skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you care about color, you should not miss "The importance of being linear" http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html and corresponding discussion on wrong gamma in a variety of programs http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html

The prettiest gradients won't look good if the output color doesn't match the displays gamma.
How many of these transactions are tulip-style speculation, and how many are real use of bitcoins as a currency for exchanging labour and goods?
Sure. But yeah, I'll take money and a healthier work/life balance than free laundry so I could stay 12h a day making something that people will hate but will drive their agenda.
Too much of something is bad for you. News at 11.
If you have no ideas - create secure messenger...or web builder.
The price has gone up by 20% in 24 hours, not just doubled in the last 12 months - I think in twelve months (according to bitcoin charts) it has gone from around $10 to around $600 - 4900% increase. That's clearly unsustainable and yes it does look like a speculative bubble, particularly when people expect it to continue to grow indefinitely in price without a commensurate rise in usage as a currency.

It'll be interesting to see this play out as it's a great example of a completely unregulated market at work.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10zm2g...

I don't see bitcoin becoming a world currency without some large changes to the protocol - for example to track users and link them with real world IDs, reversible transactions etc, and there are also political reasons which would make it very difficult - governments enjoy being able to fund deficit spending and control the economy by manipulating the currency, they won't easily give up that power.
Css and the golden ratio
The most standard (I believe) is certainly lossless:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=name_of_disc.iso

creates a bit-for-bit image of the disc. If you're trying to shrink the data, that's obviously useless, but it works fine for copying discs.

Ripping to video files, instead of to a disc image, may or may not be lossless depending on the format you're targetting, but the norm (again, I believe) is to be lossy, since you can achieve really large amounts of compression.

All that said, it's really not that difficult to judge video quality directly; what you can't perceive literally doesn't matter. In my ripped video of The Princess Bride (completely legit, in that I ripped it myself from a DVD I owned), I eventually noticed that color was occasionally washed out, but only because I was going frame-by-frame trying to get good images of the swords. I would never have known otherwise.
Hmm... but it's kindof scary that it's supposedly a currency but it's not really in practical use.

From Wikipedia:
Speculators have been attracted to Bitcoin, fueling volatility and price swings. As of July 2013, the use of Bitcoin in the retail and commercial marketplace is relatively small compared with the use by speculators.

It reminds me of a similar analysis I read of Amway -- how only a small percentage of the products ever make it to retail consumers.

If you have a currency that is supposed to end in consumer exchange but can't make it back down to that level, what is it really? It's a huge bubble that will have to go through many more transformations before ending up back in your wallet. Maybe by that time the gov't will have figured out how to tax it, or more exchanges will have disappeared.

I don't know, seems odd. An interesting risk for those who believe in easy money, but it's strange to me that a gamble that so many are making would pay off for everyone involved. That's a very... ponzi scheme level of idealism. Once the price started to rise I think maybe it ceased being a viable currency and instead became a fantasy for those wanting to trade it at a profit. I mean, the price of currency isn't supposed to be so volatile, right? If the USD for example, were jumping around like this would people invest in it? Or would they lose faith in the dollar?

EDIT: I found this article that seems to address a lot of these issues.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_ch...
People ARE buying/selling on Mtgox at 600. However, the price is not "real" because it is inflated by the inability to withdraw USD from Mtgox.

What is happening is that people are buying BTC on Mtgox and then transferring it to other exchanges to withdraw their USD.

For more accurate price information I suggest goign off coinbase or bitstamp.
Everyone is pompous about someone.

I'm a Londoner; I'm pompous about out-of-towners. Out-of-towners are pompous about Londoners.

Disdain makes the world go round.
I'd be surprised if mercurial didn't have a similar “feature”.
Agree. What really annoys me most, are websites where you can only "login" using your Facebook account.

Anyway, in this case, even registering with your dummy/spam email address is worth the trouble :)
2. The bet is that Bitcoin becomes world money.

It's also worth noting that the US government now owns 0.686% of all bitcoins that will ever be created. (They seized 144k coins in the Silk Road raid, and eventually there will be 21 million total coins.)
The good news that whatever comes next is probably going to be easily purchasable via bitcoin since bitcoin makes purchasing things online so damn easy. Even if you are forced to take something of a haircut you'll still probably wind up ahead if you choose to take that haircut in a modern currency like bitcoin than a legacy one like USD.
I was more curious about why you thought bitcoin is a PnD, but the other info does provide useful context, thanks. There is some evidence that many miners have sold most of their early stockpiles. The min-1-year bitcoin-days-destroyed chart (sum of [coin amount * coin age in days] for coin groups older than a year [1]) shows this to a degree. The metric is also an underestimation of older stockpile movement, as any transaction (even between one's own addresses) will reset age to 0. But it is still hard to say for sure.

