skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jon Rosenberg (of goats.com)'s experiment with this in the early 2000s -- not bitcoin, which didn't exist yet, but micropayments in general -- was the first one I saw with hard numbers about why this will be extremely difficult. Sadly, he's taken his site offline, but short version: There's a huge difference in someone's mind between "free", and "not free"; it's seen as a change in category, not in degree. Having to commit any amount of money - even $1 - significantly reduces your audience, but once someone's gotten over the hump of willing to pay, you might as well ask them to make a larger purchase of a T-Shirt or subscription.

This sort of experiment has been repeated many times. Folks like Flattr have tried to tie this to social networks, so it's seamless; and the NYTimes model of metered paywalls (smaller publishers can use something like http://www.tinypass.com/, which Andrew Sullivan's blog uses) seems to be taking over magazine publishing. Even attempts to turn cable subscriptions a la carte aren't doing well, as Megan McArdle explains: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-cant...

I get why the Genesis Block would have enthusiasm for this idea. But one-pass micropayments, Bitcoin or otherwise, don't seem like the future to me.
You make a good point. A manager who would take Gladwell's advice of making the font more difficult to read would probably be the type of person who would've made many other ignorant decisions on his/her own.

The problem is, the more popular the pseudoscience is, the more likely it is that you'll run into it.
> Soon after, the $3.5bn facility shifted focus, cutting the amount of time spent on fusion versus nuclear weapons research - which was part of the lab's original mission.

That was so disappointing to read. Don't we have enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet 10x over already? Why would that still be the focus instead of inventing new sources of virtually unlimited energy??
Daughter singlehandedly codes Mom’s new multi-purpose mobile Thrift Shopping app
There is a good overview here for Kanban for development: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban_%28development%29
Again you're going with the Strawman-ing. Without social compacts and agreements, and caring for neighbours none of these men would have acted together. Even in the constitution, that was a few people representing and being part of a greater polity and social scene. They were the agents of this society, from whose values they created the DEclaration of independence, Federalist Papers, constitution, etc. they didn't pluck it out of thin air! Just as the President and his administration are not acting alone.

You seem to have problems with the idea of abstraction. Learn some maths perhaps? It's worth it. You're working on an abstaction right now, as someone has already kindly pointed out.

I also recommend that you Google "theories of collective action", it's an interesting set of ideas which have had much intellectual currency for a long time, and still do.

It is not the case that people are rational actors thinking and acting alone. To understand the world we sense, there has to be collaboration and sensemaking together. Corporations embody the values of the leaders and or founders and shareholders, and are held together byt the rituals and practices of the people there every day.

What are Thanksgiving and Labor Day, if not embodiments of American society?
Right, the Chrome icon should represent the user-facing internet.
Which is exactly what the post I quoted was doing, I'm not sure what you are trying to say
There are mountains of Python 2.x code (particularly inside companies) that are well-maintained and have no plans to port to Python 3 at the moment. My approach has generally been to make the code compatible across 2 and 3, though it requires great vigilance.
I don't know if taxing is the right idea. I just know that a city void of actual residents is a city without a soul. NYC is becoming like parts of Florida, except at least in FL, the residency is tied to a season, so you get a critical mass of people together in one place.
Ok, first of all your Java example is five lines not six.

Second, a lot of the concision comes from omitting type declarations. I will argue this decreases the readability of the Scala example.

What kind of data structure does getListOfStrings return? With Java you know with complete certainty that it returns a List of String (and only String). With Scala you have to infer it from the method name and hope it's honest. Likewise with the filter function. Whatever your opinion is of explicit type declarations, they are not mere "boilerplate".

There are certainly other savings in your Scala example apart from types, like the filter lambda function. I'm just a bit incredulous that Scala advocates genuinely think this saves them large quantities of time over the course of a project vs. an IDE-assisted Java version. I mean, how much longer would it take you to write or grok that Java for loop? Seconds? How much longer to do it 100X in a project? Minutes?

There has got to be a deeper underlying emotional reason why people advocate Scala -- which is not to invalidate that reason at all. It's important to feel love for your tools. But be honest about it. It's not about saving hundreds of hours of time writing boilerplate.
One of the most practical limitations to augmented reality is battery life. Glass is limited-enough as it is, simply handling text messages, phone calls, and the occasional photo. It dies on me all the time. I can't imagine it recording (and processing) video for AR for very long between charges. Half an hour would surprise me.
What I'm teaching at my Rails class
I don't see how this would work. What key is the encryptor supposed to use to encrypt?
This is such a simple, yet great idea.
"Last week I read Bill Gates will have sold all of his Microsoft stock by the year 2018 through a series of planned transactions that began many moons ago. I was dismayed by this. Why would he sell all of his stock?"

