skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is woefully uninformed.

> There can be only 21 million Bitcoins ever found or mined, though once found ,Bitcoins can be divided into 10^8 small subparts called shitoshis which are what’s actually used for buying things.

There's not really a limit to it. You can increase the precision to 64bit if you really wanted to, 8 decimal places is just arbitrary for the moment. Values below 0.00005 BTC aren't even spendable though at the moment to avoid spam, so eight points is hardly a limiting factor.

> but on the other hand Bitcoins are inflation-resistant because of constrained supply and can’t easily be counterfeited, either.

They can't ever be counterfeited actually. At one point an integer overflow meant that additional ones were erroneously created, but that's been patched since 2009.

> Bitcoins, while possibly uncrackable are definitely not unhackable. Mining Bitcoins requires the validation of 90 other random miners before your Bitcoins are judged real and assignable

120 blocks to mature, actually. The term "random" makes them sound untrustworthy, but there's not really much trust put in them either. They could be as malicious as the author.

> but what’s to keep me from owning 90+ Bitcoin mining accounts and gaming the system?

Nothing but the cost of doing so, which is the entire point of miners competing.

> What if Amazon Web Services simply assigned all unoccupied EC2 cores to this task?

Nothing. EC2 rented servers are far too slow to attack the network at this point, that's the point of having a faster hashing speed and overall difficulty.
What is a DDoS? How do i prevent it?
They should have stuck with Wayland. Gnome 3.10 supports Wayland, and Fedora 20 will ship with Wayland as an option. openSUSE 13.1 will also ship with Gnome 3.10, so getting Wayland working there shouldn't be hard, and I'm sure the Arch and Gentoo communities will have it working very soon too.
Allahabad (India) based Khitchdee (http://www.khitchdee.com) is building software at the intersection of Hindustani music and computer technology. We are building a Windows app in C called Inck.exe that enables its user to produce music, teach and learn and write useful programs.

We're looking for an apprentice who will come in and work on parts of Inck.exe for us. A deep interest in music is essential as only then you'll really enjoy working on this. A deep interest in programming is also essential as only then you'll appreciate the usefulness of our app. A fresh B.Tech in Computer Science or something similar would be ideal.

We pay you a market rate salary and we give you valuable equity. If we do well as a company, you'll do well financially.

If you're interested, email me at rohit@khitchdee.com
How to remotely access your computer from your iPhone
Serious question HN: I often see parents have an almost instinctual need to feed their children bad information and see if the can detect the falsehoods.

Is this instrumental in teaching "savvy" ?
Hmm I just thinking of some examples, always good to have some data. When did a non-founder make a failing company successful again. I can think of Porsche with Wiedeking, however it´s a bit different there, since the founders are already dead I think.
We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
IMHO If Microsoft executives really want to begin turning things around for their company, they need to take a step back and really refocus their philosophy towards becoming an innovative software company again.
Just a guess, but I don't think it will. The policy and all documents are not in English, and no reason for them to be either.

So if they make an exemption for travelers insurance, it will be hard for them to verify that it meets the criteria of the exemption.
Regularity - A friendly regular expression builder for Ruby
A 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential will get you very far in life, but not as far as a 130 to 145 IQ maxed out on potential will.
Of course you're right re:equity. Very few non-founder chairmen hold equivalent equity (in percent), and very few founder chairmen hold equivalent equity (in dollars).

But it's impossible to know Bill's level of commitment. If we use Ballmer's tenure as an indicator of Gates' direction from above... then asking Bill to step down is as obvious as a (forced) resignation by Ballmer. I think the investors (who own 1/20th of the company as well) are rightfully concerned. Didn't Gates pick Ballmer as his successor?
How To Get Paid To Blog: 7 Top Paid Review Sites
After seeing the first, extremely slick demo of meteor, I was, as I believe a lot of people were, extremely excited to see where the project would go. Then came the funding, and some twelve or sixteen months of development, and I finally decided to dive in.

I really wanted to like it. I was predisposed to do so.

But from the very beginning, I was confronted with something I consider a deal breaker. While I am wary and generally disinclined toward the increasingly popular pattern of curl an installation script and pipe into sh, in this case it is not only skeptical, it is downright ludicrous. Why would I, nay anyone, want to install an npm package this way? Should not the installation instructions simply be `npm install -g meteor`? And what if I need to work on multiple meteor projects with different versions? Surely there is support for adding it to your package.json file, but why is this not the primary means of installation and well documented?

