skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm still kicking myself because when I first heard about Bitcoin (in 2010) I was working on a research project that required three GPU clusters (each costing between $15k and $20k). The contract for the project was delayed and I seriously thought about "benchmarking" the hardware by Bitcoin mining until work on the project could continue. I never actually did any mining and the hardware sat idle in our lab for a couple of months. I don't have the stomach to calculate what the Bitcoins that hardware was capable of generating would be worth today.
Damn you North Coast Medical - I thought I was rich, rich I tells ya!
>If you have a net positive position in a currency, sure; if you're a debtor, having the value of the currency in which your debt is denominated being slightly more valuable each day is definitely a bad thing. Deflationary currency basically serves as an continuous upward transfer of wealth.

Interest rates would go down to match the deflation rate for that reason, or people could always make contracts that adjust for deflation. Besides bitcoin is meant for trading over the internet which until now has been an extreme pain. Loans and contracts will continue to be made in their nations currency for the most part, even if it does become widely adopted. (The benefit of competing currencies.)

Also many people argue the same thing about printing money to cause inflation being a continuous upward transfer of wealth.

>Speculation on commodities that are outputs of production/extraction provides a useful function in terms of signal for resource allocation in a market economy.

It's more than that. Even for purely finite resources, someone buying a bunch of it up because they predict the price will go up, helps stabilize the price. They conserve the resource in the present for future buyers who value it more/are willing to pay more for it. And the speculator benefits of course.

The opportunity cost is that they could have invested in another resource/investment instead of that one. Instead someone with a lower time preference will buy that resource (ie someone who values using it in the short term more than the long term.) But is that objectively a bad thing? In this scenario the people with higher time preferences are better off because they make more profit off their investments. The people with lower interest rates are better off because all other resources become cheaper. Is anyone actually worse off?
Is there a blog that explains how this works? I'm assuming they either have a ton of video that is instantly available and use the closest match or some magical CG...
>> It's backed by the tremendous amount of electricity required to run the transaction processing network (ie. "mining").

That's not a backing, that's gone.

>> Remember this is the world's largest distributed supercomputer.

Doing make-work to protect itself against other supercomputers.

BTC is no different from anything else.
How does that have anything to do with what I said?
Smart Glasses Might Save Industry Big Bucks, say Gartner
A little more background from the article: the five founders left the firm in 2000, 11 years before it was ultimately sold. At the time they left, the company was floundering and nearly bankrupt. The investors who took over the company saved it and are almost wholly responsible for it being sale-worthy.

Really, the founders should consider themselves lucky they got anything at all; they certainly didn't do anything to earn the windfall.
Caches and GPUs have extra capacity that is used to tolerate defects. Cell had 8 SPEs but shipped with 7 working. It's possible that the PS4 has 20 CUs and ships with 18 working; this would increase yield dramatically. (Update: Yep, 20 CUs: http://www.chipworks.com/en/technical-competitive-analysis/r... )
Looks like you're selling banners on the right hand side and not nofollowing them, be careful as that's a Google crime and you may find yourself on the receiving end of a Google penalty.
Some suggestions for pressure sensitive tablets

http://cintiqcompanion.wacom.com/en/?country=us&language=en

Microsoft Surface's use Wacom digitizers as well, see http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/09/26/the-surface-2

Samsung's Note series also has a good digitizer
http://www.samsung.com/us/topic/galaxy-note-10-1-2014-editio...
I hadn't heard of Upad before. The screenshots look nice, especially if it really does work well for handwriting. Just yesterday I tried doing some mathematical note-taking in another app (already forget which one) and it was pretty bad.

