skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I participated also, and enjoyed the hackathon itself. I wasn't expecting to win. I expected the winner to be someone that had a suitable product that was ready to launch around the same time as the hackathon was announced, and decided to seize the moment for some PR. This is more or less what happened. I think what is leaving a bad taste is that I didn't expect that it would done so brazenly.

The problems in my mind aren't about unfair judging (all judging is biased), but rather that:

* The winning company had clearly been started long before the permitted start date.

* It took less than an hour for this to be 'proved'; Salesforce obviously can't check compliance on every team, but not double-checking the five finalists seems foolish.

* The smoking gun was a demo Upshot gave at a Salesforce meetup. One of the two company founders had worked at Salesforce for 9 years until earlier this year. There's no way any sensible verification could have missed that they'd been working on this for a while. Asking a few of his former colleagues, for example, would likely have revealed the truth.

* Salesforce haven't yet acted to remedy this; which makes them appear complicit in it. I attribute their behavior to incompetence rather than malice. If it was a total fix from the start, there's no reason to exclude projects started before the hackathon in the rules.

The Upshot product itself looks fairly good, so I feel sorry for them in that they could do even better financially if they hadn't won. But not that sorry, given they have a million dollars cash-in-hand :-)

To be fair to Salesforce, their million dollar prize seems to have backfired rather spectacularly with the very audience they were trying to win over. They are probably more annoyed than anyone, and are probably having to tread very carefully for legal reasons. Even if they reclaimed the prize and gave it to #2, it seems that many of the top 5 may also not be entirely above suspicion, and they would want to be doubly-sure of those entries. They'd also presumably have to figure out who was #6 and give them the (new) 5th place prize.

All in all, a major mess.
I'm all for teenage entrepreneurship and research but... this honestly sounds like the fellow who reads a single computer science text books then has all the answers to those silly issues that have been facing humanity for eternity.

Perhaps he found a way to encode data in neutrons ala Diaspora?
>offer instantaneous data transfer,

no

>limitless data compression,

no

>and truly unbreakable encryption

no
I was looking for a fast file syncing solution that worked on Win/Mac/Lin and didn't really need any GUI or web interface for my files like those 2 services seem to focus on.

Also Tonido has a 2GB limit on their free plan whereas AeroFS lets me sync as much files as I have storage space on my computers (so literally hundreds of GB).
Hmm... I'm not convinced. I think you want john carmack as an engineer with a lot of freedom and resource and a limited amount of management responsibilities. He seems far better suited to being first among equals (first among equal engineers) than to being a technical business-decision maker. Give him the role of arguing for the right decisions rather than making them, and I think you'll get a lot better value for your money.
You have to take into account sweat as well. A boxer's face is probably going to be sweaty as they exert themselves quite a bit during a fight. As a result, the blood is going to get watered down.

I tried to find pictures to verify my idea, but every head injury picture I found was of an athlete.
Given the claims, it sounds incredibly unrealistic. Then again, legitimate news agencies like Reuters published the press release (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/21/ca-techweek-la-idU...), but the details are pretty scant.

They claim it's patented. Can someone find the patents?
At least you got to compete. All the girls wanting to compete at Launch Hack got rejected. All hacks are rigged. All the ones worth winning anyway.
I didn't say it was worthless. But like most things, they are great for certain cases, and terrible for others, and nothing works 100% of the time.
Just add a kinect and you have your minority report interface!
And a one-line fix. Damn that must be satisfying.
Air travel has gotten drastically cheaper and safer since the 60s.
Hilariously, C checks a lot of these boxes.
I'd like this one. I sell Facebook likes. If you were offering a $1M prize I'd "sell" you a lot of Facebook likes. It would be like if all of England liked me. Which they probably do even if they don't want to admit to it.

I also sell Youtube views, so I could make sure it would be less funny than what you describe.

