skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In order to make a successful attack against a merchant accepting zero-confirmation transactions, the attacker has to:

1. Submit transaction A to miners

2. Submit another transaction B (spending the same coins as A) to the vulnerable merchant

3. This is the really hard part: make sure that the merchant doesn't know about transaction A until you got your purchase and ran away.

If the merchant has good network connectivity, it is very, very hard to perform this attack successfully, certainly not something that would be done to get a free newspaper or coffee.
I hate writing on glass whiteboards. If the markers are not strong enough, you can't see what you are writing over the glare of the lights.
If I search for 'go' then I'll get http://golang.org as the second result after the Wikipedia article for the game, however I find that if I'm searching for almost anything to do with Go I'll have to type 'golang' instead, because otherwise Google seems to interpret it as a verb.
A presentation slide is missing. Can i download the original presentation from somewhere?
Ask HN: Groups to help individuals start businesses around their skill sets
Are their any groups/incubators etc that actually look at an individual ( and their skills/passions/interests ) and tries to help facilitate the creation of businesses around them? I'm saying this in contrast to the ideal of some group having a 'start up idea'.
Ask HN: Is it possible to do transclusion in ember components?
I don't ever see bitcoin replacing first world currencies. In places like Sudan and Iran however it presents a seemingly more viable alternative.
"Richard Branson announced that Virgin Galactic will accept bitcoin"

Everybody missed another big news about another company... you can buy plane tickets with Bitcoin! Online air travel agency, cheapair.com, announced today they accept Bitcoin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784265
What do you think Factors are? Do you know what a Prime is? Do you know what a Factor Is?

I am skipping the rest of your arguments since. "What, Yes" is more correct.
FWIW, this is called run-good.

It's unlikely your $200 was a proper bankroll when you started, and it's even more unlikely that you or anyone else could consistently replicate these results (when starting out).

That said, I'm an ex-husng player, and played them professionally for three years, and I don't disagree with your overall message. Poker is a wonderful game, heads-up play is great and has almost no boring parts, and you can conceivably make a living at it if you put in your time and manage your money well.

How are the games these days? When I played it was primarily before superturbos, and I three-tabled $105s on FTP for just under a 60% winrate and 14% ROI.

I imagine the average player has really upped their game, though, and that the regulars these days would crush me on average--I'm rusty and the game has matured.
This is also cool, and probably a lot more practical!
The Thrill of Breathlessness
Fischer et al saw it coming decades ago, unfortunately.
Most of my hardware is already paid off. My effective cost per BTC has been well below market prices. Sure I have continued revenue to gain, but I'm only in this position because I believe in bitcoin and want to see the world become a better place.
Pretty much every Business Accelerator does this. They help you handhold in setting up the business & other formalities associated with this for a certain period of time and you learn in the process to manage it all yourselves.

Having an idea which is workable on and could well translate into a business is in itself a 'startup idea'.

A start-up idea does not have a different definition, IMHO.
Laura Poitras, the story's co-author, together with Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, is part of the 'troika' that broke open this can of worms. In case you still haven't read NYT Mag's fascinating profile of hers, please do: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
There have been more than one block chain splits. I think you are talking about the hard fork that happened in May, which was planned for and not an unexpected accident. If you conduct a transaction and it is included in the shorter block chain, then by definition the network doesn't recognize the transaction and you keep your money and just send again.
Genuinely curious, why that much effort to use LESS over Sass?
I believe the logic is that talking and drinking compete for the oral mutex, so limiting the ability to talk (by making it so loud that talking becomes pointless because nobody can ear you) increases drinking throughput. Or something like that.
"American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A."

= Interesting choice of words?
I noticed you are missing two languages you will end up working with the most C# and PHP. And why is Ruby on the Tutorials you will read and not on the languages you plan to learn. Anyway good luck and I hope you stay at it.
The USF funds are distributed (at least partially) through the e-rate program that school districts can use to help fund communication infrastructure. The amount varies but is primarily influenced by how "poor" the district is. I've been involved with some districts in some extremely poor areas that had full gigabit (or more) fiber links between their schools and the district office and then out to the Internet. They get this money by applying through the e-rate grant process. I know of cases where the funding paid for 90% of the cost of installation.
I think I've got one like that, still hiding on my web-server somewhere.
21 million BTC divided by 7 billion people yields .003 BTC per human. That's 1 BTC for every 333 people.

