skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. Gold production has definitely become more energy intensive, and in this regard it is somewhat similar to bitcoin. HOWEVER, with bitcoin, marginal mining cost is a function of cumulative supply. As supply reaches 21M, marginal cost goes to infinity, and it doesn't matter what technology you bring to bear. Whereas with gold, technological advances have moved the equivalent of bitcoin's 21M to 42M, 84M, etc. The maximum possible supply increases. Yes, of course at some point the technological maximum will reach the physical maximum, but we aren't there yet.

The result of all this is that gold supply has grown with the economy over the past 500 years. It may be deflationary relative to fiat currency, but it is nothing like the deflationary profile of bitcoin, not at all.
The most experienced people won't necessarily derive the most value from WWDC. My personal experience is that each time I've gone to WWDC, I've learned less. There's a fixed amount of new tech that's created each year, and a large amount in the past. Newbies have ~6 years of material to learn (since iPhone), whereas veterans only have 1 year to catch up on.
Agreed, Heroku is fantastic but I'm paranoid about keeping all my servers in one region.

#CTOproblems
Background on the B-Unit: http://www.bloomberg.com/bunit/Overview_Features.pdf

Definitely an interesting device.
AT&T getting secret immunity from wiretapping laws for government surveillance
If your device is open by default, it's open on WiFi or to other VZW customers. In every case, the wrong answer is trusting the network to protect you.
It's a very interesting question, and if you ask most people it comes down to the "feel" of the game being very different. It's hard to quantify but I'll give it a try.

To put it bluntly, one of the main rules and joys of CS is to shoot people in the head. All else being equal in a firefight, if you are good enough to get a head shot and the other guy can't, you win every time. Part of this is strategy (money/weapon management), tactics (positioning, maneuvering, footstep sounds) and aiming/reaction speed/firefight maneuvering. The main difference in CS:S affects the last category. CS:S added more randomness, changed recoil, changed the spread of bullets and hit boxes. CS:S de-emphasized the head shot, presumably to make the game less challenging to beginners. They changed the physics of grenades, running, jumping making the whole thing feel more sluggish.

Then there is the presentation part of it. CS made it very clear when you hit a head shot versus a body shot. For example, a head shot when the other player had no helmet resulted in a big spray of blood. When having a helmet there was a big spark shooting off of the head identifiable from afar, and also a satisfying sound. There was also a very different death animation after a head shot versus a body shot. A head shot would result in the player violently falling backwards, while in CS:S the player would just slouch to the ground like he tripped on a stone.

CS:S also added a lot of visual clutter that is nothing but detrimental to gameplay. Adding clutter to a competitive game hides the true important "signals" in the game, head shots being one, and just adds noise. This is why pros tend to strip down a game to the bare essentials if they can (look at Q3 for examples of this).

Another factor that adds to the "feel" is the weapon models and sounds. This is subjective, but the sounds in CS feel more powerful to me. Compare the important weapons like the ak47, the colt, deagle and AWP.

These are the reasons that "pros" never switched to CS:S, or if they did (usually because of prize money), they promptly switched back. Every issue might seem small, but they add up to a worse experience.

Ever since Valve took over CS, they have been going in the direction of making the game easier (giving beginners a chance). They started down this path with CS 1.4-1.6, but much more so with CS:S and now CS:GO. The truth is that if a beginner starts playing CS 1.6 today, he will most likely rage quit way before reaching any level of competency at the game. This is not good for Valve because it discourages new players. But this is the way it has to be if pros will want to stick to the game. There HAS to be a huge difference between a beginner and a pro, otherwise there's just no point in having a competitive game. The other part is also that there is no money to be had in a great 14 year old game that doesn't need much improvement. What CS needs is a better match-making system so that beginners won't rage quit, not changes to the feel of the game or more useless weapons or better graphics.
What are some "business problems" that I could solve with RoR?

Consider a real estate agent. Real estate agents spend most of their time prospecting for leads. Leads convert at X% into sales, where the agent earns 6% of the transaction price. Any system you can deliver for a real estate agent which increases the number of leads they have or the percent which eventually turn into sales solves a problem for them.

Consider an insurance company. Insurance companies have prospects and successfully sell some percentage of them policies, which transfer risks from the insured to them. The insured occasionally suffer losses, which results in them filing a claim against the insurance company, which the company will investigate and probably pay. Between the time an insurance company collects payments and pays claims, it has use of the "float" created by money which is probabalistically owed to someone but not paid yet on its books, and it can invest this float profitably. Software can increase the number of prospects they have and/or the percentage of prospects who are successfully convinced to buy policies. Software can assist (or replace) very expensive human underwriters, who judge whether a particular client is worth taking on and, if so, at what price. Software can greatly improve underwriting profits. Software can streamline the costs involved in processing claims. Software can be used to assist companies in paying out less claims that are actually outside of their policy requirements but which had previously been paid due to error or the infeasibility of adjusting them profitably. Software can increase the profits of management of float.