Popularity contests should be done in person. Harder to cheat if you have to get people to the venue.
Or (fn [f] 25)
"Some altcoins incorporate interesting new ideas, but there is an essential feature of Bitcoin which they all lack. It is not a matter of its technology, but rather of its history and community. Quite simply, a medium of exchange that is more widely accepted on the market is more useful than one which is not."

http://themisescircle.org/blog/2013/08/22/the-problem-with-a...
FIDE Master here. Rated 2317 according to the latest FIDE ratings.
I think it depends on the music. Lots of people watch live hockey on TV.
If you have an iPhone 3G, you can already do this. It's not very good, though. http://www.idroidproject.org/wiki/OpeniBoot
The pets sample doesn't render on Windows Phone. I get a blank screen and only the home icon shows up.
I've also enjoyed many a live music performance in Second Life. It's wonderful to be able to text chat with friends, and even with the musician, during shows. (The musician can ignore the text chat if they want, so it's only distracting for them if they want it to be.)

You're right that most SL live musicians broadcast from home studios, which is great because it keeps their costs down. Turntable Live currently says musicians have to come to their NYC studio, which I suppose is better than travelling all over the country, but I'm sure musicians would much prefer performing in a home studio or a studio in their area. Maybe in the future?
The Story of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News
Sure, the post is at http://perfektes-php.de/php-beyond-the-web/
Will surely mail you once I've got some productive feedback!
eh it's hard for me to keep going with this argument because Bitcoin's pricing is so made up, but i'll try.

I wasn't saying gold doesn't have an exchange rate. I was saying it DOES have one for EACH currency (allowing this arbitrage scenario) and that's part of what makes it strong. My impression of Bitcoin was that they simply price it in Yen or USD or whatever is their best market, then convert from THAT currency into whatever other currencies they want through the real-world exchange rates of existing currencies, in order to display it with a unified favorable price.

However, these arguments aren't even worth it really since the price is so varied from exchange to exchange that let's face it -- the numbers are pretty much all distorted BS regardless of how the prices are determined. All they represent is real-time bids. It's like watching a big eBay auction on nothing and claiming the true value of the item is evidenced by the current bid.
asking everyone for their ID just because they are on the street. That's illegal by the way, even for the police.

That is not illegal at all. Anyone can ask for ID, including the police. Doesn't mean you have to give it to them. In the case of the police, refusing to show your ID can't be used as cause to arrest you. But they can still ask for it.
I had an idea awhile back about treating large files as insanely large hex integers, then dividing that by a huge known prime, and basically storing 3 smaller integers that plug into the equation "ax + b", where x is the known prime, a is what you found when doing the division, and b is the remainder. Plugging those numbers into the equation would give you the huge integer representing the original file.

I'm assuming the known primes would be in a database somewhere, and you could just use the indices, instead of some 512-digit number.

The process could be repeatable if 'a' was too big, theoretically enabling some extreme compression.

You'd need a way to handle extremely large ints, and in the few minutes I thought about it, you'd need at least twice the original file size available for compression/decompression.

I'm also pretty sure my idea is full of shit, but there are more details than in the article.
/r/cringe worthy material right here. Yeesh!
SOCCER FANS CHEER FOR THEIR TEAM AT HOME WITH REAL-TIME APP [video]
And so the claim is that there is no less obvious reason that a comb might not be all primes only finitely often. That is an audacious claim :-).
Wouldn't that just be multiplexing on steroids?
Not bash. '~~' gets replaced by the MANTA_USER environment variable by the manta command line tool mput.
The Android docs include an exploit for SYSV IPC on Linux
I chuckled when I realized you could just copy and paste the expression and it will pass the equality test. Obviously you don't learn anything this way, but I'll admit I used it once or twice when I got stumped.
I find this just plain damm creepy.

On the other hand if it were a site where people could post requests to find people they missed like that - that could be a pretty neat site.
FWIW, it is legal to record wireless transmissions like cellphone calls. It is illegal to pass copies of those recordings on to other people. At least in the USA.
This seems like a fundamental flaw in the currency that makes it's deflationary properties worse.

Let's say bitcoin is to last a century, over time, there will be gradual losses to all kinds of problems, like hardware failures, owner errors, etc that cause lost of wallets, and thus, coins, forever.

