skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Above all other things, BTC is an autonomous zero trust system: You don't trust that something else is right, you verify it. (you might argue that the software is trusted: but you can verify that too, if you have the interest and resources)

Practically everything that Bitcoin does is a pure mathematical function. So long as everyone applies the same rules they will also come to the same conclusion about what the state of the system is— autonomy and consensus are not incompatible.

Unfortunately, there is _one_ thing that can't be decided autonomously with consensus in a distributed environment of mutual distrust: Transaction ordering. There are a bunch of superficial reasons why this must be so, but it can also be understood from the perspective of relativity: The apparent order of events depends on your frame of reference. Without a single privileged point of observation ordering can be ambiguous.

Ordering is important because the order decides which of any repeated spends of a coin is the correct one. Bitcoin uses a special kind of election to decide ordering, since consensus order cannot be achieved autonomously like everything else. Instead of voting by number of people or by number of computers— which is easily compromised by sibyl attackers— it votes using energy: The network selects the history that has the most sum-total energy spent crunching on it.

Because the energy is spent confirming the whole of the history, going back and reordering old parts becomes very costly the further back you go... and participants who don't go along with such an effort have an inherent advantage, since they're not losing the sum total of work after that point. And even then— all they can do is reorder the history, they couldn't reassign coins without having ever owned them.

The people spending energy to validate transactions have their rational incentives largely aligned with the rest of the system by virtue of the fact that if they spend energy on a losing version of history, that energy is lost forever and any income they would receive from subsidy (the initial minting of coins) or transaction fees is lost forever. Their income is generally maximized by mining on the single chain with the best odds of surviving, and this makes the system converge.

So could some quorum of Bitcoin users seize back the coins? If by quorum you mean all surviving users after the change, yes: If all the users want to change the software can be rewritten arbitrarily. But it would sort of moot the system if they did. Could a simple majority do it? No way. Bitcoin isn't that kind of consensus.
> as a simple example, recumbent cycles are faster under many conditions.

I highly doubt that. Everybody knows that ugly bikes are slow, and recumbents are as ugly as they come. /s
I always think before I write.

I used quotes because I'm borrowing an analogy from police investigations. You provided "motive", ie. "Google has a good reason to pay lobbyists for tax loopholes: money." But you did not provide evidence of said "crime", ie. "You have not shown direct evidence that they pay for lobbying for the purpose of tax loopholes -- rather, that they pay for lobbying (ostensibly for other purposes like net neutrality)."
The $1bn weather app: why Monsanto is betting the farm on smarter forecasts
That's the way I read it.
>me submitting a YouTube video for a private audience (demonstrating a new feature in a web site I developed for a side client) that got broadcast to all my friends on Google+ was the last straw.

No offense, but how did you manage to do that? I've posted a few videos to YouTube in the same manner and have never, ever had an issue with it.
Define "loophole".

Because your definition seems to be taking advantage of something in a law, miswording or mistake, in a negative way, or even illegal, to avoid paying taxes that are rightfully due.

I define it as following the law as written to lower your tax burdens.

You imply that there's something inherently wrong with using "loopholes". I say there's something inherently wrong not using them, since it is the law.

You may attempt to make this about moral high ground and doing what's right, but that's your definition of the situation and you are welcome to your opinion. But the law says otherwise.

Especially since the company is basically legally required to use such methods to reduce their tax burdens, because otherwise they're likely to be sued by share holders or to whomever they are beholden to.
The brand on your card is heavily influenced by what your bank is offering; your bank (card issuer) is offering products that benefit themselves; and they benefit from higher interchange, not lower interchange.

If Visa or Mastercard would say '0% interchange' then that would make them not competitive - banks wouldn't market those cards much and wouldn't offer any rewards/points on them; merchants would benefit but customers wouldn't, since merchants wouldn't be allowed to give discounts to the 'cheap card' anyway - the rule is 'same price or you can't take our cards at all and you'll get less customers'.
When we look back a few years from now to see where google went wrong, it'll begin and end with Google+. It is the worst product execution and strategy in recent times.
Reminds me of UNWIND-PROTECT in CL
Culture, Not Leverage, Made Wall Street Riskier
The box was already unchecked for me as well, thus the confusion.
One of the few constants in security, "Security through obscurity is no security at all"
I honestly don't understand whats wrong with this. It just seems like the natural progression of the services that Google already provides. If my friend searches for a new phone, they should see my public reviews of the phones. Friends reviews should be made front and center because reviews from people we know are always more valuable. The way the page reads, it seems they will only use your reviews in ads for friends, I think that's fair, but if they use it for strangers too then I'll probably opt out.
> Non-linear systems are inherently non-deterministic

Wait, what? That's not correct. The problem is that they are very much deterministic, so you get the classic situation of small variations in initial conditions having wildly different effects on the outcome, and we can never hope to measure all the things that can affect the weather a few weeks out.

