skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DES was broken about 23 years after it was designed.

I'd be surprised if 30 years into the future (probably earlier given the incentives we have to break crypto today are so much than those we had in '98) if these algorithms weren't broken.

There is actually no precedent of a cryptographic system relying on computational hardness surviving for more than a generation. And given that our fundamental theoretical understanding hasn't really evolved beyond, "we think a bunch of these problems are hard", things are likely to stay that way for a while.
> but actual market decisions that drives such profits is the real source of truth.

Right. Cue up the 2008 financial crisis.

> may be it isn't profitable enough because the other problems they chose to focus on is more "important" in the eyes of society.

Back to my original comment that this is a self-correcting problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6771657

But I doubt that society at large evaluated that certain things (that are currently very profitable) are more valuable than avoiding the situation of running out of effective antibiotics. I posit that there's so much information overload, this problem is simply overlooked by the masses (due to human nature) until it's too late.
Maybe I'm living in a fantasy world but isn't this what Google does with Gmail and people are completely fine with? What's so surprising about this that it needs a lawsuit. Is the angle that Yahoo haven't been proactively forthcoming about something that most people take as implicit (or maybe skipped a ToS/Privacy Policy clause)? Where do users think all this targeted advertising comes from, lucky-guess-engine (tm)?
Sort does have the side effect of writing to a temp file, when the input to be sorted is large. :)
Surface is a legitimate verb, just like any other. Perhaps the author isn't native, and is using a different verb than the one you'd like. Or perhaps that's how he feels like expressing himself. But it is shocking you'd think this is a worthwhile comment and others would upvote you on it.

It's quite sad that this comment is currently the top comment, in an article that raises quite an important topic for the JS and iOS developer communities. As much as I loathe the "hn is turning into reddit" crowd, this is much worse. HN is turning into a criticism machine that when it can't find anything worthwhile to criticise, will literally criticise anything at all rather than elevate a positive comment to the top.
It was Richard Branson..most likely someone paying for their ride to space in BTC.
This is pretty unprecedented is it not? I don't think there's ever been a case where the DOJ was caught with it's hands this dirty before.
Begun, the currency wars have...

A really good reference is "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis" by James Rickards. I would re-read it but I gave away my copy. Rickards makes a lot of sense. If you don't want to read his book, then just Bing him.
Wow, thinking about Benford's Law in binary is really interesting, thanks for this comment.

It's the most extreme expression of the concept. Every number in binary starts with 1. The only other possible leading digit would be a meaningless leading zero, so every number starts with 1. Benford's Law holds in the most extreme manner possible in binary notation, that numbers starting with 1 dominate the population over all others.
Let's say you accept bitcoin but immediately convert it to USD. In future one of your suppliers also decides to accept bitcoin. Now you can pay your supplier directly without the USD conversion step. This wouldn't have happened without you actually deciding to accept bitcoin in the first place.

I don't see any other way to bootstrap a new currency.
Chess is a game of perfect information. Chess players at this level do not intentionally play suboptimal moves hoping to trick their opponents. They try to find the best move given the position on the board.

In some cases two moves may be roughly objectively equal, one leading to more complex positions than the other. In these cases players do sometimes choose according to the situation on the clock, their style, or their mood. For instance, if I have more time left than my opponent, I may choose the more complicated continuation, and vice versa. This sort of practical savvy is important, but not nearly as important as many casual players assume.
Don't most angels regret investments every year? I was under the impression that you invested expecting to lost 90% but get a 10x return on 10% to pay off the fund and then everything else was gravy?
From two years ago, submitted here to Hacker News, an article "Why Groupon Is Poised for Collapse"[1][2] identified problems for Groupon's customers in Groupon's business model. My comment back then noticed something interesting in the article:

I think this is the most interesting paragraph in the submitted article: "As critical as I am of Groupon, the slam dunk case is to sign up with Groupon if you’re going bankrupt. I strongly encourage every business that is about to go under to call Groupon. (Don’t tell them Rocky sent you.) It makes total financial sense--as a Hail Mary play. If you’re lucky, the upfront cash will be enough to help you stay afloat. If not, well, you were already going out of business. It may be your best option. In the short term, you’re actually helping Groupon because they’re being valued on revenue and no one is taking into account risk."