There's no way to replace these, so over time, the total number of coins it not only limited, but after the last bitcoin is mined, it must decrease.

This suggests to me that bitcoin is a marvelous experiment that finally proved that such a currency is possible on a wide scale, but as a foundational currency, it has serious flaws, and it sounds like it needs to ultimately be replaced by a Bitcoin 2.0.

However, creating a new Bitcoin that is incompatible with the old would massively destroy value in the old system, so it's an interesting proposition as to how you can 'version' the Bitcoin protocol over time while not causing great upheaval.
These coins are worthless. If they ever start to gain value, it would trigger the end of bitcoin. For alts that have a chance from being different from bitcoin, see namecoin, freicoin, and zerocoin.
No, it's probably not possible, as iOS is coded to run on specific Apple manufactured hardware...

Even if it were possible, it would take a hellish amount of time to get working, I'm sure.
Ancient Abandoned Websites That Still Work
JS compiles at runtime (or JIT), C++ compiles at build time. What's the big difference? Real hackers code nothing but ASM.
hahaha, fun how this thread turns out. But keep in mind: Using R/G/B Lasers won't increase the speed of light, so don't try to debunk BS with BS.

I have read about an indian student 4y ago who invented a geometrical compression algorithm that could save about 80GB onto an image, the size of an A4 document. Never heard back from him
Credit: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/404021877477109760
Say public key x receives 1 BTC in block A. I'm guessing it's encoded as ripemd160(sha256(o)) -> 1 BTC -> ripemd160(sha256((x)) where o is some other public key with sufficient funds. I create a new key pair with public key y, such that ripemd160(sha256((x)) = ripemd160(sha256((y)). From now on let's call this address hash h.

In block B, I make a transaction h -> 1 BTC -> s. Where s is a securely generated public key that I own. I then sign this transaction with my forged public key, which hashes to h.

How does this not give me x's money?
Sure it does - I've seen stranger stuff.

Though in this case it might just be trendy .co domain that makes it so :-P
It might be harder for authorities to monitor bitcoin transactions. But, as the very fact that this HN article exists illustrates, the blockchain is a public record that's available for anyone to monitor, analyze, cross-reference with other sources of data, etc. Particularly for large movements like this, I'm inclined to say that it would be downright foolhardy to assume that BTC transactions are anonymous.
Yeah cause if everyone is doing it, it isn't creepy anymore!
``Believing Is Seeing'' by Errol Morris is a great read for those who are torn here... A great read.
The U.S. labor movement did used to be stronger than it is now, but it was never really that strong. At the peak in the 1950s, about 35% of workers worked in unionized workplaces. That's a very low figure for Europe, where typically 70%+ of workers work in unionized workplaces (here in Denmark it is 80-90%).
Fly to Vegas and put it all on an apartment.

http://needwant.com/p/buying-apartment-airbnb/
I hate to break it to you, especially since I don't exactly understand the scheme you're describing, but "virtually unlimited compression" is impossible [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon's_source_coding_theorem
Great to hear, Thanks! I'm really interested in this for an upcoming project, so I'm just trying to understand the implications of some of these design decisions.
You should try it, and update us with how many Bitcoins you were able to get this way :)
Thanks for giving more feedback. Would you be kind to respond to the other child of your OP pointing out that the winner had been working and actually demoed their app way before the starting period set out in the rules? Thanks!
YOU ARE FREAKING KIDDING ME RIGHT?

THIS IS NOT YOUR ARTICLE. YOU CITE TO MY WEBSITE AND SAY THAT YOU ARE THE AUTHOR??

GAMBLOR956 IS NOT AUTHOR OF ARTICLE

AUTHOR OF ARTICLE IS AVAILABLE BY CONTACT INFO ON THE WEBSITE!!!
Addressing Questions about the Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon
Go ahead and lay out the one true rational argument for morality then (you brought up morality way up thread there...).
Clojure core.async [video]
With a factor of 10^60 in there, the difference between a century and a millennium is down in noise anyway. :)
I think they are hedging their bets and are making a trade-off between allowing their citizens to put their savings into BitCoin and potentially letting them run free financially, and
also possibly wresting control of the world financial system away from the Americans. They want the US Dollar to stop being the world reserve currency. If they promote BitCoin they have an opportunity to wrest control of the world's money supply away from the US. To them, a currency that no one controls is better than a currency that the US controls.

