skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi there, original author of the article here.

Many Bitcoin developers are actually quite positive to the idea of alternative implementations; all they're saying is "be careful".

> Gavin wrote to me only days after the BitCoinJ release to tell me how happy he was to see an alternative implementation. Satoshi expressed very similar sentiments. Nobody is against alternative implementations.
> What some people, especially Satoshi, have said is that there’s an unusual amount of risk involved with reimplementing the full system and using that reimplementation to mine. Bitcoin is very complex and if you aren’t skilled and very thorough you are likely to diverge from its behavior in small, hard to detect ways. This can fork the chain and split the economy. It’s one of the few things that could instantly kill Bitcoin beyond legal harassment of its users.

- Mike Hearn 2011

> part of the solution is to encourage alternative implementations that make different trust/convenience tradeoffs than the reference implementation. There has been a lot of behind-the-scenes work on cross-implementation testing (the “testnet3″ blockchain contains hundreds of transaction validation test cases, for example), and new features are being added to the protocol to support alternative implementations

-Gavin Andresen, late 2012

If you're not mining, I personally would say it can only be good if you just follow the protocol spec and try to implement Bitcoin from there. If you fall off the main chain and it's not obviously your fault, then either the protocol spec was unclear and can get improved or the original client has a bug, in which case there are ways to carefully phase the bug out of existence with a patch.
Neat! By the way, "its" is the possessive form of "it". "It's" is a contraction for "it is" or "it has". You have such a grammar error in the front page text.

Good luck!
Speculating: Perhaps people who have lesser skills make up for it by networking, asking others to endorse them to fluff up their profile? Those with valuable skill sets might have little need for that, and can promote themselves more optimally.

Example: "So-and-So endorses me for Programming" vs. "github.com/myrepo/"
Smartphones and iPads don't make you look like a dork while using them.
Well that's one way to handle a big review about technology of the future: don't write a review and suggest weaning yourself off of technology.
I always thought cars close to or over 100K were considered Exotics, but then I recalled that most big SUVs are around that price point.
Quite pricey: monthly - €9.99 for 1gb?

SpiderOak, a secure cloud file storage, offers 2gb free for life (plus a handful more GBs for various promos).
مشاهدة مباراة الزمالك وبتروجيت
Python Best Practice Patterns by Vladimir Keleshev (Notes)
http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/135-jenala48
I recall reading through one of the public NSA or USAF whitepapers on securing Windows XP for usage within their organization and I'm pretty sure they recommended using a Virtual Machine that had been set up following a bunch of extremely secure protocols. Essentially the VM had network access only for the length of time necessary to transfer the file and the host's security was also dealt with. Then there was protocol which they referenced was supposed to be standard which was the wiping/reset of the VM image at certain intervals and upon specific events (contact your supervisor if...).

It contained a lot of "Contact your supervisor if..." and "Failure to follow this can result in..."
Distributed Consensus: Paxos by Example
>You forgot the most important part, validating that the public key you've received is actually for that person.

It's not that I forgot that part, it's that that's the hard part. That's the reason PGP is hard to use: They try to make sure you do it securely. And you can't have some third party do that part for you without trusting them, and the whole idea is not to have to trust any third parties. What public servers are you going to use here? Does each email user have to run their own server? Unless you have a single central server, how do you know which server corresponds to which user?

Automating web of trust could be interesting though. Imagine you get an email from a new user that you've never received any email from before. There is some new P2P network where if you have someone's public key, you ask that user whether they know the new user's public key, and they send back a signed response (either "this is the key I have" or "I don't have a key", signed either way with the known user's public key). Then if all your friends who have the new user's key agree on what it is, it's probably right. If nobody has it, you get encouraged to verify it manually (i.e. in person). And if they don't all agree you get the nasty warnings about something fishy going on.

>imagine a virus that automatically generates and adds a PGP key to mail clients before sending to everyone in the address book, just to make it more likely to pass spam filters

That seems like a low-effectiveness method of sending spam, given that the public key is uniquely identifying and tied to a sender address, so once the spam filter realizes everyone is marking all those messages as spam it can just blacklist everything sent using that key. Also, how is it different from existing PGP other than that more people would be using it? If you've infected a machine with a virus you can do whatever you want to it. You could just write the spam directly to the user's inbox, or send it out from their own address and sign it with their actual key. Compromised machine = you're screwed.

>the accompanying glut of horrible passwords used (or duplication from easily gleaned passwords)

This isn't even necessary for a virus. The problem with viruses is that they can stay resident until you type your password and then it doesn't matter how hard the password was.
Apple's ability to keep Jony Ive around comes to mind. He has an incredible platform at Apple and the creative freedom to develop and release products that are used by millions all over the world. Of course given his popularity, he could probably go off on his own and still be successful, but it wouldn't be easy.
They seem a bit expensive
The problem is that there are some people who are very, very good at bullshitting. They can talk the talk - but not walk the walk.

