skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure how people are determining this is a bubble. There are roughly 12 million bitcoins in existence. Priced at $668, that means there is a mere $8 billion in the entire Bitcoin system. That's tiny. For a global currency with the unique advantages Bitcoin has, I would expect the currency to be in the $10s to 100s of billions soon enough.

In order for bitcoin to actually matter, it needs to grow. You're going to get $668 bitcoins no matter what, if people start using it. That's simple supply and demand. Network effects being what they are, it's going to grow quickly.

In order for Bitcoin to remain stable, it would need to grow slowly. Thanks to the Internet and the plethora of Bitcoin news lately, I just don't see that happening.
SHA hash of the file: 051b176c506388f9bda78bd831aceda324d304e8
What effect will near-future government quantum computers have on bitcoin's anonymity? Are all the folks that have used bitcoins for illegal transactions in for a rude surprise?
If I loan you US dollars, how do I get them back?
If you're living in your awesomebar and don't already know them, you might want to check out our filters:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...

You can restrict location bar matches to bookmarks only, urls only, open tabs only, &c.

I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but it makes my own life a lot easier.
Agreed. Even if it doesn't die, it's going to S-curve at some point. The range between $1000-$10,000 is going to be interesting times. At that point, a lot of the early hobbyists are going to be holding minor life-changing amounts of potential money ($10Ks-$100Ks). Even with the forecast of continued exponential growth, it's will be the smart move for a lot of people to "take some off the table" and cash out a significant portion of whatever they've been hoarding.
I think that sometimes increasing your self-esteem depends on factors totally outside of your control. However, a lot of self-esteem programs seem to think that change depends entirely on the individual. Depression comes from the difference between reality and what you think it should be.
Holding, but growing skeptical that this sort of growth is sustainable. It currently makes no sense to purchase anything with Bitcoins, when one will certainly be worth more tomorrow than it is worth today.
... I never even thought of that. I always start with naive searches and then remember to add "site" refinements later as I mangle the search from the Google page, so I never actually try the "site:" qualifier right in the URL bar. That's a nasty one.
A Landing Page is not a MVP
Surveillance technology out of control, says Lord Ashdown
The Customer Support Handbook
So it's more like the squircle[1] shape used by Nokia in their Symbian and Meego phones.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle
Can we use this to Bitcoin paperwallet somehow?
We (Latvians) are actually really similar to Russians in this matter. We generally don't smile and if there's someone walking down the street with a big smile on his face - the first thing that comes to mind is: "He must be a tourist."
Here's how you know wages in the US are too low
As Bitcoin nears $700, Coinbase out of coins to sell
From coinbase.com:

"Due to higher than normal buy volumes, we are unable to provide exact price quotes right now.

Instead of pausing buys entirely, we decided to give people the option to purchase bitcoin at the market price in a few days. Once your USD funds arrive, we will exchange them to bitcoin at the market price at approximately Friday Nov 22, 2013 at 07:56AM PST.

Note that you can cancel your order at any time up until your bitcoin arrive from the transfer history page.

The market price of bitcoin changes frequently. Below are some recent prices to give you an idea. These do not guarantee what the price will be in a few days."
What's worse is open space workbenches. They make cubicles seem like a luxury. Grrr...
The Ethical Hackathon
Maybe it's your OS? They look very different to me on Windows. The orange Firefox top menu is gone, the tabs have gained an "x" button, the "+" no longer has a border, the padding above the tabs is reduced, there are 3 new buttons on the search bar which is now larger and lost its colored background, and the forward button is gone.

It looks more like Chrome than it does old Firefox.

http://i.imgur.com/Y3ZFcD4.png
Well... sorta but I want to meta it into a generic online purchasing department for any activity.