I think there's also the matter of the public ledger. An anonymized public ledger is still more information than they currently have with even the yuan about when currency is changing hands and where it is going. I think BitCoin libertarians are fooling themselves if they think the public ledger isn't a major asset to the government, who can now track money from point A to point B if it enters and leaves the BitCoin economy at an exchange endpoint.
Let's try your algorithm with the number 25 (11001 in binary).

One formulation is 2(11)+3. The primes up to 25 are 2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23, so we'll use the index 4 to represent the prime number 11.

To lay this out, we need to represent three numbers: 2, 4, and 3. Without the inevitable markings you'd need to delineate when numbers started and stopped, the bit string would look like 10 100 11.

Using 11 as the prime, your compression would require laying out 1010011 to represent 11001, which means it's actually anti-compression.
Yes and can theoretically increase the bandwith, but light is a wave function and I don't understand the quantum physical part (regarding observer dependent particle/wave formation) to tell, if it could work or not.

How it looks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4R18PYJaIM
FYI SCAM ALERT
GAMBLOR956 IS NOT THE AUTHOR OF THIS ARTICLE. I AM. MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS ON THE WEBSITE BITCOINTAX.INFO
REPEAT. GAMBLOR956 IS NOT THE AUTHOR OF THE WEBSITE.
So his whole argument boils down to him thinking it looks fake? It seems irresponsible to publish accusations like this without any hard evidence and without considering the consequences of being wrong.

Studies have shown that people are likely to remember accusations of wrong doing and forget retractions or corrections. His insinuation that either the subject or photographer is "faking it" is damaging their credibility just so this guy can get his kicks playing PhotoShop detective.
Number of unique Bitcoin addresses used
I hate to break it to you, but if super massive black holes exist, it is maybe possible. (Curious, if this is wrong or can be broken too)
How does this fit with today's transfer of 194,993 BTC?
That's significantly more than the #1 address on this list.
Am I missing something?
Like I said, probably full of shit, but I think of odd stuff in the shower.

With really, really huge (like the aforementioned 7GB) numbers, you might see something better, sort of how there's a point with most compression methods that the header is bigger than the data being compressed.

Kinda doubting it now, though.
PayPal releases Kraken, Node.js framework
Nexus 7 Android 4.4 KitKat - Where is it Google?
Good point. Getting to get back into consulting for that reason.
Ironically, this page hangs Chrome indefinitely when I try to load it. Luckily it only hangs the tab so I can still close it. I guess I'll fire up Firefox to see if I can actually read the article.

Edit: Actually, it loads fine in a private browsing tab, so it must be a bad interaction with some extension. Oh well.
zlib, lua & luajit
In reality, I suspect very few people actually notice what is going on in the ad. Ironically, they /will/ get a lot of 'wow' but mostly from the virality of the video and maybe award submissions. Which means they need not have produced the actual signage but just the video and probably would have achieved the same result. But that would have been too easy to earn them any publicity. How meta.
Neutrons, Diaspora? Do you mean the social network? Don't get that, can you explain?
If you boil down everything the answer will be 1 of 2, or 3 things:
- Get laid more, or experience better/more orgasms.
- Get richer
- Leave a legacy.
From TFA, this is just a means to produce nice looking videos to teach his lessons.

His students watch the videos at home, then the classroom time is for doing the homework with the teacher available for firsthand assistance. That is the flip teaching described in the article, which is being confused with the reversed-screen being shown in the picture.
Also this : http://worrydream.com/#!/Freedom
It's worse than that. As the post at the root of this thread observes, it's possible for bitcoins to be lost forever. So while the total number of possible BTC is merely asymptotically bounded, the actual number of BTC in circulation is going to peak and then go into a period of inexorable decline once the rate at which BTC are "destroyed" by data loss exceeds the rate at which BTC can be mined.
i am worried about sha256

and finally mathematicans could get rid of poor now
The link is no longer working. Maybe they removed.
It loads instantly for me. I'm using Chrome 31.0.1650.57 on Windows 7.
This reads like an advertising campaign for a movie or video game. Aka "Prometheus" and "Deus:EX Human Revolution"
This is a point that I can't help thinking about regularly. Gold and cash, at least 147 million dollars worth is physically difficult to store and transfer. In most cases it is also difficult to steal.