I've had several occasions where somebody I was sure would ace the coding has fouled up badly. And not "little bit nervous" badly, but "wow - you have put significant effort into learning how to lie during an interview" badly.

One was early in my career, when I didn't do coding tests, and they got hired. It was an expensive mistake. I've encountered enough of 'em to want to stop myself ever making that mistake again. Never hire a juggler without seeing them juggle (http://raganwald.com/2006/07/hiring-juggler_02.html).
I remember iPads felt that way for some when they first came out.
So you and the person it suggested to you don't know anyone in common that might have uploaded their address book?
I was thinking he had pretty bad selection bias. If I applied the same to my day yesterday, you'd assume every software developer was a sharp female game hacker with a little too much caffeine in her system. ;)
Not all laws in all countries are worth holding oneself to. For example, Russia has official internet censorship, does it mean Google should now support censorship too because some country has laws about that?
I think you are confused. Disruptive technologies can either start at the bottom of the market, or the top of the market. What makes them disruptive is that they serve the needs of a market segment that is currently not served very well by the incumbents.
Depends on context. I saw someone using an iPad in a movie theatre (before the movie started). I'm not sure if he looked more like a dork or an ass (with that ultra bright screen).
I would say all the aspects that you find lacking with the way Vim is developed, in my opinion, is what makes it the stable, powerful editor it is today.

It is somewhat following the linux model (with Linus as the primary developer in the early days).

Just like linux, I believe this has added to the widespread popularity of Vim (ie. it is available by default on most distributions).

Vim doesn't need to "modernize". I would say its availability and ability to still stay relevant is more modern than most other open-source software.
a certain social network gives universal profile access to employees as a perk

This is a rather insidious thing to say without naming the network, particularly in a comment on a post about a particular network. Which is it?

I know that both Facebook and LinkedIn have similarly strict rules about what user data you can look at.
Ranged integer types and bounds checking
Good summary!
And just shows how much current web "stinks". There's a bunch of tools that advanced users can use to make the web experience more or less safe and tolerable. But I suspect (and sorry, I don't have any source to back up my suspicions) that the majority of the users have no idea that they are being tracked and targeted by bunch of nasty scripts, and more importantly how to fight against this.
Makes one think that tools like Ghostery and NoScript should be built into the browsers and enabled by default.
This is an unsexy directive that could be a profound game-changer for civic society. If you've ever tried to get data from a public entity and had to argue about the particulars of PDF over Excel, this kind of statement is at least a good precedent to work from...some information will still be unparsable, just as much information, period, is still withheld despite transparency laws...but this is a pretty strong statement nonetheless.

Edit: I do think there's a large risk of an unintended chilling effect, as well-intentioned as this initiative. The blog post that was linked to later in this discussion talks about how defaulting to machine data will "ensure privacy"...which can only mean that there will be some process to decide which data should be machine data and which shouldn't...and, I think this will inevitably cause some datasets to just not be released at all, if there are large technical concerns in making sure the data doesn't "violate privacy"

As an example, a couple years ago the Obama administration took down a public database after a doctor complained that a newspaper was able to use it to track evidence against him in a story:

http://www.propublica.org/article/how-complaints-from-a-doct...

The database contained anonymized data about doctor malpractice records...but of course, if you have a doctor with a particularly long history of malpractice in a s single zip code, it's not hard to connect those anonymous records to an identity. So I think there will be some cases where an agency will decide not to put up data because of the fear that computerized analysis of it will reveal things that they don't want revealed.
AIO Wireless - New AT&T Prepaid Wireless Service
To me it's better than listening to music

I've completely flipped my thinking on this. Once you start to look at some cars and motorcycles not as vehicles, but as musical instruments, the emotional response and the economics start to make more sense.
Umm... LinkedIn is older than Facebook. They didn't just 'put it online with Facebook clone features', there wasn't a facebook to clone...
If she's going to write about a product, maybe she should actually use it, given that she actually has a pair.

It's bad enough when journalists write about a product without having it. She has it, but she's not using it, and then she's writing sweeping articles about it's long-term future.
Are ‘Hot Hands’ in Sports a Real Thing?
Are you saying that I can practice medicine without a relevant degree, or that the supply of the relevant degree is not controlled by the government?
Well, I used a similar approach when I was reading SICP. I decided that I would try to do two problems a day and I got really far (end of 3rd chapter) but at that time I felt I wasn't understanding things entirely. I also noticed that I had developed a tendency to search for a solution of the problem before even attempting to solve it (this was in case of hard problems). So, I stopped reading SICP because it such an amazing book and I didn't want to ruin the experience of it by ploughing through.
This is my thought: this car has no history, period. I'm unclear as to how Consumer Reports can reliably put out a report on a vehicle that's so new to market with such (relatively) few examples on the road.

