skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most bitcoin transactions include what's called a "miners' fee", an arbitrarily small amount put there as an incentive for miners to include your transaction in the blockchain, therefore speeding up the verification of said transaction. These fees will be there even after the last bitcoin has been mined, so there will always be an incentive to mine (provided that bitcoin is still in use by then).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees
Transaction fees, which are specified by the sender of a transaction at the time that it's sent and are collected by the miner of the block that incorporates it.
It seems silly to discuss changing shares of a whole output of a national economy devoted to labor rather than capital expenditures, without an even greater emphasis on increases in the overall national output. After all, I could just as well argue that all around the world, men are losing out to women, as more equality of rights is achieved. But what's really happening (thanks in no small part to steady economic growth all around the world) is that both men and women have more choices in lifestyle and family roles than ever before. Today's laborers are for the most part vastly better off than they were in the year of my birth, and they have every expectation of becoming still better off as the years go by, all around the world.
Does the GPIO include analog? If so, can you link me :D
The biggest issue here is that it's the middle level jobs that are being automated, which makes it increasingly harder for low skilled workers to work their way up over time. There was a good article in The Atlantic that discussed this a while back [1].

I'm not sure what the solution is, but increasing erosion of the middle class doesn't sound like a good thing.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-i...
As a casual browser this is the first I've heard of this. I don't know the accuracy of his claims.

I'm curious about his sources and their reasons for not coming forth. That he doesn't cite them by name leads to me to think they choose to be anonymous. I'm not accusing them of something.

I dislike the title. I need more information to decide for myself whether Paul Graham owes Michael O. Church an apology. I think Paul Graham has a hand, albeit limited, in deciding whether he owes Church an apology.
Does anyone expect a company like Western Union to come out and endorse a currency that can be transferred nearly instantly for practically nothing???!!!
Funny not to mention Robert Moses in an article about this topic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses
There's an excellent Quora thread on this with 34 answers:
http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Why-are-so-many-people-i...

People cite everything from arrogance as a defense mechanism against failure, to the necessity of entrepreneurial delusion, to youth, to denying that people in SV are arrogant at all.
Here's what really makes me angry. These jackasses who are going out and using technology's success to spout insane pro-rich politics, making asses of themselves in all sorts of creative ways (cf. Sean Parker's wedding, and that "jungle party" with the caged tiger) are a bunch of old-style corporate executives who, after invading technology, have given technologists a bad reputation in the country at large. Our image is being tainted by their arrogance.

Look, it's not the nerdy engineers (the ones who love technology, who would be in it even if it weren't "hot") who are responsible for this crass, New Money horror-show. It's the carpetbaggers who failed into technology because banking, hedge funds, and consulting didn't want them. They don't really belong in the first place. They're an invasive species in tech, and they're the ones creating this arrogance problem. They capture the lion's share of the value, set themselves up as the elite (when tech is "hot") and make a whole set of unrelated people look bad.

However, I agree. The Sand Hill Road elite is utterly unfit to manage a bag of rock salt, much less run the world. Those sad wankers built a society in the Bay Area where the software engineers building the place can't even buy a house-- and they want to call government ineffective? Crackah, please.
I wonder if this is caused by union membership decline and the increasing power of lobbyists?
Yeah, it's really apples-to-oranges to compare anywhere in the US to the UK -- even the state with the tightest gun laws is more permissive.
I just want to point out that Marxism was started as a response to the Industrial Revolution. [1]

If you guys think that machines are going to decrease our standard of living-- that the separation of (production value)/wages is going to cause poverty-- you have to prove to me that the same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution.

[1] Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist
Bitcoin ASICs aren't reprogrammable to perform other computations -- the hardware (at least the really fast part of it) isn't Turing-complete.

People have speculated about whether other kinds of computational problems can be represented as Bitcoin hash searches but I think the answer is pretty clearly no, because the computations involved are so specialized.
Yes, Spielman and Teng showed that the shadow-vertex variation of the simplex method has a smoothed polynomial complexity [1]. It's worth noting that while other LP methods are known to be weakly polynomial, the polynomiality depends on the size of the largest coefficient involved in the problem instance rather than on the number of rows and columns of the LP.

Finding a purely polynomial algorithm for linear programming or establishing that none exists is a major open question for linear programming, and indeed, for all of mathematics. It's not a Millenium problem, but it's the next best thing [2].