I don't know why smart people keep repeating this over and over again. Who says Bill has to sell all of his stock? His stock selling schedule does not go to 2018. Yes, if he continues to sell at the current rate through 2018 all of his stock will be gone, but that's an unrealistic extrapolation. Gates has never said he plans to sell all of his stock by X date. He holds $63 billion outside of Microsoft. I'd argue it's at least as likely that Gates will hold onto a multi-billion dollar stake, and that his goal is to limit risk by not having such a singular large position in any one investment. His goal being to maximize the amount of money he can put to use in the foundation, and minimize the chance of a big portfolio loss.

It's also worth noting that by 2018, he will have been sitting on that stock for roughly 43 years! That's an extraordinary length of time for a founder or any owner of any stock to hold.
There's actually a whole science to this that you're completely disregarding (which, generally speaking, is the cause of a lot of dumb thinking in this world).

Look up BLS inflation measures and the 'basket of goods'. You could spend years coming to an informed conclusion, and people have. Then look up the costs of patio furniture or computing equipment compared to 20 years ago. They decreased in price. It's an average, yo.

Also, if you don't trust broad consensus across economists, take a look at the free market. People are buying gov't treasuries. If they thought that inflation was higher than the interest rate, they wouldn't be buying them, right?
This is awesome news - I visited the NIF a few months ago and they seemed a little downtrodden when asked about results.

I bet they're all cocky now!

They also told us that the lasers they use, if built with modern tech today, would actually only be the size of a 40' cargo container (as opposed to like 100K sq-ft building), and cost like 1000x less. Pretty epic...

If we invested in fusion power like we did water power less than a century ago, I can only imagine the possibilities...
This bit of the fusion research is mostly aimed at making small-scale experiments on weaponised nuclear fusion without having to set off nuclear bombs every other day. As a long-term energy source, it is assumed to be rather unusable.
Another criticism of Gladwell's writing by Steven Pinker some years ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html...
You get all this fearmongering every time there's a currency change, but the people who do it are very much a vocal minority; a 'paper tiger' might be the apt term here :) Usually people are really curious about the new format and pass it around to be seen. There's some cachet in being one of the first to get a new -foo-.

In hindsight, the only real currency change criticism in Australia that had substance was a coin change. We replaced our $1 and $2 notes with a heavy 'gold' coin, and there was a criticism from blind lobby groups that these coins didn't 'ring' when you dropped them. They still make a particular sound, but it's much less obvious if you're not looking for it. Every other criticism I've seen, while sounding momentous before the change, dies pretty quickly after introduction.

As an aside, I was buying a train ticket in LA in 2009. Handing over a $50 note, the cashier marked it with a felt-tip pen. At this stage, I'd been using polymer notes for nearly 20 years, so I was puzzled and asked what it was for. She explained the marker was to test for counterfeit notes - and I had to stop myself from inadvertently muttering 'oh, how quaint!'. The pro-to-con ratio for polymer notes is just so strong, it's hard to see how a government can seriously reject it... it genuinely seems backwards.

As another aside, before polymer notes were brought in here, we had the dumbest bank note possible. The Australian paper $100 note was black and white with subtle colour shading. You could (coarsely) counterfeit it with a photocopier - and you'd occasionally hear stories of people giving such a crumpled-up note to a sleep-deprived 7-11 employee and walking away with nearly $100 change...
Sound a little cynical Lance. I'm not a Republican (or Democrat) but I think they just don't like spending tax payer money on "big government" projects. So, if a submission in such a hack-o-thon helped students, without requiring a lot of infrastructure, or govt investment, you might hit the right formula. Of course, STEM related might be necessary too.
That article is arguing against a gross simplification of an idea in Gladwell's book. Not exactly the same standard of rigorous science that Gladwell's critics seem to demand.
Giant displays or newsalumpas?
Kazakhstan is not small.

http://overlapmaps.com/print.php?defaultZoom=2&defaultLat=39...
I've made a plugin to automate this for AngularJS: https://github.com/steeve/angular-seo

Works with PhantomJS (of course).
Personal.com has a solution for this. It is cloud-based, with strong crypto and no need/motivation to see your data = secure. Secure Share is built-in and allows each team member to manage the passwords they are responsible for and share them with exactly the individuals that need access to them. Access can be revoked allowing you to revoke/change password on a regular basis, or as needed.
That would be a cool use of a CubeSat (as long as it never becomes worthwhile for a wealthy entity to go snatch it out of orbit...)
Oh my... http://www.jasondavies.com/animated-quasicrystals/
Would that be a payphone or are you implying one's own smartphone?
It's closer to a MCVMV or model, controller, view-model, view. Which is close to a MVVM pattern but adds a controller in. In my view the model is back-end, controller is mostly backend (processes the api requests and return the model data or the correct data value to the client), View-Model (grabs data via the model api and loads it into a model class on the client, this model class may or may not be the same structure as the server model, usually mapped to an/multiple api end point(s)), and View is the actual client side presentation.