One twist about bitcoin is that most early adopters are strongly invested ideologically and/or emotionally, reducing some of the potential dumping power. The next year or two should be rather interesting. I could see some large corrections, but each month that passes gives bitcoin more staying power/legitimacy. So far, each downtrend has only resulted in a later movement to much higher levels.

[1] http://blockchain.info/charts/bitcoin-days-destroyed-min-yea...
tl;dr JS_loader == BAD_UX

I can't comment on the post because I'm on a train with spotty 3G coverage. Which begs the question. WTF is going on with this trend of JS loaders? If your site takes too much time to load, stop nagging users and just take the time to properly optimize the site.
>Do startups really look at github contributions as the ultimate measure of one's tech chops or are looking for people who go that extra bit and make time in their schedules for contributing back to the community?

When I was hiring, yes. There is no easier and simpler way to evaluate someone before bringing them in for an interview than checking their verifiable OSS contributions. It's low friction.

Doesn't mean we didn't consider others, but for obvious reasons people who actually could prove they had done work went to the head of the line. It's just how it is.
Just like with every bubble, some people will wait and wait again to invest in... Only once all their friends will have gain some money speculating, once the main media will say it's an easy way to make money, when they'll have the feeling that eveybody else is making money, only then will they invest in... And loose everything the next day, after the bubble collapse.

So, if you're planning on speculating with bitcoins, do it right now, or never do it... The chances are it's already too late btw, since people are already mentionning exponential growth.
I don't have a good sense of how to be properly gracious, so today I'll try this way.

You make good points, and I don't object to the things you've said. I wish my situation was less fuzzily-defined. :/
MtGox does allow you to withdraw in USD, it's just that you get put on a long processing queue. The problem is that their Japanese bank has restricted them to only 10 international wires per day. They've been having a really tough time with banks. Interestingly, if you have a Japanese bank account, you can withdraw Yen from MtGox within a few hours.

Regarding price - MtGox's has been fairly in step with BTCChina's price. BTCChina and MtGox both represent the top exchanges by 30-day volume, so it would seem to me that MtGox's price is more accurate than BitStamp's price which lags miserably behind every rally.
I've been a Gmail user since its invite-only inception. I would agree with you about the UI a year ago. But the new SMS-sized compose window and the UI changes that put all non-basic functionality 2 or 3 clicks away are really annoying.

I would leave Gmail due to the UI changes, although I must confess I hadn't at the moment because it's too much bother to tell people about a new address, set up redirection, find out how to save all the old messages and have them at hand, etc.
Intriguing - I was expecting a Jekyll-based static resume
> It's too easy to shut it out by putting pressure on banks not to open accounts for the companies running exchanges.

That would have worked last year, but right now we have ripple(http://www.ripple.com) up and running exchanges are no longer a point of failure. Ripple interprets exchanges getting shut down as network damage and routes around them efficiently. There's plenty of choke points left, but exchanges are not one of them. Price might take a hit but it'd bounce back when people realize that the solution is in their hands.
https://coinvoice.com promises you can invoice in USD and receive BTC. Reverse of bitpay. Have registered, have not used.
i can offer no concrete evidence, but the impression i get from within the gamedev community is that this is generally accepted to be the case.

there are ample hints that this is fits with Apple's philosophy for the app store. the fact that they forbid you from mentioning if you are on other platforms being the most easily verified.

if you are ever lucky enough to meet with some of the Apple guys to discuss how to help your app on the store then you might be able to find out for yourself whether this is bullshit or not.
I'm pretty sure a lot of smart adults at Facebook thought the true valuation was $3B. I don't see why an IPO right now would look so different.
No, there is no way to get your US Dollars out of Mt.Gox, after you sell you BitCoin, in a reasonable timeframe. Supposedly they only process about 10 total USD wire transfer withdrawals per day. There is also a question of bankruptcy risk as it is common knowledge that the US Government seized several million dollars from MtGox earlier this year.

Anyone that quotes MtGox as the reference bitcoin price almost certainly has little experience trading bitcoin. Bitstamp is a much better reference price or if you want to be US centric CoinBase.

It's not that arbitrage opportunities don't exist in the Bitcoin world. There are some rare and fleeting ones. This just isn't a good one.
Bitcoin is no longer the only cryptocurrency, so it has to hold value against gold, diamonds (both of which are completely anonymous), all fiat currencies, as well as alternate methods of payment.