I think people really really really want the Tesla to be for real. And I hope it is. But that judgement can't be made until a few years down the road.
I take it you've never seen someone taking photos at a wedding with an iPad.
Any product can make you look like a dork depending on how you use it. Even if you're Spike Lee:

http://i.imgur.com/OY5RBuo.jpg
Shoeboxed CEO on Growing Your App Even if it isn't "Viral"
Ripoff Report is in expansion mode
You could mention that kind of misuse on the page where users enter their code, and suggest they don't enter their salary information unless they are aware that the code was displayed somewhere publicly (yet anonymously) in the company (like a company bulletin board or sent out to a list of company emails from a dummy address, where you can vet that the other addresses it was sent to were your coworkers). That way, no one has any way of knowing which datapoints match to which of their coworkers.
Ask HN: How to make a living from Open Source Software on Open Source Hardware?
I've been working on a JavaScript interpreter for Microcontrollers called Espruino - it's taken an immense amount of work. Ideally I'd make it Open Source so that people can install it, modify it, and port it to new platforms freely, but if hardware was sold with it preinstalled (so people are profiting from my work) they would have to pay a small royalty.

This seems reasonable to me - but looking at http://opensource.org/docs/osd it seems completely against the spirit of Open Source. I've contacted several well-known Open Hardware suppliers, and the response has been 'looks good - but I'm not using it unless it's Open Source, and if it's Open Source, why would I pay you any kind of royalty when competitors can use it for free?'

Does anyone have suggestions about this? If I try and sell hardware with my Software on, I'll be competing with others who can use my software for free! Do I withold features? That hardly seems like it is in any of my users' best interests.

Or do I just release Espruino with some licence that allows people to access and modify the source - but only noncommercially. This won't be 'Open Source', but it seems to be in the best interests of my users.

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated.
The same model year after year doesn't involve retooling billions in their current factories.
Jon Gottfried does it AGAIN! You are a god among hackers, sir.
Yet another person speaking for consumers on a device that isn't even finalized yet.

The only evidence I need that it sucks (in its current form) is that

1) Robert Scoble loves it.
2) Robert Scoble thinks he looks good wearing it.

You can't buy taste.
The White House also posted a blog entry about this with many additional links: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/09/landmark-steps-lib...
Partly that, partly that the motivation is that the government justifies the law by the expected savings in other places (healthcare). This boils down to the fact that, because the government has promised to "repair" you if you "break", it also has a right to "perform maintenance" on you as it sees fit.

Even less palatable is the argument that healthy long living citizens spend more time on the labour market, generating more tax revenue.
Yea, I would do something, I was redirected to the wordpress installation screen..
If its not reproducible it is not science.
You're wrong. What you say - that we conclude anything if not everything was taken into consideration - is undoubtedly true for mathematical meaning of "conclude". Mathematicians, computer scientists and a few others, like theoretic physicists, have a luxury of using law of excluded middle, which Sherlock Holmes also used. The famous detective states that if you eliminate everything that is impossible, whatever remains is true, even if it sounds improbable.

All the people who use this law do so because their work is about some kind of model, which can be wholly known. However, if you have a misfortune of working in the real world - like nearly everyone - then you can't apply this law. This means that you won't ever get a proof in a mathematical sense. You won't ever be completely certain - you can be convinced beyond reasonable doubt, but that's all.

So when we talk about how biologists are just grant hunters because someone couldn't reproduce their experiments we need to take this into account. I don't know, but if I had to guess I'd say that nobody ever expected these experiments to be 100% accurate, 100% reproducible or 100% true. I think they are treated as a data point, some input to think of, and not definite truth.

But I may be completely wrong here, of course.
Speed Up Online Ad Optimization
Found out about external fonts not showing up in FireFox (or Safari) the hard way myself. So thought I would share the solution :)
Why can't the existing industry do this? Why all the mediocre product that's the tail end of pumping billions of dollars into R&D staffed by largely the same folks Tesla has been hiring?

The car being reviewed is $90,000. Are competitively priced vehicles really "mediocre"?

The Tesla was not built independently. Most of its components come from the auto industry. Most of its innovations are auto-industry innovations. When you make a $90K car, you have the capacity of really optimizing the entirety of it.
This (and the other suggestion by zerr) still leave the potential for someone to create multiple false 'minimum' datapoints, then target one of their coworkers to find out their salary.
It's a generational thing, I think. Two thoughts come to mind when I hear a V8/12 roaring down the street: "out-of-touch boomer" and "sea level rise". Literally nobody I know my age wants anything to do with those fossil burners. Electric (or something better, I hope) is the future.
Yes and no is acceptable. It's really a "Yes, but...". Is Newtonian physics correct? Yes and no. It's roughly correct at a macroscopic level, but at small scales quantum effects are important and at high speeds relativistic effects are important. "It's correct, but..."

