skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "barbell" strategy (avoiding the middle in favor of a linear combination of the extremes) is just such an effective model for society. And the medium risk space is perceived to be a sucker's game that combines the worst of both worlds (huge measurement errors of risk without the chance of outsize returns).
Down vote and no comment - what's offensive in not understanding a significant value add?
Tips for Starting an Internship
In a few days I'm beginning my first internship, as well as foray into the profesional world. I'm a rising high school junior with two years of programming experience, and the company I'm interning at is a 15 person web product company.

Do you have any tips or advice for performing well, as well as getting to most from this internship?
AwesomeWallpaper - automatically change your desktop wallpapers every day.
It's 100% posturing for the German public.
>EU governments

AKA individual member nation governments.
Sadly, the true brilliance of secret laws and classified programs is that they place incredible barriers in front of anyone attempting to prove they have standing to sue, making constitutional challenges difficult, at best.

“Assuming you don’t know exactly what the government did, how could you possibly have a lawsuit that provides any sort of relief and provides and effective remedy?” Samp asks, “How could the plaintiff know what remedy to ask for when he doesn’t even know what’s happened?”
--Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation

SOURCE: http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/10/suing-over-surveillance-se...
I agree with what you're saying, but the mere existence of this letter is indicative of the fear gripping those in power whom would rather their illegitimate authorities remain a secret.
When I was using NetBSD in 2001 I actually liked the built-in "mail" command to read email. It was very minimal. Sadly, I could never figure out how to handle attachments with it.
Mac App Review: SliceReader
Then use a library or local call. For web based projects with low security concerns or something reminiscent of Yahoo! Pipes this is pretty cool.
Not sure why an uneven distribution of btc implies currency manipulation. The author should explain how exactly this manipulation supposedly works.
Well, the beauty of a democratic society is that if a majority agree with you, then you can change the system. Personally, I disagree with you, but it's a free country.

Your comment about the military is so rude, though, that it was difficult to write a temperate response. You ought to feel ashamed of yourself.
>NSA's staunch commitment to protecting and upholding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people

yup, no problem at all violating the data from foreign people. No problem at all. This will help american based business.

Welcome to the balkanisation of the web.
Obligatory talking points associated with the Fermi Paradox:

- It takes a very short time in comparison to the age of the galaxy for a single self-replicating probe to result in a descendant probe visit to every star. A few million years. This means that you cannot really argue plausibly that all civilizations fail to do this - it would take trivial effort for just one faction within just one advanced civilization to set this underway. It's quite clearly the case that we will do it when we can.

- There is a proposal I recall reading that suggests all colonization/self-replicated expansion is patchy in a sort of fractal way. You're always going to get sparse frontiers and empty real estate.

- The Great Filter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

- The Simulation Argument (Bostrom variant).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

- The Drake Equation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

- Where are the macrostructures? We don't see Dyson spheres or other evident macroscale engineering. Everything we can see so far looks natural. This is more troubling than an absence of detectable communications. There are any number of ways we can think of for interstellar communication networks to exist and yet be undetectable by us at the moment, and then there are no doubt all the ways that we can't think of.

- Agents responsible for the Fermi Paradox through suppression of nascent intelligence are a popular science fiction trope. First one to the top kills off the rest as they turn up. (Berzerkers, Wolves, etc). It makes for good plotting, but in reality this suffers from all the same issues as economic monopolies and monocultures - i.e. without some sustaining outside influence they are fragile and short-lived, prone to defection, being undercut, and out-innovated from a blind spot. So it's not plausible to suppose that we are randomly in a period of suppressive monopoly.
One of the most interesting things about Bitcoin is the possibility of introducing commerce directly into P2P networks.

You could imagine a Bitcoin micropayment protocol (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_7:_Rapidly-adju...) layered on a P2P network of Tahoe-LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs) providers competing for business.
Of course it's normal, and of course "we" are not surprised y the scale of NSA spying. What did you think the NSA did if not this? Have all of their 40,000 employees listening in on Bin Laden's phone calls?
Wouldn't exchanges have precisely this signature in the blockchain?
Did you not even bother to read the article?

"The most damning fact revealed in the paper is not the extreme top-heaviness of the Bitcoin ownership pyramid, but rather the elaborate lengths to which the hoarders went in order to conceal their existence from “rank and file” users."

I don't see how it could possibly have been made any clearer.
3 years back, when we had to use it with Liferay, the experience wasn't really great. Hope it has improved now; need to check.
On a website primarily used by city dwellers ....

How do you know that?
Not to mention, these claims are uninvestigatable. They can say anything, and not only can we not investigate, but even if someone knew the truth and wanted to set the record straight, they would be considered a traitor and a criminal.
The paper this blog entry is based on was debunked. [1]

tl;dr: "The Ron/Shamir paper contains provably-false key assumptions. Further, their data source (website scraping) is a secondary data source known to have served invalid data in the past.

