skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has built-in maps now! (like dicts or hashes in other languages).

http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?section=maps

That is exciting. I'd want to play with it again. I like Prolog. Or rather, I like idea of Prolog, until I go to solve a problem and it breaks my brain. I love seeing elegant solutions to complicated problems in 10 lines of code, but also realizing there is little chance of me coming up with those solutions.

Other languages, functional, OO, imperative, I can often iteratively improve a solution. It goes from wrong,better, even better, almost works, good enough. With logic languages it goes from wrong, wrong, wrong, x100 ..., aha I got it and it is beautiful and short.

Also speaking of maps, Erlang is probably going to get them too in the next release early next year -- R17, https://github.com/erlang/otp/tree/egil/maps/eep-implementat....
Thanks for the info. I just realised too (thanks to a friend) that the kanji might originate because "corona" sounds similar to "kuruma" (meaning "car"), and that's why the "bo" kanji has the "car" kanji in it.
According to the site, they pay the homeowner the entire cost of powering the server. They claim to save "60% of TOC" for not having to buy a dedicated datacenter building and cooling system, which sounds reasonable in the short term (although, eventually a datacenter-builder will recoup the costs of construction, while an electricity premium is constant.) It looks like homeowner also pays Nerdalize to sign on- which may make their balance sheet more reasonable, but is also only a short-term advantage if the server is leased indefinitely.

In the long-run, they're probably just banking on people paying a modest premium for "green computation."
Erm, in order to cash out, founders/early adopters have to sell a slice of the pie. Furthermore, anyone with a lot of BTC is incentivized to cash out slowly in order to keep the price up.

The Man has the upper hand, as does any weakness in the protocol. Either one, especially the latter, has the capacity to destroy bitcoin overnight. I'm not too worried about "Nakamoto" devaluing bitcoin (though I do wonder what "Nakamoto" will do with that much money/power. A billion dollars can do a lot of good or a lot of ill.).
Where is your thought leadership?
Manage your rubies with direnv and ruby-install
For comparison, here's a scalability benchmark for postgres (also read-only) from a year and a half ago:

http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/04/did-i-say-32-cores-how-abo...

It's hard for me to tell what the MySQL benchmark was really doing, but the postgres one seems a bit more "normal" (ordinary SQL queries from postgres's ordinary simple benchmark tool).

So, not apples-to-apples, but still interesting.
You bring up a good point. I don't think our service is right for every business but there a certain businesses that it can work for. I like the analytics idea.
That's true. But rocks erode at a rapid pace in comparison to the age of the earth. Apparently, very little is left for geologists to study from earlier than about 1 billion years ago. And there is a tremendous amount of groundwater deep underground, with some of it trapped by rock formations.
I've actually been to the dole/kemp website because I thought it was hilarious that he closed his presidential debate with a mention of it. Yeah, Bob, the "Young people of America" are going to go to your webpage in droves. Kodos had a better chance.

(Penultimate sentence) http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-6-1996-debate-...
vs how much you can lose from market volatility.

The thing that would scare me about accepting bit coin for transactions is that in a scenario where BTC is rapidly losing value, it would be easy for lots of orders to be placed in a short amount of time.
> Sourceforge and friends are known for injecting badware into binary installers for open-source software.

Wait... what???
I have spent a little at http://takeaway.com in the UK, but I'm primarily seeing it as an investment.

I know that we also need to start spending it for it to have any real value, so my wife and I agree that as of January we're going to start putting our takeaway funds into bitcoin and gradually spending that, while also keeping some aside as an investment.
awesome. would love to catch up and trade thoughts.
just send me an email reechaurd@ gmail dot com
The article postulates an effective outcry, akin to that of the github incident which resulted in success, were that to happen. Perhaps it is you who is shortsighted?
Here's the original Miami-Dade article, which was printed the day before the one referenced earlier in the thread:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/21/v-fullstory/3769823/in...

In the original article, the owner explains what he originally thought he was agreeing to - and why:

"About three years ago, Saleh said police asked him to participate in what they called a “zero-tolerance” program to reduce crime. He gladly signed up, not realizing at the time how much it would impact his business and customers. Under the program, Miami Gardens police are given broad powers to stop and arrest people who appear to be loitering or trespassing at the participating business.

The idea behind the program is based on the “broken window theory,’’ a concept that has been employed by police around the country. The theory holds that a community that rids itself of petty crime, such as shoplifting, vandalism and trespassing, can eradicate more serious crime because criminals won’t have anywhere to hide."

