skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Let’s ship something over the holidays
In previous years the holiday season has been one of my most productive time for setting up new projects. This year I would love to get my first app shipped and thought it would be fun to do this together with somebody else.

Let's be frank: I am a noob (despite the 5000+ karma on my real account), coming from a different industry and having relatively basic programming skills (js,php,mysql + bootstrap). It is most likely going to be a simple product and Appcelerator based.

So far it is not narrowed down to a final idea but there is one or another problem worth solving around. I would love to find an idea that we both can find interesting. I will have somebody support me in case I get stuck on the programming part so the main goal is to ship that thing at whatever it takes. Besides that I might throw in a bit of money for promotions just to see if we can get some traction going. But that’s it, no taking over the world talk or other bs.

If you tend getting bored over the holidays and want to do something productive – let’s connect. All you need to bring is the willingness to get something shipped and figure out some way to contribute - no matter if it is a bit of experience in promoting apps, analyzing app clicktrails, design/ux, or just an audience via your blog.

Heck, even just a bit dedication to spend a few days getting familiar with something like the things mentioned above should be enough. I'm not looking for the typical Hackathon crowd here - more an open invitation to anybody who wants to get something shipped.

If you expect to have some down time over the holidays and the desire to get a product out, message me! (email in profile)
Please do alexholehouse. I actually was trying to finish it and the system wouldn't let me add another comment.

I've been working on a project recently and have spent around 12+ hours a day coding, but then my leisure time is spent watching TV or playing a video game. I was curious to know how that compared to the folks in this forum.
I was going to make a joke but The Onion got there first.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-90-of-waking-hours-s...
>Tools: valgrind and gdb are obvious.

The fact that someone is saying they don't know where to start seems to indicate this isn't true.
This is a good point. Science doesn't prove things by working backwards (although it can be used to generate hypothesis).

This is the exactly same reason why the FDA makes you form your hypothesis before you run a clinical trial, not after.

You can't run a clinical trial and say you're looking X, not find it, but then find Y (something you never thought you'd find) and have the FDA approve your drug. It's weak science.
> a.) the lack of even distribution of early wealth

Like an IPO? [1]

> b.) the possibility that a great percentage of Bitcoin are currently held by bad actors (criminals, anarchists, use your imagination).

I know you are probably using the term anarchist in the colloquial sense (meaning those black bloc anarchists who smash things and want revolution) conjuring images of a Mad Max like dystopia, but would you consider Noam Chomsky a bad actor? People of that ilk just consider a different structure to organizing society, or as he puts it "a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Kropotkin and others."[1]

Sometimes its tempting to paint pictures with broad strokes but as someone who can appreciate many different political viewpoints (as long as they are peaceful and productive), it doesn't seem to make your image any more accurate.

bitcoin.it has a page on some myths you should read.[3]

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Early_adopters_are_unfairly...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky%27s_political_vie...

[3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#The_Bitcoin_community_consi...
I actually live a quite isolated existence. I dont really like most people and am very happy this way (I can read, program, play games, make music etc. in peace and not deal with the tediousness of having to interact with people I find boring)
However, I do occasionally meet other people (maybe a bit like me in some ways) and we get on incredibly well. Every week or two when we feel sociable I will meet one of them for intense session of something.
Also the people I really get on with could be any age/sex, one is a 50 yo man, another is a 20 yo girl.
Why not take it to its logical conclusion and require a government permit, after proving responsibility, to get pregnant and bear a child? I'd be willing to bet there are an order of magnitude or more kids suffering abuse and neglect living with their biological parents than there are living in a "private guardianship" arrangement.
Anarchists are not necessarily "bad actors". What is it you are afraid they will do with their btc wealth?
Great material, but it's been directly taken from the source material (http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/19759/core-algor...) with no added content. I imagine Vijay (the author of the source material) put a lot of work into assembling this information. Vijay's CS Theory answer should replaced as the URL for this HN submission.

EDIT: Removed part of my comment, per the blog author's response below.
99 Percent of Indian IT Engineers Lack Programming Skills
Xtranormal software development video’s
The stack exchange comment was amazing. You can't get a better raison d'etre for why studying algorithms is important.
* raises hand* I'm in an LDR and may only see her twice a year (each time for a month or two) but this doesn't excite me at all. Perhaps it's just the fact that I keep seeing people shout look someone solved the problem of LDRs which just makes me roll my eyes - the inability to have sex in certain times of the year is the least of our worries.