If word of this gets around, the incentives set up by the typical Groupon agreement with a merchant will be responded to by merchants for whom those incentives are the most perverse. Groupon may discover that it is inexorably moving into the business of last-ditch financing for failing businesses.

[1] 13 June 2011 TechCrunch story by Rocky Agrawal: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/13/why-groupon-is-poised-for-c...

[2] Hacker News discussion of story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2649739
I struggle with the word "currency."

Any economy built on a currency that fluctuates this wildly is going to be unpleasant.

I don't know how someone can genuinely believe that bitcoin is a currency with this kind of pricing turbulence. It is behaving like the focal point of rampant speculation.
Thanks. I liked the physicist reference.
While that is true, Bitcoin is far from a bulletproof preserve of wealth. Gold has other uses if it isn't used as a currency anymore.

Bitcoin on the other hand can be made completely useless if some critical flaw is found, or the wealth is too concentrated in a few users and the majority decides to switch to a newer crypto-currency.
How the heck are you going to put new BTCs into this new address?

Unless you have some anonymous way of depositing BTCs into random addresses, all transfers into and out of that address will be stored into the BTC Blockchain _for life_.

No, seriously. Forever, for the rest of Bitcoin's history, there will be a record that two addresses transferred BTC between each other.

This will be timestamped, cryptographically signed, and archived by the BTC Network. That is... what Bitcoin is after all. It is the ultimate ledger.
If so, how does that work? If I exchange USD for Euros, and the dollar weakens against the euro, am I taxed?

Is it an issue of intent? If I exchange for investment purposes, it's taxed, but for practical purposes, it's not?
This is super interesting to me. If you exchange your money from one currency to another (USD, Euro, etc.) and profit from doing this, do you need to pay taxes? If not, is BTC treated as a currency, or as a security (eg. FB, TSLA) where you would obviously have to pay capital gains taxes.
Not only is Bitcoin sent frequently, it's also stolen frequently:

http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-hacking-stolen-million-417/

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/250-000-worth-bitcoins-sto...

http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/czech-bitcoi...

edit: unrelated, someone should make an index of how many Bitcoin threads hit the front page of HN per day.
You might be interested in Ejecta[1] then. X-Type[2], a game I made with it, easily draw hundreds of sprites with 60fps.

[1] http://impactjs.com/ejecta

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/x-type/id597488149?mt=8
The details of the story are hard to find nowadays, probably because the lawyers told everyone to shut up about it. You can find some vague allusions to it here: " Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled)." http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...

Btw, which side of his reputation does he live up to? To being a visionary genius or to being a raving crank?
If Stallman were able to exert hegemonic control, we would not be using words like FOSS, and software development would focus on solving social problems. Stallman is vocal about his Socialism and spends most of his time addressing political issues. Anyone can see this clearly on stallman.org.

But since the free software model was so successful, many people worked hard to remove its political associations, creating the open source movement. I think the real hegemony is the collection of existing power structures, which will always work to assimilate successful models.

It's important to think about who benefits in social interactions, but a useful analysis requires understanding particular historical details like the animosity between idealists and pragmatists in the FLOSS community. It might have been more useful to state that despite its idealiatic origins and the continued participation of people who want to address social problems with software, old structures of privilege continue to determine who benefits from social interactions. Anyone who disagrees with these privileges must take care to decide how best to work against them, because the default benefit is always to those who have inherited privileges.
Google is actually doing the opposite of what Microsoft did: they're unbundling the browser from the OS.