We do not claim this wholly invalidates their statistical results, but given the web wallet and cold storage examples, seems likely to introduce statistically significant changes in the results."

[1] https://gist.github.com/jgarzik/3901921
> large yellow signs along Interstate 271 that warned drivers that there was a drug checkpoint ahead, to be prepared to stop and that there was a drug-sniffing police dog in use.

One thing hinted at in the article is the risk of harm to "innocent"[1] drivers from drivers carrying drugs who are distracted by the large scary yellow signs, and thus driving while distracted.

> Peters said the officer asked him what kind of drugs he had in the car, saying it would be much easier to confess before other officers and a drug-sniffing dog arrived. Peters insisted he had no drugs. As promised, other officers and the dog were summoned, and Peters agreed to allow his car to be searched.

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it you shouldn't agree to be searched. What's the current best practice for this?

[1] using the words of law enforcement to emphasise the point.
Don't similar things happen on the stock exchange all the time? I'm not sure. But I think the fact that one can discover these things with bitcoins by tracing activity while it would be much harder to do with more established markets is a plus for bitcoins.

It's like when android first came out, all these people got upset because it informed you about what personal information apps wanted. So some went back to IOS despite those apps doing the same things (you just didn't know about it). Way to punish transparency.
Washington Post releases four new slides from NSA's Prism presentation
BTSync should really have an encrypted node mode where all the data is encrypted before leaving the client, so it wouldn't matter where the server is located.
You can get really legitimate peer review on the Internet. You don't need somebody standing right next to you to get it.
Shock therapy a relic of the past? The story of a man saved by ECT
I made my web app side project (a text editor for Dropbox) into a paid product. Once traffic picked up on the original (free) app and I gathered feature requests from users, I rewrote the app from scratch and charged for that while keeping the old one online. I did this about 1 year after launching the original app.

It was a great decision for me and for my users because I was able to implement new features and cover their costs at a price that users were happy to pay.

In my case it helped that user data was all in Dropbox, so there wouldn't be any data migration to do in case they decided to move off of my app. I've also found paying customers to be really appreciative and grateful for the app.
>By their own estimation, the cost of a four year education at RISD is $245,816.

>An online debt repayment calculator recommended a salary exceeding $400,000 in order to pay off a RISD education within 10 years.

... If you made $400k and had $250k in debt, why wouldn't you live like you made $100k for a year and then be done with it forever?
It continues to amaze me how much hate bitcoin generates. Lot's of assertions in that article based on opinion. That's common with most technologies, but the vehemence is not.

We've all seen some real apple haters, or Microsoft, or vi vs. emacs wars, but man the energy that goes into bitcoin FUD is worth a study in itself.

Even worse if you just ask people on the street (I have) does a non-FED controlled currency that has low transaction fees and was easy to send over the internet sound interesting or useful to you?

Everyone, to a man, says yes.
Did you set up the advanced spam filtering and then train it on all of your folders? I also set the super-advanced options and changed the thresholds to around 3.0 (instead of the default, which was I think 5.0), which really helped. It's better than when I hosted on gmail, but I'd say 5-10 per day still get through and have to be reported, after about a month on fastmail. That's only a couple of percent, though (scanning my spam folder, I get something like 10-12 per hour, but this is an e-mail address I've had and not hidden at all since 1997).
Nice article. I have a Xerox 6085 "Daybreak" workstation that runs Interlisp.

An emulator exists, that runs on various *nix systems. It used to be available for noncommercial use under here http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/medley/ but the links seem dead.
im not sure he totally understands how manipulating a financial market works. just having a lot of btc doesn't mean you're one of the inventors of bitcoin neither. the article is called how the market is manipulated but doesn't really explain how, except someone owns 90000 btc (about 9 million us)

is 90,000 btc really 95% of all btc mined? or 97 whatever he quoted.

what kind of lying or mongering that he eludes to is going on in the btc community? i would think lying is far less profitable than market price manipulation.

i guess the point of the article is in the midde: who are the lords of the btc community.
It can be made a decent amount more difficult with some simple changes like obfuscating the source and also encapsulating all the object definitions and state in a closure, instead of putting it all in global variables. Of course I think that would violate the minimal spirit of the game and it's really cool to be able to see its source so easily.
There's certainly nothing rude about pointing out a relevant and possibly non-obvious truth: military life is so distinct from civilian life that it may result in drastically different perspectives about what it means to be free. If merely being exposed to a hypothesis you disagree with offends you, then I don't understand how you can ever hope to have a meaningful debate.
A Facebook Update In Real Life
If you are going to use the common definition instead of the C-standard definition, why not use the common implementation characteristics of C as well? A char is one byte both in the context of the standard and in the context of common usage. It's only when you mix the two contexts haphazardly that the two aren't the same size.
Sooo... it's pine?
Snowden Spying Claims: US 'Bugged EU Offices'
I don't think so. Why would they?
Any statement that begins with the equivalent of "We're at war" completely destroys credibility.