There are fewer than 11.5 million addresses in use, so fewer than 11.5 million people have any BTC. There is a lot more growth to come.
Thanks for the awesome link, I'm surprised I missed this Ikeahacker post. I might have to bring a dry erase marker along on a future trip there. I'm definitely going to do this for a future home office upgrade. Now I just need plan out some kind of dead simple rig for taking photographs of the whiteboard that would automatically sync with either Dropbox or Evernote. This might be a good use for one of my old android phones.
what is this use of sic, i thought sic was for when you are knowingly mispelling / misusing something?
thank you, i will fix that. I use Twitter too but the thing is you can´t really control what the people you follow talk about and most of the time it isn´t relevant to you but to them, so for discovery its fine. What we are doing is showing ONLY what you care about and giving you all the control on what you see in your feed.
Except that it wasn't a joke.
I think so. Several hackathons are just call somethingHack. Like LaunchHack.

Unrelated to your comment. Nice to know I got voted down for pointing out sexism. I thought I was on YC not Reddit.
I have not. I basically stopped checking out file syncing solutions as Aero has been working well so far.

I'll have a look at BTsync now though. The feature set seems similar but btsync seems to have better mobile apps (Aero only has an Android app and no iPhone one).
... That's still presumptuous of you. For example, I don't check Reddit. Ever. Is it so hard to believe that some other people who no doubt have something better to do with their time don't check HN? [1]

[1] Rhetorical question.
Your first sentence is confusing me, so I just want to clarify. Chess Network is one guy name Jerry who streams on twitch and uploads videos on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/user/ChessNetwork http://www.twitch.tv/ChessNetwork
lol. on a more serious note, op's question is incomplete. i assume the question is: "is it too late to buy and hold btc for a profit?," which is what most of the answers here seem to be implying, but that's the not the only way to profit...
Ask HN: Best provider for mobile payments integration?
What's the best API for integrating mobile payments into my mobile app (both payment and cash-out)?

I'm looking at Stripe, Balanced, Braintree, and PayPal.
I've seen this usage in the wild a few times. It makes me twitch just like when someone types out "FireFox".
Yeah! "We demand nothing back!" [1]

[1] Tickets were free.
Ah yes when I posted my comment it was originally obvious that I wasn't referring to the same post as the linked article. My article is for a print tax publication targeted at tax advisors, and comes out next spring; Mr. Robbins' article is clearly not intended for print and is aimed more toward laymen.

Also, Mr. Robbins has updated the article since I posted my comment, so generally all of the questions I have received would now be answered by his article.
Coursera Adds Another $20M To Its Already Massive Series B
No. Mining is a Poisson process. The expected time to the next block is always 10 minutes, irregardless how much time has passed since the last.
No, because the chance that Bitcoin one year from now will be double what it is know is (probably less than) 50%.

Not to mention that your argument is semantically false because 1 million years from now I can guarantee you that Bitcoin won't be around.
NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software
*trigger the end of all coins, including themselves
Maybe not, but you could certainly replace recessed canisters, or other fixtures with those that have AC/DC power supplies built in, in such a way that they can have a larger surface in the ceiling/walls or even in the fixture that can then not be part of the "bulb", and subject to the same size constraints.
You are right. The example I gave is probably a bit skewed to faster travel times. If I had chosen say Barcelona to Moscow, times would have been a lot different.
The other difference is that the trains in western Europe are much faster than their US counterparts as well.
The easiest way to have proof would simply be not to transfer the coins to other addresses; if they remain in a single address then it's fairly obvious what the holding period should be. If you cycle the coins, you'd probably have to prove that you were the owner of all the addresses involved.

The standard that applies to Silk Road is not the standard that applies to tax supporting documentation. The Silk Road is a criminal prosecution and thus is held to the highest standard in the land. For the most part, tax documentation merely needs to be reasonable.
> The assumption is that bitcoins must be sold immediately to cover operating expenses. If the shopkeeper's back-end expenses were transacted in bitcoins as well, then the exchange rate would be irrelevant. Larger adoption of Bitcoin would make prices sticky. Future volatility is expected to decrease, as the size and depth of the market grows.

> In the meantime, many merchants simply regularly pull the latest market rates from the exchanges and automatically update the prices on their websites. Also you might be able to buy a put option in order to sell at a fixed rate for a given amount of time. This would protect you from drops in price and simplify your operations for that time period.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Shopkeepers_can.27t_serious...
glad you have likely found your answer already, but it probably will help out others in the future to pose and answer this question on a site like stackoverflow.com
Startup Risk and Fear
Probably. Making money = income, and income is taxable. The question really is...what type of income?

For the most part, unless you've held the coins for longer than a calendar year, the income is short-term capital gains, or as it is frequently known to tax advisors, ordinary income with a special name.
It seems some people think being reminded to think is profound.
KitKat shows caller IDs from Google Places, Apps customers
The way to credit Snowden is to get things to change, ideally so that he can come home.

The way to get things to change is to clearly, calmly, quietly, and confidently educate all the people you know on what the government has done and why this runs so contrary to the American spirit. You don't need to bluster or make emotional pleas. You do need to come down firmly on the side you believe is right, and educate the folks around you.

