skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Krugman: "bitcoins are in a sense the ultimate fiat currency, with a value conjured out of thin air"

I recently did a little reading into the mechanisms behind bitcoin, and am intrigued. I was skeptical but certainly understand the merit now, though I don't understand enough details (especially the transaction-fee-only endgame) to rule out vulnerabilities. However, it does seem clear that the miners actually perform a valuable service of ensuring the integrity of the bitcoin system. So, for Krugman to say that the bitcoins are created out of thin air is disingenuous, if not surprising.
The Rise of the New Groupthink (2012)
The hypocrisy of the New York Times in printing this is shocking.

As opposed to thinking it but refusing to print it because it would involve conflicting with something they printed four or eight or twelve years ago?

I would hope that a newspaper could be trusted to reverse the opinions it prints.
I looked for something that felt right for the brand. For my agency I wanted something masculine (we were all women), waspy (we were all Jewish), and sounded 100 years old (it's brand new). I told my friend who does naming that it should sound like 100 year old scotch. She came up with Hunter & Bard (hunting for leads sales & market, bard is the story teller which is how we do it). I was happy. My exact quote was, "I feel Blackwatch plaid all over"
How deadly is your kilowatt?
Joining the Ranks: Demystifying Harvard's Tenure System
Maybe Civil War is a slightly different context, just throwing that out there.
I don't know anything about ABC, but generally speaking, I imagine that the likelihood of a media company's internal team declaring that their own company's reporting is biased is about as likely as BP creating an internal team that reports offshore drilling creates uncontainable environmental risks.

I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.
Spy on your kids with Parental Skype Recorder
If you want to get in touch with your kids without letting them know you can try this stealth Skype monitoring. Parental Skype recording installs automatically on Windows startup without showing absolutely no icon on the taskbar and monitors Skype activities in secret All type of Skype and Skype conversations will be recordered to compact mp3 files with call details: time of call, contact name, type of Skype call.
I don't buy that. It seems that the notion of rights endowed by the creator should apply broadly to all humans whenever possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock
Does congress control how Gitmo is run? My understanding is that the President is in charge of the how (execution of the law), and congress only controls the what.
I'm a NZer living in India and I see the themes described in this post on a daily basis. One example: http://lostinmumbai.org/2013/04/14/a-man-called-bunty/
Usability and Security of Authentication Using Brainwaves
There was a joke once in soviet time that the dollar is backed by gold, while the ruble is backed by tanks. Currently USD is also backed by the tanks. The US government has the power to extract from every person certain amount of USD per year that it determines. And the US government is the only source. How the person can obtain them is up to them. This makes a big difference.
Continuum - A Next-Generation JavaScript (ES6) Virtual Machine
Password-cracking. (Um ... for penetration testing ... that's it.)
This reminds me of this you tube video, called "Peter Schiff Was Right": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

It's basically a bunch of people screaming at Peter Schiff that he has no idea what he is talking about, when he was basically predicting everything that happened. Apparently Peter Schiff is pretty smart, I watched a bunch of these videos and listened to his radio show. He is now predicting a massive drop in the dollar due to inflation.
What makes a “lightweight” desktop environment lightweight?
To clarify: "I give up" was referring to giving up on the argument in that subthread, not on the idea in general. It requires a lot of hard work and perseverance to get something this disruptive merged; I'm merely taking a break to do more groundwork before coming back with a v2 of the approach.

I have utmost respect for Junio, Linus and the others, but realize that they have some negative attributes like all human beings do. Junio can be especially defensive when it comes to something new, although it's not completely without reason. After all, we do have an ultra-stable and well-maintained piece of software because of him.
You, sir, speak a sad truth. But truth nonetheless.
great "article" shilling for his own book. news is bad for you.

everything is bad for you. every single thing will kill you in the long term. should write a book about that.

is it important to know about current events in politics? what the sequester is and how it impacts a US citizen? who won the venezulean elections? latest financial news out of europe?

well, it depends on the person. do you have an interest in the world around you? do you feel that a cultured individual should not be fully ignorant what's happening around him?

and then, the business perspective, this is HN after all - shouldn't you know what's affecting your target group or maybe investors? being able to talk with someone you meet from India about something that is going on in his/her country proves you care about what's going on outside of your little tech bubble.

is it necessary to know who won the US masters? No, you will survive without. but it provides context if you meet someone who cares about golf.
The president can pardon them, the president can use private money to move them. The president can be on the news every night making this an issue.
Who would you say are the main AWS competitors today (at least in part)?