Sadly, the support links leave me with little confidence in the product. The "PockeySoft Web Site" link is actually a youtube video, and "UPAD Support" takes me to a 404 (http://www.pockeysoft.com/upad). If I remove the path on that URL, most of the images on the resulting site are broken. If their site is that broken, and the app hasn't been updated in 11 months, it sure gives the impression that the app has been abandoned.
HN Day One
I did the same with VS2010 and VS2012. The problem for me is that I'd have to buy MSDN all over again just to get VS2013. The features just aren't enough to plunk $1000+ down. I like it but, for single person devs like me, the cost is just too damn high.
Nobody said doing an API-based design requires you to (purely) client-side render. Lots of people are consuming APIs and rendering (initially) on the server, then consuming the same or similar APIs to do updates on the client. Best of both worlds -- this approach has neither downside you mention (even though the downsides are not as bad as you suggest even if you do pure client-side rendering).
> I think it's important to point out that the URL that the data is being POSTed to doesn't in fact exist, you can see this from the HTTP 404 response

Is it possible that they do indeed collect it, but are faking 404?

Step now would be implement technology into the TVs. check

Step two would be to accept payload, however perhaps they are in waiting period to see if news like this one will come up, and then how much damage, if any, it will create. If none, then Step two: check.

What's step 3? Agreement with RIAA or Holywood to sell this data? It could help in litigation by giving more ammunition to plantiff. What is LG TOS of the TV says? Mentions anything about it?

Thank you for the post BTW. While they are tens of TV brands, its good to know which one to stay away from.
Customer activity maps: predicting and preempting customer activity
>> A spike in electricity costs would directly effect existing bitcoins' value

How?

Please explain?

It makes mining more expensive, and some people may be switched off mining as a result, but the same number of BTC will be made.
Snake! I miss playing this on the old Nokia phone.
Thanks for the heads up about HOP, I'll certainly try to read it. It's been a few years since I did any serious perl. :-)
Why? Insurance companies are looking at the data and would easily find the 1/5 as likely to be in a vehicle fire bullet point.
I don't know how anyone can justify having 8 kids without having a family farm you're trying to staff.
With an aging population, there's going to be a lot more people who have trouble with doorknobs (due to common arthritis and other impairments) than those who have kids young enough to be stumped by doorknobs but not levers (say 3-5 years old) or dogs who turn lever handles. (So maybe 10% of homes.) It's not a "few" people who have trouble with doorknobs - it's probably close to 20-30% of your overall population and maybe 30-40% of households.

E.g. it's about 1 in 5 Americans who are impacted by arthritis (of some form), plus you have people with repetitive strain injury and other non-arthritic conditions who will also benefit from lever handles. Compare that to the relatively small fraction of people in wheelchairs and this seems like a no-brainer compared to ramps.
I would think it would be taxed as capital gains just like any other commodity that rises in value.
So, radiation is a big risk factor in sending astronauts to Mars and around the solar system.

What if we could genetically engineer ourselves to use this melanin pathway for ourselves?

We wouldn't use energy from radiation in the fungi-melanin pathway (although we could), but it could be good to make our bodies recognize that a radiation storm is happening and that could trigger biochemical changes in our bodies. Either to become more radiation proof (hide yo' DNA in chromatin) or take some radiation-resilient actions (heavily increase the reproduction of cells in our gut lining).

This isn't a very realistic idea, just a sci-fi thing. We have a hundred years of ethics and technology to accomplish before this would be realistic.
http://jsonapi.org/ is an emerging standard.

http://dev.billysbilling.com/blog/How-to-make-your-API-bette... is a great blog post on API design.
I should clarify -- initially I/O bound, but with pipelining, we are able to "impedance match" the flow of data coming off the backing store with the GPU's computational progress. I suppose the better word is "I/O heavy," rather than "I/O bound."

We're certainly not the first to describe mapreduce as "embarrassingly parallel," but I can defend myself nonetheless:

A shuffle executes in parallel where each unit re-indexes into another unit. Reduction is parallelized over each key, and even finer granularity can be achieved by considering a tree-based approach:

http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/1.1-Beta/x...

In fact, I used this tree reduction approach to merge non-disjoint clusters of friend groups in my social network clustering algorithm.

Parallelizing the input parsing is problem-specific, but even that is possible in many cases.
Read up on your history. Before WWII, they WERE turned away at the border. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

My mother was rescued as an orphan by Catholic missionaries. Turns out that Catholic girls look just like Jewish ones if you squint hard enough.

