skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it was not the cause of today's drop[1], that is a big part of the problem. While they are frantically working on decoupling their website from the trading engine, they are still connected, and DDoS attacks are still effective at causing extreme trading lag.[2] Such attacks have been the root cause of several mini-panics over the past couple weeks.[3]

Of course this is bad design, but you have to remember that this website started out as Magic the Gathering Online eXchange. It was built to trade playing cards, not to serve as a multi-million dollar currency exchange. The trading engine was retrofitted for bitcoin, and was stuck with several bad design decisions as a result. While I agree this should have been fixed long ago, MtGox has had its hands full recently. The massive growth in its userbase, the ever-growing verification queue, and the fact that it is expected to be online 24/7 have made things difficult.

However, I suspect the main cause of today's massive has to do with this: https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html

It will interesting to see what effect this policy change will have.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/455962117821534

[2] https://www.facebook.com/MtGox/posts/453409538076792

[3] https://twitter.com/MagicalTux/status/320043013420249088
The fact that every bit of infrastructure is being "attacked" at once suggests that it is not a DDoS attack to me.

If the price starts going down, everyone will rush to their favorite bitcoin related site to see what is going on, even if they are not planning on panic selling. Would you say you have checked bitcoin related sites 5 times more than usual today? 10 times?

If the regular users of a site all decide to use it five to ten times more than usual, it is very likely to cause some slowdown.

On the other hand, if a single bitcoin related site was experiencing problems, that is when I suspect a targeted attack.

Lastly, the only thing that mtgox announcing that they have been DDoSed in the past tells us is that they are willing to announce the fact that they are being DDoSed. This would seem to make it less likely that they are being DDoSed in the absence of such an announcement.
I've seen this. I used a 99 cent .com code last night. It didn't work and I logged out. Then they flashed a banner telling me to grab a 99 cent domain. So I logged back in and grabbed it.
Great article. I'm interested as to what the effects would be on the taxi industry from these ride sharing apps combined with self driving cars. I think it would likely result in a further more efficient transport system - less people having to own cars, a decreased need for car parking.
I could see someone trying to learn to sight read music, get frustrated with how it is "broken" and then invent something like this...

I felt exactly this way learning to read music. The score just didn't present enough information fast enough for me because I hand't learned to build the context in my head and spot the relations. I fumbled about with alternatie notations, extra notations etc. I finally settled on colors. I wrote a small program to color the dominant, subdominant etc. and then printed it on my color printer. This helped me immensely and I didn't take the dead end road of learning alternate notations that would shut me out of all written music everywhere.

Some windmills should be tilted at, some should just be left alone.
Jeff, thanks for the links. It was the help I needed in getting past the online based setups I have been using so far. Plus it was a pleasant surprise to see the curriculum of g|school.

P.S. Glancing at your other posts, I really like what you and Steve have said about g|school having high expectations for your students.

P.S.S- Look out for me in the applications, I am hoping to submit my application the end of April.

-Brian Hall
Happy Birthday. Project is awesome and so are the people.
lol, you never step in the same stream twice, you're not the same person and it's not the same stream - Heraclitus or somesuch

you never step in the same steaming turd twice, you're not the same person and it's not the same steaming turd - RockyMcNuts
LOL. And yes... But it's quite funny to find out, that there was a real gang of four :)
http://i.imgur.com/cGjIS9x.png
Same link, bypassing the paywall.
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB...
IDC Reports 'Worst Ever' Q1 PC Sales
Another point you need to consider is if you ever want to live or work overseas. Most countries require an undergraduate university degree for you to get a work visa.

This might not be the case in the future but it is a reality in the present.

Of course if you are successful in your company and have large sums of money at your disposal investment of $1 million or so in your destination country should get you a work visa, degree or no degree.
Your post is wonderfully self-righteous but not very helpful or insightful, unlike some of the other comments below. This makes me sad. I hope more people vote the latter up some more.

The fact of the matter is that someone is always unhappy when it comes to spam control. If the restraints are too loose then suddenly everyone is screaming about how "spammers are ruining Google" and "Google is doomed because of spam" (this was very true right before the Panda rollout). However, if Google starts to crack down, then you get more false positives and more people upset for different reasons.