I had a discussion about Snowden recently with a number of friends and acquaintances of mine. I had offhandedly mentioned his name as a leader in a discussion on the nature of leadership, and someone vociferously objected to my terming him as such, even playing the "traitor" card. I didn't have to respond to him, however, because about 5-6 of my friends chimed in, explaining the facts about what the government had done and why this meant that it was the NSA in the wrong here and not Snowden. And then several bystanders who previously knew nothing about Snowden said that even without knowing all the facts of the case, they were much more swayed by the Snowden supporters because we presented reasoned, sourced debate rather than impassioned name-calling. These were not techies - they were well-educated, generally professional 20- and 30-somethings.
(constantly 25)
Couldn't agree more. Mass adoption would absolutely stabilize prices. Even without mass adoption merchants can exchange similar to foreign atm transactions.
Given the volatility of Bitcoin, isn't this more like gambling rather than investing?
try to build a screw, a single screw

That's pretty easy if you have a tap and die set, it doesn't require advanced machine tools.

I agree fantastic progress has been made due to our cooperative societies and the division of labour though, even just in the last few decades, the advances are astounding. The Internet alone is an advance at the level of Gutenberg.
I'd like to read more about how we can prevent this class of error going forward. Could stronger typing or RAII or some other feature or trick have made the bug apparent at compile time?

I made a very basic Node.js module in C++ with V8 and it was surprisingly difficult to make a good (idiomatic JS behaviour, believably bug-free) wrapper for a straightforward class and factory method. I say this coming from Boost Python and Luabind, where there are some tricky parts to bind complex classes, but simple ones are easy enough, and once written, obviously correct.
Given the short albeit brief history, although there is no way for me to know for sure, I'd say it still has a lot of growth to go for a long time considering Bitcoin's market position or lack thereof. Meaning, its only the beginning.
the ~1,000,000,000 usd worth of bitcoin transactions (https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...) that happened today alone should be evidence enough that you would have to be stupid or ignorant to think you can move the price of bitcoin with a blog post like that
It is entirely possible to be an excellent programmer and never work with either C# or PHP. If you work at Google or Apple, for example, you will never touch either.
What is the difference between existing code and an existing product made of code, for the purpose of reusing code? The distinction (which I understand is not your own creation) seems forced, if not ambiguous.
I discovered that this is not the case. In general, Board meetings don't work like hollywood says they do. Usually my board meetings are pretty uncontentious.
It is very clearly laying out what they think - and in black and white text - the LAWS are what is broken - not the screwed-up snooping at any cost motto of the NSA - so the LAW (U.S Constitution and state and federal statutes) should be modified.

"We have the power to snoop on anybody at anytime and by god we will go to any lengths to protect and increase this illegal power." The fact that Terrorism is not even tangentially invoked is the true tragedy of this situation. All the current laws vastly increasing the intrusive surveillance were passed post 9/11 to specifically stop terrorism.
infoq seems to be down.
The Art of Intrusion - Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers
Wolfram: Wolfram
IMO it's not a real currency until the value gets a bit stable. Currently it's all over the place.
This is fucked up :)
Dropbox CEO: Jobs wanted to 'kill' the service
Same rules apply if you sold your stock - you'll be taxed on the capital gain.
Are Sudanese Pounds and Iranian Rials real currencies in your mind? Agree 100% that bitcoin is not currently comparable to any first world currency.
It's all a matter of what you're trying to do. If you have a nice test framework with good coverage and automated build tests running stuff by valgrind, you mitigate the risk of having memory leaks.

Is it worth all the extra effort, when you could just go with a language that does GC at runtime? Sometimes it is, it depends on the use case and it depends on the people.

I've done a project rewrite from C to Java where the Java implementation performed a lot better and consumed less memory than the C one. Some of the performance gain was because I chose better algorithms and limited DB interaction, but some of the gain came from having immutability guarantees whereas the C code would just copy a lot of data structures where immutability was not guaranteed. A lot of time in the C based project was spent doing mallocs and frees and memcpys for nothing. This is poor project design, but poor design happens and Java has some protection agains that due to promoting encapsulation to a greater extent than C by default.

I am 100% certain that if the original project would've been better designed and managed, it would've kicked ass because having it in C would have allowed us to have a smaller memory footprint which would've meant a greater monetary profit in the end for this particular project over time due to system constraints.

What it comes down to is that if you have a good team that understands the required dev proccess of a mid-sized C project and who are profficient enough to implement such a project without doing too much "quick fixin'" it can be worth it. If you're limited by the size and/or competence (everyone can't be a rockstar. I certainly am not) of the team or limited in turnaround time for the product, choosing C will probably not be in your best interest. But having the right people around and if there's a monetary gain in doing things efficiently with the hardware you have then C is still an awesome tool to have in your toolbox.