The equivalent commodity value in BTC can be stored on a tiny rom, and transferred anywhere in the world for free from anywhere with network access.

I hate to be cynical, because the ideals behind this currency seem nobel -- but I can't help but feel dread that it is only a matter of time before bad things start happening here.

Is this outlook too negative?
>The transaction has to be verified by multiple other people before it can be trusted.

That's not how it works, sorry. If you don't double spend your transaction and you attach a proper fee it's going to get in the chain, period.
Karl Gray claims the transfer

https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404043972646932480

https://twitter.com/paradimeshift/status/404042739127308289
Our company (based in LA) has party today at Vegas. A friend of mine decided to take the plane from LA -> Vegas, I took the bus, other people drove their cars.... And somehow I got 30-60 minutes earlier than him, if not more. Granted, due to the rain it was much harder for the planes to take off, but adding checkin time, checkout, taxi to the hotel, etc...

On top of that we had nice 30 minute break with the bus, at not so bad place (In-N-Out). And plenty of room to play monopoly on the iPad, read books, drink wine, stroll around, etc.
"Linux 12.04+" lol.
Very few people registered at even the $99 hacker pass level, which is why they ended up making it free. Nobody who wasn't already going to DF paid the full conference price to participate in the hackathon. Quit with the hysteria.
I am curious why you find this ironic? What is your definition of irony?
Ah, so that is what this checklist yields for Urbit!
From what I remember in that article[1], the baseband processor was actually crashing and rebooting in the days leading up to the launch. The "peg the signal bar at 5" trick was to hide that problem for the sake of the demonstration.

That's shady, but for the sake of a marketing event I could understand why it was done. It's not as shady, however, as faking an entire product behind a curtain.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-sa...
31.0.1650.57 on OSX 10.9. Firefox handles it just fine. Could be some interaction with an extension I have installed.
WILL IS RA HELL START WORLD WAR 3
Depends what you mean by "legit". I once asked a project manager if the client had and legally-mandated rules for passwords. The response from the client was (paraphrased) "no legal requirement. Let's go with 6-12 characters, at least one number and one symbol". I suggested a higher (or no) upper limit, but I was told to just give them what they wanted.

"It's what the client wants" is a rather legit reason, whether the rules come from a legal standard for their industry or completely out of their rear end.
I don't think grandparent comment is arguing that.

The post is about a transfer of 195k bitcoins (not dollars) from one wallet to another, all at once. However, as grandparent comment points out, the title is inaccurate: even if this transaction indeed involved an exchange of dollars, it's incorrect to assume that the dollar amount was 195k × (current BTC/USD rate).

You could probably make such an assumption for, say, JPY/USD, because the daily volume of yen trading is measured in hundreds of billions U$. Not so with bitcoin.
Yes, I agree. I would just hang out in rooms all day; tt.fm was like a rush of nostalgia from my IRC days.
Not being able to understand the intricacies of this proof, I can take away but one message. Genius can come from anywhere, even from an academic who was only able to find a job working at a Subway diner. So be open to good ideas - they can come from anybody, anywhere.
You could almost call it ... dense wavelength-division multiplexing.
He has been looking for a job in his hometown after returning from London. Firms like yours should be more open to remote workers, particularly in a small country like England where most everybody can take the train to London for a half day meeting on a regular basis. Heck, I knew people who commuted from Leeds every day, but not everyone can handle that lifestyle. The best part of it is that the British train system makes it easy to be productive while travelling. Leave home 15 minutes before departure time, step on the train just in time, sit and relax and code for the hours that it takes to get into the city.