If anyone wants to "solve the problem of LDRs", I'd much prefer them to as a look at things like immigration laws, international transport, cultural barriers.
I worked with a company which was affected. They opened a phishing email which claimed to be within the company. We didn't pay any ransom because we recovered from Crashplan backups.
unknown money coming from other sources into local economy

These centers actually exist even today. I personally know places where you can buy dollars using the local currency for something like a 10% discount on the market rate. They are obviously very shady and aren't used by anyone close to being respectable. If you use them and are big enough to matter, expect to be screwed over by law enforcement pretty much the instant they feel like getting you.

governments will be much more limited in power when they can't print their money at will

I believe printing money is actually a good thing. But let's not get into an economics argument here.

And governments can easily take over the bitcoin network tomorrow if they wanted to, simply because the ability of Intel, IBM, AMD/GF, NVIDIA and the big semiconductor manufacturers to build really efficient mining ASICs vastly outstrips that of everyone else. And companies like Intel have nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping the US government happy if they requests come in from the top.

Again the analogy with cash is relevant. There is really very little technically difficult about printing counterfeit cash. I mean there's not even cryptography involved - it's just security by obscurity! The reason people don't do it is because governments clamp down on this activity very hard through law-enforcement mechanisms. Similarly, if the governments thought bitcoin was important enough to regulate, they'd be able to do it in an instant simply they have guns and we don't.
Plenty of "products" also do not have a business model. So code posted on Github that gets comments would be a product? Really sounds like you are quibbling.

The statement about "existing code" was ambiguous for a reason...
> The only thing we can do is try to stay out of their way.

No. We can't give up. We need fight back with every legitimate tool at our disposal.
I'm guessing the other twitter account retweeted the photo, apparently within bounds of twitter's license. AFP then took that photo claiming "the pictures were posted for public distribution." Although they should have known that wasn't the case. Even if the other user did something wrong, AFP also did something wrong, and the did it knowingly (or they should have known, as it is their job)
* You need to describe how it actually works. Describe the network protocol well enough that someone can re-implement it in their own favorite language.

* Your license sucks. Restricting modified code from connecting to the network tells me that your network protocol is fragile and exploitable

* How is your system better than Tor and a hidden service?
It's ok that you don't buy what I say.

What bothers me though is academics like the one I quoted making asinine statements as if it holds any water. It's just a pure speculation.
No they can't. False arrest, which includes arrest without probable cause or a warrant, is a crime.

Of course you'd need to get the prosecutor to take up the case, which would probably require the help of a lawyer, which a person taking out the trash at a convenience store probably can't afford.

Additionally, I think there is more to this story than is being reported, because it makes no sense on its face.
> Is it possible that DPR himself was an early adopter of BitCoins

It is also possible that DPR is more than one person.
You can drop scripts directly into the page context using Greasemonkey too. Its 'sandbox' is pretty easy to break out of.
This was bugging me too, so now it's fixed. Thanks!
Could you elaborate on your suspicion?
the lack of even distribution of early wealth

Totally! All we need is an "affordable bitcoin act" and the problem is solved.

Without being snarky: I just dislike when people tie political ideology into their evaluation of new technology.
What is wrong with the system, and how should it be fixed? The main problem I see (other than the numbers of people breaking it) are copyright lengths.
+1 People should support vendors which accept bitcoin by making it public that they paid with bitcoin @ X store. I made paidwithbitcoin.com a while back. I still think its a good idea. People should tweet #paidwithbitcoin and mention the website where they bought. Would make it super easy to build listings of sites which accept them from all the tweets.

To answer the original question, I've recently used bitcoin to pay for my VPN subscription @ hidemyass.com
Serious question, then, why the need to provide a negative comment when you didn't even examine the material presented?

EDIT: Won't out the author's identity, but parent post explained that he had only skimmed the article. The original post was asking who the computer scientists were and why this wasn't just link bait.
I've been stopped by the police for turning to look at their car as they passed by me. I'm white, clean cut, and middle-aged and was around the block from where I've lived for over a decade.

My crime? I was walking barefoot down the sidewalk.
> What about looking for keys generated using the broken Debian RNG?

You'd need a time machine, and if you had one I can think of better uses.

Actually even a time machine wouldn't help since bitcoin showed up long after the RNG was fixed.
Here's an interesting idea:

"I'm a big fan of the Konami code jQuery plugin. On my site, when you put it in you get a better deal on your VPS."