Maybe I am being overly sensitive to these issues, but it really baffled me that the very foundation upon which a meteor project is predicated would be contradictory to the typical node workflow. I will probably try meteor to spike out a project at some point in time, but I do not foresee myself using it extensively in the near future.
scanning for spam does not have to extract the context. Scanning for serving ads probably does?
Do you have children? I know ostensibly that is irrelevant but what you're describing is good and impressive but it's probably not as uncommon as you think. Baby sign language is pretty popular in the parenting world. Actually, many babies can do that at much earlier ages. Not to detract anything, just saying ... :)
I hesitate to agree with this article given that that hindsight is 20/20. If anything, you could mark the decline of the BlackBerry with the introduction of the iPad.
Sure! The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a protocol called DDP, which runs over websockets or HTTP long polling. Meteor clients can connect to any DDP server and vice versa. So you just need to implement a DDP server for Python.

DDP is pretty simple (just a few messages) and the spec for the 'pre1' version of the protocol is in Git:
https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/livedat...

This is pretty close to version '1' of the protocol that will be locked down in Meteor 1.0:
https://trello.com/c/kMkw800Z/53-official-ddp-specification
So many articles about who's smart, why are they smart, blah blah blah. I just wonder if it is just narcissism or its inadequacy or what ... but on some level, if you think you are smart, then just get on with and do "smart things" and if you think you're not "smart enough," get on it with anyway ... pining away about whether Khan Academy can make you the next Einstein or whether you need to be Einstein to understand it is pointless ... Sure we need some people to research education and so forth but I feel like we have that covered by now. :)
> How do I NOT place importance on sex and love?

Yep, I see where you're coming from. And if it weren't for that outlook, chances are the entire human race would die out in a matter of centuries, because people would say, "Jesus, what's the point of this? Who actually enjoys all this forehead-beating?" But hardly anyone does that. They get bred out of the population. By natural selection.
Yep, Word Lens http://readwrite.com/2010/12/16/amazing_instant_translation_...
I second your comments on Pirates of Silicon Valley. I always thought it was a spoof, but it's actually quite a good film - it's definitely a lot better than the new Jobs movie ... it gives you much better insight to what sort of man Steve Jobs was (good and bad).

One of the things that stood out from the movie was just how much Microsoft "stole" from Apple. I'm not making that comment as flame bait - it's common knowledge that Microsoft copied Apple ... but I didn't realise that Jobs gave Gates the actual computers before they were released ... including operating system and all.. It gives you an understanding of just how much copying actually happened.

Two sides to the same coin: Gates was most probably the more shrewd operator, but with little tech skills - he bested Steve Jobs who was much more of a visionary, but let his guard down with Bill Gates, and paid the penalty.
Public service announcements should at the very least not contain false information in their titles.
Edges between abstractions? You lost me with your abstraction.
Ask HN: Is C# suitable for creating a modern OS like Windows 7?
Are C# and the .Net framework suitable to create a modern OS like Windows 7?

This is a followup question from [the now deleted] thread:

http://web.archive.org/web/20100812071342/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/783238/why-windows-7-isnt-written-in-c

What kind of problems might one expect to encounter by choosing C# over the tried-and-true strategy of using C? What kind of problems in this domain might be better solved by a high-level language like C# compared to C?
Solid parenting advice, #1 talk to your children even when they cannot talk, #2 read new books to your children every week. You can always re-read favorites but just keep the new books coming. And then combine #1 and #2 and talk to your children about the books you read.

There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name. It starts by looking at the colors used in ancient texts and works its way forward. Some women have more cones than normal and are tetrachromatic so they can see more colors than the normal trichromatic human. But until you name the new colors apparently you can't see them (or recognize them).

People seem to need words to organize their thoughts and reason about things they see or read. The more words you give them, the better able they are to reason.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/
Which "privileges"? The ability to say I'm American? Tell me how that's worth it. Tell me how it's fair that I should be criminally liable to report my income and bank balances every fucking year to a country I neither live in nor draw a paycheck from.

You'll be unable to come up with a reasonable explanation for this, but feel free to insult me again by ascribing my desire to live elsewhere unmolested to a sense of 'entitlement' or some other garbage.
How Can Crowdfunding Help You Fulfill Your Dreams
Given the massive, long-term and apparently ongoing breaches at major data collection agencies, a complete leak (to the public) of non-pseudonymous transaction history for any given credit card has probably either already happened or it's just a matter of time. You probably shouldn't use a credit card or checking account to do anything you wouldn't put a picture of on Twitter.

There seem to be a lot of forces that make it impractical for institutions to keep secrets of any kind secret. This does not seem to be stopping said institutions from acquiring vast volumes of sensitive data. The volume of data used to be a practical limit on it becoming public, but that's fading fast too. This is going to get weird before it gets better.
That view would also line up with Pirates of Silicon Valley (that Gates stated was reasonably close to the truth). Gates was a "wheeler and dealer" rather than being a geek. The way he played Apple and IBM was the sign of a business genius.
It often works out well. Not every company is Apple.