This isn't my specialty, but I suppose the list includes Microsoft's Windows Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. There are some open source efforts to watch as well, including OpenStack (backed by Rackspace and others). No doubt I've missed some.

There's plenty of time for those competitors to catch up to AWS by 2020.
I read the original "Avoid News part 1" (http://dobelli.com/?page_id=827) some time ago and also quit reading news. What occurred to me is that a lot of decisions people make are based or have to do with fear fed by news.

For example: fear for bad weather. Rain is just rain but reading the forecast in the papers sometimes make you wonder if you will survive the next day.
You don't need funding. Just send them home.

They shouldn't be in any detention center – there is no legal reason to detain them.
If a neurosurgeon can't get hip replacement surgery right I would definitely not let him operate on my brain.

Krugman specialty is macro and liquidity traps. Bitcoins are way out of his comfort zone.
First you said that we need them to make pesticides, and replacing them would be impossible. So I showed you how to make pesticides without oil. And now they are for energy, and the pesticides doesn't actually matter.

Talk about moving the goal posts.

Look, of course oil is used for energy, no one disputes that. The method of making synthetic hydrocarbons is not as efficient as just finding it in the ground. But it is a net positive for energy, and in a world where it's hard to find oil it would work just fine - especially if all you needed was pesticides and other organic chemicals.

If we run out of energy we are going to be in much bigger trouble than pesticides - but we won't run out of energy, because if we come close then public sentiment will shift and nuclear power will be OK again - and we have at least 10,000 years worth of that - at a minimum.

This article is about population, and your claim (I think), is that we can't actually sustain as much population as we think because we're going to run out of oil AKA energy. Except you are wrong about that, just like you were wrong about "If you can show me ANY process to turn trees into pesticides" - which I did.

We have many many options for energy besides oil, and we can sustain our population just fine.
The tax argument is interesting. I suppose a choice to pay US taxes is a "bet" on the state, and the currency.

Let me know when some country starts to accept bitcoins for tax purposes.
Witch hunts were primarily a phenomenon of the early modern period, not the middle ages, during which both the political authorities and the Church repeatedly cautioned against blaming e.g poor crops on supposed witches.

Also, I believe about half of witchcraft trials ended in execution - I'm not sure what the comparable rate is for Gitmo (although obviously there are no trials).
I'm not going to speak on all libertarians, but my world view is pretty much that you can possess finite scarce goods and call them "yours" (things made of atoms) but with things that aren't scarce (information, once produced, is not scarce - we can easily order electrons to represent the super-majority of the information space) it is tragic and wrong to try to restrict them.

Radios are scarce, but the range and ability to produce electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies is not scarce with said radio. Computers are scarce, but digital information is infinitely reproducible and millions of people will send you a copy for free (see: torrents). This kind of stuff shouldn't be limited or restricted by artificial government constructs.

There is a difference between having a finite resource and artificially calling it "yours" and taking an infinite resource and calling it "yours. Ownership is a fundamental human right - to possess scarce resources you can call your own. It is only recently the bulk of humanity has had this right. I don't think it should be anyones right to own an infinite resource like an idea, though.

Personal opinion. I write software and think trying to sell per-copy instances of infinite information is ridiculous. In computer terms, it is the flip side to the free software coin that makes open source a whole. If you distribute a black box you shouldn't be able to try to force people to treat it some certain way, after all, you freely gave it the first time, anyone else can do with it what they will.

I still target open source since I'm not a dick and don't like giving someone a black box, but that is tangential.
What natural monopolies are there then?
I believe the thinking behind this is that if a nation state designates a currency as their official currency, that will guarantee a baseline demand for the currency: citizens will need to either hold or obtain the currency to pay their taxes. With Bitcoin, no such baseline demand is guaranteed: if the "faith" in Bitcoin drops in the network, and people stop accepting it as payment, there's no stopping the decline in value.

I'm still not sure whether to buy this argument, given that history has more than a few examples of state currencies crashing like there was no bottom, too.
Not to mention Google Public DNS http://wilmer.gaa.st/blog/archives/58-Google-Public-DNS.html...
Why does HN link to this propaganda?
I fail to see how bitcoin transactions are more or less private than those in dollars.

It does seem a lot easier to make private transactions with bitcoins. But anybody sufficiently motivated can achieve an arbitrary level of privacy with either, right?
Have you tried java? Let me show you my TimeDateAccessObjectFactory.
I usually like Krugman, but this column is botched. Krugman does not get bitcoin protocol but is a bit better with Bitcoin.

Just reading about "complicated math problems" make my brain hurt. There is nothing complicating in a hash function except designing it properly.