[1] This paper has an even better result, finding a polylogarithmic simplex variant. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~romanv/papers/simplex.pdf

[2] It's Smale problem number 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smale's_problems
The ShopKick app uses consumer grade microphones on iPhones to pick up ultrasound signals from in-store speakers so you can check-in automatically just by opening the app.
How was this created?
And I think we're starting to see all those same arguments made here in this comment thread.
My brother is in dental school in the USA. A dexterity test was part of the admissions process.
A Guy Said Something That Freaked Me Out So The Wall Street Journal Would Like To Remind Silicon Valley On Behalf Of The Establishment That It Is Not The Establishment And It Should Stay Aware Of Its Place
It says right there in the post:

* improvements to the dynamic tick code,

* support infrastructure for DRM render nodes,

* TSO sizing and the FQ scheduler in the network layer,

* support for user namespaces in the XFS filesystem,

* multithreaded RAID5 in the MD subsystem,

* offline data deduplication in the Btrfs filesystem, and more.
I didn't read the paper, yet. I was relying on my failing memory of university courses. OK, so I guess the open challenge, I remember, was to do what everyone knows should be possible: come up with a version of simplex that chooses clever enough to get polynomial worst case complexity. (Do you know if any probabilistic variants are in the running?)

Yes, numerical stability is great as a measure.
>So now here we sit with 14% U6 unemployment ('the new normal'), and a labor force participation rate that matches 35 or so years ag

The other important statistic you're missing is that corporate profits are way up, even better than pre 2008 levels in fact. The question is why, if the economy is so bad that employment is perpetually depressed, how are corporate profits so high? The answer is that production is in fact back to where it used to be. But through automation and piling more work onto fewer people, corporations are reaping ever bigger profits at the expense of the rest of the economy.

In fact, the problem we're seeing is a prelude to the very future folks like kurzweli talk about: a future where human labor is obsolete in favor of automation. It's not that the future is necessarily one of destitution for the vast majority of humanity, its one where current thoughts on how to best distribute wealth will have to change. These really are easy problems to solve: some form of basic income. The hard question is how do we get from where we are to there without a very nasty revolution. One good step would be to simply mandate a reduced work-week. Full time becomes say 30 hours rather than 40. These sorts of steps are going to become necessary to maintain social stability as these trends towards fewer and fewer jobs increase.
I put the word probably in for a reason. I don't know, for sure, what is going on. It does seem, however, that there are variables determining comment placement other than age and karma.

One commenter on my blog suggested the problem may be an abuse of the "flag" option (which is only supposed to be used on spammers).
You probably won an automated penalty - it's easy to imagine your comments getting lots of downvotes even if they're overall +x.
Software is from Silicon Valley, Hardware is from Shenzhen
I wish more did, but I suspect there is a good reason they don't. There is liability in what they say. And when dealing with lots of money it's easier to say nothing publicly.

[offtopic]
Wow I hate reading twitter threads, I wish there was an easier and better way to see related tweets and connect who is talking to who inline.
If you're smart, not bitcoin, considering the value of bitcoin frequently fluctuates considerably more than 4.5% in a single day.
Ask HN: Video chat library for iOS/Android?
Am trying to find an opensource library for video chat on iOS, Android and web. I think WebRTC might be the way but no luck finding it so far. I see hundreds of apps which support audio/video chat in their apps. Am wondering what is the quickest way to build one. Any suggestions? Am open to looking at a paid solution too (please do not recommend tokbox; its too expensive)
Checking in to say that I rode the G once from park slope to Williamsburg for a "quick dinner." The ride took over an hour each way. That's when I decided to never ride it again.
The talk "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit" that the article mentions was (also?) given at Startup School a few weeks ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
There might be a financial incentive to make hardware to crack crypto to sell to governments, which could use the hardware to spy on people. In other contexts government contractors do make surveillance hardware, like IMSI catchers. Because the crypto involved is so easy to attack, it's possible to imagine someone building a passive cell phone monitoring box with ASICs in it.

I haven't looked through the relevant stuff in the Spy Files (vendor presentations from the ISS World surveillance conference), but that might be one place to look to find people making crypto-cracking ASICs for a profit.

http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html

They only have documents through 2011, although the conference is still happening frequently.
Vinicius Vacanti of Yipit - http://viniciusvacanti.com/

Dan Shipper - http://danshipper.com/
I literally just launched http://fmhgifts.com last week so it's a bit early to say but I have heard rumours of similar websites making several thousand a month.
A loss for Apple: iOS veteran Henri Lamiraux steps down
any reason the site feedvenue.com doesn't work?
The 200 MB is no strings attached, but the cheaper rates mentioned in the press release do have strings attached. I'm referring in particular to:

> For T-Mobile voice customers, 'always-on' iPad plans start at just $10 a month for unlimited data including 500 MB of 4G LTE data each month. Customers can add even more 4G LTE data in 2 GB increments for just $10 more per month. For customers who would rather have the flexibility of on-demand data, T-Mobile offers daily and weekly passes. Daily passes include unlimited data with 500 MB of 4G LTE data starting at just $5. The weekly passes include unlimited data with 1 GB of 4G LTE data for $10.