So as a kit designer, my lab experiment which anyone in the world can buy from the startup for $100 or whatever (of which I get 5% and the startup keeps 5%), needs an arduino, a A/D and D/A shield from some specialty electronics supplier (adafruit?) and a spool of copper wire, clipleads and connectors and stuff from generic supplier (jameco?) and some sticks of different metals like aluminum, copper, steel (onlinemetals.com?) and some rather generic glassware (carolina? VWR? Fischer? or downscale to a ceramic mug or flower pot?) and something like lemon juice in a can or maybe a wide variety of mostly harmless electrolytes like diet coke soda (amazon food department?) Whoops forgot to add a decent printed lab manual (lulu.com?)

Ta da instant lets do introductory electrochemistry at home kit. Send the startup $100 in a single credit card charge, they keep $5, send $5 to me as designer/curator, and $90 goes to about 5 suppliers and boxes start arriving at the end users house.

Now the magical startup wouldn't only do this project or only those suppliers, but it would middleman ... hundreds of kits maybe thousands?

This is basically the drop ship retail model, but for small consumers and small orders instead of the more traditional use of drop shipping a 5 HP air compressor. Also I'd internationalize it, why not. So if you live in some weird country where shipping canned lemon juice is illegal, well, I guess its not available for purchase in that country.

I don't personally want to do this. It sounds like a huge PITA and probably will fail and it'll be hard. Someone else can go right ahead, and I'll probably end up a project curator for a couple projects and most likely a buyer. Unless they try to grab something ridiculous like 50% as middleman, in which case I'd drop them like a hot potato.
You can say D-H key exchange works the same way with colors as demonstration. But it's cool to see this demonstration. Moral of the story: don't trust your Google logo :) It might have a hidden secret!
Maybe not 20, but 10 -- definitely. Try being a fan of any other Eastern Time Zone team in DC (and presumably NY suffers from the same situation). Even if your team has a pretty national audience (i.e. Steelers, Eagles, Patriots, Giants, etc.), the Rs and Ravens block out two weekly TV slots. Anyway, you end up with perhaps two games where your team is playing the local team, another 2-3 games of national coverage, but I'd definitely be willing to PPV at least 10 games (and I'd definitely consider dropping cable and PPV-ing all 16).
The order in the questions is taken directly from Google Search, thy are ordered by (Google) relevance. With the right search terms this usually works pretty well for me.

The answers in each question are ordered by votes.
Which makes me think lately: why do I even need Microsoft's stack for HTML5 as an employee? I bet that by choosing Scala instead of C# I would gain both in terms of salary and in terms of re-usability of skill across different platforms. And JavaScript/HTML5... well I guess these are just crappy times and we have to bite the bullet of using outdated crappy languages for client-side...
Ph.D student in Stats here.
That we can even sample the full posterior with so much data is interesting in and of itself. The method isn't particularly revolutionary, especially compared to a method Zaiyang Huang and Andy Gelman[1] came up with 8 years ago, but it's practical (for a restricted class of models). Steve Scott spoke to my department about a month ago, describing the problem. It's not a solution that works for all posteriors, but it certainly allows more freedom than restricting oneself to conjugate priors and allows computation on large datasets.

Academics tend to trivialize the implementation (we had some pretty strong critics of his talk in my dept), but some kudos are in order for that, even if the algorithm itself isn't revolutionary.

[1]: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/co...
> an Atheist would receive a lot of "I'm praying for Jesus to make it better" cards

I'm an atheist. I've had believer friends ask if they could pray over me during a time when I was navigating difficulties. Do you know what I said? "I would be honored". Do you understand why? Because, while I don't share their belief system I recognize their request comes from only one place: love and caring. It would take a pedantic asshole to reject something coming from such a place. So, they did, and they felt better for it. And I did too. Good friends.

I am not necessarily critical of your comment. Just wanted to point out that not all atheists are militant fire breathing monsters. I do get upset when religion gets in the way of scientific truth and social justice (vaccines, gay rights, etc.). That said, in general terms, I am having trouble thinking of any believers in our group of family and friends whom I'd consider to be undesirable people. I would, without a doubt, be happy to receive a "I am praying for Jesus to make it better" card from any of them during trying times.
Methinks "open offices" score better than cubicles on many points precisely because there is no expectation of privacy/quiet/etc. Lacking the expectation of better, there is less dissatisfaction with reality being worse. Cubicles at least give the occupant a semblance, and thus hope for, privacy/quiet/etc. so one is more keenly annoyed that it's not up to par.
> There's also this extra long shot of Dr. Wu awkwardly pouring a glass of Yili brand Chinese milk.

