skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh. They actually want to step up their testing game? So why this thread? <g>

btw, I am glad no one asked the alternative to testing -- it would have been more a textbook on software development. <g>
Not everyone has a full time job. The labor force participation rate is only about 63% in the US.

Also, I think a lot of people need television as background noise. They don't necessarily watch it, but it's on while they do chores and what not.
Lots of problems can be solved with one language depending on the language. And I have worked on several single language stack projects. Having a single language stack has many benefits. Right too for right job is only relevant if the right tool doesn't do many jobs good enough.
Every time I see another metoostrap site, I die a little inside.
> Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.

It already is. Netflix is funding a lot of new stuff (House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, lots of standup stuff). Note that this stuff is being received very well by normal consumers and critics alike. They're also funding canceled shows like Arrested Development, Lillyhammer, etc.
Apple Confirms Acquisition of 3D Sensor Startup PrimeSense
Notch Is A Wearable Sensor & App For Tracking And Capturing Body Movements
> It's not really significant, because there aren't many people involved in this bubble. If the startup scene in SV gets cut in half, it's going to hurt locally, but the broader economy won't go into recession. In addition, should some VC funds go bust, it won't trickle much to the average consumer.

You're missing the plot. There are numerous asset bubbles today and they are all being fueled by the same source (the central banks).

It is unlikely (although possible) that the current "tech bubble" will pop on its own. It is more likely that it will pop at roughly the same time as the others when the massive experiment in monetary policy we have seen since 2008 comes to an end. The bursting of many of these asset bubbles will have a devastating impact on the broader economy, and the fact that numerous bubbles are bursting at the same time will only exacerbate the situation.

Timing, of course, is uncertain. The day of reckoning could come tomorrow, or it could come a decade from now. The disturbing thing is that the longer this goes on, the more painful the impact.
It has to be that the this language was adopted as a compromise between being technically correct and non-tech-friendly. Most people aren't switching browsers on their same machine, so for non-tech-minded people, their "computer" is synonymous with their browser. Imagine what they'd have to say if they wanted to be technically correct? Something like "Can we store a cookie in the browser you're currently using so we can automatically sign you in the next time you visit this site?"?
The Epidemic of Idea Hoarding
Moon.js - Apollo Guidance Computer Simulator
we've actually been using this hack for months and i'm sure there's a group of people who also have, who don't write about it. :/
While page sizes do matter (esp. when it's JavaScript and needs to be parsed & run), remember that things like "establishing an SSL handshake" or "resolving a DNS query" can very much be slower than downloading say 10KB of compressed assets. We should be smart about reducing the amount of junk you download when you goto a webpage, but make sure you don't save a penny and lose a pound.
Much more likely, existing financial services and platforms will co-opt the useful parts of bitcoin. The result will be a more robust solution on their part and a casting of bitcoin into the pile of interesting historical phenomena.
Well, as with everything, it really depends. But if you're going to do be launching a business by yourself, then hell yeah some business skills are going to be necessary. It is rarely the case that simply hacking together some web product will turn into a profitable business. In fact, if you take a look at a lot of the successes out there, I bet you'll find that the successful marketing and growth strategies were every bit as important as the actual offering, if not more.
It is in your best interest to care, because otherwise these commons get mighty tragic. You are getting content without paying a representative cost of that content. Which is good for you! For now. But be prepared for that to change, and probably sooner than you'd like.
A bitcoin miner in Python
One of the things that I've learned in recent years closely relates to several of those points: There is no shame in being wrong, it is much more important to quickly adapt to new information that has since proved your original assumptions incorrect.

Especially on the non-IT side in the corporate world, it seems like a lot of people have an irrational fear of making a decision on anything in case that decision ends up being wrong. Instead you end up with either a watered down solution that doesn't really solve the problem or the decision to delay the problem entirely.
This puzzle has been on the XKCD puzzles wiki for several years. They have some very fun puzzles there. It's a huge timewaster, so only click if you have nothing pressing to do.
http://wiki.xkcd.com/irc/puzzles#Prisoners

If you need help on any of the puzzles, hints and answers are on the talk page. For this specific puzzle, the talk page links to a paper by William Wu that answers this exact question with asymptotic analysis.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/papers/100prisonersLightBul...
I don't think that that's a requirement at all, unless you think that his second example question of a list of countries perfectly divides the population with not even a rounding error
I was thinking more in terms of different versions of the same library, which is clearly one of the reasons why we have encapsulation :-)
> Without side effects you couldn't do anything.

Not true.

> Pure functional languages make side effects explicit, but it isn't about them being missing.

True. I should have been more clear about that.
An important caveat is that Bitcoin Script isn't enabled in the current implementation of Bitcoin, for obvious security reasons. The immense possibility of Script is yet another reason I am long on Bitcoin.
The scripting language vision has been there from the beginning, but parts of it have been 'off' (in the reference client) because of incomplete implementation, or concern that the implications and potential bugs aren't sufficiently understood.