Voice customers get $10 off both recurring plans and daily/weekly plans.
The solution they chose seems to be the absolute silliest way to solve the problem.
I think he understands it just fine. Those aren't a problem with Bitcoin itself, but they're very much a problem for any entity like Western Union that has to abide by legal and financial regulations in all its business.
Let's not forget to add Richard Branson http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson
Srinivasan is orchestrating a lot of great work with Bioinformatics. In the comments, it's very odd that people think the best and the brightest in SV are only building tools that help give ads more exposure.

But then again I should probably stop reading WSJ comments, and that would also probably get me called arrogant.
> The history isn't that bizarre. Robert Moses simply despised anyone that wasn't rich, and spent his entire career trying to make the city even more miserable than it already was for the poor.

Robert Moses is a great example of the problems of unchecked power and hubris, even if ostensibly well-intentioned. But he absolutely democratized Long Island, which was an idyllic enclave of gigantic estates and private beaches before he built the LIE, Northern and Southern State Parkways, Jones Beach, etc.

He pissed off a lot of rich people in doing this.
Many members of my family have been on the staffs or in the employ of various hospitals. From what I've heard, if one has an inside connection it would be very difficult to avoid learning of a particular surgeon's poor therapeutic outcomes. It's true that past results are not perfect indicators of future results, but unless you just transferred to this hospital, every nurse on every floor has a firm opinion of whether she'd let you operate on her family.
I can give you lots of measures.

1) The cost of a home compared to incomes, along with mortgage durations. In the late 1960s, the average house cost about $18k to $20k, and the average income was around $9k (2.x ratio). Today that's about $220k and $50k income (4.x to 1 ratio).

2) The savings rate. In real terms it's negative.

3) Debt accumulation across the board, from personal to government (the people have to pay for that one way or another too).

4) Minimum wage and average incomes. I don't regard the CPI as a very legitimate measure given what they don't include, but even using that average incomes for the middle class haven't moved in 40 years (and that's the best case scenario). If you price wages in oil or gold or silver or the Swiss Franc, they're drastically lower. Meanwhile the cost of being in the middle class has gone way up.

5) Unemployment rate. From 1950 to 1970, it averaged about 5% give or take, with a floor of 2.9% in 1953, and 3.5% in 1969). The closest equivalent measurement to that is the U6 today, which stands at near 14%.

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNU04000000?years_option=all_...

6) Cost of education to just join the middle class. It's in the stratosphere.

7) The average cost of a new car in the late 1960s was about $3,000; against an income of $9k (3 to 1 ratio). Today the average cost of a new car is $31,000, against an income of $50,000.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/09/04/record-p...
I think this is a fifth-level recycling of progressively more sensationalistic reporting about a talk that was, I thought, quite humble and thought-provoking. I expect this kind of journalistic garbage in the tech press and in lesser (read: most) mainstream news outlets; I definitely do not expect it from the WSJ. I know it was merely an opinion piece, but still very disappointing.
Geolibertarianism would solve it pretty effectively, since it would allow the human to opt-out.
Wow, this is incredible. Exactly what I needed to start developing on Windows.
I typed www.facebook.com.

Amazingly, it was the response page itself that got blocked(, TCP reset to be precise). Perhaps the Great Fire Wall read 'www.facebook.com' as a substring in url, and subsequently killed it.
The thing I love about ddg is they don't seem to do that horrible redirect on some results that Google does.

I'll never understand why they do that; if you want to track links, send an async post when I click, don't add an occasional multi-second delay.
Alexis Ohanian on how the Internet can make you more awesome [video]
Seems to have less programs but might be easier to work with.
if all those ASICs were so profitable, wouldn't the company making them be keeping them for themselves?
Twitter's IPO Roadshow
I would not be at all surprised if most of the creative work of filmmaking isn't automated eventually, once you can generate photorealistic virtual actors and sets, and algorithmically generate plots, camera work, dialogue etc. As formulaic as popular movies tend to be nowadays, would anyone notice the difference? Just imagine having the same server cluster somewhere crank out the movie, its sequels, and the video games from the same models. Digital actors never get old, never get arrested, and never need to get paid.

Also there's no reason at all menus and courses can't be automated as well. Everything from the design of the menus to the design of the building, to its construction, and staffing, everything but the eating can be automated somehow. I think people are going to come to a shocking, ego-blowing realization that, yes, creative work can and will be automated as well.
It's worth pointing out that, while 64-bit Windows has dropped its 16-bit layer, 64-bit Wine has not. You can happily run your original 16-bit version of Chip's Challenge on an out of the box 64-bit Linux/Wine install these days.
They are not buying any more than you are buying a politician by donating to their campaign, putting up a sign with their name on it in your yard or voting for them.