This is also the justification for NYC's "stop and frisk" program which has been in the news so much lately. For the record, I'm not a fan.
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You're not investing. You're speculating - a perfectly valid use of your own money, but different nonetheless.
"There are tons and tons of opensource software out there thriving, and without any type of backer."

That's pretty short sighted as well. I don't want to invest my heart and soul into something only for it to disappear in a few years like so many have. In the long term, a lot of that software will be gone. Looking back at all the open sourced software I used as a teen most of it has decayed. Little by little over the years I'd receive an automated email from the founder who "built it out of love" saying he needs to "move on now, because I have a wife and kid on the way and a full time job".

Am I the one being insulting? Or are these creators who suffocate their own creations the ones who are insulting open source?
It's not by design. There was a temporary built-in anti-spam limit (max block size of 1Mb) that is not even hit yet. When the pressure of transactions will push blocks closer to 1 Mb, most miners will raise the limit to not diminish the usefulness of the protocol (and therefore value of their own earnings). Essentially, the limit will depend on network latency. No miner wants to risk creating orphan blocks if his 100 Gb block takes too much time to reach everyone else. I don't expect hardcoded limit to be completely removed. Miners will still want to have some limit to still prevent a situation when someone creates a huge block just for fun, so everyone has to carry it around forever.

I wrote in detail on economics of block size limit here: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43849158813/this-is-how-block-...

It's a question of whether the hardcoded block size should or should not raised. There's no incentive not to raise it when needed, that's all.

Of course, there's also need for some ultra-frequent small transactions. Those will be handled just fine by some clearing houses or distributed clearing networks. All debts will be covered very often with real BTC transaction completely automatically, so there's no much risk of fraud (like creation of yet another fractional reserve system).
At some point along this future, the question might be "What grandkids?"
I don't think this is right.

There are certainly prime gaps that exceed 600. In fact, the higher you up (in the number line), the higher these prime gaps tend to get.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_gap

What's being said here is that despite of that, there will always be prime gaps smaller than 600. No matter how high you go, you can always find a pair of primes that are separated by less than 600. In other words, pick the biggest N you can ever dream of, and there will exist primes p1 and p2 such that they are both bigger than N and their difference is smaller than 600.
Previously I would only have thought about distrusting a CA like CNNIC, but since the Snowden revelations, I feel like we all need to start questioning just about every CA out there.

The entire CA approach requires me to trust entities that I am not certain are truly trustworthy. After all they all fall under varied jurisdictions and at the end of they day they are owned and operated by individuals that can be bribed or coerced. Furthermore, we don't know what kind of practices each CA has in place to mitigate tampering and prevent subversion of the CA system.

With that in mind, is it possible to make a CA that is distributed (via a DHT) and publicly verifiable. The process to get a certificate from such a distributed CA could be a long, intense process, but at least it would be trustworthy to a degree no other CA could be.

Is Namecoin a viable alternative? Are there others?
Its hard to justify its use as a transactional currency when its capital appreciation is so high. Perhaps the adjacent question is "why spend it on anything"? At the moment...this may impact the evolution of transactional infrastucture...in terms of ROI (when timing is considered).
GMO - the truth
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I've actually been disappointed that downloading Firefox is only done over HTTP and I didn't see where SHASUMs for the builds were available. I actually tweeted at them about this and never got an answer: https://twitter.com/andrewdeandrade/status/40000123091669401...
http://www.lieferdienst.de in Germany
I bought VPN access with bitcoin around a year ago. I would have used it more often in the past, but most of the time when I wanted to buy / pay something online they had no support for Bitcoin, but support for Paypal, so I still use Paypal more. I guess if there's more uptake, I may chose Bitcoin in those situations more often.
He was a lecturer, not a professor. In universities, lecturers are considered at the bottom of the totem pole, probably even lower than those desktop support staffs as the latter are often unionized.
Yes, I still don't understand why people assumed it was a safe way to pay for incredibly illegal things.

Unless you take extreme precautions tracking down the individual behind a wallet would be trivial for a government.
VMware, SAN storage
can anybody describe a bit more?
Looks like something marketers/companies could definitely use to test engagement. Nice solution, good luck with it.
If you live in a nation of laws, i.e. some form of functioning democracy, the people decide what is legal through their representatives, and this can change gradually as attitudes shift. The government is supposed to be an instrument of the people, not the other way around.
wow - that's really possible ... it simply had never crossed my mind but like a catflap - once the idea is explained it stays in.
I was sitting face to face at a table with a contact at my bank and all the time she was writing the numbers and diagrams facing me. I said that i was very impressed with her writing so he told me that writing backwards was actually part of their standard training at that bank, because they all have to write things on paper while facing customers like this so often :)
>There are many, many schemes that can be built into the protocol or on top of it to make transactions anonymous.