Unfortunately, no pattern recognition system runs at 100%. That's not a hard problem(tm), that's an impossibility. Relatedly, I don't really see what's wrong with assiging a "reputation" to a domain name. As the article states, it's possible to climb back up to "good" status, it just takes some extra work. Kind of like in real life.
That's assuming anyone would want to live on the barren North Slope of Alaska. Just because it's land doesn't mean you can live there comfortably...
There were many, many transactions with amounts of 0.02 BTC. I think P(attack|0.02 BTC * n) > P(~attack|0.02 BTC * n). The reality is probably six of panic sale, half a dozen of DDOS.
How is it a false positive if there are thousands of spam links still pointing to the domain?
Interesting that you linked to pg's essay, as pg himself has both a humanities and technical background.

Overall I think you're boxing people into categories that need not exist. Plenty of engineers/scientists enjoy studying the "huge ideas" in human history, and plenty such people have also become strategic visionaries.

Your argument may apply to a subset of engineers/scientists who box themselves into their own field, but in my experience that's a pretty small minority (of the best ones at least).

Ultimately ..

don't let schooling get in the way of your education.
- Twain
it's usually pretty obvious to spammers when they get penalized. their traffic drops and if they use webmaster tools (admittedly ill-advised and unlikely) they get an explicit message telling them they've been caught.
How does one accurately identify a 'spammy' domain without insight into google's data?

Obviously you can check the RBLs for email related spam issues but Google does not expose any interface that would allow you to accurately determine a domain was used for spam in the past.

The best way to build a company on the web is to build one that does not overly rely on single traffic sources to begin with, and that imo includes google. Lest the next update of their algo puts you out of business.
From the last year only:

Wrong product/market fit.

Overshot sales estimates.

Realized that I did not enjoy serving the market.

Co-founder issues.I never took in co-founders, gave it a try, realized I work best alone. Issues were of productivity. I'm very productive, they were not.

Not enough funding.

Issues are spread out between a handful of projects.
Depends on the market. What market are you aiming for?
Honestly, Yeah it is bad. I think it sounds a little unprofessional. Hope that helps
Enterprise document management is a $10billion+ market unto itself and Dropbox has not positioned themselves to approach this market well in the past. I love the Dropbox product and am happy to see them taking enterprise head on.
There's definitely a great deal of automated trading happening. I suspect it's less DDoS than ad-hoc HFT bots, though.
I once asked a cab driver how much he made (in SF), and after humming and hawing, he implied that he made close to $90K/year, mostly tax-free.

Take it for what it's worth (sample size == 1), but there are a lot of people who would love to be driving a cab in SF. Cab drivers who rent the cabs pay $300 for an 8-hour shift on weekends (Friday evening - Saturday morning), and still manage to make enough money to make it worth their while.
While you are making your point, you're being overly pedantic, and the point is irrelevant. Email should not be able to be accessed by a third party without warrant period. Whether or not the analogies line up.
You may be onto something.
Thanks for pulling those numbers. But something doesn't quite add up.. The first linked report says:

Samples of rice products from the US, South America, Asia, and Europe were purchased from local supermarkets and analyzed using XRF and GFAAS. Lead was present in all the foods samples and its concentration ranged from 4.3 to 17.9 µg/g.

So both domestic US rice and imported rice were in the 4.3-17.0 µg/g range, which if true would contradict the FDA's results, and mean that US rice was order-of-magnitude as dangerous as imported rice. What are we (or I) missing?
The significant difference is that taxes are assessed on an impartial basis - usually a percentage of current market value. The classic problem with landlords is that tenants have no incentive to increase productivity when the landlord captures all of the gains by increasing rent. Even today, businesses often end up in situations where the landlord sees that they're doing well and jacks up the rent in the belief that moving to another location will be too disruptive. My municipal government can demand property tax, but it doesn't hike it every time I get a raise at work.
Great template - most of my SaaS portfolio companies use very similar metrics templates. One addition would be YoY numbers so that you can better account for seasonality.
You are wrong. Gold is very often used by drug cartels for their laundering operations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/06/nyregion/drug-money-launde...

http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/mexico-cartels-steal...

"Mexican authorities say that, since 2008, criminal gangs have robbed so many trucks carrying gold shipments that some mining companies have been forced to switch to aerial transportation"
I've been trying to find drinking straws not made in China.

Makes me wonder what's in them with mouth contact.

But this endeavor seems to have no solution, cannot find any.
Yeah, but it is removing it because Universal is claiming it owns the copyright of it, that's slander of title afaik.
If pop ups increased the amount of data my hard drive could store they'd be equally good... Monsanto is an evil corporation but GMOs are pretty much the only reason there's going to be enough food for "your sorry arse" to eat in 10 years. The farmers have to pay for the seeds, yes, but their yield is much higher than without them. Sounds like the guy knew what he was doing when he bought the second hand seeds. Why don't you spend billions of dollars on a piece of software, sell it to me cheap and allow me to sell knock offs for 1/2 your asking price; lets see how you feel about it then...
Its not panic if your first.
Because Google wants to get searchers to the best content for the query, not to the content with the fewest spammy links.