Not every work of science needs to be exact fact before being published. Really, nothing in science is accepted as absolute fact. The scientific publishing process is a conversation between scientists to try to determine the truth.
For the typical day to day, I just don't see the killer application for a heads up display. My phone is never more than arm's reach away, and then it's out of sight when I'm done with it.
Oh, no doubt I'm confused. But what market isn't being served that the Model S can waltz in on? It's an M5 with a linear torque curve that you can't take on long trips.
GM already had this, with the Chevy Volt (a very interesting concept in its own right). But the problem is, despite a highly sensible transition approach from gasoline to electric, it's still a CHEVY. It's built to Chevy construction standards, Chevy aesthetics.
I probably haven't been keeping up with the bitcointalk forums as much as yourself, but I haven't gotten the impression that the main bitcoin developers treat alternative implementations as threatening.

There are already several moderately-popular alternative implementations in the wild. Bitcoinj is used by pretty much every Android-based Bitcoin app. Electrum (a popular thin-client) is using a custom implementation on their backends, too.

Every time I ask or see a question from people who are working on alternative clients, the developers have always been supportive and informative.

The biggest problem, and possibly the underlying spirit of the warning you quoted, is that the current version of the protocol is not super-well documented. Some data structures are undefined and need to be reverse-engineered from other implementations (such as net_time), others are ambiguously defined.

My takeaway from the thread you linked is closer to this quote:

"Yes, please, feedback from re-implementors is very helpful."
— Gavin Andresen, lead Bitcoin developer.
I'd say that yes, if you are just performing an operation that already exists in a common C library just use that. But I could see the advantages for an algorithm that did not already exist for which you wanted to express in Python.

OpenCV is great as a black box but its built in functions are not always sufficient or optimal.
50 shades of grey in web design
I'm saying that I think the other person may have uploaded their contacts and then chosen not to send you a friend request or there's someone follows both you and the other person on twitter. In order to build long lists of suggestions, LinkedIn probably has to make some pretty big leaps of logic.

But, other posters have done some anonymous experiments that suggest there's something else going on, perhaps with cookies from other sites or IP addresses. I'm not sure how we'd figure it out, though.

>> Yes, it was a hot chick I was creepily cyber stalking. Like you haven't ever.

I'm not judging, I promise. :)
Inelegance
Alibaba Tamps Down Valuation Expectations
Your suspect was right :) I remember many discussions about this when G+ was in its infancy. Obviously for Google the best thing would have been for G+ to become facebook - but that was, and is, impossible. So, the second best thing would have been (imho) to beat FB at the openness game, attracting first the developers, and then their users. Alas, they chose a different path.
I think what you say is true, but only if you somehow arrive on a website with absolutely no understanding of what you're looking at or how you arrived there.

When most people land on a company's home page, they arrived there from searching specific keywords in a search engine (which demonstrates a context for what they're searching for), clicking-through a socially shared link (which probably includes descriptive text like "Checkout this awesome Fireworks replacement I've been using...), or directly clicking marketing messages in an email or display ad (in which case they'll have a very clear understanding of the category the company is in).

In other words, they have a pretty good sense of "what this thing is," and they want to know _why_ it's better than the other ones they've seen.

Now, if you click a link on HN that says something like "I'm 13! Checkout the product I coded over the weekend!" then yes, the main question will be "what is this thing?" But in the "real world," people don't often stumble randomly across websites in this way, and if they do, they're probably not in the target audience anyway.

Most of the time (and I'm assuming we're all optimizing for most of the time instances), users already know generally what you do. So tell them why you do it in a way that is interesting and meaningful.
Good points, especially the condo thing! The range thing confuses me: How often do you drive more than 200 miles in the city? I live in DC which has lots of far-flung suburbs, and can still take a day-trip to Baltimore (an hour away) and back for around 100mi total.

I see this as a really attractive second car for wealthy commuters. If my spouse had a normal gasoline car we could use for long trips and hauling things, this would be a great daily driver, especially if I lived in suburbia and commuted for 30min a day where having a nice car would make a big difference in my life.
glad u liked it!
The number of endorsements is really just a matter of the number of connections and a persons activity on Linkedin (e.g. if a person endorses many others, then it's likely they will also be endorsed by them).
What the hell is a floppy disk?
Not open source (would you stop using the buzz word already?). Expensive as well.