That's how I tend to think of the pattern, it's not really MVC anymore it's a new pattern that is evolving out of MVC.
Exactly. If one were to give a hundred billion to fusion research, how much faster would we get results? Would we be funding needs that are critical to help the science into its next phase, or just be funding the N next-best ideas that previously were set aside?

For a community that has such high praise for bootstrapping businesses, there's a surprising love of throwing money at unproven scientific research avenues. We're in this for the long haul, if we get fusion in twice the time for half the money, we'll still have fusion.
The following should explain a bit better than I could: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247%28VS.85%29....
Keep in mind that the main goal of this project is to further research into nuclear weapons development.

> Too bad shovel ready money wasn't spent on more long lasting impact projects like this.

Perhaps some kind of "Manhattan Project".... oh.
unfortunately that nomenclature might also lead to exposing a spank the monkey method which might also be suboptimal
The whole Googling "proved" vs "showed" thing is junk science at its finest. Not really an effective way to illustrate your point, dude.
>If those fake rates were true

Energy and food prices are volatile, as they depend on exogenous factors. Try reading about droughts and wars. Your new car is more expensive in 2014 because it's safer, more fuel efficient and technologically superior in every way to your 1997 version.

Only the ignorant think the CPI reports are fake. Perhaps you should read up on the methodology of how it's calculated.

There is a whole world of finance that depends on a reasonable calculation of inflation rates. I suppose we are to believe the best financial minds on the planet are wrong in their bets, and you are right?
Consider Google Glass a HUD. (Not sure if that is their desired term but it's the closest commonly known example).
Glass is not attempting to tackle AR at the moment.

See this for more background on why it won't be anytime soon.
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/why-you-wont-see-hard-...

See these for even more background

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_head-mounted_display
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-up_display
Previous post (5 hours ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6509781
> that just means the language you are entering isn't the same language you are reading

I don't think that's true. Your phone has an autocomplete function for text input. You're still typing and reading the same language.

> a programmer who is aware of a case where being maximally concise impedes clarity can opt for a more explicit expression

By the same token, readers are held hostage by the poor decisions of overly concise Scala programmers. This is not theory, it really happens a nontrivial amount of time. You can blame the programmer if you want, but it's a point for Java readability.
Thanks, that makes much more sense.

I agree that webforms is bad. I worked on the framework side of things before ASP.NET MVC was an option and needing to roll our own was where most of my experience scaling .NET systems has come from. In spite of that, .NET was a good choice for other reasons and was fun to build and scale.
Wow, I remember seeing this project start up a few years ago, about how they wanted to make a "sun" on Earth. It seems it only took them 5 years to achieve this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3981697/Scie...

In a way, it reminds of Spiderman, too, but let's hope things don't go as badly as in the movie, once we start to make that "sun" big enough to provide a ton of energy.
> What happened for us is we tried to adopt it, but it was just so unworkably at odds with our current process, it got mostly ignored.

My issue with this criticism of kanban and many other agile practices is that it pretty much boils down to "X does not work; we did not actually do X".
How To Drive Traffic Without Search
Er, isn't this the purpose of CrunchBase? (albeit, it's less pretty).
Absense of evidence of " … if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it." is a damning enough takedown of at least that part of the argument…
Google Protocol Buffers. I want to use those for exporting scene information from Blender.

Blender uses Python 3 for scripting and the protobuf code generator and libraries only support Python 2.x. The same for Apache Thrift. Both are very well maintained, they are just not planning to move to Py3 any time soon.
That's one good question, up to this point I've only had the chance to use the main Application. Although, I doubt that they would do P2P from the browser, since they need to have the songs cached in your computer before being able to become part of the P2P network.
It's hard to Google, but that syntax is called UNC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)#Uniform_Naming...
Sorry the new information is that they are Microsoft Perceptive Pixel displays running Windows 8.
Sinatra for the API, Redis & PostgreSQL for data, Ember & SCSS on the front-end.

Redis should be able to handle the most common data for 10k users, with PG for the less commonly requested data.

No particular reason for choosing Ember other than I like it better than Angular/Knockout/Backbone, and same for SCSS as opposed to LESS/Stylus.