Usually they are correlated, not always though.
"Medallions exist for a very good reason: they prevent a tragedy of the commons from creating gridlock and pollution in major cities by limiting the number of cars circling around doing nothing on city streets."

You're missing a huge piece of the equation: politics and corruption. Medallions were currency used to do favors to politicians, power-brokers, etc. It was a cheap way for someone to make some cash by renting it out. The government created the monopoly and scarcity; then those in power used it to make money. A story that's repeated all over the place.
It's just been five years? It feels like I have been reading about it forever. Never got to use it because of limited private repos.
Only 25% of AdBlock users are strictly against all ads
I think this is a fuckin' great idea! I started out as a front-end developer and I would get discouraged when I couldn't see my work deployed in action. Wish this was around a few years ago!
Animal Farm: a look at the laws that are making it tough to film cruelty
Dear quandryfoe

My name is Danjuma Sule, one of the sons of major Gen Gumel Danjuma Sule, The late Nigeria's former minister of mines and power in the regime of the late former Nigeria's military Head of state, Gen Sanni Abacha. When my father died he left me an inheritance of 9830422.33333421 bitcoins. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges are not yet set up in Nigerian currency and I am in need of a young techno wizard with a bank account denominated in US dollars to assist me in gaining access to my inheritance.

It is on this basis I am seeking for assistance. Your percentage is negotiable. Please note; your age and profession doesn't really matter in this transaction. Waiting for your immediate response and bank account specifics.

Regards, Danjuma Sule
I think these are done in bursts specifically to cause lag. Nobody would bother to buy 0.1 BTC in 100 separate orders at the same price. Often the orders are cancelled anyway.
Why is your name in green?
CISPA passes committee, will head to the House floor for a vote
"Noob"

Edit: I mean green equals new account.
Ecommerce Startup Club Parker to Accept Bitcoins as Payment
If you're creating a new account because you KNOW its going to be downvoted, isn't that an indication that you just shouldn't make the comment?
People are bringing up "market forces", etc.

The solution that I think would work in SF is as follows. Charge a flat rate (say, $50K/year; though a Dutch Auction might be reasonable too) for leasing out a permit to qualified drivers. You qualify drivers by running background checks, and testing them on the knowledge of the city. Pass a law that makes illegally running a cab a serious offence. This will automatically solve the "tragedy of the commons" or "too many cabs" problem, because if there are too many cabs, they won't be able to make the $50K/year needed to break even.
If 2000 cabs (a number 20% larger than the current fleet size) enroll in this, you're looking at an additional $100M/year.

To run the program, have a small enforcement wing of SFMTA (instead of the current gigantic bureaucracy that micromanages everything). Offer up an open API so people can build apps that track cabs, hail cabs, etc.

The medallion system is 19th century. We need a 21st century system.
I skateboarded 85km from Sydney to Wollongong. It took me 12 hours
Hey, hey, what's with the "..." and cutting out the relevant parts? I explicitly mention SSL and TLS. Those are encryption standards that are designed exclusively for privacy.

I cut out the SSL and TLS because I don't disagree; SSL and TLS certainly says "privacy". I wanted to specifically address the notion that "authentication =~ privacy"
Intro to Express.js: Simple REST API app with Monk and MongoDB
Banks on Fed Staffer E-Mail List Get Accidental Leak of Federal Reserve Minutes
Coming from haskell, I just like the fact that rust has a decent record syntax built in :)
Musical notation has never been spoken-language-free: the scores I play are all full of Italian words. I have never learned any Italian; these words are simply part of the notation, much as English words are parts of the notation in many popular programming languages.
It's an 'HN Verified' account; this person has passed all identity/credit checks and may -- nay, should -- be issued convertible debt at will.
So what would value would your platform provide that people would want to use it? I'd advise looking for a problem to solve and then thinking about the solution from there.
Leading an online poll is not that much of an achievement - it puts him in the august company of people such as Hank the angry drunken dwarf.
High Schooler Timothy Doner Taught Himself 23 Different Languages
Spoken like a true musicologist.
Questions I Want to Ask, but Can’t
Who are Kippt's main competitors?
Yes, but that may very well be because it does not do TCO... What's idiomatic in a language is usually the result of how efficiently that language implements certain constructs.
Thanks! We'll look into this.
It doesn't make sense to me either. If the FDA found n.d. levels of lead in all their samples, you would expect some of the new study's samples to have low levels as well.
Problems in Education
I worked on Web-Based Reputation Scores for IronPort/Cisco. I know how hard this is, especially at scale. This is not about them having a reputation as a concept.

