skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of political-philosophy replies here on the ills of inflation. That's not my main point.

My main point is: what if a non-deflationary competitor (so BTC couldn't just "copy" its defining differentiating feature) takes off as the way to pay for Pizza, drugs, eBooks or guns online -- will BTC discover its true "intrinsic value"? Or what will it do? The artificially induced, algorithmically guaranteed scarcity of crypto-bits'n'bytes is hardly worth $100, is it? Isn't 99% of BTC valuations expectations and bets abouts its glorious future as THE currency for digitally lubricated commerce and web-based bartering (or---others betting on others betting so)?

What part of BTC "reassures" its users?

For USD, people may look for reassurance at the might of the USG and/or FED (and global reserve status / oil settlements).

For Gold, people may look for reassurance at the past, many 1000s of years of tradition -- millenia of "giants" / kings / wealthy and powerful people / central banks who will always be interested in your shiny metal to store material excess.

For BTC, for reassurance people can only look at the future. Is this the coming digital currency (medium of exchange) par excellence? (And given its built-in deflation -- can it ever be?)

That is, ignoring the prevailing BTC2USD price-chasing speculating casino: what is the intrinsic reassurance of BTC that makes people fork over USD for BTC and that will remain a superior criterion even when a more "currency-esque" (not so very deflationary) alternative digital currency (transactional medium of exchange) comes along?
Why store JSON in a DB column?
Obligatory Charlie Brooker "How To Report The News" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4
You got the point.

I don't really believe, this is a serious question. No way water is unlimited nor _free_.
Amazon will probably have some very strong competitors. For starters, there will be national-champion types, who will prosper due to geo-compliance issues if nothing else. (I.e., rules restricting cross-border data transfer.) Other security compliance will also matter, both pro- (strong enough security) and anti- (government back doors). OpenStack is currently an Amazon fast follower, but that's apt to change, with OpenStack getting some technical advantages as well. And OpenStack is likely to maintain the very big advantage you can move it among providers and hardware configurations, on-premise or off-.
Should he be?

What are the official laws regarding a POW? Certainly not that of naturalized citizens...

After skimming the UN Laws for POWs[1] and reading the parts that seemed to deal with internment and time length, it's not really clear to me why he should have to be tried.

Once he's be associated with the enemy he can be held until the end of Hostilities at which point the "host" country can decide when and how to exchange him with "ex-enemy" . That last part will be a little difficult because I don't think Al-Qaeda takes many prisoners.

That said, they might be violating laws regarding torture but that's a whole nother ball of wax.

[1]http://www.un.org/arabic/preventgenocide/rwanda/text-images/...
Rascaban
Nonsense. Haven't you learned anything from the fact that IBM still dominates computing today??

:)
Ask HN: Those with intense focus, how do you do it?
I've been having intense focus problems (beyond normal distractibility), and each year they get worse. I'm in grad school, and the inability to focus is becoming a huge problem. It takes so much work to get into something. On rare occasion, I'll be able to get into what I'm working on and then I can focus non-stop for 10-12 hours, but it's near impossible to just sit down and get 30 minutes of work done on something. Even those 10 hour sessions require an hour or two to get started.

I am looking for advice beyond the normal "minimize distractions". My best attempt has been to go into a plain, featureless room without windows and use a software program that blocks any time-wasting internet site. But I just end up staring at the wall, thinking about other things instead. Or if I start reading a textbook, I'll just fall asleep or read the same line over and over again.

I'm not sure exactly what the cause of this is. The bad thing is that the stuff I need to work on is mostly things I'm really interested in (research) although some of it I am not so interested in (classwork). It's very frustrating, and it doesn't feel like it falls in the "normal" range of focus issues anymore. I'm quite certain it's not ADD, because I didn't really have this problem when I was younger.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I know many in the entrepreneur crowd have developed techniques to maintain rigorous focus (otherwise you wouldn't be a very good entrepreneur) so perhaps the HN crowd has a unique solution that may work for me.
https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94
Programming Style & Your Brain
> The problem I have with straight jacket languages, I have to think long and hard about how to do something that the type system doesn't allow easily

Can you give an example please because I'm struggling to think of one aside working with dates and time but those can be a pain on loosely typed languages as well (Perl, I'm looking at you).
Free Chocolate
Nice!

Gandhi also preached and practiced something called "Peaceful Protest" this guy is accused of "associating with"/guarding UBL.
The qualification round for Google Codejam happened last Friday. I'm guessing that was what inspired this post...?
YouTube adds Tape Mode to celebrate birth of VHS with static and screen roll
Funnily enough I just blogged on exactly the same issue: http://www.noelwelsh.com/programming/2013/04/13/less-wat-in-...