However, we don't have to eliminate error, we just have to push the error below some threshold (+- a few degrees, within some margin of the actual distribution of rain over an area, etc) for some acceptable amount of time into the future. More data is definitely one part of the solution to the problem.
The OS does not. That's the job of the out of order architecture (load prediction and reordering of later non-dependent instructions).

And when that fails, it's exactly the use case for hyperthreading.
It wasn't checked for me. I suppose I could have unchecked it earlier and don't recall.
Didn't go through the link.

This was turned off by default for me when I edited my Google Profile (not a paid user).

Shared Endorsements Off edit
What if it were used to support students trying to learn intersectional gender theory, or help a small family replace their year-old phones, or pay for some fresh grad to sit on their couch and play videogames?

I'm not trying to be provocative, it's just that you're thinking about this in the wrong way. You can't associate it with any uses that you may think beneficial or worthwhile. You need to accept that it's no-strings-attached money, otherwise you're just going to be disappointed.
Or on a more light-hearted note: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Sou...

Which just goes to show, hitting memory is a Bad Thing(tm) even when you're running on a slow(from today's perspective) processor like a 68000.
Useable live programming (Microsoft research)
Well then, as a fan of the sport who apparently already knows everything a mainstream magazine has to offer and then some - can you offer some insight, a link or anything at all for the rest of us beyond self-satisfied bitching?
Mine was unchecked when I went to the page.
There is about a 3% (0.5^5) chance of this occurring with random guesses isn't there? There are enough hedge funds that predict the market that many of them are bound to be right many days in a row. I will be impressed if you get a whole month in a row.
If you don't use G+ there is nothing this opt out would do. This is an opt-out for having your G+ profile picture and name show up next to search results for people who have you in their circles. If you +1 a page, then that page can be promoted in your friends search results with your name linked to the page. It's actually a fairly useful feature and I often see Android links promoted by people I have added to circles, which is useful.

It's really a fairly benign feature to begin with as you have to actually +1 a page before it shows up. At any rate, this checkbox appears to remove that so that others can't see your +1s in search results. I don't really understand why you would +1 something and not want people to see though, although I'm guessing it has something to do with an employee of companyA +1ing companyBs page by mistake and making it look like an endorsement.
So, no then. "Group video chat" is one of the listed benefits...
T-Mobile Hands Consumers a Pleasant Shocker
Oh okay cool! Have fun, wish I could go!
If it replaces focused benefits for people in need, doesn't that make it regressive?
Large associations of merchants (who'd benefit from lower interchanges) can do that, IIRC there are some examples of successful country-local cards. Making any of it an international network comparable to Visa/MC would anyway take decades and billions.
The thing I'm having a hard time understanding is with so many fans of Age of Empires out there and so much seeming visibility why people don't seem to be donating?

I've downloaded the Alpha version of the game and when I compare it to some successful IndieGoGo campaigns (http://blog.indiegogo.com/2012/12/top12.html) it just makes me wonder if these guys seem to have a great concept and great game but they're just terrible at publicity?
Hiring Engineers - OrthoConnect - Online Medical Startup
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We are hiring ASAP. Please contact us for further information. You can email me directly at orthoconnectcontact@gmail.com
This isn't really true. Inflation is defined as the cost of purchasing necessities (for a specific set of necessities designed by the BLS - basically housing, food, medicine, etc).

If a BI shifted spending from investment/savings to consumption, demand for necessities would increase, driving up the cost. I.e., inflation.

Also, there is another structure which distorts the market even less than Basic Income. It's called the Basic Job. You get a Basic Income, but you need to show up and do work to receive it. It solves all the same problems as Basic Income, but with far lower disincentive for work, and at far lower cost.
I'd go back a little further, when the ads first started to overpower the search results.

In retrospect, Buzz might have been their last classically-Googly project.
What about isolation? With heavy use of virtualization one can make the air gapped machine even more secure:

- Only open documents in a virtual machine
- Only interface with the document transfer media (cd/dvd etc.) through virtual machines. Don't ever mount or use this media on your host.
- Clone a new throw-away virtual machine for opening EACH document and delete it after reading the document

About his points:

1) This is nonsense. It's possible to set up an OS (for example linux) with zero internet connectivity, just download the ISO on another computer, verify checksums and signatures, burn onto optical media and you're set.

8) Also, use one-time media. Write once on the internet host, fill up and finalize media, read once on the air gap host, destroy media.