Which is not to say it's a good thing, just that it isn't the same at all.
I'd say, yes, the value is almost as high, because it's not about the changes themselves (many of our "visible improvements" are bugfixes that only happen in weird cases) but about showing that you're constantly improving. It's basically a signal of the health of your company.
2013 Argentinian here. To buy a house right now you usually have to pay dollars cash because nobody accepts a currency that devaluates 25% per year.

The political class here is crazy corrupt and rich like in every third world country, and they are known for using piles of 500 euros bills to stay out of the bank system because euros have more wealth density than dollars.
I can agree with this, but I think that most flash sale sites have diverged from Groupon and the like (or the other way around). Physical goods based limited deals offer more value than purchasing a voucher (discount, massage, restaurant, vacation, etc...).

Also, flash sales sites tend to be more focused and give the appearance that you are dealing directly with the site owner; not a third party aggregating deals.

So, to me, there are two types of daily deal sites.

1) Flash Sales (Steep and Cheap, NoMoreRack)

2) Voucher Sales (Groupon, Living Social)

I feel like the physical goods space will always do better than a voucher-based deal site.
Unrelated: I've greatly enjoyed your comment history--particularly the bicycle metaphor and the moral stance on Bitcoin.
ahhhh genius. of course. make it the problem of somebody who's trying to prop it up or actually believes in the exchange rate ;)
I'm not sure that's true.
You're so open to scammers that it isn't even funny.

Lets say I give you a "physical" BTC worth 1 million BTC. Is there any way for me to prove to you that I have erased the private key to this BTC address?

No, there isn't. Anyone who is caught using physical BTC coins is a sucker who doesn't understand the system. They can be very easily scammed by the very man who created the "physical BTC coin". After all, all I need to do is keep a copy of the private address, and transfer the money sometime after I've "sold" you the BTC.
Day 25: Tornado--Combining Tornado, MongoDB, and AngularJS to Build an App
Would be rather fitting, considering "Treason! Burn him at the stake!" was the battle-cry for some of the politicians in regards to Snowden's actions.
Yes, it looks like something from the late 90s (and it probably is), but this is a tutorial I used early on: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Spoiler: #(%1 5)
This was exactly the koan that I felt had the biggest discontinuity, and yeah, having the previous ones visible might help.
Yes, but what's happened to your conversion rate?
How the CEO of TD Ameritrade became a college football coach
Someone trying to get #1 on http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100 ?

Seems very reckless. All your eggs in one basket.
Metadata: The information that helps you decide to target for deeper collection the comms of someone you were previously unaware of. Diplomat X talks to Y a lot, so we better track Y more closely.
I know the words "ethics" and "lawyers" don't generally enters people's minds at the same time, but the model rules of ethics for lawyers take this sort of thing seriously. If the Senators show that some lawyers did indeed lie to the Supreme Court, the Court itself could take action on those attorneys' licenses. It's also a lawyer's duty to report if they are aware of another attorney's violations of ethical rules.

I know it's doubtful, but one can hope.
PBOC Says No Longer in China’s Interest to Increase Reserves
I think you might be missing the point. Bitcoin right now operates more like gold. You can't pay off your house, buy a car, pay your taxes or go out to eat with gold. However, there is a healthy market for exchanging gold for currency. You wouldn't call gold funny money. I think it would be more appropriate to compare bitcoin to gold right now. I have no idea how healthy the market is for exchanging bitcoin for other currency, though.
In 2012, the DOJ had to send a letter to the Supreme Court to admit misstatements made in its briefing in an immigration case:

http://www.justice.gov/osg/briefs/2008/3mer/2mer/2008-0681.m...