Anyhow, enjoy your vacation. And remember to pay your taxes.
Free Education for Everyone (The problem with MOOCs)
The added thickness is to compensate for the fact that the iPad touch screen has a reasonable distance between sensors. You cannot get pixel-perfect accuracy on the iPad touch screen, and a pointed stylus would make that extremely apparent. So instead the trend is for larger tips, to encourage users to bump up their line thicknesses and to obscure the lack of pixel-perfect accuracy. Think marker, not pen.
Even prior to TFS2013 there was a git-TFS bridge to let you check in code outside supported platforms. I'd looked into it for an xcode project but thought it looked really awkward for something I really needed to trust.
You're right, my mistake. There was a typo in my grep ('btrad.com')
Rdio Lays Off Staff To ‘Improve Cost Structure’ & Improve Biz For Long Term
Sokoban:
http://jsfiddle.net/zabbius/nU74f/

Minesweeper:
http://jsfiddle.net/c884a/

Roguelike RPG:
http://jsfiddle.net/kPZaP/3/embedded/result/

Tetris:
http://jsfiddle.net/ova777/kFxja/

Ping pong:
http://jsfiddle.net/WNrfp/6/

Rally:
http://jsfiddle.net/agegorin/kML8G/embedded/result/

Arcanoid:
http://jsfiddle.net/martin_/Fq8F4/

Snake:
http://jsfiddle.net/Uk2PP/9/

And piano as a bonus:
http://jsfiddle.net/c62Pe/1/embedded/result/
> "Insurance companies are often accused of over-reacting to recent data (eg, a recent hurricane will jump up insurance next year). That being said, the insurance companies are also likely to actually look at the data and dis-regard pr spin when they are on the hook for the damages."

Could the surge in prices after a recent hurricane be the insurance company 'cashing in on'/exploiting the irrational reaction of the public, rather than the insurance company itself having an irrational reaction?

Insurance companies can only survive long term if they are data-driven, so it seems likely to me that they are reacting rationally (although perhaps coldly) to an irrational market reaction.
Transactions via Square Cash show up as "transaction adjustments" in my bank account. It is possible that Square is using VPP and that is simply how Visa distributes the payments, but it seemed to be different to me.
> Maybe we should ban glass coffee tables and make them all out of plexiglass instead, in case anyone with vertigo wants one. That would be pretty "functionally and cost equivalent".

If you're making and selling coffee tables to the public you can't make it from any old glass - it needs to be glass that meets certain standards and is tempered.

No one is saying that people who like door knobs must not have them - you can fit them once you've bought your house.

The fact that you'd prefer to push the work of replacing door knobs onto the people who need the functionality of levers, rather than onto the people who prefer the aesthetics of knobs, is a clear inherent bias against those with accessibility needs.
Foreign students love America, but other nations are wooing them
The controller is much better than the older PS controllers. Unfortunately the only game I have is Battlefield 4 which likes to crash every 15 minutes and delete my save files (not a PS4-specific issue).
The new debtors’ prisons
You just need to venture further into the dark alleys of the Internet where stuff like MoneyPaks are used.
But I think it's easy to see paying for something in USD, and using BTC as the means of transfer.

Customer USD -> Customer BTC -> transfer -> Vendor BTC -> Vendor USD
Adblock Plus plans to develop a custom web browser for iOS
For the high stakes kind youtube or twitter are good examples. For the business kind every old little business around the corner is an example. Why do I need to spell this out to you?
For in between - can't really be bothered to research this, so I'll just give you that.
I've been using the new Jot Script and the positional determination when writing is good. As the reviewer notes, the biggest problem is the "feel" of tapping on the glass. It is like writing on glass with a ballpoint pen. You naturally expect the more tactile softened sensation of a pen landing on paper, so it jars a little. If there was a screen cover that worked with capacitative touch and felt like like paper it would be more natural.
So basically there is no good way to get bitcoins without revealing ones identity right now? Since mining is not quite possible?
Walgreens & Startup Partner for One-Drop Blood Workups in Store
I keep reading these Google stories that appear flawless examples of exceptional thinking and execution. But heck, at some point, the stories just wash over without effect. Do they have no problem employees? Management feudal battles? Studies and organizational change movements that produce nothing appreciative?