Couldn't agree more that this is bad practice!
Don't you remember MFM and RLL with CHS addressing? Disk controller wasn't mapping bad blocks out, it was the file system.
I guess it depends what you're doing with the video... most of the time I'm happy to use vimeo - as then you get stats etc through their player as well as discoveries through that site as well.
Documentation is an issue indeed.

I don't think that you really need the inner information about NAND to do the original and innovative research. It really depends on the area you want to work on, the SSD firmware level might require that but the SSD makers are already on that route (some better than others). The other level is to not pay too much attention to the differences between NAND chips and just implement something at a higher level to push the hardware-agnostic smarts to the OS.

The OpenSSD also lacks documentation, last time I looked at it there was no info on how to do NCQ on the SATA interface, without which there is no talking about a speedy SSD.
Sure. As I think I made clear, I would have little confidence in McCain's willingness to reliably do the right thing in any given situation. (Taking it as read for the moment that agreeing to bring Guantanamo detainees to the US would be the right thing at this point.) But with the combination of stronger external pressure, (maybe) more cooperative Congressional Republicans, and whatever McCain might have felt like doing once President, it seems possible (very far from assured) that he might have made more progress down the military-tribunals route than Obama has made down either that or the US-trials route. (It would be harder to see McCain reversing his consistent opposition to US trials for the detainees.) The strongest reason to think otherwise would seem to be scepticism that anyone could really make the military-tribunal option work efficiently.
Political articles are off topic on Hacker News.
Let's not forget that this comment of yours is in a thread about a guy sitting in that very same place, _asking_ to get home whatever the price would be. So the whole article that spawned this thread shows a very different position.

That totally ignores my immediate 'citation needed' urges and my shock about this opinion.
Indeed, but life then was different, the CPU was weaker and there was a good intention with pushing everything to the disk. The intention is still good but it is now possible to do things better in a different way.
Most Keynesian governments will think this way.
On days like these the US is Guantanamo Bay. The US is poverty and regular people without a home. The US is bad health care, as in only the rich can afford it. The US is drones, fired at civilians in the dead of night. The US is oil, as in that they want it all. The US is guns, like the ones likely to be pointed at you if you get robbed. The US is x-rays at the airport.

And finally, the US is the land of the free.
Krugman really dropped the ball on this one. He really needs to sit down with a technologist and have them explain to him how bitcoin works before he writes anymore critiques of Bitcoin.

However, looking pass his technological misunderstanding, he does raise some good points about why bitcoin can not be the idealistic currency people want it to be.
Compare to The Economist's take, at roughly the same time:

"The worldwide rise in house prices is the biggest bubble in history. Prepare for the economic pain when it pops"

http://www.economist.com/node/4079027?story_id=4079027

That article was instrumental in convincing me to quit being an architect in 2007, since it was obvious that a real estate crash would bode ill for that profession.

When it comes to economic advice, I won't be taking any from the Cato Institute.
Different domain is fine.

[1,2,3].reduce([], &:unshift) #=> [3,2,1]

I don't see a problem with writing a for loop, but I think it's not as composable and it can be a little harder to read. So I don't think it's purely religious but it's close to that.
this happened a few times especially on the highway in the dark

thanks for your kind words!
> You're being delusional...

I found this needlessly uncivil, making it more difficult for me to sympathize with your point.
Alice strikes back against Bob's 'reverse dictionary'
But guilt does imply wanting anonymity, and because actually setting up secure anything is hard, J. Random User isn't going to really do it.

Look at how hard it is to get many people to set up a password manager, or encrypted email. You can't hide in the crowd if the crowd isn't there.
Yeah I'm myself anti-"Keynesian" in the "what should be" department. In the "what is" department, I get the impression that, given an official sanctioned and sufficiently convoluted "vehicle", the "masses" don't mind consuming more than they produce for a while, as long the gravy flows. Else, current fiat wouldn't stand a chance with the electorate, even accounting for "propaganda" and legal tender laws etc.
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It's time to release these innocent men.

America, this is fucking shameful.
Well, I guess that's akin to asking "what if aliens invade NYC in September 2014?" -- answer being, we'll find out. ;D
Whitepapers take forever to read and the FAQ still doesn't clear anything up...
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Yep, that's exactly it. When this link popped up on HN, I read the article and though "wow, that's horrible. Something should be done here!". But tomorrow my mind will be full of other concerns, and a Yemenite I don't know who has been detained without charge or trial for 10 years on a military base far away by a government that is not mine is simply not on my radar.