While there are valid attacks on bitcoin he is not making them.
yes, but when cyprus defaults, what will the european countries want? gold.
I like this idea. If any rent-seeking group achieves market dominance, the government should regulate their prices. For example, the price of prescription drugs and higher education should be set by the government. Laissez-faire capitalism only works in markets with price competition.

Ultimately, I think most industries will evolve into government regulated monopolies. Consolidation is a standard part of the life-cycle for most markets. We should embrace the efficiency that dominant players can achieve.

With regard to individuals, I think a universal basic income is the long-term solution. Let a few people become billionaires, while the masses are paid to relax at home. There is a large amount of wasted resource in industries like retail, marketing and sales. Society would probably be better off if those industries shrank.
Effectively the major mining pools control bitcoin since they determine what is likely to get accepted. Note that the devs had to ask the minners to down grade.

The funny thing is if several large banks decided they wanted to open minning pools, i'd imagine they could do so and then control all kinds of things. I wonder if this will happen (or if it already has. How many miners operate over Tor? )
Are you serious? The Daily Show is no more "news" than Hannity is.
One tiny detail though - paying taxes is anything but a choice. Unless you are one of the corporation-americans of course.
Lot of things mentioned here are not that easy. To legally bring citizens of other countries in American justice system and have them fair trial you need to have respect various treaties - many of which may simply require sending them back to their respective country to be handled by their own governments which usually is not the best thing especially for terrorist suspects. The next best thing however might be have them as prisoner of war kept out side of US justice system.

What is missing here is other side of the coin, however. Keeping people in Gitmo takes money, planning, book keeping and plenty of other administrative hassles. Even though there was no trial it is hard to imagine that military doesn't do any accounting of these people and they are just kept there, fed, clothed every day without any justification or reasoning. I know govt can't be trusted from wasting taxpayer money but it looks over the top that such a high profile place will keep people for 11 years straight without any convincing reasoning. Without response from govt to this story we only know one side.
That only means people will borrow less and the denial of capital some may face will be exactly to the extent to which they profit from deflation and hoarding. Borrowing is not the solution to all of the problems, yet it is pictured to be that precisely because of the perverted inflationary economy we currently have.
I think we agree about the functionality, but maybe not quite about when what is a appropriate. The subtree/submodule discussion is somewhat similar to merge vs rebase. There is a lot of personal/project-specific opinion in there.
Except you can't convert it into USD that quickly. If the price tanks well you are waiting for Magic the Gathering exchange (yes, Mt.Gox, the main place people do bitcoin conversion started out as a place to trade magic cards), you get screwed. This wouldn't be a problem if there was large economy denominated in bitcoin since they'd still have value there. But there isn't.
Agreed, I think he fails to see past the idea that bitcoin has its own "gold standard" built in. The idea of a non-inflationary currency to PK is just silly. Perhaps he will change his mind once further adoption has taken place or when a new use surfaces.
Basically anywhere that the structure of costs makes it more efficient for a single firm to serve a market. High upfront capital costs and low maintenance relative to capital make it hard for second entrants to follow, because the incumbent has already paid down some or all of their capital cost and can cut prices to the marginal cost of operation to drive out the entrant -- but the entrant must pay off the capital as well.

If the capital costs are low, this isn't as much of problem. With some understanding investors and creditors an entrant can match the incumbent.

But when you have to build millions or billions of dollars of stuff just to get started, that's much harder to arrange.
Ask HN: Who Is Hiring Remote Workers? (April 2013)
I choose where to live, right?
I loved to work at the Atomic Bean & 1369 in Central & when by MIT I love the Rotch Library - that is one nicest spaces to hack.
well, probability of american news being wrong about geography is significantly higher than any other news source.
He's not fairing so good in macro either in this piece, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549839 points out. (And if you read e.g. denninger's criticism of his columns, you'd see that this column is not a fluke: He often cherry picks evidence that fits his narrative, and ignores evidence and common sense when it doesn't)
Bad news is even worse! Seriously though, Kahneman in his last book described very good experiments that show bad news having a much deeper effect on ones psyche than good ones. This obviously extend to social sites, like facebook etc..
Miners do not control the rules, they merely choose to accept or not accept them. That's a very important distinction that is a part of the checks and balances system in Bitcoin.
> In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."

That confirms what I always thought.
I wonder if a more advanced version could be used as a bug finding tool for modern games.
They have a lot of rubles, right?
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If Bitcoin is outside of his comfort zone then he should do some research first!

Seriously, how long would it have taken him to read up on Bitcoin and learn about the publicly distributed transaction ledger?