My point is that Google suggesting you register a different domain because their href-based reputation sucks over time is a cop-out. This specifically falls under the "Things that are Google's fault".

Matt's suggestion here is definitely practical, but it's a fault in how Google looks at domain reputation. When he talks about "having to renovate a domain" he's talking about you the consumer of a domain legally acquired and without spammy content hosted on it, having to play Google's algorithm, because their definition of "spam" is absolutely massive, vaguely defined, and with way too long of a ttl.

And with a massive, undefined, long term concept of spam, you're going to have ridiculous FPs. Which Google has, and is now recommending is somehow your responsibility.

This is entirely their fault, and it has to do with how they are determining reputation, not that they have reputation at all.
The problem with such terms as "creepy" is that they could apply to anyone, depending on circumstances.

- Did the hot date you were kind of into try to touch your boob without asking you? Creepy! (acceptable)

- Did the ugly guy two tables over compliment you on your looks when you were both trying to get a drink at the bar? Creepy! (not so acceptable.)

- Did the guy you were dating for a few months ask you for a 5' in-person conversation after you decided to break up out of the blue over SMS? Creepy! (that one happened to me and I felt personally threatened by this woman's implicit threat of slander)

It's also interesting how prevalent the notion of "creepyness" is in the US. Whereas in other cultures the same guy would be considered annoying, inconvenient, misguided or justifiedly threatening, here a blanket term is applied and everyone accepts it. The same principle applies to a lot of emotional stuff, where Americans apply very coarse "pattern matching" to behaviors that other cultures are way more nuanced about.
I also would not pay for sex with my girlfriend if she would start all over sudden start charging me for sex. It seems twitter has to learn something about relationships.
I can pretty confidently say I am the best programmer at my current company. Granted, I'm the only programmer... but still. :)

Actually, I hate being the only programmer. I love my job. I love what I do. But if you're the only person there and you get stumped -- you've got no one else to go to. You're both the "dumbest" and "smartest" person in the room and that doesn't workout well sometimes.

I want to work somewhere that I know the least among the programmers to that I can continue to grow more easily.

[/end random rant]
I confirm this. Also, outside the checkout page or domain search page what they show is an entirely different price from when you move forward to purchase it(even before logging in). On their just one website, any sub-domain - I tried with GoDaddy India pages - there are more than 2 prices at least, for a TLD registration, on different pages.

I've raised at least 3-4 tickets in the past and all the answers came ending in something like "this policy" "that policy" "certain offer is valid from this or that or sth else". You ask simple questions using bullet list(I've tried this), they answer(instead of a YES/NO) an entirely different matter and always linking to those irritating policy/pricing page links which I had referred to them in the first place and had asked them questions based upon that.

Feels like I asked population of Alaska and the support rep replied Tom Cruise's educational background with Wikipedia links. This is exactly how frustratingly their customer support replies.

But this was before they came out.

Now, I've blocked "godaddy.*" from my computer and I do this for websites which I find worthy of the honour.
Maybe he was just committing to the joke.
I love how the FBI illegally fucking with him has essentially legitimized him. (Didn't really seem to work with Julian Assange, though)
They'd be much better served by an offline app or a dead-tree book, but that wasn't the point of your comment.
Thanks for the support! We're excited to empower these service providers who play an important role in helping small businesses. There's a growing shift toward outsourcing the back-office, given how busy a small business owner is. Independent accountants & bookkeepers can provide a compelling service by leveraging modern SaaS tools, and in doing so, they're able to streamline their business and help more clients. It's a win-win all around.
New Pirate Bay Greenland Domains (About to be) Seized
The spam that's being referred to is link spam i.e buying large numbers of links, comment spam etc in order to boost the target domain's search rankings. There's no one tool that will give you an exact answer regarding the domains penalty status. Putting the domain in something like ahrefs.com and looking at the linking domains and the anchor text section should give you a flavour though. If it's using spammy links you'll see things like lots of links in (poor quality) comments coming into the domain, links from unrelated or poor quality sites, lots of links targeting a specific phrase. If you see any links targeting pharmaceuticals or gambling that's usually a bad sign. Obviously you have to use your judgement when looking at these kind of reports - no one tool will be seeing the same dataset that google sees so it's possible it's missed a lot of links also legitimate sites suffer from scraping and apear on spammy sites so you have to look at the link profile as a whole rather than the odd bad link.