Sad, and shameful, but true.
The relationship between share price and Amazon financial results has always been a mystery to me. As are Apples.
All I wore was shorts and a t-shirt. I was cold the whole time but it was OK because I kept moving pretty much the whole way.

I was absolutely freezing waiting for my train at the station in Wollongong for a good 20-30 mins, and again on the train because it was air-conditioned. I was getting a bit worried as time went on because I was seriously cold. But I knew it would make that hot shower that much sweeter once I had arrived home, which it did.
My personal read on this is that, if you have difficulty focusing, you're not really interested in what you're doing.

I say this because everyone I have met in my life -- including myself -- who had excellent focus, also had a transcendent passion for what he was focused on.

Based on your description, you simply aren't interested in your studies or your work, and that is the real problem, not focus per se. Maybe you're having second thoughts about your life's direction or your school major.

> It takes so much work to get into something.

This isn't the voice of someone who is passionate about what he's doing. I think that's the problem. You're asking for advice about how to deal with your life as it is, but my advice is to consider making changes to your life, to your work, to your studies, in a direction consistent with your real interests.
The article argues in large part that news reporting generally lacks context and depth. You just left a comment that perfectly illustrates why this is problematic.

Oh the irony.

If you care: What's at issue in the Aaron Swartz case is the proportionality of the government response to the infraction. Whether he committed a crime (or not) is largely a moot point.
> extremely insane cruel anti-woman Islamist totalitarian regime

Afghanistan was under the secular, socialist leadership of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan until the CIA launched Operation Cyclone and began funding Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda and Taliban predecessors, in order to overthrow that secular, socialist government. Sylvester Stallone made action films like Rambo 3 where he fought alongside Islamic jihadists to overthrow the secular Afghan government. Now some poor guy trying to make a living you pontificate about because he went to a country which was exactly like how the US tried to make it? But they're totalitarian...I guess whisking people off to detention centers with no evidence, no recourse to trial is the democratic way.
Really?

We're "protecting them" by keeping them locked up forever without charges?

This kind of moral prevarication disgusts me. You disgust me.
It was exceedingly redundant, resilient, and worked very well at the one thing it was meant to do and was only caught by sheer luck.

So yeah, I am going to call that "great code."
Customer Service Lessons
They differ quite significantly. dtrace uses probes - points where instrumentation can be installed to inspect the process as it runs. Since it requires these probes to be defined, probes only come "for free" in kernel-space: e.g. tracing syscalls, pageins, that kind of thing. SystemTap offers similar functionality - userspace probes can be defined for it too.

Pin, on the other hand, dynamically rewrites the binary to inject instrumentation. This allows it to inject instrumentation code at a higher granularity (individual instructions). It's useful where the application might not define dtrace probes, or, for example on OSX, where the application has "opted out" of it to protect it from being screenshotted (a la iTunes).

Pin is more like a scripted debugger than an instrumentation tool.
Slightly more subtle - TL;DR: news does nothing to cure you of ignorance, so avoid the aggravation of news
It's very rare that a book promo article makes me want to buy the book, but this one certainly succeeded.
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Actually, we have the alternative. The 2.4GHz ISM band is unregulated, which means that my old analog cordless phone causes the Wi-Fi to disconnect in half the house(and maybe my neighbors') and my microwave causes a major signal/noise ratio drop.

Sure, it somewhat works and if necessary, I can just go sit right next to the Wi-Fi router to watch some cat videos while warming some food. I'd rather have my cell phone always working, though.

Besides, if spectrum is unregulated, what prevents company X from interfering with routers from company Y, so that Y's products are perceived as flaky? I mean, even with regulated spectrum, there were still issues between LightSquared's planned broadband network and GPS[1], for example.

[1] http://www.gps.gov/spectrum/lightsquared/
I come from C++ background, so by "direct support", I think he means a language construct that clearly shows the inheritance relationship, as in

Java:

public class MountainBike extends Bicycle

or C++:

class MountainBike: public Bicycle

From those links, it looks like in Go, you use an anonymous struct inside a normal class. I would call it "aggregation" or "containment" (or implicit delegation), not inheritance. It suggests "has-a" relationship rather than an "is-a" relationship. The Go's "syntax" for inheritance (if you can call that) is ambiguous, unlike C++ or Java.
I think it's because you gained criticism on your work by being aware of what are doing others. It can be considered as an improvment.
You're right, I apologize. It was an unnecessary statement. I think I tend to be a bit passionate when it comes to certain subjects and it hurts the discussion. I hope the author of the comment I replied to didn't take it personally.
I would have thought that if this was a government backed project it would include the ability "to know" - whether that be the persone, the amount or the "where" af transactions.

It would be pretty dumb not to include that aspect, but as far as I know, these are exactly the things bitcoin prevents.