Most of the time, in the world of SaaS and web based solutions, using C doesn't make a lot of sense except for some bits of core functionality. That's why I like languages with good C bindings. Knowing e.g., Python and C, you really can get the best of both worlds.

IMHO, YMMV, &c

EDIT: inserted some newlines
SIM card f.ex.
Thanks, I thought this was an extremely obvious assumption as well.
Bitcoin hits all time high at $844 USD
Calm down, dude. I never claimed to be the author of your article, and I quite specifically stated that my article was on Bitcoin holdings, not transactions, as the bulk of your article is. Writing an overview about Bitcoin-related tax issues doesn't make you the author of every Bitcoin tax article that will ever be written. There are a lot of tax advisors out there with an interest in Bitcoin; I've spoken with at least a dozen who are submitting articles to various print journals discussing Bitcoin and digital currency-related tax issues.

Finally, while we're on the subject of contact info...
I can't help but notice that you appear to be employed by an accounting firm. I've actually done business with your firm, and I don't think they would appreciate one of their associates publishing an online tax article without first going through the internal review process and having it vetted. (You should re-read your employment contract, almost every law firm and accounting firm has something on this subject in there.) Moreover, you may want to expand upon your Circular 230 warning and the legal advisory notice at the start of the article, since both are inadequate. Finally, you really should change every instance of would to should because your are implying a level of certainty that doesn't (and can't) yet exist about the tax treatment of Bitcoins. (This is why I used should and probably in my answers--I'm not offering a covered opinion, merely expressing the potential application of the current state of the law to the provided facts as I understand them.)

You weren't that hard to find on LinkedIn, and your behavior on this board reflects poorly on yourself and your firm.
Nope, and that's not my intention here. I want market prices to stabilize. Trying to artificially inflate the rate is counter-intuitive.
That doesn't make sense because as soon as you create something you automatically own the copyright to it.
Compile error: only the full sequence ";\n" ends a statement.
Condom Contest Produces 812 Ideas for Improvement
Funny I thought I saw it hit $900 the other day.
Another one that's quite bone chilling is http://www.heavensgate.com/
Hmm. Buy an Amazon Gift Card via Gyft with bitcoins, use gift card to pay for Amazon Fresh. Mmmm, food on the table.

Assuming I can pay for Amazon Fresh with a gift card. :-)
um it wasn't a billion it was 147 million.
Now you have to tell us what it is.
And if you don't pay the Bitcoin bribes, sorry fees, your transaction can take hours or even days to be accepted by the benevolent miners.
I fail to see how you jump to this conclusion.

Suppose that all bitcoins are lost except one.

Well, we just use fractions of the one remaining. While the protocol currently supports 8 decimals, there isn't any hard limit; we can continue dividing forever as needed.
I find it hard to believe it's Enterprise-grade when the documentation link points at a GitHub README.
I've pointed this out before in other discussions, but my contacts in the IRS freaking love Bitcoin because it makes their job so much easier. Tracking Bitcoins may be difficult, but it's a cakewalk compared to tracking physical cash transactions.

Taxes have always been based on voluntary compliance and disclosure in the US because that is the "freest" way to handle tax collection. If a significant number of people choose to be non-compliant in Bitcoin, the IRS will simply create a Bitcoin collection task force, modeled after its current Small Business Owner task force (SBO's are remarkably bad at complying with taxes). Because they won't find everyone, they'll throw the book at the few they do find, to increase the compliance rate without actually having to resort to more draconian measures that would truly impair freedom.
"Unless you provide me a way to realize bitcoin to actual USD in non trivial amounts with the same amount of effort it would take to convert my stocks or bonds, it is as useful a currency for real life as is my current GTA V Online bank account."

So it's either as easy as stocks or it's useless?

Hmmmmm.

I think you're overstating your case a wee bit there.
Show HN: Air controller browser game
I suspect that the ISP deliberately keeps it up for historical reasons.
Short-term volatility.
Ask HN: Supported locations for merchants (Play store) - no new countries
This is the list of supported countries for publishing paid apps on Google Play Store:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/150324

Years go by and the list is mostly intact - why can't Google do more? Are they really trying?
This is the blandest non-statement filled with lies:

- "...any Salesforce customer or developer is likely to have a whole set of existing customizations and logic that can be exposed to their mobile app via REST API."
- Customization and Logic... can mean almost anything. How does that reconcile with "from Scratch" as stated else where?

- "Every eligible app entry was reviewed at least twice." Many Apps videos have zero views & zero installs so this twice thing is a provable lie

- "Once we complete our review of the final entries, we will post our findings here"

Will you revoke the 1 Million prize given to an Ex-Salesforce architect who had Demoed this app at a Meet-up 2 weeks before the Open of the Hackathon?
Clickable:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...