Many companies are at the end of their life cycle where the best thing they could do is manage the business well and return capital to shareholders.

Often founders act like it's their baby and don't want to let it die instead of fulfilling their fiduciary duties. You don't see many articles about how GE can't make anything new since Thomas Edison left.
> I think Shuttleworth got burned by the early-days Gnome Shell debacle--he felt that they had no input on or control over what Gnome Shell was to become, so he went his own way with Unity.

As someone who was there from the beginning, this is false. The hackfest where some of the initial goals of GNOME Shell were planned out in 2008 at Canonical offices. We were wondering why some of the Canonical guys who were listed as RSVPing weren't there... until we went to lunch and saw that they were having their own private meeting. I don't think we'll ever know what was discussed -- perhaps their indicator system.

Canonical employees were participating in the Boston hackfests in 2008 and 2009 and we welcomed their presence; they actually had a lot of good ideas which we integrated. I, personally, never had any issues with Canonical's work and I think all of my coworkers would agree. I'm really not sure where this perceived "us vs. them" animosity came from, but I never felt it personally.

They're still absolutely welcome to contribute back to GNOME if they want to (and, to be fair, some still do).
Corporate and government is profitable. It's just that the profits are shared by a plethora of companies. Apple failed long ago to get a foothold and gave up.

Apple don't dominate the high end of phones by market share any more. They do make more money out of it than anyone else at the moment. Good for shareholders but consumers are largely indifferent to profitability.

If HTC and Samsung went bankrupt Android would still be OK. They'd be replaced.
Any discussion around smartness reminds me of the Big Bang Theory. If one needs to discuss their intellect, well they probably don't have much.
npm install -g meteorite

Then create a site with it and specify whatever local version of meteor you want.

The deets: https://github.com/oortcloud/meteorite/
As a GNOME developer, there's still a lot of work to do. It's mentioned as a tech preview for a reason. We'll work on shipping with full Wayland support by 3.12, but don't expect it to be fully usable or represent the final state of Wayland support.
Children are amazing mimics.

If you interact with them in clever and intelligent ways, they seem to end up thinking similarly.

If you act reserved, prejudice and racist around them, sadly they also learn to mimic that as well.
it's because your getting a full mongo database installed and configured with it
Time to split Microsoft into pieces to unlock shareholder value.
CERN releases retro 'Line Mode' browser
don't forget about Muggsy Bogues!
Red light cameras
I'm curious if red light cameras actually discourage red light running. Do we actually run fewer red lights because some intersections have them? Would be curious to see actual data on this.
Damn, I just paid for this book 3 weeks ago!

But for those who haven't read it, it was money incredibly well spent. I have a much greater understanding of JavaScript's batshit crazy semantics and FP techniques. It will make you a better programmer, regardless of whether you use JS regularly or not. But if you do, I think this book is as close to capturing the true soul of Javascript as anything I've read. The examples are very well thought out, and the writing style is a joy to read. And if you like it as much as I did, I hope you'll kick a few bucks the author's way.

Well done Mr. Braithwaite!
I can't remember where I read it, but I know that hunting and tracking skills don't correlate very well with g. Though surprisingly, marksmanship does.
I switched to Chrome recently because Firefox was growing overnight to the point where it started thrashing and becoming unusable. I just checked and it says I already have the latest version. This recent change must not be the whole story.
The problem with drug addicts is not what happens when they have sufficient money to fuel their addiction (except in the case of a number of drugs, including -ironically- the one under discussion here : meth. Making it cheaper won't work : dosage must be continually increased to keep the effects, resulting in the need for exponentially increasing doses, and the money to buy them. And that's ignoring psychological addiction. Few people start out doing 5 doses on a work day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine#Long-term

Some tidbits:
Methamphetamine use has a high association with depression and suicide as well as serious heart disease, amphetamine psychosis, anxiety, and violent behaviors. Methamphetamine also has a very high addiction risk.[12]
Unlike cocaine and amphetamine, methamphetamine is directly neurotoxic to midbrain dopamine neurons.[27] Moreover, methamphetamine use is associated with an increased risk of Parkinson's disease due to the fact that uncontrolled dopamine effluxion is neurotoxic.[11][28] Long-term dopamine upregulation occurring as a result of methamphetamine abuse can also cause neurotoxicity, which is believed to be responsible for causing persisting cognitive deficits, such as memory loss, impaired attention, and decreased executive function. Similar to the neurotoxic effects on the dopamine system, methamphetamine can also result in neurotoxicity to serotonergic neurons.[29]
For Google products, huge gains come from running an optimizing compilation (Closure Compiler) which dramatically rearranges Javascript the same way GCC rearranges C into assembly.