Not sure if I should include the guy's website, but I'm keeping this in mind for the next time I'll be ordering something online.
I wouldn't even care about color; I don't need color to code. I'd buy an e-ink notebook in a heartbeat, likewise a display if it were at least 24"
You're uncertain because no part of my argument attempts to rationalize it. You're taking the debate approach that asks 'should they or shouldn't they arrest or harass the person?' Who cares. The fact is that they can and will harass people. What's up for debate is whether is there some missing information in this article that is leading to false conclusions about corrupt cops. Is there a doubt about whether this is random police harassment. Yes there is.
I wouldn't consider your opinion well thought through.
SN makes mistakes. Most notably the bad build that required global cooperation from the miners to roll back.
Sad that Xtranormal is offline. These video's are very funny IMHO.
I love this. Especially the end.

Every time I read anything about "social justice", all I see is shunning and hate. Fighting racism, nazism, sexism,... I'm all for that. But if you become just like your enemy, what's the point? You're just another whatever-ist.

It's just getting ridiculous. Some countries (hello mother France!) have anti-racism laws. A common french saying is "Racism is not an opinion, it's a crime". There you go, fine the racists, send them all to jail,... All this does is give fuel to their idea of "The <people-you-dont-like> lobby is in cahoots with our government, it's a conspiracy". The idea spreads underground like rotten water and nobody ever tries to clean it.
I'm surprised to see that this submission is from 2008; while I identify with the author's struggle (and subsequent delight) as he plays the part of an Internet archaeologist, I thought this was a common piece of knowledge five years ago, let alone today. Goes to show how incorrect assumptions about what we do (and do not) know can be.

Burners-Lee's talks are wonderful. My favorite is his talk "Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny": http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html
I've worked in aluminium smelters. Three interesting things:

They are hugely energy intensive and a good way of exporting cheap electricity from otherwise hard to connect locations. The very bottom of New Zealand, The North east of South Africa as well as Mozambique, the Middle East and of course Norway and Russia. Hydroelectric power, free once the dam is built, is ideal, but oil (Middle East) and coal (Southern Africa) are also used.

They are generally located next to a port so that bulk shipments of alumina and carbon (coal) are easily transferred. The carbon is used to make the anodes and cathodes used in the giant 'pots' where the reaction happens.

The metal itself is alloyed up in final form, but is generally shipped from the smelters in pure ignots, at a price related to the LME quoted price.

And a bonus - we were forbidden to have aluminium cans on site. If they ended up in a pot (full of molten bubbling alumina, cryolite and aluminium) then any fluid left inside the can would get super heated and result in an explosion.
I agree with you that there's no way DPR is Satoshi. DPR seemed to be learning to code when launching Silk Road. While Bitcoin had bugs (lots of them) to start with, it is not amateur level computer science. It's not even reasonable to assume that a dude who needed help getting curl to talk to a proxy would be competent enough to work with very advanced crypto concepts, and even invent a few things of their own (using standard crypto algorithms, but still, Bitcoin was not tested waters...).

So, yes, SN is smarter than DPR, and vastly more capable as a software engineer.

And, Satoshi wouldn't need Silk Road to be fantastically rich in Bitcoins. As far as we know, he's got a vast swath of the first mined Bitcoins, even if he gave away most of it. (Which is possibly how Satoshi's identity will be revealed...if suddenly there's a new trillionaire in the world in five years...well, might be Satoshi.)
Within two weeks of arriving in the US I had been arrested and hauled out of a bar by two police officers, thrown over a car, and had my wallet and pockets rifled through. My crime? Talking to a cop's girlfriend.

Of course, we won't get in to equally informative stories of police in China, India, Thailand or the United Kingdom.

Having collected a fair range of experience across the world, I think I've now discovered where my misunderstanding originally arose: I had the wrong idea about what "police" meant. I see now that it's clearly nothing more than an internationally popular short form for "useless and corrupt thug-cum-bureaucrat".
"Hypertext reference," I said to myself as I clicked the link. What do I win?
> * aren't sufficient to explain the Blue Line of Silence*

That's very true in this case. Cop unions are just one aspect of the problem, and if you look at this particular case, no cop has been disciplined. The union, which comes into play late in the game, really cannot be a factor except very indirectly. There are dozens of problems upstream of the union that need to be attended to first.
Hosting is by hostgator

192.185.7.203

203.7.185.192.in-addr.arpa. 3600 IN PTR pss010a.win.hostgator.com.
This is extremely likely. The SilkRoad admins all have access to the old (and the new) DPR forum account. One of them was using it even after Ross was arrested, leading someone to ask why DPR was showing up on the active members list of the SR forum even after be was arrested.
If you have not seen it, please watch the Conspiracy Of Silence documentary.