It is highly unlikely that it will be adopted as a currency for major business transactions (too unstable and unknown), and is completely traceable, so will not be adopted by major elements in the black market. In the end, if bitcoin specifically (as opposed to some alternate cryptocurrency) remains in use for a long period, it is likely to be for relatively small transactions in niche markets. Does that warrant it's current valuation? I have no idea.
btc-e is having market issues right now. There are literally no coins for sale. Everything has been bought up by arbitrage bots to push to mtgox.
You just ran a script that scattered production / sensitive information in your source files. You definitely don't want to get that into history and get the last head state back.. Yes, you can delete the working tree and check out head again, but than again, git reset --hard pretty much does that and it's welcome at times.
Important to note that credit card processors charge not-insignificant fees to the merchants. So paying cash in BTC is a win for the customers who want to support that business.
Anything that goes up fast will come down fast. That simple is that. The sooner you sell your speculative investment the more likely you'll get your money back (at the expense of other people). I sold some leftover coins of mine after 2x in price and that's still phenomenal gains from just some random coins I saved for any next purchase.

The value of BTC will slowly rise but naively extrapolating from the last year or so only I'd say the realistic value is still below $100. I'm pretty confident that roughly $50 is a rather stable floor for the years coming.
> It is neither inherently immoral nor illegal.

Whether it's moral surely depends on whether you think people have a right to private communication. If you think it's immoral for someone to monitor your personal communications, then someone monitoring Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's phone is surely immoral too.

I don't buy that it's someone less immoral because the stakes are higher.
Useful tip. Anecdotally this helped me save 40% of memory on some data I need to store in memory for analysis: Used to be about 1KB per object, after adding __slots__ it came down to 590 bytes.
$38500 aint bad, but it isn't $771000. I wish I would of purchased more than one when it was around $65 (right after the first pop). Now I'm trying to find the thumbdrive that contains the bitcoins that I got from the original fountain.
Curry takeaways and PC games, also to send money to techie friends is much easier than even online banking.
as a note this seems to have +36 points, i assumed it was negative because my reputation seems to have taken a dive by roughly that same value. just noticed in my history that negatives are marked with a '-' and get greyed out. how strange... or perhaps i am again just being stupid.
...all the wealth stored in cash, gold, silver, bonds and other low-risk less liquid assets will go into Bitcoin

This is rather utopic vision. None of the gold owners would sell significant part of their gold for btc - gold is used to store value for ages, bitcoin is a currency.
>> I sometimes feel very insecure when I read statements like this.

Relax. This is what happens here on HN often-times. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

>> However, I have (so far) never been able to manage contributing to open source projects in any significant way. Sometimes I have been too busy with work projects, sometimes it has been a busy life at grad school, sometimes family,

I can take a safe bet that a lot of us here can confirm to this as well. So this is more prevalent than people care to admit/inform here.

>> and I wish I were more like them.

Not a bad wish, but if I were you, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. :)
So, just keep doing what you are doing, and the opportunities (oh, there are plenty of those around. I can assure you) that arise around those things will come to you. Good luck!
Bubbles pop because people lose confidence. The ways in which that can happen are infinitely varied. While the reasons you list can cause that, people also can lose confidence for irrational reasons or decide that their confidence was not rational. Most commonly their confidence will just align with what they perceive other people's confidence to be, causing feeback.

Remember there were people who dumped a lot of money into bitcoin at $200 last bubble and then bailed at $100 an extremely short time later.

Something like that will probably happen again with the current rise. The long term probably doesn't really care about the blips along the way though.
They've been having a really tough time with banks

Although from what I was reading the last time this came up, these issues are largely caused in no small part by poor decisions on the part of MtGox.
Case in point: I hold quite a few bitcoins. I am waiting to sell them. The deciding moment will be when my mom mentions bitcoins to me the first time. That will be the trigger ;)
> There is only one problem with elevating young people's tastes this way: Kids are often wrong. There is little evidence to support the idea that the youth have any closer insight on the future than the rest of us do.

And we grew out as kids and we actually were the one pushed social network and youtube to its fullness. High school kids and young college undergraduates are kids right? I remember Youtube back in 2005 when I was a freshman in HS.

I agree that buying snapchat is a risky investment. In fact, I am not really sure if that's going to make Facebook stronger. What is Facebook lacking? One of my friends today said "John I like the new Facebook messenger update. It's pretty!" I agree with my friend the messenger app is getting better. But what is taking Facebook down?

It's the way we share photo and videos. Frankly as someone who tries to become a successful security engineer, I can be lazy and agree to FB tracking me as long as my money isn't stolen. I can accept that and try to keep as little sensitive personal data like whether I am still a virgin away from the Internet. I can do that. Kids like me just want to enjoy socializing with friends and the Internet as much as possible.

So if you own things like Instgram or whatever social app you have, integrate that fully into your product. Why is GIF still not supported in Facebook? I heard they used to support gif in the early days of Facebook.