So as it stands truly anonymous transactions are impossible. The possibility to make that not true doesn't negate the fact that today bitcoin is in no way a private way of transferring money.
Excellent! I used to enjoy swi-prolog a lot, especially the semantic web library.
At our store at bitelectronics.net, we set the prices in USD, then with cron we update the price every 15 minutes. This is done by using a average sell rate from Mt.Gox.
You are absolutely right, I don't disagree with you. That was a poor choice of words on my part.

Despite how it may appear in other comments I've made in this thread, I don't believe corporate entities are entitled to use a photographer's works for profit and without attribution.

This may seem contradictory, but that's because I have failed to make the proper distinction between sharing for personal use and using for profit.
That may be it; in the last couple of weeks there's regularly been some useless Bitcoin related speculation/incorrect statistic etc. on the frontpage. Or the constant announcements how much one is worth.
The problem isn't the IRS, it is everybody else who wants to know. Especially in the case of bitcoin where all transactions are public record.

Come up with a way for the IRS to investigate (not just get it handed to them on a platter, but something that mathematically requires a level of effort to prevent fishing expeditions by IRS employees) while simultaneously keeping all transactions private from everyone else and then we'll have a solution.
It's too early to measure any value of BTC in dollars. Any trial comparing to dollars or in any other currency are hype.

BTC transaction meaningless because you don't need to pay commission. It's simply can go infinite at any time if you have enough BTC.
It's worth testing to see how how your customers respond. If you provide value in the Tweet I think they would like it. Just remember to respect their privacy.
By that logic wouldn't it best to buy everything possible through bitcoin? i.e. transfer fiat you would spend on products to bitcoin and enjoy deflationary prices
Any investment is speculation until proven otherwise. And by that I mean that "the mass" accepts it as an "investment".
> It has built-in maps now!

Prolog has always had that. You declare facts like parent(patricia, shelly), and you cant make this at run-time too with assert and retract. Unification & resolution makes this work like a 2-way map. What's the big deal now?
And who exactly determines the procedures? Isn't this something public sector unions routinely negotiate? American public sector unions (teachers as well as police) routinely convince the public that they represent the public interest rather than the private interests of their members so there is no one left to lobby against them, giving them a blank check to make it impossible to dismiss a union member for misconduct.
That's only true when we have any write operation. If all dataset are purely read-only, it's always consistent. And I believe this article is the case.
Are you saying, "I, for one, welcome our new sexual robotic overlords"?
I live next to the Oregon border in California (along the coast) and our local papers carry stories at least once per month about drastic budget problems north of us.

Our local Sheriff gave a Neighborhood Watch talk and mentioned the drastic down-sizing of law enforcement officers in the Oregon counties adjacent to us as a major concern and a potential source of problems for us.

Far more South than Portland...
Lets be honest kids are a hassle anyway
is inet part of stdlib?
I assume the parent is talking about the USG spying on or murdering other not-US people, in which case the people of the US have more or less decided that's what they want.
So far I've bought domain renewals at Namecheap and a few rounds at the pub. Both faster and easier than paying by card. I intend to buy my next flights at btctrip.com.

I'm aware BTC's appreciating value so I periodically top up to offset spending.
i'm not convinced the currency can survive since it's really blind faith that is holding it up, so i'm partially just examining an end-game scenario.

If BTC starts to plummet (which will likely happen at some point in an ecosystem so volatile) people may literally lose their investment entirely. Why? No one will want to sell assets they paid $600 for for $10, they'd rather believe it is going to climb back up. Then even if they decide "fuckit it's over its just a currency now I guess I'll sell" nobody will want to buy. They'll instead buy a cryptocurrency that has a better theoretical mechanism for stability and can actually be used in practice (unless people are so dense that they want to restart the speculation cycle).

The ecosystem could just freeze and there is no way to force people to continue to buy into it (I once read an analysis by an economist in which he mentioned that black marketers may end up having to intimidate constituents to buy into it in order to keep it afloat).

Basically this all kindof boils down to a Game Theory issue where everyone wants to sneak their money out at the proper time in order to maximize their cashout before the system fails or the market corrects (I'm not sure it ever will based on the nonsense principles used to design the mining rules / currency cap).

But not everyone can cashout at the amount they paid in. In fact, as I point out in my endgame scenario, many may not even be able to cash out at all. It's a mass vehicle for redistributing wealth and the volatility makes it useless as a currency. It may take a while to fail but when it does a lot of people will get screwed.

