skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since the difficulty is periodically changed based on the hashing rate, it makes an interesting case.

Everybody would generally be better off to throttle the rate because the difficulty would tone down as well and you could still make the same money with regular, much cheaper hardware. But there would be more people doing that which would spread the gains more evenly. On the other hand, that's not how it will ever work because everyone is locally optimizing for their own profit and buying larger racks -- first big GPUs and now ASIC miners -- which ironically doesn't result in profits proportionally equal to the larger investments.

In the end it shouldn't even matter: mining bitcoins is just a way to distribute the 21 million coins to people and the cpu power required to do that hasn't got anything to do with the final value of a single block. Your cost to acquire one bitcoin just varies based on how much competition you have.
Reader Poll: What Kind Of Topics You Are Interested In?
So I need to write chocolatey packages for non open source stuff? For example, I was about to add a package for Teamcity. So scoop doesn't encourage that kind of tools / software? Btw, I am not being critical of the tool. It is great that Windows is getting some much needed tools like this.
> if you want to use PGP, you first have to make everyone you intend to communicate with also use PGP

And that is probably even harder then getting people to quit facebook...

There should be a popular messenger that uses xmpp with otr by default.
The CEO certainly says he pays more than minimum wage (when the statement was clarified, it turns out it doesn't include part time labor or contract labor, so it's not clear how true that actually is). But why would he pay more than his competitors? (I can find no evidence that it does and a fair amount of evidence that it doesn't.) And paying above minimum wage does not remove the labor market pressure that comes from increasing it.

All that aside, you may be right that it was a chiefly PR stunt and perhaps Walmart is in fact a poor example.

I was enjoying this discussion until your edit.
In the 1950s the financial sector amounted to around 2.5% of GDP. It now amounts to more than 8%, and more than 30% of corporate profits. Anyone who is an apologist for such an increase needs to be able to convincingly argue that this increase has been instrumental in increasing the U.S. standard of living in spite of labor's receiving a decreasing share of gains. I for one think it's rather easy to imagine finance and the American standard of living getting along just fine with finance capturing a mere 2.5%.

The question is whether this shift is a symptom or a cause: perhaps it's a symptom of a property of progress, whereby labor is becoming decreasingly remunerative, thereby forcing the best and the brightest into finance. The more cynical (and thus, to my mind at least, more likely) explanation is the pervasive, and plainly visible, influence that the financial sector has exercised on policy makers for the past half century, eventually leading to Wall Street's pull turning into an ever strengthening positive feedback loop, whereby savvy Ivy League-ers feel decreasingly adequate if they're not taking in seven figures within a decade of graduation.

And so instead of inspiring and setting wonderful examples for everyone else, America's most charismatic are busy cutting deals with each other and exploiting private information asymmetries.
Unemployment rate is very difficult to compare across time. The unemployment rate in the 50s and 60s is unlikely to account for vast numbers of women who would be working today, for example. Employment statistics are very difficult to winnow down to a simple-yet-meaningful percentage number.

Another is that the term 'unemployed' can be readily redefined - here in Australia, one government managed to make good unemployment figures by redefining under-employed people so that they were out of the picture. They now counted towards the 'employed' numbers, even if they were literally only working a couple of hours a week.
Hawala and other informal networks are accounted for 40% of the remittances sent every year.[1] USD 534 billion were sent in 2012 via formal networks.

Analyzing the remittances flow and their impact in the receiving countries (often more in term of %GDP than official intl development aid), it's a shame that the global average fee to "remit" is 9% and up to 12% while sending money towards Sub-Saharan Africa. [2]

But that's a fast moving market with several technological and business model innovations (and some YC startups too.

This last years, we have seen a lot of startups with interesting ideas based on new technologies or new business model to improve the remittances market:
Azimo (http://azimo.com), Xoom (https://www.xoom.com/), Regalii (https://www.regalii.com/ - send good instead of cash, YC), Transferwise (http://transferwise.com) and new technology like mobile banking (M-Pesa, MTNMMO) and bitcoin (buttercoin YC - http://buttercoin.com/).

Disclaimer: I work on TawiPay (http://tawipay.com) as a side-project, a comparison website for remittances services.

[1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/150342765/Trends-in-Remittances-Ju...

[2]https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/sites/default/files/R...
EBay CEO John Donahoe Is Bullish On Digital Currency (and Bitcoin)
What's this guy asking? I don't read stupid Hacker News comments.
Thanks. Also available here, from 2009
http://steveblank.com/2009/06/29/agile-opportunism-entrepren...
Prolog was on my list of "neat to learn languages" but I never got around to it.

Any Prolog fans here to sing its praises?