Many people think this is buying, it is simply helping the candidate you agree with the most win the election.
This is just a more clever way to project the same nostalgia as adventured's comments. What evidence do we have that 1950's America was a font of innovation and civilization that 2013 cannot match? "Civilization" is an odd term for a place with millions living under legalized segregation, and an entire half of the population largely consigned to domestic labor.

Not to mention, much of the prosperity of the '50's was a "fringe benefit" of most of the rest of the industrialized world blowing itself up for the second time in 30 years.

And of course there's survivorship bias: No one remembers all the terrible inventions of the '50's. (Had they come up with Smell-O-Vision yet?) All we remember is the transistor radio and the hydrogen bomb. Look back on the 2010's in 60 years and you'll see all sorts of amazing stuff that made its mark on the future, I'm sure.
Absolutely, but it is a counter-example to the "runs great on modern hardware" statement.
It's hard to understand why Facebook, Twitter, etc have all used this "RetailRoadshow" video service. Perhaps someone here can enlighten me?
dhh is the first example that comes to my mind.

Interesting point, but I think it's still probably important for early stage startups to blog. It helps get them exposure and increase their luck surface area (http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...). Things probably change when you get really big though.
I ordered one of these (5GH/s "Jalapeno") from BFL in March because it seemed like a really good idea at the time. Received it in October, putzed around with it for a couple of weeks, and sold it on eBay for a small profit last week once I realized that it was not even going to pay for itself.
Too bad, I'd like to participate.
The one time I bought a few bitcoins, I started by transferring money from a bank account to a site that takes a cut, and then from there to MtGox. The whole thing took way too long and tied my identity to the transactions. It occurs to me that some people might be willing to mine at a small loss in order to get BTC that's never been near their name.
I refunded my BFL long outside the 60 day window with a simple e-mail. It was clear they weren't shipping anywhere near on schedule and it wasn't going to be profitable.
The next logical step is to increase taxes on capital, starting with an increase in the capital gains tax.

Of course the Economist doesn't mention this... EDIT: Oops, maybe they did. Good for them.
I didn't say it was good or bad. It is a legally, ethically and economically acceptable practice. They are exercising their right to protect their business.

That being said, I hope they lose.
I haven't even read the article, but I did just read this[1] and I agree very strongly that SV; particularly developers, are very difficult to approach. Everything & everyone is below them; not worth their time. If you lack any detail of some domain-knowledge of whatever treny new tech you're trying to ask about, you just get insulted(maybe accompanied by a vague hint at the answer). Basically, like this video[2].

1. http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employees-confess-the-...

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGkL6eQWOAI

3. ...really? http://i.imgur.com/4aaH7GW.png
Perhaps because "capital" is composed of the products sold because labor is willing to pay for them? These two sides aren't as cleanly drawn as people might like to think. The preferences of individuals drive the economies of the world (except in North Korea).
>There's a reason women joined the work force en masse, and it was because the money they could make and the satisfaction they could attain in the work force was worth more to them than whatever value they produced scrubbing floors and steaming vegetables.

I'm usually not one to demand a citation in casual online conversations, but this is just screaming out for one. Did women really join the workforce en mass for "meaningful work", or was it out of economic necessity. I can imagine the majority of jobs available to women in that time weren't exactly what anyone today would call "fulfilling". Nor would I consider a survey of your female colleagues who themselves are likely well educated professionals, and thus a non-representative bunch, as a useful statistic. No, it is very much not obvious that women joined the workforce because working is more fulfilling than "scrubbing floors" (aka watching your children grow up).
"I should learn how to do it myself."

That's an excellent idea. You'll still hire a developer next time of course, but you'll know exactly why you are doing it and you'll appreciate the result a little bit more.

Sure the demand for a 5-star review was a little underhanded but what do you expect when you are bottom feeding like that? $800 for any app is way below bargain basement.
Medium's problem is that the posts just aren't that interesting. There are lot's of people that write well. But, yippeeeee, big deal. Sure there are people that elevate writing to an art form and regardless of the topic it will be worth reading. But most of the time it's a just form of communication and it's what's being communicated that counts. Medium has a quantity problem: the quantity of interesting posts/articles is low. Very low.
It seems to give an error if the URL contains a path.
Remember earlier when I said "It's just not a point worth arguing with someone who holds a position that clearly conflicts with mine and is highly unlikely to change it."

This is why I said that. You have your belief. You are clearly unlikely to change it no matter what I say. Your goal in this is not to possibly change your belief, but to find a way to confirm it in what i'm saying. This is what people do in these situations.

That does not often generate useful discussion, and it hasn't really here.

Realistically, I haven't tried to wiggle out of anything. It just turns out, as I suggested, we strongly disagree over whether Android is open, whether it was meant to be, and whether it still is.

Rather than continue this unproductive debate, i'm just going to go back to hacking some code on this fine sunday :)