter which does beta-reduction. In this case, there is no stack which could overflow. Just a lambda expression, which is reduced to another expression.
Do it now. And do it several times. Airbnb "launched" 3 (4?) times.

If your launch fails to gain you any traction, good, that means you can launch again and no one will know the difference.
You've got a nice interface there. Needs something to facilitate picking endpoints & paths with Street View data, else it gets frustrating fast. That is in competition with this thread, which features a nicely-chosen video sequence which includes non-automated focus on scenery features (like contrails).

Seems another idea's time has come.
Rochester Company Helps Inventors Turn Patents into Profits
ehm. anti-virus? there's a whole discussion about it, i won't go into here.

but what can an anti-virus do? best would be to patch the database (might be pretty hard). then it could write something like:
echo "you have been hacked!"; exit 0
into the .profile. that will let the user spot the cracking attempt.
This is a test of the default configurations of various brokers, NOT the brokers themselves.

Apart from declaring the testing queues in some brokers’ configuration and the persistence settings, all brokers were running with their default configuration out of the box (no tuning made).

He also casually mentions that ZeroMQ is using an in-memory configuration.

A home-made ZeroMQ 2.2.0 broker, working in memory only (no persistence).

The default configuration of AMQ persists messages to journal on disk. So apples to oranges?

Why do people keep writing "benchmark" blog posts like this?
IMO, FourSquare's big missed opportunity was the chance to become the first popular meatspace social network. They could've provided interesting ways to meet new people, not just track your friends.

Instead, they've pivoted into a boring Yelp competitor. In fairness, it's probably an easier way to make money. But I never hear anyone talking about FourSquare anymore.
I'd like to add that it doesn't have to be a start-up at all, it could be any small company.

Where I'm working, I started as a (paid) intern, doing some research and just seemed to stick around. I would occasionally sit in on meetings and training just to see how the other parts of the business worked.
IMO, the limiting factor has been the amount of people willing to sell bitcoins. So the price ended up going up and up and up.

And now that we've reached a point where the value of it is so unrealistic (determined by because everyone is so drastically delusional about it's value and also the causes of the given events -- as your post and other comments demonstrate), those same people are now willing to sell / cash-out, and others will follow their lead.
NSHumanReadableCopyright - Good stuff.
This thread appears to have a download/torrent for a recent version of the blockchain data. It's about 4.7GB, apparently.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145386.0

So does that mean if you're not using BC via a wallet service, it requires at least 4.7GB of disk space in order to do its thing? How is this amount of data expected to grow in the future?
CRAPCHA: Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement
If it has file access permissions it can scan for wallet.dat in a few likely locations and then simply upload that file to a server, then delete the original and you're pretty sure that you'll have time enough to register a transaction with the bitcoin network.
To paraphrase Nathan Hale, I regret I have but only one up-vote to give.

Brilliant.
One can read the data in different ways, and I don't think anyone doubt that pharma companies do contribute to the investments into new medical innovations. One interpretation that I listen/read about is that NiH and pharma operate on different levels, and thus sadly, NiH's contribution tend to be forgotten because they aren't the people with that pop out the pills bought in the store, even if the pills would not have existed if it hadn't been for the NiH funded research that made the new innovation possible.

Then we add patents and insurance companies into the mix, and some people want to paint a picture how innovation gets created. My comment was thus mostly to inform that the largest single funder to medical research is not some for-profit company like Pfizer, but rather tax supported NiH.
Not only is it extremely limiting, there are so many explicit assumptions and so little reasoning in this article, it's barely even anecdotal. If it were, that's still one person's experience/opinion; as someone else predictably pointed out in this thread, Mark Zuckerberg. No, you're not him, and even if you were it wouldn't matter, because if he'd come along and someone had popularized an FB-like product first, chances are he'd still be just as obscure as most of us here.

Further: I’ve talked to more CS majors who say, “I want to be an entrepreneur” than I care to share...

Then they may be in the wrong program, unless they mean "I want to be a YC alum" or "I want to be a technical co-founder." An "entrepreneur" is someone who deals in business, not just a programmer who doesn't work for anyone else. If that's their goal, they shouldn't be in CS. In the reasonably likely case they do want to be something more specific and technical, hopefully they've thought about it further before committing to such a statement.
It seems the original didn't gain traction (it happens)
It's certainly better than a similarly stable SVN server, there's no question about that.