Additional details: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/justice-depart...
part of the problem Mathematica has is that people assume it's just for math, which isn't the case. it's a very general system. this renaming, while utterly dorky and aesthetically hamhanded, will at least help clear that misunderstanding
After recent fluctuations it's very hard to predict what, if any impact this will have on it's value.
A few interesting Clojure microbenchmarks
Low-voltage at any meaningful distance is extremely lossy. Unless he's using big expensive wires, he's going to have a lot of voltage drop on any load beyond a small gadget. Even just pulling, say, 50 watts out of a 12-volt socket with a 20-foot run of 12 AWG behind it gives you a voltage drop of over 2% at the socket. At 120V/12AWG, the drop would be 0.22%. You'd have to use ~2AWG to match that. That's a lot of copper.
This sounds important, but I'm at a loss as to its significance.

What was Clapper v Amnesty?

It sounds like Solicitor General Verrilli made a lie of omission in the court. Is that considered a lie under oath?

What obligation does Solicitor General Verrilli have to the three Senators to answer their questions? What consequences might he face if he choose to ignore the letter?

Realistically, what could this mean for the original Clapper v Amnesty case, and how might it affect the public in general?
Let's not go there: http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/3/essays/11....

The U.S. hasn't convicted someone of treason for more than half a century. Even John Walker Lindh, who was literally fighting with the enemy against the U.S., was not prosecuted for treason.
Do you have an option to offer AeroFS Private Cloud for personal use? I would love to be able to move off of Dropbox to a home based VMware solution.

That and 1Password support asasp (PLS!)
Unless some high-level DoJ and NSA officials are thrown in jail for a couple decades for all this, it's not going to stop.
IPad Spanking
Having a little fun!
Really it's because the three guys who started it knew that stack the best. The rest of us are just hangers on :)
I cut my finger on this edge.
Gigabit! I only dream of that. I'm happy that my ISP claims I can get 30 MBps here 10 miles outside town.
There are some good criticisms here about some of the discontinuities in difficulty, but first and foremost I really want to congratulate OP for doing something to address the instant gratification problem in learning to program. You can open this site in your browser and immediately start interacting with code rather than trying to get your java environment/editor/etc. set up, and that's fantastic, we really need more tools like this.
Bitcoin Black Friday
So maybe I'm ignorant here, but did they do the transfer over the Internet, or was it a thumb drive taken out of "cold storage" and handed off to someone else. Do we even know? Don't you think there are vulnerabilities in the system for transferring Bitcoins just like there are vulnerabilities in the system for transferring other valuable things?
This is good to hear. But problem is that the curve is moving all the time and Mathematica seems to be catching up very slowly.

As for the REPL and general editing, if I were you, I'd quickly go towards LightTable integration — it should be doable, and the effects could be spectacular.
Oh don't worry, you can still do it, just head over to AngleList and you can grab yourself some investors. They all meet the qualifications (have a certain income level) and since it's a platform specifically for investing it's not a random solicitation so you don't have to know them personally before asking.

Here's an example: https://angel.co/makespace?ref=startup_card
This is why my Android phone is rooted and uses Xprivacy to control app permissions.

Though I still have no control over all the information Google itself leeches using it's own framework.... which is sad.
Maybe, sense of justice? :)
Yes, it's called a capital loss. A loss can be used to offset an equal amount of capital gain, or a small amount (up to $1500/year) of earned income.

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Ten-Important-Facts-About-Capital-Gai...
The kind of wishes people have about "I don't like it --> should be treason!" is one of the reasons that the US has a narrow definition of treason enshrined in the Constitution.

Plus, no, it wouldn't: the President is both immune to criminal prosecution while in office and has plenary power to pardon, so "someone could make a treason case out of it" wouldn't constrain executive abuses. The only thing that constrains those is a public that cares enough to extract a price for the abuses, starting with public outcry and action at the ballot box.
Sort didn't supervise autocorrect properly
No, the Bitcoin system has real value. Or rather, it would have real value, if Bitcoins themselves had real value.
Yes, but that makes for a very uninteresting story
Winamp Shut Down or Sell Out? Microsoft And AOL Discuss A Buyout.
Does AeroFS do both encryption for in-flight and at-rest data?