Think about it. The guys with those hoards are probably slowly cashing out 10 BTC now & then to put 5k in the bank, knowing full well that these crazy prices can't hold forever. They are a godsend for the scheme's designers who printed all the free money for themselves. For blackmarketers & gambling sites its more dangerous because they may end up with a wallet full of worthless coins.

When people say "Don't invest more than you can afford to lose" I like to internally translate that to "Don't invest more than you'd be comfortable with having a criminal potentially steal from you".

And then good luck trying to get the US Gov to bail you out, lol. They are looking at Bitcoin totally amorally to understand it. They couldn't give a rats ass about the investors. Amway is legal, after all. :D
This I can confirm this. Internal affairs never finds fault unless you call a lawyer or the news. I live in Baltimore city and I've experienced the same treatment as well. A couple of years ago I moved from the rural county of Baltimore back to my moms in the city. Since I've been back I've been stopped and frisked more than 20 times, my mom was assaulted by police officers on our street (they forced a nightstick into her mouth because they were convinced she swallowed drugs.) My house raided once with a fabricated warrant.

I've also experienced a similar situation where I've called for a shift commander and the officers that stopped my mom showed up. Or Another when I called internal affairs because they destroyed/ vandalized my computer equipment in my room, including opening brand new beers and pouring them on my laundry. I called a shift commander and the officers of the raid showed up at my house while I was on the phone with internal affairs.

It Baltimore they don't call it Stop & Frisk. They don't check that box off. They check the box called Citizen/Police Contact. The last time I had "Citizen/police contact" I was with my friend who's an eagle scout on our way from the Loyola/Hopkins Lacrosse game when we were stopped by 4 police cars with guns drawn, demanding to see our hands forcing us out of the car, and putting us in hand cuffs while they searched us and the car. The officers reasoning was "You were a black guy (I'm mixed and very light) and a white guy in a beat up car driving through the hood".

I still carry the Citizen Copy of that paper ticket/notice/citation whatever it is because that's the day I was almost shot. It's a reminder that we're not safe anywhere. The only thing we can do is try to stay out of their way.
I can't help but think about the hours of your life that an autodidact like you are wasting on school when you are capable of something like this. They should just give you a list of things they want you to know, give you a year to do all 4 years worth of worth and let you move on your merry way to bigger and better things.

Any way to get out of there early? Maybe apply to a solid CS program at MIT or Carnegie Melon and get out of there ASAP?
> you are vanishingly unlikely to do a better job of designing an encrypted channel than every cryptographer and protocol designer and software security person who has poured time into TLS

Given the overwhelming, repeated breakages in the SSL/TLS record protocol I'm really surprised you put the designers of it on such a high pedestal.

The researchers who broke SSL/TLS should certainly get that kudos, but the result of this is that a competent designer should be able to do a better job than TLS now if they merely choose to fully research the problem domain.
I apologize for blatant advertising, but my colleague and I run https://www.bitcoinshop.us, an attempt to host a vast amount of inventory available for purchase with BTC. If anyone has any comments or suggestions on how to improve our service, we would appreciate it very, very much!

I've lurked on HN for quite some time, but could not pass up this opportunity to obtain feedback from such an excellent community.
This is handy: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/11/20...

Several businesses around me I wasn't aware of take it.
That might be a problem, if the bulb was installed in a recessed ceiling can, right? Convection would heat the environment in the fixture.
I bought a domain with it. Although I'm not quite fond of the potential traceability. I earned the money by playing poker. In a way someone could link my personal information I had to give up to make the purchase to my poker habits and the guy who sold me the initial bitcoin in the first place who might or might not be a marijuana dealer.
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GCHQ have said for at least 15 years that their mission is to monitor all communications, world wide, at frequencies from DC to light

That's a truly appalling aspiration. If that is indeed their aspiration, which apparently it is (total information awareness, master the internet etc), we'd be safer with them shut down completely. Otherwise as more and more data becomes available online, they'd be in a position of absolute power over the populace (including those who are supposed to control their activities).

That's not keeping us safe, that is endangering the things they purport to defend.

Don't you find this aspiration frightening?

It's a grab that happened a decade or more ago.

Oh, that's ok then. Business as usual. Would you prefer people just didn't bother to discuss this topic, or do you have something to say about where the limits on this behaviour should be?
How long would it take a large computer to crack a private key?
Makes you wonder what's going to show up when (if?) diagnostic scans like this become widely available to consumers.
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