However, when it's down, I can't push my changes for others to review, or review pull requests. I can't update and pull in the latest changes, or checkout branches to help someone with a bug. If it's an integral part of your workflow, it can be quite a pain when it's down.

"I can't tell you how many times in my svn past where I couldn't get any work done simply as a result of the repo sever going down or having some other issue affecting its reachability."

I had the opposite experience, although an SVN outage would have been worse, I'm used to them being far rarer.
A great idea and new way of looking at music, but with music and expressing it in a new visual manner, it is still missing a few things that may improve the piece stylistically. Crescendos and dynamics for example.

Although this might be an easier way to visualize and teach music for young musicians, it might be harder to translate to traditional music as one gets older.
According to the thread I linked above, the software verifies the data during import.
What Will Elsevier Do With Mendeley's Usage Data?
We also have to consider how we move our "concerns" from one place to another. Tanker ships and trucks for petrol, metal wire for electricity. Neither is super efficient.
That's not across the board, though. My family grows rice in northeastern arkansas in fields that have not been treated as such. Still spray for bugs though.
maybe later on :/
or we could crowd fund an adapter for google glass on prescription glasses.

We will need an adapter solution for prescription glasses wearers anyway because we will be forced to get google glasses off at some places but need to let the prescriptions glasses on﻿.

Here is a possible kikcstarter project to solve this
http://bit.ly/GOOGLE_GLASS_ADAPTER
In the ATC system planes don't actually get routed electronically. Controllers give verbal clearances and tell pilots where traffic is.

This sounds more like spoofing an SMS from the airline's dispatch.

Sort of makes sense simulator would have ability to load scenarios without pilot acknowledgement, has no bearing on whether it would work in an Boeing or Airbus.

The ATC system is pretty vulnerable to DOS though.
I hope this opens people's eyes about venture debt. A much cheaper alternative compared to preferred stock - the traditional VC go to. Venture debt is attractive to investors at the right stage, especially with traditional yields at an all time low. Just look at the investment history of firms like Square1, Comerica, SVB, and Gold Hill Capital.
Advertising: The better way
It's an interesting concept, but.

ADS-B, this is just automating a couple of things, firstly the classic mode-c transponder. Secondly things like weather information and other such, which is often read out on good old analogue radio such as AWOS.

Messing around with that wouldn't be any different from people just SQUARKing fake data.

I suppose there could be opportunity for security exploits on the digital device listening, but the airline industry is very legally enforced at applying updates.

With regards to ACARS I have no idea, as a PPL my rust bucket has nothing that fancy. I suppose there could be buffer overflow type things, or a flaw in the encryption.

However I still feel that this is a little bit sensationalist, as it stands you could create chaos as it just VHF radio and voices.
Elon musk claims that even if you take the same source fuel and burn it into stationary power plants, you're still better off. If you burn natural gas in a modern general electric gas turbine, you'll get about 60% efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine, you get about 20% efficiency. So electric cars 'make sense' if this logic is valid.

http://youtu.be/IgKWPdJWuBQ?t=59s I summarized at 59 seconds of this youtube clip you can see his exact claim. Is his claim logically/mathematically sound?^
I like it, would have came in use when I was trying to choose a colour scheme for my recent project. Tis simple, serves a single purpose and works well at doing that. Good job!

My only real criticism is the name. I'm not too keyed in with that pronunciation script so I'm still not too sure how to pronounce it.
Work Hard and Play Just Enough
Dude The Battle to Become the ‘Male Pinterest’
Interview with Warren Wiscombe on scientific programing
> They could've provided interesting ways to meet new people, not just track your friends.

I couldn't agree more. And you're right, at one point everyone was always talking about in, checking in and everything, but you just don't see that or hear about it anymore. People would rather check-in on Facebook because they know their friends will see it, unlike checking in on FourSquare where it gets lost in app-space.

Really, the majority of hardcore FourSquare users I still see active are narcissistic bloggers who are always going to conferences or traveling.
The questions lead me to believe that Blackberry is hanging their hopes on a native wrapper around an HTML5 framework/interface like Phonegap, which is such a horrible mistake, IMO. Platforms should push for the best experience for users and let 3rd parties like Phonegap deal with the 2nd-class user experiences while bringing more developers in.