It's very well fit for writing computational grammars for natural language and parsers/generators. I have used it a lot during my PhD. Terms can be used to represent attribute-value structures and e.g. agreement can be checked and larger structures can be formed through term unification.

I can really recommend this book:

http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf

It is both an introduction to Prolog and to natural language processing, and shows the power of Prolog for such applications.
That is a very important question. Because it is so often asked when talking about Bitcoin, I took some time to write an answer for it. Please read it and let me know if you have questions: http://snitko.ru/blog/the-beauty-of-deflation.html
> It would basically just be based on luck, whoever could land the higher yield jobs.

The honest truth is that it's already mostly luck that determines who gets the big payouts and who doesn't. There are so many factors beyond your control that play into your success.

From that perspective, a society where we were up front about that fact would at least be "more fair" in the sense that it would reduce lauding some for their unearned success while disparaging others for their equally happenstance failures.
And the rules that got issued today include several announcements by the Coast Guard about changes to drawbridge schedules, species being delisted from the Endangered Species Act, and announced decisions by the FAA on the airworthiness of various products.

Business is moderately regulated in the US, especially compared to other industrialized societies. The mere existence of a large number of rules doesn't mean that the regulation is onerous.
Blinded at 1000mph
really nice job.
simple, affordable and needed solution.
Yes, I agree. The government should take a stronger role in preventing industrial pollution. Nobody else is going to step in.
Steve Klabnik uses this
Or organisations that don't want Joe user (that includes Joe developer who thinks he understands security but does not) running random powershell scripts off the Internet written by god-knows-who that have access to COM, their AD and local file systems and might just POST it all to some remote web site. Or even ones that download packages off the Internet that may have licensing implications or malicious bundling.

I assume no one is old enough or so far away from reality that they don't remember the hell that was VBA and macros in the late 90's and early 00's?

They're very sensible organisations IMHO.

Theyre not oppressive and to be shunned. They just take data protection seriously.
Well, this is just nonsense. All this jibber jabber about being non-discriminatory is good for business falls flat when discrimination becomes good for business, which s not difficult to imagine.

Let's take an example. Southern Baptists, or any group you like, want to grow their numbers. Lets say they succeed and gain a majority of followers in the US. All of a sudden it can be a boost to business to comport with whatever discriminatory practices are popular with the majority. The invisible hand moveth.
Actually, it seems like an apt comparison. A slot machine (on average) takes a certain percentage of your cash each spin. Bitcoin takes a certain percentage of your cash (transaction fees, bid/ask spread) on each trade.

Do either enough times and you'll most likely whittle your money away. But you could win big with a few spins or a few lucky trades.
"A Point of View: Should the baby boomers leave the stage?"
-- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24765974
> I'm sorry, are you seriously arguing that the American median standard of living was better in 1963?

Perhaps he was referring to the difference in purchasing power, which was most definitely greater back then. There were no iPads, but lots more people were getting by comfortably.
I feel like I'm a different species when I hear someone excited about working 80+ hours a week. Having so little free time and so little time to spend with friends and family seems like a sad life regardless of the paycheck.

I agree with this: "Have a passion for Doing something rather than Being a title on a business card." I also agree that "Showing up a lot increases your odds" (in this case meaning working a lot of hours), but I just don't think it's worth the trade-off.

Life outside of work is, for many of us, far more meaningful than work. I thought this feeling was extremely common, but judging by what gets to the front of HN I'm in the minority here.
But since you have to pay the commissions and trading costs, there's not much difference after all...
Why? I've been doing it since 1992 without the aid of this!
If, thanks to technology, 10% of people are able to produce all the goods, 90% won't get paid. With most people not having money, only 10% of goods will be needed from that point on. And thanks to the new technology, only 1% of people will be able to produce that. Which means only 1% will have money. Thus, less goods would be needed. And so on. The cycle ends when the last human being dies of hunger.

Options:

1. Ban the technology, Amish-style
2. Cut working hours
3. Introduce some new kind of re-distribution, such as basic income
It doesn't work because its a straw man.
I was in making photographic (those with silver halide) plates in the 90's. That's a wet chemistry process which does not tolerate any dirt in the final product. I made a good deal of the required machinery on my own so I have some basic knowledge on clean room design (albeit a bit rusty).
Not at all what I was implying. Not everything is so black and white, yeesh. It's getting so a guy can't pontificate without having a bunch of pre-conceived positions applied to him before even getting the chance to... oh wait, this is the internet.
Personally, I like to think of real facts, not thought experiments. In terms of global poverty, disease, hunger, active wars, inequality, the year 2012 is the best year recorded in human history [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

What happens with the US (and the UK) is a global redistribution of wealth. The US economy is basically stagnating, but developing countries are booming.