I am not saying there is an easy solution. I don't know and don't think anyone has any idea what would be the coolest yet functional comfortable interface Facebook should have. We need to focus on what people want to see. Facebook, GMail they are just becoming everyday's gadget. It is not exciting. Snapshot is exciting, maybe. Maybe it will continue but I know people soon or later will change to another one. We need to look at what FB messenger can't do that snapchat can.
Meet the robot that teaches coding
>The combination of keyboard shortcuts, labels, and filters make it the best.

I find the web interface routinely bloats up the browsers mem usage (A freaking gigabyte to display a UI??!). The spam filter is average - on both false positives and false negatives. My inbox is only ~5GB and many searches are really slow.
> Almost but not quite: it must surely go to zero at some point, because chances are extremely high that we haven't accidentally hit the holy grail of digital cryptocurrencies and no better thing could ever be possibly come along for all eternity.

Bitcoin mathematically approximates Byzantine concensus with arbitrary parcitipants. This is the fundamental insight over the fundamental hurdle that made all prior attempts at cryptocurrencies (for decades) non-starters.

What is the space of cryptocurrencies that exploit the Byzantine insight, but are somehow better than Bitcoin? I would suspect that it is very small, or nil.

So unlike you, I don't think there is a high chance of something better coming along. I think there is a low but significant chance.

A slight digression:

I _do_ think that bitcoin may end up being the "gold" used to resolve balances between crypto-banks that have their own currencies. The advantage of such a system is confirmation in almost no time, and not having to pay a transaction fee to get your transaction into a block (which could be large as contention for block space rises).

But other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin will have to be redeemable for bitcoin, always. If you sever the link, they become worthless.

Now if they increase the block size limit to keep transaction fees low, there may never be any need for other cryptocurrencies backed by bitcoin.
Because it's not that big of a deal. People's CC number is everywhere. In databases, on receipts, etc.

Where I live the full no is not stored on receipts, and in dbs it must be encrypted. I think emailing CC numbers around would be breaking PCI compliance, and that would be a big deal. There's no way I'd email a CC number.
Broke you iPhone? Make it into art.
vires in numeris
"I was part of the most noble of professions. "
Sarcasm is not necessary :-(
Actually I realize now that this might only represent people's attempt to SQL inject rather than any real representation of their SQL structure
there are many of this apps already, and while there are a couple that are nice my question is: has anyone actually ever used any of this for something serious?
That's not really true, a lot of us more sensible people want to 'cash out' a little slowly as the price goes up, and what better way to cash out than actually spending the bitcoin on an actual product and supporting the economy? I'd be willing to bet that as people suddenly find themselves with tens or hundreds of bitcoins, and that they can buy a pizza for 0.05 BTC, they are quite open to the idea of receiving what is essentially free pizza. Sure, that pizza could be worth five pizzas tomorrow but you still have a decent chunk in bitcoins and if the whole thing plummets to earth then at least you got something delicious.
That's just pure speculation now.
I have my mail server on a ISP for private email, but other ones email accounts for other purposes as well.

Yes you are right about your remark, but as I said, I am lazy and rather have Google servers do spam filtering and email aggregation than doing it myself with SpamAssassin.

I got to a point where I rather spend evenings with family and friends than coding.
They must be motivated to preserve that wealth now.
I've suggested this several times, to several different people, and their response is always an outraged, ``But it's mine!'' followed by various reasons why they won't donate something they never use.
I'll second Coinbase as the hands down best choice for US merchants looking to sell (you get your first million in sales transaction fee free) and US citizens looking to buy coins (dead simple instant identity verification and linked directly to your bank account no shady third party money transmitters or wire transfers required).

There is one caveat. Coinbase isn't a real exchange in the sense that you can't buy and sell in real time. If you are looking to day trade and make money off short term price fluctuations you should use something like bitstamp.net which will execute your trades in real time instead of having to wait 3-5 days for them to settle.
>And we grew out as kids and we actually were the one pushed social network and youtube to its fullness.

Not really. Youtube catters to all demographics and all ages. If there ever was a social network to speak to 50+ and 60+ as well as 20+ this would be it.

So, no, there wasn't some swarth of "high school kids" and "young college undergraduates" pushing it to its fullness (what would that be?)
This is a doubled thread... I asked a bunch of questions on the old one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753033). Now I found this article that seems to address a lot of my reservations about Bitcoin so I thought I'd post.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_ch...
A. Richards deserved to get fired.
I remember looking at it when it was below a dollar... at the time I had no money and told everyone I know to buy. I also managed to mine 50 coins, but have since lost the wallet.

Now, my brain melts when I see the current price.
Making the healthcare data public in an anonymised format would not affect people's jobs, unless there is some property of that data that makes it easily identifiable.