I though that lactose intolerance was so widespread in China that it wouldn't be a product for mass-market advertising.
Comet ISON becomes visible to the naked eye on its first trip past Earth
Show HN: My small poll project
I run a small subreddit with about 4k subscribers and I think you're onto something. The amount of spam that beats the spam filter feels absolutely overwhelming sometimes.

Even with self posts only enabled there is still a crushing amount of spam submitted daily.
good effort, but the new design does make my head spin and thus i rarely go to TC anymore. it's just too much content in your face.

i find it interesting how they discuss and plan about fonts/colors down to the wire for UI sake, and yet miss the "bigger" picture of readability.
Concur.

The design people in Firefox lost me as a user when they decided to re-arrange an interface that had looked the same for the better part of a decade. Re-arrange, not improve. Apparently years of users' visual + muscle memory means nothing to these UX guys.

I persevered with it for a while but eventually I just gave up and switched browsers. Shame, since I'd been using Firefox since its first release (called Phoenix back then, later Firebird, finally Firefox).

FWIW, here's the "original" user interface: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Mozilla_F...
The inevitable sequence of questions:

1. Why not Web?
2. Why not NoSQL?
3. Why Microsoft?
Well, when searching from the address bar, I can't get the search suggestions to work.

Or maybe there's a setting that I missed.

Still, I don't use the search bar and leave it off since I only like to keep the the address bar + the download button to minimize complexity.
Gender and speedcubing
I'd generalize this to (continental) Europeans, and it becomes more true the further East you go. Being in Poland, I notice the same thing.

However, I did notice that New Yorkers are also closer to the "Russian" camp. Not totally (especially when it comes to retail), but closer...
shrug. Firefox already had pinned tabs with an icon, and the icons for incognito/private and bookmarks aren't much different from the current ones either.

I'll grant you the tab shape and the option icon.
I can't think of a single season in which they haven't "left money on the table" by denying one group or another that ultimately proved to be successful. Similarly, there hasn't been a single season in which there wasn't at least one failure.

Venture Capital is, at its very best, a gamble, and it's a gamble in which there are a near infinite amount of variables. Product, team, market, vision, future, government regulations, etc.

I don't really know how this would equate them to Google, Microsoft or IBM, especially as except at a very surface level, those companies aren't really all that alike. If the accusation is just that they're slow moving giants incapable of innovating, I'd warn that 1) that accusation isn't fairly applied to the references, and 2) that even if that were the case, isn't really a critique, except where it might be applied in the context of failing to make money.

Seeing the recent batches, it appears that the money-making focus has definitely been more B2B than in earlier batches, but that's likely as a result of B2B proving more profitable over the long run than it is to be attributed to a lack of innovation. As a money-making endeavor, I'd wager that betting for more companies to make less profit than in the hopes of finding one Facebook amongst a bunch of flops is the more humanitarian path of funding as well, but that's another topic altogether.
Seems like the prudent thing to do is take a page from the oil industry and have a bunch of liability-shell LLCs so that even when one takes a hit, the others keep going.
App Development with salesforce.com
I like the idea of the challenge, but some kind of standard formatting is needed, otherwise 30 lines is very arbitrary. I like the X bytes challenges as there's no ambiguity in what that means.
> I wonder why none[1] of the major dynamic languages offer the option of running with the built-in associative-data structures implemented using a Red-Black Tree. Seems like an obvious thing to do.