I understand that Google is basically a giant marketing company ran by engineers who own the web, so I get the fact that there's a lot of creative spin that goes with anything you're going to see published on the web about them. But hell, it sure would be interesting to poke around behind the scenes and see how things really work.

I'm not saying that to disparage this article or work, it's actually quite impressive. I simply wanted to point out that at some point, a company that does no evil and always is inventing things along the lines of time machines and faster-than-light travel every month starts to be a bit much for a reader to consume. Surely with 40K+ employees and that much money there is some other story here.
This is a very cool fungus, I'm glad this was posted! The trickery of its survival comes from its use of melanin, specifically pheomelanin. Basically what happens is when ionizing radiation strikes pheomelanin, an incident electron is generated because of something known as the Compton effect (think photoelectric effect but at really high energy). Somehow, pheomelanin is able to strip down the energy of the electron until it is no longer capable of acting as a free radical and destroying surrounding matter. Unfortunately, that mechanism is still unknown, hopefully with the development of higher resolution microscopes we can get a more thorough understanding of the molecular structure.
It looks like your troubles came purely from not understanding the concept of fast-forward merges. I completely agree with you that the documentation does not make this as clear as it ought to. However, the standard book on git (Pro Git, available free online) covers this (and most other git concepts) very well. This is simply a case of not understanding your tools (which you did acknowledge in the post). This is a widespread and deeply problematic situation, not just for version control systems but for almost all software, and it seems to only be getting worse. Takeaway lesson isn't that there's anything wrong with git, but rather that there's something wrong with an industry that seems to think we should be able to use tools without first learning how they work.
I will never understand the stylus-on-capacitive-screen thing. The lag, the limited accuracy, the interpolation of your movements, it's all very opposite to the idea of a stylus as an input. I'm glad others find it useful, but every stylus I've ever used on a capacitive screen has immediately struck me as, to me, worthless.
Love the serendipity moral; loved surviving the vicissitudes. The story reads well.

There's a lacuna between Codentical and Parallel X: 1. people willing to pay for it; 2. a spark went off; 3. "validate before you build"

You say you did have paying users, so why did you stop? What was the spark? I'm guessing that there weren't enough paying users - but that's not stated. This makes an inexplicable gap as you race down the homestretch of the story. It's not a huge problem, but since the rest of the story is so great, it's a shame to mar it.

Also, the story would be absolutely compelling if you mentioned the specific CPU, GPU and task that gave the incredible speedups. Your reader wonders, "Why aren't they mentioned?"
The Visual Studio Online Monaco editor is cross-browser, no Windows box required. Here's a post I did playing with that: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2013/11/13/a-quick-...
Apparently there's an 'Express' RT version of Photoshop, might be what they're referring to?
I don't think Microsoft is making much money either, the extra cost of xbox one is kinect.
The Kinsa Smart Thermometer
You're completely right, I should have clarified that I was only talking about committed data. My mistake.
> Note: MS primarily uses perforce and git for source control.

Heh. No.

Also, almost everything in that link is out of date or wrong.
Unlike SHA-1, which has a 2^60 local-collision attack and a 160 bit output (so an 80 bit birthday bound), SHA-2 has no theoretical attacks and a 128 bit security bound.

You can do the math on how much it would cost to find a SHA-2 collision; for instance, you can steal Skein team member Jesse Walker's back of the envelope calculations, assigning 2^61 cycles and 2^8 dollars to a server-year. Now multiply the number of cycles a block of SHA256 takes by 2^128.