[1] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPOVCALNET/Resources/Gl...

[2] http://cid.bcrp.gob.pe/biblio/Papers/NBER/2009/Octubre/w1543...

[3] http://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/pdf/statistical-review/stat...

[4] http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/document...

[5] http://www.who.int/malaria/world_malaria_report_2011/WMR2011...

[6] http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...
This caused me to exhale air sharply through my nostrils.
Every Programmer should use IRC
Sorry about the throwaway account. Would rather not link the numbers to the site at this point. Revenue about $60k/month; fairly even mix of affiliate programs (mostly a couple big ones) and advertising (mostly adsense/ad exchange). Earnings before taxes and my draw ~ $500k/year.

Have tried out many alternate ad networks and exchanges, and the only other one I've found worth taking space from google so far is AOL's new Advertising.com. Individual relationships and niche affiliates can be worthwhile too, but come with more overhead. I'd generally rather optimize UX and try to attract more users than worry about managing a bunch of advertiser relationships. For a larger or smaller site that would probably change though.
IIRC the choice to favor neighborhoods like central, chinatown, and beacon hill was intentional. The thinking was that the traditional franchise agreements allowed incumbents to choose to compete in the neighborhoods with the greatest disposable income. Other nieghborhoods were left to providers, like broadstripe and clear, that were unable to provide the significant capital outlays required for infrastructure upgrades. Over the past few decades this led to significant divergence of infrastructure, and ultimately capabilities, between neighborhoods.

One of the "funny" things about Gigabit Seattle is that the last mile is actually supposed to be wireless. Much like that other network pioneer of Seattle, Clearwire.
> Because the world does not exist for the benefit of the rich and privileged

No? Does it exist for the benefit of the poor then? -They sure keep voting for more wealth transfers and taxes on the rich, and they keep getting them too!

Note that I'm just an ordinary middle-class white person. I just wanted to point out that the world does not exist for any group's benefit. We're all just people, all just individuals here.
Note that stock prices are "Wall Street" metrics, which by the way constitutes two thirds of WSJ's name. By their metric, SV is doing well.
That's a pretty shitty future. It's also still definitely better than the current-day society you support.
Any feedback on a new model for online legal services?
Just an idea and I would appreciate any feedback as to whether you think this is a good idea.<p>Most online legal services are either selling documents or legal services. But documents are not the best without an attorney looking at them and legal services are never really sold at a fixed rate: lawyers just charge their hourly rate.<p>what about combining documents and services for a flat, fixed fee, say $200 or $300 to customize a document for you, all paid upfront.
Do you think this is a good idea for an online legal site?<p>linking to legalZoom as an example of a legal documents site
Recover corrupted blob object
Removed the edit, my apologies.

I'd venture that most well run and dominant companies pay more than their competitors. This is likely (speculation ahead) because these companies know that they must obtain and retain higher quality employees than do their competition.

Even for Walmart, their employees are the most important asset. From top to bottom. People like you and me (I'm assuming you've never worked there - I haven't) aren't aware, but supposedly Walmart really does treat their workers well. All in relative terms of course... And based upon pure hearsay of course.

Finally, regarding whether or not it was a publicity stunt: Maybe I'm jaded, but I consider everything that a corporate employee says publicly and in official capacity to be a publicity stunt, almost by definition.
That's a great response had it been to a slightly different comment... But what I think you're trying to say is that the gateway (IGD) allowed the internet to grow much faster than PLATO was capable of and that growth is part of the character that defines what the internet is.
Thank you for a detailed and thoughtful response.

I definitely agree with you that Microsoft is listening on the server side. The biggest change that really made me realize this was with the release of Windows Server core.

Also, the release of PowerShell as the glue for automation has really made so many things possible. PowerShell is not perfect but it is definitely making a difference in the Windows ecosystem.

Sometimes it seems that people that are criticizing Windows are still stuck in the Windows 2003 world and pre-Powershell days.

One can basically automate Exchange, SQL Server, IIS etc. using Powershell. Granted, there may be still edge cases, but for the most part it's all there.

This is empirical but I also feel that over the last 5-6 years Microsoft has really started to take the best of linux and open source and start to incorporate it into its ecosystem. There are still scenarios where this is not the case but I do notice the trend.
"You’re not so smart, you just show up a lot in a lot of places."