It is not always true that minifying method names is the same as gzip, as a good minifier will understand scopes and arrange many of the variables to have both the same name and smaller distances between like symbols. This shifts the frequency distribution of the symbols as well as the distances allowing the huffman coding to be more optimal.
This link told me nothing about "how". I learned more from HN comments than I did from the link. Shame on link-bait.
GNOME 3.10 doesn't completely support Wayland, yet. Parts of the software stack do, so you can run Weston in a window and then run individual GTK+3 apps with the Wayland backend and they'll probably work, but actual end-to-end Wayland is aimed at a later date. It is getting close, though :)
I've been looking for the perfect note taking application for a while and here are the things I'd really like that nobody else seems to have in one place (I understand that these things likely do not coincide with your goals but I thought I'd put them out there anyway on the offchance you implement them :) ):

- Strong (technical) security so that the server is a knowledge free environment (no staff, governments whatever can read my notes). Ideally through client-side encryption (perhaps the search would grab some tokens and send them to the server for processing, rather than having the plaintext document on the server). Perhaps the encryption should be optional and encrypted notes wouldn't be sent at all?
As a non-American, I _really_ don't like being forced to put my data on American servers where I essentially have no rights.
The alternative to this is having a way to specify that the note should remain offline (in localstorage or somesuch) and never touch the server.

- Ability to take the app offline and have it work mostly the same (without search of course)/

- Web clipping (see the Evernote web clipper) with image rehosting

- Markdown support

- Desktop client

- Client side plugins (these make the rest of the above much easier), ideally written in something like JS or Python.

- Full-featured API

I really just want something where I can feel like I'm in control. When I use most services it feels like I'm surrendering something (security, convenience, privacy, ownership of my data).
He fails to mention the two biggest weaknesses of Bitcoin (in my uninformed opinion) :-

- The stability and security of the various online exchanges

- The relative difficulty of converting BC to/from cash
Wait. This is pretty much just "closure conversion," which is a standard, and widely known technique. Did I not read carefully enough?
Meteor is a lot more than an npm package. For example, if you type these four commands..

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh; meteor create myapp; cd myapp; meteor

you're up and running with a complete stack including MongoDB, node, the dozen-ish core packages that make up the Meteor pubsub and realtime templating stack, and the 'meteor' build tool (which can do things like compile coffeescript and less, generate source maps, minify your production code, and provide a realtime development environment where whenever you save a file your app updates in your browser.)

As for versioning, it's actually got a great way of doing that. Each of your Meteor projects is locked to a specific Meteor release version (similar to an Ubuntu release, it's a release-engineered snapshot of the Meteor core packages), which you can set with the `meteor update` command. And this has automatic `npm shrinkwrap` integration so that if you use npm packages alongside Meteor packages, everyone on your team is always running exactly the same versions of all of the code in your app. The Meteor tools automatically handle all the work of downloading any needed Meteor versions and keeping them installed side-by-side on your laptop, using the correct one for a given project, and notifying you of available updates.
I cringed when I read you saying 'am pretty intelligent these days'
Einstein, Euler, Reimann realized that the subjects and challenges were truly important, not their intelligence. Solve life, don't inflate self.
Internet Explorer 6 usage drops below 5 percent in September
If a wolf is raised by humans, how much will that improve its IQ score?
Cool project. Thank you!

BTW, I create srcmap database for this project @

http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm#c=P&d=/proj_src/wizardwar/&p=...

Let's see how many users will hit the server in next couple of day or so. (finger crossing...)
That's kind of the tradeoff of hip college towns, right? The good news is that if you're willing to relocate there, you're probably also willing to relocate away from there.
> There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name. [emphasis added]

Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific. Do you see why? A color we can't name isn't open to systematic investigation. If we try to get around this by asking a subject to compare the "unseen" color to a color patch, we're only given the "unseeable" color a name by proxy.

This kind of claim is very commonly made by people who don't understand science.

> People seem to need words to organize their thoughts and reason about things they see or read.

This argues that animals lacking language also lack the ability to think. Copious evidence disproves this idea. Video of a raven using tools to achieve a purpose:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Z6Mvjd9w0

> The more words you give them, the better able they are to reason.

The better able to reason with words. This is self-referential in the extreme.
There's a list of various Go design documents maintained on the Go wiki:

https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/DesignDocuments

There are a lot of interesting reads in there.
The latest changes done as part of this are only present on Aurora (Firefox alpha) and the feature is turned off by default.

Also, I have my Firefox (Aurora again) running for over a week now on my dev machine with > 50 tabs open an I have had no issues with memory. I suppose there is some problem with one of your add-ons. Try creating a clean profile and see if it's any different.