Consider a SaaS company. Ignore the product. There's four numbers of interest in that company: visitors per month, new trials per month, average plan price, and churn rate. Software can move those numbers up, up, up, and down, respectively.

Working in any industry will tend to expose you to a lot of these opportunities. After you have the mindset, the question is more-or-less as simple as asking an accountant "How would you look at a company and find where money is being spent?" I mean, if he were pressed for time, he might say "By looking", though there's a longer way to phrase that.
What makes Google such a great place to work?
Have you looked at ClickMeter? I wonder if this kind of functionality is harder to find because it may be harder to monetize.
It's a tradeoff - clear simplicity for limited logic. I.e. not every problem that requires distributed computation fits well with map reduce, yet many attempt to fit the problem into it to begin with, instead of trying to shape a right distributed solution for particular problem.
How is it possible that Facebook, which owns the data, does not give tools like these but others tap this using their data?
I've had a lot of luck discovering technologies in my off-time and then figuring out how to incorporate them into my paid work. It's really an awesome approach.
Nova [Part.2] Beginner's Guide to OpenStack
> I for one am glad that the Reddit effort turned into the fiasco it did.

I don't know if i really believe that it was that much of a fiasco. All the photos i saw where pictures of people with backpacks near the area of the bombings. That definitely gave the FBI leads.
My personal opinion is that it has to! I mean logically more communication has to speed up the conscious evolution of mankind, which can only lead to a more peaceful world.
Every Job Description You've Ever Written Sucks
Great now all of us that were prepared with notifications this time cause we were burned last year are going to probably miss out again.
ClickMeter is a start, but it requires adding the link into your email yourself which is a friction point for non-tech people.
Yes, for a few reasons — most are application specific, though.

An active websocket connection does have a faster response time than a regular HTTP connection ([1]). The difference here isn't a ton, but may affect real-time applications. The packets are also smaller, so less overhead if you're sending many.

The biggest difference I saw is that when the client or server needs to send several quick requests (many within a couple second), long polling breaks down. From the spec ([2]), "Once the server sends a long poll response, typically the client immediately sends a new long poll request." This delay can add up, and is not pure full duplex. Chunked responses help for server -> client, but client -> server still has the same issues.

[1] http://eng.42go.com/secure-websockets-vs-https-benchmark/

[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-loreto-http-bidirectional-0...
Someone with more tolerance for regulatory BS than me should be working on a Saas app to manage this new complexity.
It's less about the number of bytes than the number of records produced by the map step(s). Sometimes 10gb input data will produce many billions of records to reduce (if you're looking at combinations of things).

Basically, if your computation would never exceed memory on a single machine, then it is more processor efficient to code a more simple multi processing method and run on a single box than to code a map reduce on a cluster.

But what if you're not sure of the input data size? Processors are cheap. Engineers are expensive. Code the thing once for map reduce and you don't have to worry about making the transition later.
Nintendo misses profits forecasts by 50%, but some hunt for a bright side
How to Own Your Own Bitcoin Exchange
It is a big deal... the Garden State soundtrack is still in my regular rotation now almost 10 years later. Braff's projects have always had good soundtracks.
Planetary Resources Google Hangout (recorded earlier today)
There's the value: a trusted* escrow service.

(* Well, within the known limits of how far Paypal can be trusted. )
> The redditors are basically using the scorched-earth method of journalism, with no regard to who they accuse. Theyre causing considerably more harm than help, which is typical of vigilantism.

What? The difference is that redditors don't claim to be journalists, so why would anyone put any weight in their accusations? No one was lynched by redditors (or in danger of being lynched), so let's not call this vigilantism.
It can be heinous. In theory I love sales taxes, but I have friends who simply could not get their home state to give them a yes/no question on whether an item was taxable.
I'd definitely like it to be part of the benchmarks project. When I get some time I'll submit a pull request for it.

As mentioned in the other comment I use this for recording animations: https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast
Submitter here: Just thought it was interesting that some emphasize the earnings target miss (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-04-24-nintendo-mi...) while others look for a rosy side (original link).
It works fine as a long-term career strategy as long as you always have a strong BATNA. If you can walk whenever anyone betrays your trust, then eventually you'll end up surrounded only by people you can trust. That's a very strong position to be in, and usually makes for both a happy life and a solid professional outcome.
Every article I read about this focuses on "online" businesses, but doesn't the current exemption stem from a legal precedent set by a case involving a mail order catalog company? Is the bill Internet specific, or is it just that mail order is such a small market no one is even talking about it?
Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you use an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions, finding a good accountant, etc.