Quite astute. As they say, showing up is half the battle.
Ahh, who doesn't love unrelated metaphors. You underestimated the power of neuroscience. All that rage and hate and bloodlust will be fixed with a small chip and a small tablet.
It's funny you mention this because as I've moved forward in my own personal project, both in learning and in actual coding, whenever I've come upon a need the Clojure community seems to be arriving at filling that need in a sufficient way right as I come to the point that I need it. Granted my own personal project is not equivalent to anything I'm aware of in any corporate scene, but it's been uncanny how many times this has happened. Things like Pedestal and Datomic and Clojurescript or core.logic it's almost as if they were birthed at just the right times to be maturing at just the right rate for me to be adopting them and learning them right as they 'ripen.'
Wow very terminal doge
You’re not alone. I’m only awake for 80 hours during the week. Devoting half of that to a job is insane enough, thanks.
"Get your facts first , then you can distort them as you please"-Mark Twain
If you think things through:

1. We were all born with the same rights.

2. Therefor, we should all have (and keep) the same rights.

3. Yet, we don't have all the same wealth (money=rights) - FAR from it.

How come we accept that people who were born more lucky than others get to have more rights? When we were all born equal?

How come society still accepts this basic and too obvious hypocrisy?
Purely out of interest, what's so wrong with Windows as a development environment? I've seen this claim touted before on HN, but I've never seen an explanation (not doubting that there is one; I just haven't seen one). I develop on Windows every day, and I'm always happy to learn a new way to improve my workflow, so does Ubuntu (or Mac) actually make it easier to develop software, and if so then how?

I'd also be interested to hear what kinds of software you've found it hard to develop on Windows.
Although in other posts Moldbug also quotes the statistic that the crime rate in Britain today is something like 50 times higher than it was in the Victorian era

And yet just before the Victorian era, crime was so bad that people were sent to literally the other side of the earth for crimes as minor as stealing a pair of scissors.

It would also suggest that the murder rate would have been ridiculously low - in modern times, it's 1.2/100k. In 1831, the start of the era, that would mean that the UK had a mere 3 murders of its 13 million people for the entire year. Difficult to believe. In 1900, the end of the era, it would still be less than 10 for the 30-odd million. According to this article [1], homicide rates weren't too far from what they are today, neatly bracketing the modern rate (which has the advantage of better reporting; historical homicides were likely higher)

A 50-fold reduction in crime is astounding, enough so that it sounds like baloney. Particularly for a country famous for shipping its criminals around the world during the 'low crime' period.

[1] http://www.historytoday.com/clive-emsley/victorian-crime
If you read HN and your organisation treats you like 'Joe user', I'd say you probably feel pretty oppressed.

Scoop is aimed pretty squarely at HN readers, not so much at people that are ok with working at an organisation that doesn't trust them to run programs on their computer.
NukeMap
Wohnungsräumung
Wohnungsräumung , Wohnungsräumung wien
Umzug Wien , Umzug , Wohnungsräumung , Wohnungsräumung Wien , Entrümpelung , Entrümpelung Wien , Umzug Wien , Umzug , Wohnungsräumung , Wohnungsräumung Wien , Entrümpelung , Entrümpelung Wien , Umzug Wien , Umzug , Wohnungsräumung , Wohnungsräumung Wien , Entrümpelung , Entrümpelung Wien
Please stop with the animal metaphor.

Firstly, human beings are omnivores, not pure predators.

Second, human beings have been evolving under the selection pressures of hunter-gathering lifestyles, semi-nomadic pastoral, settled farming lifestyles, and urban lifestyles for thousands of years now. The new lifestyles have been bred into our genes.

Third, if we really had no potential to behave like civilized people whatsoever, we wouldn't even feel morally drawn to civilized behavior at all. If we really were pure predators, "wild-born wolves", we simply wouldn't like cooperative behaviors or institutions whatsoever. The fact that we feel one mode of behavior is more moral is actually an indication that we are capable of that behavior, provided we actually choose to discipline ourselves.

Now if you'll excuse me, speaking of wild-born wolves, I have to go listen to that metal song again. Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind der Jäger!
That's quite a bit if hand waving!
Those butterfly labs lumps are small. They're useful to people who want to steal electricity because they can be easily hidden.

So, if you can buy them cheap second hand, and are okay with stealing electricity and installing them in hidden locations, then you might make a bit of money.
Weirdtopia, obviously.
such plug

very terminal shibe

so hax

many monads

https://github.com/thiderman/doge

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6667414
linkedin is such a rotten place and such a rotten company. remember intro? remember the package full of crap they sent that guy who found a vulnerability in intro?

remember what linkedin stands for? It stands for corporate America, it stands for enslaving people, especially the young. Everything about linkedin is broken, and people writing blogs on LinkedIn (what?) about how they successfully subordinated themselves for Money Inc., just makes sick and sad and sick again.
The 'extras' bucket for Scoop is a good fit things that aren't open source command-line tools, but are still useful dev tools. Teamcity should fit well there:

https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop-extras
These puns are starting to feel repetitive.