One of the things I didn't like about AeroFS when I last looked at it was the dependency of having Java avail on systems. I try to remove Java as much as possible and it certainly would be nice if the AeroFS client were avail in a different bundle.
Isn't this due to treason being interpreted as providing an enemy with information or assistance during a declared war?
Otherwise the syntax would live up to the shell's name.
Don't expect Holder the Untouchable to ever be punished for this. At this point I think he's more untouchable than even "Emperor Alexander", the current (and soon former) chief of NSA.
This is better for quotes (asterisk at start and end)
I may be ignorant here, but isn't the BTC system entirely based on 3rd party oversight?
Does anyone else think the 10% fee from bountysource is a bit high?
Yes, because making sure someone isn't buying a nuke on the black market and is paying the taxes they owe is just terrible. Don't get me wrong, the regulatory framework for money transfers seems to suck, but I don't want to go from "shitty regulation" to "zero regulation", I want to go from "shitty regulation" to "smart regulation".
As a funny relevant aside http://vanilla-js.com/
I think you got it all backwards. They are contesting that very distinction, so their position is that there is none, so why should they write as if there was?

Their stance is that the other side's distinction is merely in their choice of words, but the facts of the situation are such that the standard plays the same role as a law would, and as such choosing to call it a "standard" rather than a "law" only serves to confuse people, not to describe the actual situation, and so they instead choose words that accurately and clearly describe things as they are from their perspective.
you can do

SetOptions[EvaluationNotebook[], DockedCells :> {}]

and there are options to remove the window frame, etc. but i think if you are using certain licenses the toolbar may not disappear. and the main toolbar never disappears, to my dismay
I should have said DTrace for functional programs
Xbox One launches to crowds and lots of hype
Show HN: A place to rate development schools
Read the FAQ.

https://www.casascius.com/faq.aspx
Aufeminin Acquires Subscription Service ‘My Little Paris’ For $90 Million
FM Stream Tech Report
I wouldn't say closures are what make functional programming functional. I tend to think like that too, but it's probably a bias from my Lisp/JavaScript background. Closures are orthogonal both to OOP and FP.

IMHO functional programming is just:

- Higher order functions
- Referential transparency
- Immutability

Closures are just a convenient way of encapsulating state avoiding global variables.
I once put a proxy in front of an HN client for iOS. Every time I tapped on something or performed an action, it would send at-least 10+ requests to various analytics firms. This included locking my phone. Additionally, almost every private key was transmitted in the clear, over HTTP. Nothing was encrypted, not even the connection to HN.
Xbox One site BELLY-UP in GLOBAL Microsoft cloud catastrophe
That doesn't help companies like Skyhook(and Mozilla if Firefox too is banned by the agreement) because almost all OEMs are current members who are bound to the agreement:

HTC

LG

Sony

Samsung Electronics

ASUSTek

Garmin

Huawei Technologies

Sony Mobile Communications (joined as Sony Ericsson)

Toshiba

Acer

ZTE Corporation

Alcatel Mobile Phones

Compal Communications

Dell

Foxconn

Haier

Kyocera

Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Ltd.

NEC

Sharp Corporation

Saygus Corporation

Care to guess the marketshare of Android handsets not shipped by one of the above?

More and more things are being moved into Google Apps with each Android release. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

Anyway, I don't begrudge Google doing this, I only have an issue with the bastardization of the word "open". AOSP and Android are very different, and when people say Android is open, they actually mean AOSP is open, since Android as shipped on devices is very different and contains a lot of proprietary things.
Yeah, I think they started to get really aggressive about controlling how people access Youtube videos, trying to keep from sending more data than is absolutely necessary over the wire to keep costs down.
Thats a really interesting suggestion actually. I have previously sold a few domains I acquired a while ago and that is something I was considering getting into again.

But to buy a domain together with a profitable website hmm... have you done something like this before?