It's not a command-line option, but Perl lets you "tie" a hash to a different backing implementation, and there are some tree-based ones:

use Tree::RB;
tie my %hash, 'Tree::RB';
'Legitimate' bitcoins value soars
The complaining about women's representation at conferences seems to be predicated on the belief that women would be equally represented if merit assessment was unbiased (thus gender imbalance is proof of bias): well, here is a situation where merit assessment is unbiased (performance is measured by a timer). And the gender situation is more or less the same (women's representation is much lower at the top than overall). This leads me to conclude that the women in tech complaining is unfounded.
Combine this with the Finnish attitude towards smalltalk, and I think you'd get the ideal sort of country for me.
Just because someone is passionate doesn't mean they will do a good job. It is much more likely that you don't understand what makes a startup successful and thats why you don't understand why certain companies are rejected.
Q&A with an Entrepreneur: Saeju Jeong of Noom
The actual number of bitcoin actively trading hands is a lot smaller than 12 million.
There are many such algorithms, and it is an active area of research especially in the area of soft body physics (cloth, human tissue, etc) where precise collision handling is very important.

Most rigid body simulations use discrete collision detection with fixed time steps, so it only checks for collisions at specific points in time. This is fast, but can cause issues where fast moving objects passing through thin objects (such as a bullet through a pane of glass). The alternative is called Continuous Collision Detection in which you calculate exactly when two objects will collide (or have collided) and can then simulate up to that point (or roll back to that point) and deal with the collision. One naive technique to do this is after integrating your simulation forwards, you use the volume each object swept out in that time step as its collision geometry instead of just the shape of the object at its new position. This solution has issues; it doesn't tell you when two objects collided and it can give false positives, but it works ok for rigid body simulations.

Some recent papers on the subject with more exact (and complicated) techniques:

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/ACM/

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/brochu-siggraph2012-ccd....
I had no idea that existed - thanks!
Results of the 2013 State of Clojure and ClojureScript survey
Powers of Ten, by IBM
Because XAML: 1) is a limited subset of WPF; 2) an intentionally chosen confusing name; 3) can't be used for desktop development (AFAIK) - and that is what a typical enterprise wants.
Apple Loop: PrimeSense Means 3-D Cameras, Samsung's Patent Penalty
Me neither but I gambled .XX BTC into it before it exploded in reddit than mainstream online articles.
Yes, It has always looked different on Linux. Here's how Firefox 25 looks on KDE for me right now (entire screen).

http://i.imgur.com/bYDqi2L.png

with the exception of adblock on the right, that's the default layout.

Fyi, I also liked the orange button on Windows :(
There are other nuances too. Such as the number of angles available after hitting the paddle, and speed of the ball based on what color brick is hit. This classic video explains it all pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRAPnuwnpRs
> Personally, I don't like the idea of a GitHub/OSS resume. While for others this is great, it does not work for everyone. Many of us are not able to contribute to open source projects...

Of course, not everyone can. But likewise, not everyone can go to college and get a degree in computer science, which is generally pretty important for one's resume.

Open source contributions on github should not be the sole or even most important measure of one's technical skills, and neither should having a college degree. But the more options there are to prove one's skills, the better a chance talented people have.

In other words: For those that can't afford to go to college, but are good at programming, github can make the hiring process more fair.
I don't understand how curved tabs are supposed to get "out of the way". The new design seems to use less standard UI elements to push it's own (WinXP / Fisher-Price) agenda: I don't see any gains here and I reckon they just want to appeal to the chrome crowd.
Firefox has consistently been shown to use less RAM than all other browsers:

http://media.bestofmicro.com/L/5/390857/original/memuse.png
The next Nielsen for Social, SeeVibes, buys TvTweet and expands to Europe
Yep (though it's a constitutional republic, not a constitutional democracy). My point is that discussions about moving the slider even more away from 100% pure democracy should be within the realm of reasonable discourse.
Launch party was great. Can't wait to get my first kit
Microsimulation of Road Traffic Flow
Just had his conversation with a coworker, I've never felt comfortable editing any of the my other IDE's including my favorite VIM.

Lighttable's datastructure based configuration makes it so nice.