If you have to pretend we are at war to make a convincing argument, you've already lost (war is obvious).
I don't really see that a new currency is even relevant to solving any "1%" problem. If anything has value, wealthy people will be able to own more of it.
The debunking has been debunked:

Oct. 31 UPDATE

The authors have introduced several revisions to their paper, available at the same URL as before.

The criticism below may be outdated in part or in full.
Our radio emissions aren't that visible, there is a horizon, so to speak, where your radio signals attenuate to be indistinguishable from background radiation. For our TV transmissions I believe this to be no more than a handful of light years. As tech has been increasing we've been putting less power into our transmissions and thus reducing that horizon. Even high powered military radars aren't typically banging away into the sky in the same way they used to.

Then you've got the fact that the env for coms has been becoming increasingly hostile anyway. Long term quantum computing is pretty much a certainty, and when that happens quantum encryption seems like it's going to be the only workable form of coms for anything you want to keep quiet. Even if you assume that in the West it'll only be places like NSA and GCHQ and so on who have one - China's going to have one too, and do you really think they're not going to use it against commercial systems? People will have to move to quantum encryption - you're just not going to be able to do business without it.

So, I wouldn't expect us to keep using the airwaves very much. I expect the future of airwave use to be primarily relatively short ranged point to point transmissions.

The visibility for radio transmissions, even if humans survive a million years isn't, I think, going to be a million years, I'd expect it to be more like 100. Thus - though I don't know how they calculated their number - I'd make the back of the hand odds that someone examining our planet randomly would pick us out not 1 in 5,000 but, instead, 1 in 50,000,000.

And since we're not going to get 50,000,000 civilisations within the handful of lightyears before our signals have attenuated down to the background... I'd put the odds heavily against anyone seeing us on that basis.

Whether someone will pick up the composition of our atmosphere and aim a more powerful beam in our direction I don't know. But it makes it ... something that the other civilisation would have to decide to do. And then you're dealing with - does it actually make sense to let other civilisations know that you exist? What are your potential gains when balanced against the risk of relativistic weapons and the like?
There's an important basic confusion here: addresses are not accounts. The closest thing to an "account" is a Bitcoin wallet, which is a database that can contain many addresses. And not all addresses are owned by a single party; any business that takes deposits (eg, Bitcoin exchanges), will tend to have a high-balance address full of Bitcoins that it doesn't own, but is holding for others. (The largest-balance address is used by MtGox, and many third parties own the rights to varying numbers of coins in it.) Drawing inferences from the Bitcoin blockchain is very hard, an deliberately so; that's what protects users' privacy.

> the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking chains and fork-merge structures, in which a large balance is either transferred within a few hours through hundreds of temporary intermediate accounts

This is what happens when someone with a large account balance spends it a little at a time using the default Bitcoin software: each time they send coins to someone else, some of them go to the recipient, while the rest (the "change") goes to an automatically-created new address that's kept in the same wallet. If there are hundreds of transactions in a short time, you're probably looking at a wallet that's controlled by a Bitcoin-oriented business such as an exchange.

> or split into many small amounts which are sent to different accounts only in order to be recombined shortly afterwards into essentially the same amount in a new account.

This sounds like coins getting withdrawn from an exchange, circulating a little bit, then getting deposited back in the same exchange. This also happens if someone takes all their coins (split between different addresses because they've been doing transactions on them), and sends them all to the same address (eg, to move them to a new wallet). Alternatively, it might be a coin-mixer (eg, I have read that Silk Road does coin-mixing on its depositors' coins). And there are other things that make weird transaction patterns, like Satoshi Dice.

> It is remarkable that 97% of all owners had fewer than 10 transactions each, while 75 owners use the network very often and are affiliated with at least 5,000 transactions

This doesn't say anything about the owners, only about the addresses. Large numbers of addresses are created and used only once, because that's what the software does. A few addresses are reused many times, because they're published and many people send coins to them
wow, finally. Something that will actually be useful I believe.