Also - if you are unaware, you should look into Johnny Gosh/Jeff Gannon and how he relates to the Bush/Republican party with respect to the information revealed in the Conspiracy of Silence.
Well, were you expecting someone to take it down?
What a fantastic read. Thank you for posting the original.
If you post a work on a public site, without explicit copyright, you are STILL granted copyright. You typically also give permission to the site (implied, or otherwise) to store and post that public work... But that permission isn't transitive. Twitter basically says "by posting to our site, you give us permission to republish it, as well as other users to republish (retweet) ON OUR SITE"
BUT it is generally considered that 140 chars isn't creative enough to warrant copyright protection. If that was a case, I could easily write a post to generate all possible tweets, and then no one would be able to tweet.
jsfiddle says "All code belongs to the poster and no license is enforced." Which means if you post to jsfiddle, you still own the copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I would expect that if you posted something to a site like jsfiddle, you are actually giving implicit permission for people to use your code. This would be different than to you posting your code to your own personal blog.
a downvote apparently :)
Clearly not the server to which would originally have been deployed. Someone is actively maintaining it.
Have you seen Retroshare?
> - SN is fairly humble.

You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.

Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.

There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.
1) On its way. I'll be launching a protocol spec for anyone to implement their own client.

2) The license is very temporary. I'll switch to an OSS certified license soon.

3) Hidden services still need server resources. This is closer to Bittorrent than Tor.
I usually reply like that because often I see the attitude that Magic is just a game of spending money on cards -- whoever buys the best cards wins. When in reality, card availability is more of a barrier to entry, and all it does is get you to the point where you're on an even field, card-wise, with actual competitive players. From there it's up to you to have the skill to hang in there.

Beyond the decks/openings analogy though, I'm not sure Magic and chess really compare well.

I think the most interesting distinction is in innovators vs. honers; Gerry Thompson is now out of the game at the professional level, but he was one of the greatest honers who ever played the game. Gerry was not known for coming up with new deck ideas, and in fact the few times he tried it he did horribly. But his ability to analyze the tournament landscape week to week, and make the perfect couple of tweaks to existing deck shells, was unmatched.
Honestly, I'd rather read about bitcoin than the app someone wrote in X lines of *.js
gahaha poor guy.... i fixed it i think
It's so obvious it hurts. The H in both HTML and HTTP is "hypertext". "ref" is clearly "reference". What kind of downer actually writes such a detailed article about this?!
for what its worth, I think that since you know how bad it is, you know the true value in keeping in contact and thus will work for it more and be a better parent because of it.

I have to spend conscious effort to maintain my network of friends and its hard for me because its not automatic and not something I was brought up to do. I inevitably drop the ball sometimes and forget someone and have to get back into contact and reestablish our friendship. Because I know what lonliness does to me and I don't want to ever be that way again.

So if I am ever lucky enough to have my own child, I am certain I will do all I can to make sure they never feel the same. I will fight so no child of mine will ever have to bare the scars that I bare, and that resolve will make me a better parent.
> Many other utility examples do not require structural separation to be regulated like a utility.

And yet they are, or they can be. Specifically, generation and delivery of electric power and separate in many places.
I did, but not in detail. I just see too many unsubstantiated negative articles about bitcoin that it gets tiresome sometimes. I'm glad to know I was wrong this time.
All I wanted was to bring attention to Vijay's amazing answer in stackexchange.
I disclaimed this by thanking him for the brilliant research on the first line of the blog post.
Can anybody change the link of this HN submission to the original answer? Mods?

I didn't meant to blog spam, not sure why the submitter didn't link to the original content.
It is possible that aspects of the SN persona were highly constructed but what is a simpler explanation - that everything about SN was fake or just his identity? It would have taken an enormous cognitive effort to be able to consistently demonstrate the same personality traits in post after post unless it came naturally. It seems like he was more concerned about technical discussion than hiding information about himself beyond his identity.

But of course you are right - until we know who SN is, we can only speculate.