Frankly, I don't think a platform wants developers who prefer quick-and-dirty frameworks like this. Take some pride in your platform!
The best part of having a Mac in the 90s, as a kid, was Ambrosia's games. I've spent countless hours on Bubble Trouble, Barrack, Harry, Mars Rising, Slithereens, Ares and many others, which I got as demos on Macworld CDs. I even bugged my parents and managed to convince them to send 15$ in an envelope to the USA to buy the license for Bubble Trouble. My father still plays Barrack on his PowerMac G5 from time to time (he's still a pro).

But all things end -- and Ambrosia's gaming business has been dead for a while, unfortunately. I just keep hoping they release the source code for their old games, so someone can create OS X ports...
Gasoline cars are reliant on the grid (of petrol stations), unless you can refine and pump oil yourself.

Eletric cars are only reliant on electricity. Availablity of eletricity from the grid is much better than gasoline from petrol stations, and even if power goes out you can charge your car from your solar panels or any other means you can find to generate electricity, of which there are plenty. Gyms could probably generate plenty of miles just from obese people on crosstrainers.

All in all, a move to electric cars and renewable power sources will decentralize energy supply and make us less reliant on the grid (and all the failed states that supply oil).
The reasons for the culture of urban sprawl in the USA substantially boil down to white flight. Urban planning was a disaster in most US cities, the governments and services were dysfunctional, and there were too many people in the cities that middle class folks didn't want themselves or their children around. Arguably the death knell of urban family living was forced busing. Suburbia was a way to get away from people who couldn't afford two cars, and to live around only people who could afford that.

You will not curb the suburban sprawl problem in the US until ways develop for communities to control who lives in them. Right now the only mechanism is price. The rich can sustain unsprawled urban enclaves because they price undesirables out of their neighborhoods.
The ADSB is the "secondary radar" part, and radar reflection is the "primary".

To to create a "fake aircraft", one would have to "fake the primary" also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_surveillance_radar
Murcia, Spain Offers A Good Deal To Tech Companies Looking For Expansion
Serious Presentation Tips From Standup Comedy
tldr: author is too lazy to moderate comments
SanomaVentures invests in yet another online fashion startup. Meet Brandkids.com
Just like you pronounce Palettes :)
Now that the Intercats know what is possible, that's probably a good idea.

May I suggest a sacrificial ball-of-string alter? Or possibly a cardboard box with a laser-pointer-disco-ball inside (This may be impossible, but try for Intercat's Glory). Cardboard boxes seem to be an integral part of the feline spirituality.
Outbound links from Twitter (t.co) breaking
> There is no way that 20K database inserts in a day should affect them in this way

I doubt its the 20k new accounts. It's probably the 20k new accounts' (per day) trading activity.
I don't want to tell you 'folio'. I want to prove to you that I know the answer is 'folio' without telling you the word 'folio'.

If you thought the answer was 'bored' and you followed the steps (which are not a secret) and you didn't come up with the same end confirmation word as I did. (i.e. me = 'things' you = 'hamster') one of us is wrong and neither of us had to provide our starting word to the other. We don't know who is right yet, we just know we don't agree.

One round leaves some room for error because we could both accidentally choose a word that resolves to the same word in the target position. But since we are doing 5 rounds and moving the target word (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc) for each successive round the odds become much better that we won't have an accidental collision.

(edit: grammar)
"So the main reason to intern is to just become a better coder? Doubtful. Just to be completely blunt, the main reason college students intern is to have a secure job after graduation."

False. 100%, completely and entirely, false.

School is frequently grounded in theory. More often than not, Internships are on actual products. Being able to traverse/understand source code and build productively into an existing product is an invaluable skill as an engineer.

Not only that, but it's during the internships that you meet all the people from outside of your collegiate bubble and where you FIND the people you want to build with. Not only that, but a fair amount of (us) students are consumed by loans, and any sum of pocket change (though the thousands of dollars you make at a place like Facebook or Google is in no way trivial) is invaluable. Not to mention that you get that building experience at the same time.

And yes, internships help you get a job. There is nothing, NOTHING AT ALL undignified about doing that.

The mindset of building for the sake of building is great! No qualms there. I think your view on internships and their value to students is a bit oversimplified.
Try clicking any of the links from @nytimes or any other Twitter page...