My accountant, Cameron Keng, is giving an attendee talk on this very topic at Microconf this year. I'm going to be taking notes. (The cheapest advice from him I'll get this year, for certain. ;) ) Remind me to post them if he doesn't.

Noted on the other two suggestions.
Because that's not how distributors work, I'd assume. They'll want exclusive rights in their territory.
Okay, your accountant example has made it clear that there is really no obvious way of finding business problems by just merely looking from the outside. Now I guess I should figure out how to expose myself to an industry.

What is your opinion on the effectiveness of speaking to people and asking them directly about their problems? Or am I better off reading industry magazines/blogs/forums and kind of examining them in their natural habitat?
This commonly expressed idea that companies are out to screw everyone is divisive and poisonous. "Companies" don't make decisions on how much to pay someone, people do. And most people, by definition, are decent and have a strong understanding of what's fair. Again, there are exceptions but assuming you work in a field where there are other career options, staying in a sociopathic working environment shouldn't even be up for discussion.

I might be considered a doormat because I don't demand what I deserve. But the very fact that I don't seems to turn into fair pay, good working conditions and honesty. Sure, it's one data point. But I've given it a lot of thought and noticed that people who are constantly demanding what the deserve are highly unpopular and frequently unhappy.
I would definitely do it, if I had the dough. They probably would make more if they have Jony Ive for the bidding.
Yes I'll have a better testing setup in the near future. (Right now there are individual unit tests scattered in the modules themselves)

Glad you like the documentation, I try to take pride in writing detailed documentation. :)
States have to provide sellers and software providers with 90 days notice of any changes to their tax rate, then update both their database and their software for computing taxes. This, coupled with the state-wide sales and use tax harmonization requirements (for remote sellers), only local businesses will have to worry about things like "tax free weekends" and short-notice changes. It's still going to be a mess.
In theory you should be paying use taxes to California, with a credit for the New York state taxes you pay, right now.

In practice that is too hard to care about, but if you try to do it with something like a car or a $10,000 piece of jewelry the state will care.

Charging their local sales tax could be an excellent baby step towards the ideal.

(I am not a tax attorney, nor any kind of lawyer.)
I was fortunate enough to get two student scholarships to WWDC through the Apple University Consortium[1]. Unfortunately the AUC is no longer subsidized by Apple and doesn't issue scholarships. Both trips were life-changing. 2010 convinced me that I had to live in SF so I finished my degree to be eligible for a visa. In 2011 Dave (my now co-founder who was writing iPad games) and I hashed out what later became Minefold.

Do whatever you can to go. If you need a place to stay I've got a free couch.

[1]: http://auc.edu.au
Very true... when this thing goes over budget for the digital effects, I don't think you're going to see him hit up Kickstarter again. Personally, I'm willing to put up some cash to see another one of his movies made.
I have a question to all LISPers out there. It's just, cause I really don't know. I read a bit about LISP, but never used it or anything. Anyway. Here it is:

Why not Scheme?
Not convincing me I don't WANT a DVD. Sure its hard, distributors want what they want, but thats pfft to me. For my $20 I want something.
Can't we just present the interesting insight without using religious language and deifying the man?
Choosing Black Bathroom Accessories
Whoa! Déjà vu!
Dude... the small, light gray text... are you trying to ruin our eyesight?
The expected display resolution probably changed too.
They also get to talk with Apple engineers who work on the systems, show them their code or designs, get their input, and talk to other people in the dev business.

That's the main reason. You can talk to the guys who MADE your system and have THEM describe and discuss things with you.

(Disclosure: I read that on the internet)
> And my question was, if the files are private, why should their content be against the TOS?

They probably don't want to allow the services to be used to aid illegal activity. Say what you want about how technology should be completely agnostic to matters of culture and legality, but that isn't at all the case.
Short answer: It's part of the uniform.

Long answer: Conferences were traditionally the way to get the latest information on technology, but now that we're so well connected, that's no longer the case. As with all relics, people will continue to do these out of industry habit, and for the networking opportunities.
The New Deal: Merkel says euro members must be prepared to cede sovereignty
I agree that you should code your analytics once. I think the lesson from this work is that the market could benefit from a Hadoop-compatible but non-clustered runtime which should be easier to run and 10X faster.
The thing is that MapReduce is still a very good programming paradigm for a single box.

Machines have 8-64 cores these days -- you don't want to write multi-threaded code every time you want to do an analysis. So you can write MapReduce, but use a multicore framework instead of a cluster framework (hadoop).

The unfortunate thing is that there is no popular open source implementation of a multicore mapreduce, so people use Hadoop, which is wasteful on small data sets, as mentioned.