I feel like Node would be overkill in this scenario, Sinatra is so much faster to develop with (for me personally, I'm sure there are plenty of Noders out there who could swing it with their eyes closed).

PostgreSQL + Redis + Ember + SCSS + Sinatra; I call it "The PRESS Stack"
Thank you! Can you link here to any better economic analyses which are not so osecret but worth reading, to enlighten us some more?
This .NET library from the .NET BCL team helps a little: http://bcl.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Long%20Path&referring...
> If you aim for consumer friendliness, you shouldn't do DRM in the first place.

> Since DRM is by definition "defective on purpose" (or "defective by design", as some NGOs say), there is no reason to trust any DRM scheme - p2p or centralized.

Those are unexamined assumptions that are driven more by emotion than anything.
I intend to be moral. This can coincide with obeying the law and with breaking it.
Seriously? (string) x fuzzy equals to (int) 0? Holy crap that is some cancer.
Concept: Simple Collaborative Web Pages
> There is no intrinsic demand for bitcoins, only inertia behind perceived value.

Not true; anyone who sells something for bitcoins creates some amount of intrinsic demand. Silk Road did, and was probably by far the biggest generator of such demand, but not the only one.
Bitcoin paywalls… gee how original. It's just like our old non-solutions, only with Bitcoins, so that makes it awesome.
I've been using TypeScript for experimenting with Node.js and while it's a great solution there's a few difficulties some might face with it:

-TypeScript definitions for many libraries, such as express are out of date and require modding to use.

-Visual Studio has no built in support for TypeScript with Node for debugging, but it has been mentioned as likely to be added by the TypeScript team eventually.

-There are third party plugins for Node in Visual Studio for debugging, but none support TypeScript yet.

I've found the best solution thus far is Intellij IDEA or WebStorm, as it has support for both Node and TypeScript.
> This is a guy that ordered at least 2 known about hits/kills .

In pallandt's America, people are guilty until proven innocent.
First project on the Perl 11 page is p2. Perl may be great at manipulating text, but it looks like it's awful at manipulating numbers.
NIF's nuclear weapons research was in support of maintaining the current arsenal of nuclear weapons. Most notably, it helps solve the question of how to ensure current stockpiles are reliable without actually detonating a nuke (since that's a huge no-no). It also kept a generation of nuclear physicists and engineers in employment, and also providing a method by which to test future weapons designs.

So really, the answer is, it doesn't matter how many nukes we have right now, NIF was created (in part) to ensure that the capability to blow up the world could be maintained.

As depressing as it is, it's pretty much how it goes with nearly all defense technology spin offs. Why the hell did we spend all that time working on rockets that purposefully crashed back onto the Earth (on top of people!) instead of doing something like getting communications satellites up, or getting to the moon.
I'm still testing big loads with mono. Once I figure out all the performance bottlenecks, I'll write a blog post about it.
Neuroscience journal takes tough stance on plagiarism
Ask HN: Startup School worth it?
For anyone who has been there (or seen videos), how was it? Is it worth a trip? Why or why not?

A little bit of background: Startup School is marketed as an event for people who "thought about one day starting a startup" or "afraid of making the final leap". I have previously started two startups, and I am debating if I should make the two-hour trip or not, as I don't seem to be the target audience? Will I still get a lot out of the event?
Bitcoin doesn't have this: http://www.tinypass.com/terms/
Er, my identity is disclosed on the site, on the FAQ page and in the page footer of every blog page. My name is Mike Gogulski. Previously, I registered bradleymanning.org and co-founded the Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning Support Network, among other things.

Namecheap's system screwed up when I ordered the domains and blinded the whois information. I tried disabling it, waiting a few days, and it's still blinded. I opened a ticket a few hours ago.

But yeah, you go, there, with your presumptions of guilt in your last line, and five sentences at the start showing clearly that you're way into "scam! scam!" before bothering to actually read.
Try this one too: http://www.jasondavies.com/bml/
It's a list of projects all loosely oriented around untying Perl 5 the language from perl the runtime. Perl 6 has already done this, with several (Parrot, JVM, Mono/.NET) VMs currently working fairly successfully, if a tad slowly still.

Personally I'm most excited about perlito (which features perl 5 compiled to javascript, among other things) and p2, which promises to be a super-speedy rendition of Perl 5 based on why the lucky stiff's last public project, the Potion language/VM.

The idea, as I understand it, is that if both Perl 5 and Perl 6 are running on the same VM, they can share library code on the level of that VM's bytecode.

All of that said, perl the runtime remains actively maintained and improved. End Perl users are just going to have some choices, much as Ruby users have had for a while (JRuby vs MRI, for example).