There would be very few people with peer-to-peer networking skils the programming knowledge to put that together and thhe mathematical knowledge to create the algorithm and the economics knowledge to understand how to control inflation. But there are still weaknesses in the process.
> My apartment complex does not charge for water (hot water included). I've been trying to think of a way to make use of the water supply that exceeds traditional use.

You must not have much life experience. If you exploit the fact that the complex doesn't charge for water, they will start charging for water. The explanation? The only reason they don't charge for water is because the cost of metering and billing exceeds the income that would come from a fair price for the water. By trying to use more water than a typical household, you will change the paradigm, and they will start charging.

So ... wake up. Realize that your plan will change your environment for the worse. Everyone will be hurt by your action.
>as that lady from Taiwan who implemented the Perl 6 in Haskell parser combinators

That would be Audrey Tang. The Perl6 on Haskell project is called Pugs.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=audreyt

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs

* http://www.pugscode.org
Can companies patent human genes? Is there a limit?
I would have thought that if this was a government backed project it would include the ability "to know" - whether that be the person, the amount and the "where" of transactions.

It would be pretty dumb not to include that aspect, but as far as I know, these are exactly the things bitcoin prevents - it provides anonymity.

There would be very few people with peer-to-peer networking skils, the programming knowledge to put that together, and the mathematical knowledge to create the algorithm, and the economics knowledge to understand how to control inflation, and the sheer willpower to do it so successfully. It seems like it probably was a team rather than a single person.
I came across it as a platform for running and debugging code for a non-yet-released CPU: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-deve...

A couple other uses that I thought it would be good for were marking instructions with unaligned loads and stores and flagging switches to and from 256-bit VEX code. Although probably you can do these with other tools as well.

I posted this here because it seemed potentially useful, and I was surprised I'd never heard of this project. I'm mostly familiar with the ones Lally mentioned, but Thomas brought up DynamoRIO which is also new to me. Are there other niche optimization tools I should know about?

A specific question would whether there is anything more useful than IACA and gut instinct for determining optimal instruction order. Even just something that would generate an easy to parse data dependency graph for a short section of code?
I think you are right that there is no "default level" for CL. I find this an interesting point of programming language culture - what do people do when they want to optimize.

In Erlang the culture is to write your code in a straightforward way and you accept the performance you get. "Inner loop" code looks much like any code. It's a point of pride that you stick with the same style throughout and don't burn brain cycles looking for tricks.

In Common Lisp the culture is to write performance-critical inner loops in a very different way to other code. So although the code on the shootout page looks weird compared to most Common Lisp code, it does look like code that a Lisp programmer would write when they are in deep optimization mode.
I've been following the advice of another front-page story (don't follow the news) for a while now so I'm really curious which / how EU governments are complicit in this. Do you have some pointers for more information on that?
Thanks! Direct link to the paper here: http://ursuletz.com/people/faculty/pdfs/p190-luk.pdf
Perhaps witch hunts were just performed under a different name. See also:

the Medieval Inquisition (1184–16th century)

the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834)

the Portuguese Inquisition (1536–1821)

the Roman Inquisition (1542 – c. 1860)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition
Who are these "medical personnel" performing these acts? I am a physician and I can tell you that force feeding these people is against our code of ethics. The physician overseeing their treatment should be 'outed' so that we can report this behavior to his/her licensing board.
> tuition costs at top private schools

Hardly the whole story, especially since sticker-price tuition at "top private schools" is more a mechanism for price discrimination than anything. Do what you will to justify cherry-picking your evidence--you're still cherry-picking your evidence.
Having the longest block chain doesn't matter if the transactions in your block chain violate the validation rules of the people doing business.
Citizens surrender their control of information flow when they accept mandatory public education and learn to accept a regimented doses of "knowledge" by schedule. The alternatives are to become "knowledge" rebels, which often means not just bucking the establishment, but one's peer groups as well, whom you can't escape in mandatory educational institutions.

Real education begins when mandatory learning ends.
Turning your Word-of-Mouth from Hopeful Marketing to Active Marketing
Yes they do. All countries claim to be the best.
Indeed, it does not. However, there does not seem to be much of an incentive to pay the tumbler's fee if someone has nothing to hide, so it's likely that only people who do have something to hide that will use such a service.
I'm not sure that this article is using the word (1) in the 'canonical' way either, so don't be too critical of your rinky-dink drama friends. They're just modifying the language to suit their ends, just like everyone else!

(1) the word describes a political position regarding the relationship of the UK government and the established church there. Therefore the antidisestablishmentarians were campaigners against those campaigning for disestablishing the Church of England
Or the article: http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article