But the great part about it is that you will use the same application code for both. I fully expect in 5 years or so that people will be running multicore mapreduce jobs on 100 or 1000 core boxes.
McAfee Patents Technology to Detect and Block Pirated Content
One of the reasons for this is SurvivorBots, despite their relatively solid behavior overall, can occasionally get stuck on an obstacle or trying to decide between divergent priorities (follow the others or grab a powerup? They can get stuck in a "dancing loop" where they shuffle a couple steps one way and then the other.)

It's important in L4D to require players to pay attention to their teammates, but it's also important to maintain the "fun" aspects of the game. It's one thing if the AI gets behind because they're being attacked and the player is doing a bad job of protecting them; it's entirely different if the AI gets behind because its algorithm sometimes gets hung up (and it's not fun for the player to have to try to solve pathing glitches!)
Need "Custom" Analytics? Not So Fast
Do a Moses documentary. Aaron was a homo and law breaker and he lost. Moses gave laws and he won.

God said the 11th commandment was "thou shall not litter"

God is wise enough to cover the spectrum of major and minor.

God says...
Instructor grievest tongue-science pieces scorned shapen
to_infinity_and_beyond meanwhile pastime shares x flashing
lecture approved beset sacrificed alternatively skills
promise animals rites threats shower heat fore-past shuns
evolution whisperings Platonists over_the_top save growth
felt impair innumerably aghast warmth exhortations choice
modestly swerving Love I'll_be_back iniquity confiding
remedies rejoice obtain phantom conveyed influence gathered
exist If_had_my_druthers cloyedness awoke asketh died
ceasest umm_what_now conjugal melodies replenished well-being
foretell dispose you_should_be_so_lucky wages no drove
warning strings lacketh praters boldly recalled strengthless
degree look_out mingled pursued stretch men's assuaged
proposed O sayest lovingly promising whirlpool figuratively
torment UNDER You_get_what_you_pray_for supposing GUTENBERG
considered brittle interpretation banner caught abounded
staff million attendant spider giant doth teachers envious
plant

God says...
C:\TAD\Text\BIBLE.TXT

in the LORD's house.

36:9 And it came to pass in the fifth year of Jehoiakim the son of
Josiah king of Judah, in the ninth month, that they proclaimed a fast
before the LORD to all the people in Jerusalem, and to all the people
that came from the cities of Judah unto Jerusalem.

36:10 Then read Baruch in the book the words of Jeremiah in the house
of the LORD, in the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe,
in the higher court, at the entry of the new gate of the LORD's house,
in the e
What makes good leadership? If you have a highly talented team, good leadership might be less leadership and a shared vision might require nothing more than everyone receiving the same assignment. This mentality is what makes some poor "leaders" put themselves ahead of everyone and claim credit for everything. It wouldn't be foreign to Dilbert's pointy-haired boss.
"The minimum processing and handling charge for this item is $9.95."
Isn't scheme just a dialect of lisp?
Question... Would you consider, as a startupper, to invest some money (quite a lot, we are now around 15k $) in the possibility to chat with Tim Cook?
I was talking specifically about paying customers, and how DRM probably doesn't reduce the revenue from that market very much even though it's clearly hostile towards those people.

Obviously the point of DRM is to try to reduce the number of people who are consuming the content without becoming paying customers, and given the assumption I'm making above, it doesn't need a very high success rate to be economically worthwhile.

If people still buy EA games like lemmings even after things like the SimCity fiasco, how many pirates do they really need to deter using DRM, and for how long, before it becomes an absolutely guaranteed revenue booster? Most games or major movies make an extremely disproportionate chunk of their revenue in the first few days after launch. If the suppliers can hold off piracy for even a week or two before a crack is out and get even a few percent of would-be pirates who are desperate to play the game or see the film to do it through a legitimate channel instead, that's potentially millions in extra profits on a AAA game or Hollywood blockbuster.
I have one theory as to why: It would penalize online retailers that happen to be based in a high-tax location. As a Chicagoan, for example, I would have a really hard time starting an online retailer if my customers all had to pay the 9.25% Chicago sales tax. It seems like bad policy to discourage tech companies from locating in big cities, which often have higher sales tax. Also, it would be hugely unfair to companies that predate the bill and are based in big cities--are they supposed to pick up and move?

Another reason: The idea of the business's local tax rate is less coherent for larger companies that have multiple bases of operation. Suppose I have several offices throughout the country, plus a bunch of warehouses. Which of these would count as my home base for tax purposes?
Good to know. I figured it'd be that way. Still seems like wholly non-physical items could become a pain point.
I would like to put a bid in for Richard Stallman (Founder of GNU foundation), but I don't have the money to make that kind of minimum bid ($15,333)
Meanwhile every person singled out by the mob was quickly alerted to that fact. A big part of professionalism (and law enforcement in particular) is knowing when to be discreet.