I don't think a direct attack on SHA256 is a productive use to put the world's computers.
You still can't make a search engine like DuckDuckGo the default and DragnFly is still missing in action :-(
As for volume pricing it almost certainly does take that into account. Most electronic component manufacturers publish "Budgetary price per xK pcs" which I assume is where most of prices mentioned in article come from. For even slightly specialized parts this number tends to be significantly lower (tens of percent to order of magnitude for some parts) than price given by distributor even for same xK volume discount. Also most significant parts that are used across different Sony products tend to be either insignificant (passives) or manufactured by Sony (or semi-custom parts manufactured for Sony).
Hey I documented your API here https://www.mashape.com/community/airbrite-io#!documentation

However I keep getting an 'unauthorized' error despite using the keys on my dashboard. Can you help?

(Disclosure: I work for Mashape)
Bitcoin has had the ability to make nearly everyone look foolish at one point or another. Try not to kick yourself too hard over it.
Measuring programming languages popularity
The learning curve is not that steep. Compare it to learning vim or emacs, for example, and it's no contest. The learning curve is basically: 1) read Pro Git, 2) play with git for a little while. That's about it. If you can't afford that learning curve for something that is a core part of your workflow, you're doing something wrong.
So following up later papers that cite the original [1] doesn't seem like this has gone very far. A number of papers collecting extremofile exemplars, and a few thinking about energy sources. But nothing on 'space food', 'radioactive remediation', or analysis of the energy source in humans. Sigh.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14704617567455474393...
They can't seem to make money on high-margin luxury vehicles

This is incorrect. They've been profitable since Q1 of this year and their profit margins are continuing to rise, even discounting the ZEV regulatory credits (which have been steadily decreasing for a number of quarters now).

in fact the auto industry is also trying to accomplish the same things that Tesla is

This is debatable. Mainstream auto manufacturers have released plenty of electric cars, but they're all "compromise cars" that seem to shy away from cannibalizing their mainstream car sales. None of them come close to having the range, comfort, or storage space of the Model S.

This is a huge deal. Some people might be happy buying a Nissan Leaf as a secondary commuter car, and they might be willing to put up with the ugly styling, small size, low range, and poor performance. But, unless someone is making a compelling electric car that's actually better than a gasoline car, EVs aren't really going to take off. Right now, Tesla is the only manufacturer that seems to be even trying to pursue this goal, and that's what makes them so unique, interesting, and important.

But if you think those subsidies and bailouts are equivalent to giving extremely wealthy people a discount on a luxury vehicle...

The existing tax credits apply equally to all electric cars, not just luxury vehicles. You get $7,500 back from the federal government regardless of whether you buy a Tesla Model S for 70k or a GM Spark EV for 27k. As a percentage of purchase price, cheaper cars are actually being subsidized more than expensive luxury cars.
I do agree that some ad networks and sites push advertising to the limits and beyond, but it is only because of these ads that we get free information on websites, which is the very essence of internet.

Everybody hates ads, but at the end of they day, we should not forget that these ads help these website monetize their traffic and pay their bills.
Understood but I was addressing whether 'pure Python' is a selling feature which it undeniably is.

edit: I don't mean to say that it is a selling feature for everyone (i.e. people who aren't already using Python) but for those who are already using Python it definitely is.
Why buying Bitcoin without purpose is for sharks and sheep.
I think he covers that here:

Investors and employees make much more money by increasing the size of the pie rather than their share of the pie.

Percentage-wise the new grants will be smaller but could theoretically match the (estimated) dollar value of the original grant, if they are considered based on the time each was granted. Obviously, the new hire grant will be worth much more than the evergreen grant at the time the evergreen grant is given. But the employee is now taking much less risk than they did when they joined, which is covered here:

The best part is that, as your company grows, you always grant stock in proportion to what is fair today rather than in proportion to their original grant.
Google saves and remembers all your passwords
I, for one, will be very sad if it does revolutionise the foundation of any economies, because deflation is bad and creating a new aristocracy from a few BTC hoarders is also not something I consider useful.

Crypto-currency good. Bitcoin not so much.