Thanks Chris & Co. keep up the awesome!
CoreOS Test Drive
Well design is always subjective.
I think before Firefox 4, the browser looked really stale and old (as does your screenshot)

And I don't think they really changed it much anyways. Many of the GUI elements are in the same position as before, there's nothing new to learn. A lot of them have been integrated, which is nice and reduces the unnecessary chrome.

I like Australis. To me, it looks more modern, even if it does look like Chrome. It feels like a step in the right direction.

I also don't mind them changing the UI of Firefox because most of the time, this is what I look at: http://d.pr/i/iEtP
In the past 6 months I've worked in a cubicle, open office space, and in an office of my own, with a proper door. I would say that productivity was lowest in the cubicle, and is highest in the office. Open office space was the most unenjoyable however.
I only hope they're also getting rid of GTK icons on the main chrome. They make (unthemed) Firefox on a high-DPI screen completely unusable.

(Why? Scaling up page content (via layout.css.devPixelsPerPx) also scales up chrome, including the (already properly sized) icons­— so every icon in Fx ends up being four times larger than it should.)
RIP Doris Lessing
I think that "face-saving ruse" was in relation to the second "hit", which sounded incredibly implausible. Someone says they need $500K and blackmails DPR, then the creditor shows up and is willing to kill the blackmailer for 20% of that? Yeah, OK.

The details on the first "hit" weren't known before, were they?

And it still doesn't invalidate the logic behind it some people were proposing: Given the prior that the USG will do harm to SR users and dealers, is it less harm to kill one person that is going to give information to the USG? (Again, that logic only works if you take the assumption that the USG is acting immorally and will impose a large amount of suffering onto many others.)
Book Review: Remote by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Foxconn Interns Reportedly Damaged PS4 Consoles
Hey I emailed you. Not sure if I "decoded" your address correctly from your profile. If not my email is in mine so say g'day :)
I don't think you can meaningfully compare open workspaces to cubicles without talking about how densely people are packed. I really like the open plan office at my last job, but that was because people were spread far enough apart. And we had side rooms for taking phone calls, having discussions, etc.
And I can't fathom why you'd focus in on curved tabs in this UI redesign. It's one of the smallest details.
I've not managed $5MM in ad spend, but its held true for many of the accounts that I have managed. At any rate, I'm only advocating for segmenting your visitors by CPC and looking at the results; I'm not saying that what's been true in my experience will be true in yours!

Regarding the article you shared: I assume Google is making that judgement based on AdWords' conversion tracking, which does not account for offline behavior, but rather tends to track actions like form submissions and calls. That's an incomplete picture for any business with a sales funnel that includes on an offline component (e.g., speaking to a salesperson on the phone, touring a college campus, or coming in for a test drive).

In my experience, customers who click on lower positioned ads might be as likely (or more likely) to fill out the contact form and ask for more info, but they are not as likely to convert into customers. YMMV.
You are myopically looking only at the experience of the payer during the transaction (and perhaps after). There is a whole lot more going on that adds friction.

To accept credit cards I need to fill out a bunch of paperwork, wait for blessing (which might be withheld), and then pay transaction fees on every exchange that are way higher than bitcoin transaction fees. They are likely to stay way higher since bitcoin allows direct competition on the basis of transaction fee. Then I'm faced with the possibility that the charges will be disputed!

To use credit cards, I need to fill out a bunch of paperwork, wait for blessing (which may be withheld), and only then can I easily make these payments - with the acknowledged advantages you cite. I may also have to pay an annual fee, but that's often waived because - analogous to web advertising - VISA wants larger numbers to better convince businesses they need to accept VISA.

Bitcoin is also substantially more resistant to fraud in one particular dimension: I am not constantly handing out my secret to every waiter and website I interact with.
Pegadinha do Malandro II GluGlu YeYe
GDL Weekly: Dart 1.0, Portable Native Client, Hackademy
Statement to the U.S. Senate on Virtual Currency/Bitcoin