Also, I don't think Schneier is recommending to use Windows for this task. He's just assuming that most people out there is using Windows and can use these tips to improve their security. For his own high security setup(s) I'm pretty sure he'd have the common sense to not use Windows.
It is worth noting here that endorsements are only shared to the circles that can see the original review.

For an endorsement to appear to a user in search, that user has to have access to your review in the first place. Data that was once private is not being leaked publicly.
> Or would you only want to do it if everyone at your income bracket was also doing it?

I think this is general answer to this question (at lest it's mine). It's similar to prisoner dillema: I am happy to agree to rules forcing cooperation but in absence of those I won't cooperate that happily (reasons I think are easy to imagine and I've just seen that one poster did great job explaining those).
Yes, and I'd say they are even harsher than for creditcards - i.e., return cash first and ask questions later.

The DD system doesn't do dispute resolution - you can make DD's easily, but the customer can revert anything he 'didn't agree to' and that's it; and the EU rules allow doing that for at least 13 months (UK says unlimited, I'm not sure on that).
Speaking of all this tripe, does anyone know how to export your YouTube favourites without creating a G+ account?

A couple of days ago, it starting requiring me to sign up to add a video to my list of favourites, and the API throws an error - probably for the same reason.
The article DOES recommend using different languages for different tasks. A large part of it was about Ruby and Python shops that added Haskell to their toolbox in order to clean up overly complex parts of their codebase.

As far as the supply of programmers is concerned, if a software developer is TRULY talented, then they will be able to learn a new language in a couple of days, and learn a new paradigm (such as functional programming) in a couple of weeks. I say this as a person who has moved from imperative programming to object-oriented programming to functional programming over my career. And I have used so many languages that I have difficulty even enumerating all of them. They range from machine language, to various assembly languages to FORTRAN, COBOL, C, Visual BASIC, Java, Python, Ruby, Scala. The hard part of programming is not the coding. It is the DESIGNING. If you do the design part well, then the code flows from your fingers naturally, and you end up doing very little debugging, especially if you practice TDD which forces you to debug problems within 15 minutes of creating them.
Personally, while I enjoy Marijuana, I have stayed away from it diminishes my ability/motivation to work, and I'm not completely happy with where I'm at in my life.
Four New Privacy Laws & What They Mean
Thanks for bringing up the issue. I saw that they have at the bottom of their campaign a, "What are the goals for the campaign?" with listed dollar amounts for each goal. For $40,000 for example they have, "Reduce or Eliminate Lag".

Of course no guarantee they'll do that if they reach that level but I'm not sure if there is a guarantee they'll succeed at anything even if they reach the total goal amount.
> Guess who can not evade taxes through complicated international arrangements? Startups.

Startups, almost by definition, are generally not profitable. Almost all revenue above costs will be more or less immediately reinvested into growth. Taxes for companies which are not profitable are very nominal.
I don't think anyone's suggesting we legalize weed and give people immunity from prosecution for driving high.
How Open Source Development Boards Will Impact IT
Atomically Replacing Files and Directories
It must be because you already opted out of +1's

It was blank for me too.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/11/google-users-shared-endor...
In government entities such as the ACA, IRS, NSA, TSA, fraud and abuse is prohibited by magic fairies. Why can't the banks hire the same magic fairies?
It's interesting that folks in the tech community had the same reaction that I did... TURN IT OFF. Seems that this would be one of those "Don't be Evil" moments for Google. It seems reasonable that people wouldn't want their rating or review used out of context on an ad. This is exactly what's wrong with Facebook "Like" buttons. Why repeat the same mistake?
It's open source software with clear funding goals. ($40K gives us 2 guys for 6 months, $60K gives us 2 guys for 9 months etc.) Each dollar donated gives us more developer time, and I'm confident they'll linearly interpolate. The game is playable now, so there's no risk of non-delivery, but by donating you can make it better.
Is it unchecked by default? For me it was unchecked when I got there.
You are probably only looking at high level solutions, like Braintree.

Take a look at the more do-it-yourself solutions, and you'll see different numbers. For instance, we have a merchant account with Merchant e-Solutions. The base rate is 2.19% + $.20/transaction. I say "base rate" because there are other costs that depend on the particular card.

For example, for Visa there are these:

• "Acquirer Processing Fee", $0.0195/transaction.

• AVS fee, $0.01/transaction, only applies to transactions that make use of the address verification service.

• 0.097% if the card is a commercial rewards card. (10% of the cards)

• 0.45% "international acquiring fee" if the card is international, and 0.40% "international service assessment" on top of that.

• 2.39% labeled as "VISA NON-QUAL". I have no idea what the criteria for this is, but it gets applied to about 5% of the cards.