Is there a possibility to collect all the hashes of everyone if you have enough computing power?
yea check out the documentary money masters. Jordan Maxwell is really good on the topic too, but probably believes in lizard people by now... IMHO they could have been vampires too though.
The other great apes are quite intelligent and occupy the top spots in their ecological niches. Bottlenose dolphins pass the mirror test for self-awareness and appear to have individual names [1], and are at the top of their ecological niche. Elephants pass the mirror test and are at the top of their ecological niche. Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent for invertebrates, and are among the top predators in their niches. In the blink of an ecological eye, intelligence has started showing up at the top spots of the food chain across a diversity of different niches. Just because we haven't seen it before (e.g., the top dinosaur intelligence, the genus Troodon, only had a brain-to-body mass ratio comparable to modern birds [2]), doesn't mean it isn't adaptive - only that it took a while to evolve. Life existed for a pretty long time on Earth before it started running around on the land, too. Doesn't mean running around on the land is maladaptive.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/02/dolphin-names/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troodon
Besides, I don't care how "legal" they make it or how much oversight and checks they put in place.

At the end of the day, they're still collecting everything. And I don't want that to happen. Is that too much to ask for? Google got in so much trouble over collecting Wi-fi data, but if the governments do it, and a lot more, it's fine? Surely there have been, and will continue to be alternative solutions to stopping terrorists besides collecting everyone's information en-masse.

Also, what about the foreigners? Politicians, judges, activists, everyone is fair game for spying? I don't want to live in such a world. That's can't be the future.

Obama tries to make it seem like this is the "balance" between privacy and security. This nowhere close to a "balance". They're getting everything. How is that a "balance" for privacy? If that's the balance, I don't think I want to know what they have in mind for when they really only care about security.
> Well, the beauty of a democratic society is that if a majority agree with you, then you can change the system. Personally, I disagree with you, but it's a free country.

The majority are disengaged, disinterested and apathetic.

Furthermore, the particularly abhorrent feature of these programs is that their existence was kept secret. Secret courts issuing secret orders to secret services to work in secret violating citizens' right to privacy.

Without these leaks, citizens lacked the capacity to change this system, because they had no idea this system even existed.
> the exchange rates (as denominated in anything) would dive through the floor, never to recover.

Why people keep saying such things? If 1% were to sell all bitcoins they have for 0.01 $ then other people would just suck them up at such price. Mostly miners would be interested in acquiring bitcoins well below price of the electricity they use to mine. Since mining gear is becoming increasingly specialized it's either bet on bitcoins bouncing back or write off all your investments in hardware.

If people who own most bitcoins cashed up they would have to do it at significant loss to themselves and even then they could not drive bitcoins to 0. Even if bitcoin lost 99.9% of its current price it doesn't significantly harms its utility as a mean of exchange. Paradoxically it would make it even more attractive for investors.

Some people think that if price drops significantly people will just abandon the thing. It's not tulip bulbs or hollow dotcoms. It's the first truly valuable thing on the internet.
You could, I suppose, by continuously querying the bittorrent DHT for infohashes.
My startup is still on page five of Google and our traffic is almost all word-of-mouth. So it is possible but it is not fun. Very easy to get bitter when you see the spam that floats above your stuff and hear people tell you that Google rewards quality content, or when users write you to complain that they cannot find you.

Anyway, I would not try it with multiple founders. It is hard enough to get yourself to the point of making enough money to pay rent/food for one person without strong distribution without having to worry about multiple partners.
I had a similar setup a couple of years ago. The main problem I had was the maintenance required. If you have any machine publicly accessible you have to be on top of security updates and proper system hardening. I gave up after my exim4 Debian system got 0-day rooted.

If doing it again I would avoid a Debian based distro. I'd probably use openbsd. And the less ports open the better.
Ask HN: Best command line XMPP client?
I recently asked about the best command line Usenet client (and the best command line mail client has been discussed plenty in the past); now I wanted to ask about peoples favorite CLI XMPP clients?

Right now I'm using Finch (CLI version of Pidgin), but I hate the interface (fake floating windows just waste a ton of space). I use IRSSI for IRC, and always wish there were something similar for XMPP (that wasn't just a hack ontop of IRSSI). Any suggestions?

I prefer Vim-like to Emacs-like if it's relavant, but all suggestions are welcome. OTR support a big plus.
The Enemy, When Relocating, Is Often Yourself | The PR: Press Releases
The author should add "large dataset" to the title.
Wow this is basically an excerpt from Mein Kampf.

The head of the NSA should consult with us here on reddit and HN before doing anything since we actually understand geopolitical realities.
Indeed these rights were acknowledged before the constitution and Madison, along with some of the other framers, worried that a Bill Of Rights might create the negative pregnant[1][2] that we see being born out today. The largely ignored 9th amendment was a compromise between not having a bill of rights or somehow exhaustively enumerating all of them.

It's ignorance of history that holds us back.

[1] http://www.library.okstate.edu/constitution/previous.html#ad...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pregnant