> "Unlike credit card transactions, which leave a digital trail, bitcoin transactions are designed to be anonymous and untraceable. When you transfer bitcoins to someone else, it’s as if you handed over a paper bag filled with $100 bills in a dark alley."
They aren't "inch marks". They're straight double quote marks. The prime (used for feet, arc minutes), double prime (used for inches, arc seconds) and ditto mark are all distinct.
> The president can be on the news every night making this an issue.

This is why the legal technicalities are irrelevant. The President has the ultimate bully pulpit, and it sure ain't getting used on Gitmo.
Sorry, but it sounds like you just haven't used Linux on a desktop since 2007. Honestly, I can't remember having any hardware support issues since around 2009, and I've been through a lot of machines.
The author should have added a TL;DR "ignorance is bliss" at the top.
looks nice, especially because you can check huge resolutions!
Freeman's Days - A Half-Life fan film from Russia
Using A* does a much better job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8

Look at that AI play. It's godly.
There are a bunch of apparently wealthy Middle Eastern kids who live in University Park. They and their friends drive your typical Maserati, Porsche, GT-R, Ferrari, etc.
Economists talk about rivalrousness and excludability when classifying goods.

Rivalrous means that, to the extent I am using or possessing some good, you are not. Excludable means that I can, as a seller, prevent you from using it without payment.

Most physical goods are rivalrous and excludable. I can keep an icecream to myself and while I am digesting it, you are not. The icecream truck can prevent you taking one without payment. This meets the definition of what people usually think of as "private property".

Radio waves are rivalrous but not excludable; economists call these "common goods". These lead to -- you guessed it -- the tragedy of the commons, where individually optimal decisions lead to globally suboptimal outcomes.

Commons can't work unless agents agree to constrain themselves, or are made to constrain themselves. The former can happen by agreement, the latter by regulation.

In the case of radio, regulation has been the standard model because of the nature of the usage. Voice and vision have been analogue and the human nervous system is a poor demultiplexer, so they needed bands to themselves. Similarly for many other applications (radar, for example) , the amount of information put through a certain band has historically been low but the value high. So: regulation.

Wireless networks are an example of a commons managed by agreement; or perhaps managed by emergent phenomena. Each wireless node blindly follows some simple rules (such as randomised exponential backoff) that, in practice, make a shared medium largely usable.

edits: to clarify terms a bit
his personal narcissism seems to rival Obama's

I realize that the view of Obama as a tremendous narcissist has become a right-wing meme, but it seems so odd (kind of like the related view that he's a know-nothing who can't speak without a teleprompter, though that one seems to have died down since the election). I'm curious: how did the narcissism meme get started, and what evidence is cited for it, other than that major politicians tend to have major egos?

I'm not trying to make a political point. I don't follow the sources on this and would like someone to explain to me how the people who believe this came to believe it and what arguments they advance for it.

(p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)
This is why, paraphrasing Taleb, I shun newspapers and TV and keep hoary tomes by my bedside.
News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier (guardian news .com)

Hmm...
The "Who's Hiring" threads are posted on the first of the month.
Want to make a great product? An engineer isn’t enough
You should give GNOME 3 a shot. It's really matured into something great. As of 3.8, it feels just as polished as OS X to me, and more usable.
But not easily online and certainly not without tursting a third party. Bitcoin is not anonymous, its pseudonymous . It is,however, more anonymous than most online payment systems and unlike all but 1 or 2 academic proposals that offer real anonymity, it does't require you to trust someone not to run off with your money.
Strategy pattern and WPF made easy
Location Based Services Dead?
In recent events on foursquare most people are saying that location based services like foursquare are dying and it's time to move on. Any idea on This?

What about a location based service that makes discovering people? Like discovercircle.com?

Is there a future for location based services? What's are the current trends?
Google's Leonhard Euler Doodle
Because inflation discourages hoarding. It encourages people to actually do something with their currency. Use it, generate economic activity, make it grow through investment, etc.
Hence the phrase: ignorance is bliss.
It's my understanding that the number of transactions doesn't really have an affect on the amount of processing power needed to run the network. One problem that a large number of transactions could theoretically impose would be that as the number of transactions grow, the memory require to keep track of the main block chain would grow as well, but it seems that this isn't even anywhere close to being an issue.
As ridiculous as this patent attempt is by itself, I find it even more amusing/alarming that an American court is seen as the appropriate body to sit in judgement of the human genome.
In addition to the difficulty of rewriting existing code, even when you program something new at Google, you'd be a fool not to leverage what infrastructure already exists. If you try to do that while at the same time writing the new project in Go, you run into weird interoperability issues.
Yes. It's basically a brute-force Groundhog Day approach to finding the best move.