So, the actual cost of a transaction for a particular Visa card can be as low as 2.19% + $0.2195, and as high as 6.4% + $0.2295.

Last time I ran the numbers, it worked out that for Visa cards it averaged out to 2.62% + $0.23/transaction, and for MasterCard 2.80% + $0.23/transaction.

The downside to this is that providers that offer this kind of fine grained pricing tend to be targeted toward merchants who are looking for low level solutions--merchants handling their own credit card storage, doing their own recurring billing, and so on.

That is probably not a road you want to go down, especially if you are small and just starting out, and doubly especially if your servers are not servers you own. Doing PCI complaint credit card handling in the cloud on something like AWS is difficult and not something you want to deal with while dealing with the other aspects of a young business, like developing and promoting and supporting your product.
This is a perfect example of HN acting productively. Identifies a serious problem that effects the audience and pushes the solution to the top.
That's the way it should be. Otherwise, you'd be incentivized to leave (dishonestly) positive reviews.
Me neither. It seems perfectly consonant with Google's entire MO, and not in any way out of line with the implicit or explicit usage agreement that people have with them. Perhaps the culture of G+ is such that this is unexpected, or perhaps it's just HN echo chamber bleating? I'm not a Google user, so I wouldn't presume to say.
Holy sensationalism batman! I know HN loves its sensationalism, but wow.
Russian Missile Lights Up Space Station's Sky
Does anyone else feel that buying out Hackermeter this early on is almost somehow polite of Pinterest, relative to the behavior of other bigcorps that practice acquihiring?

Most companies will only acquihire once a startup is pretty mature, and has thousands/millions of people relying on its service--even though it would be equally easy to judge whatever attributes of the startup's product/service signals "good team, do buy out" from much earlier on in its lifecycle. I had never even heard of Hackermeter, but on reading the pitch in the article, and seeing a bit of the product, it's immediately obvious what kind of tech/UX/design/product-sense expertise would be required to produce it, and what I could do if I could put the same talent behind my own venture.

Maybe this should be the start of something. I'm picturing a PR-wire-like service for startups to post their MVPs, which bigcorps can subscribe to, and offer to buy out the talent that catches their eye before the service is even out of closed beta. (In fact, just to go a bit crazy: imagine if the use of this service became commonplace. Acquihiring a startup with traction might be considered "bad business!")
because that is what json is for
Comedian Gives TED Talks The Pranking They Desperately Deserve
It's not about having nothing to hide. It's about fighting for what is right. Homosexuality would probably not be so tolerated today if it was easy to hide.

You have to realize that you can't please everyone. And you certainly can't expect to live your whole life anonymously. You have to make decisions, and you have to accept that someone, somewhere, is going to be unhappy about it.

What if you were/are gay? Would you hide it from your parent all your life? Probably not (I hope). Why do you expect something different with the causes you support?

Does anyone blame Facebook for making Likes public? Probably some, but they're the tinfoil hat kind. Your support has no real weight unless your identity is known.

Should we ask Google to lower their standards, to match a culture of privacy that is both unsustainable and dying?

My suggestion, don't +1 anything until you're ready to accept the benefits/consequences. Doing otherwise is unresponsible.
I don't get a check for the usage of the natural resources of Illinois. If I did, it would be a handout, because I didn't put them there, and I don't own the land. One would assume that conservatives would be against people getting money just for living somewhere, without having to work for it.
closures, prototypical inheritance, the syntax for object/array literals. and I know it's not strictly part of the language, and it's deeply unfashionable to say so, but I'm quite a fan of the DOM, too.
How has the minds of otherwise intelligent Americans been hijacked by the main stream media and their 'conserative/christian' social conditioning?

Money is simply an abstraction used to further the production and exchange of material resources. Yet Americans seem hostile to any form of Social Security - which simply means printing money and distributing to be used to share production and resources equitably, rather than channeling it into expensive military procurement and genocidal foreign adventures.
Do they know that the money is printed by private institutions who charge interest on the money they print, virtually out of thin air, or computer storage (whichever you prefer?), pauperizing future generations even more?
Pretty close. Step 1 isn't quite right - you can't make your resolver send queries repetitively as it will just use its cache.
The attack involves sending tons of queries to the auth server yourself(or, from a botnet) - but spoofing to appear that you are the resolver you are poisoning. The auth server starts dropping queries from this ip, allowing you to send it answers with greater chance of successful poisoning.
I have to admit this was the part of Valve's announcements I was most skeptical about. This looks better than what I was expecting, although I will reserve judgement until I've tried it myself.

The "blended" mouse mode demonstrated with Papers, Please looks particularly interesting.