I wonder if a future Bitcoin offshoot might even use a more general standard language for in-ledger transactions. Javascript? LLVM?
Druckenmiller Shorting IBM in Bet Cloud Computing to Win
Bitcoin use a scripting language for the transactions, as described in here[0][1].

Interestingly, I believe that this is one of the case where "lazy programmers make best programmers": instead of implementing the transaction system, Satoshi decides that he couldn't be bothered and just put in a scripting system instead (I have no citation for this, and can't claim for certain that this is the case, it was just something I read a while ago).

However, due to security concerns, I think that most of the scripting ability is currently disabled.

[0]:https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

[1]:https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts
More information is on Wikipedia [1]. After reading that article, it definitely sounds like the quoted statement was created from within some kind of reality distortion field.

To add to your original comment: the US pilot insisted that the plane was on autopilot (and thus he was hit by the Chinese pilot, not vice versa), the Chinese pilot had a history of flying way too close to US planes, and the US plane "landed without permission" because it was so damaged after the event that the crew was on the verge of bailing out.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
SV rewards people who fall for the cheap parlor tricks of extrinsic motivation. "You'll be a multi-millionaire! Just work your ass off! Here's a crappy title to tide you over." Why do you think they pursue young engineers aggressively? They prey on a lack of self-awareness. Actually, they need it in order to make it sustainable.

The real solution is to rewrite the cultural narrative that praises these sorts of runaway successes as being essential. We're being held hostage by individualism. When we deify success, we say "it's ok to neglect your SO/family/health!"
Well gender is good enough already: "Are you female?" does not imply everyone saying no is male and is close enough to 50% that it not a big deal (2^33 leaves you with some 1.5 billion people leeway).
Just like pre-internet online-services and publishers co-opted the best ideas from it, relegating the internet itself into the pile of historical curiosities.
Kern Type, The Kerning Game
It all starts with one style attribute ;)
If anything as such exist as you say, if anyone is responsible.. it is not USA, it is individuals. That is, if so.

Besides, that would have been very off-topic
> I'm not seeing how infrastructure or data management
> was any particular value of Google's, and have seen
> absolutely nothing declaring otherwise.
> Indexing/deduplicating/managing data didn't
> seem to be a problem for anyone.

Well, I'd say otherwise. It was hard and there were big differences in how efficient the various platforms were. And sadly, not all of them could keep up with the development pace and the growth of the web.

(I used to work for two of Google's competitors in the late 90s and early 2000s, I had some knowledge of the internals of a third competitor and I eventually ended up working at Google for a few years).

> Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google
> won, therefore Google must have done everything right.

That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't. I didn't touch on why Google succeeded at all. In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant.
Using a map doesn't necessarily mean random mutation, or giving up on your type system. In languages with immutable data structures and a sophisticated type system, you can type-check the keys and values in a map.
The Internet's Transformative Potential In Africa
I'm in the same position. I cut the cord five years ago and have just been using Apple TV for Netflix.

TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
I think the problem is that the terrible shell semantics are inextricable from the larger semantics of using Unix. So you could replace sh with something less dumb-stupid, but you'd still be interacting with the garbage that is the shell environment. You could then replace the latter, but at that point, well, you're off into the weeds.

I hold my nose and write shell, even as I look over at, for instance, scsh, and think ... yeah.
Facebook App Ad Experiment Results
Early Google was exactly what we'd call a minimum viable product from a lean startup today. Two smart, committed people put together a site that just did one thing well, running off minimal hardware.

The difference was that the idea (quality, uncluttered search results) was a good one. The anti-Pointcast stance is well taken.
Brainwallets shouldn't be casually recommended without appropriate warnings, but they certainly can be secure.

Passphrases aren't limited by length, and your brainwallet can be derived from your memory and publicly available information, so you can construct very strong memorable passphrases, e.x. the 3rd sentence of the 8th chapter of your favorite book concatenated with a moderately strong but memorable password.

Key stretching with PBKDF or scrypt helps a lot as well. Do you care if it takes 1 minute to compute your keys from the passphrase? Probably not, and it will make cracking much more difficult.
> at different times there were different governments minting coins (from different kinds of metals).

Copper, bronze, and iron (depending on location). But not silver, even when taxes were required to be paid in silver. You've taken the position that the medium of tax payment will necessarily be used as a currency, but this isn't true.

What distinguishes the farmers, with their tax obligations in silver and their business in minted copper (or iron), from the merchants with their tax obligations in silver and their business in unminted silver? It can't be the tax obligations. I've taken the position that the distinction is in the amount of value they generally handled; silver was worth more than copper and used for large transactions.

> "Face value" only makes sense with fiat currency, which is why I drew the distinction.

This is actually untrue; clipping a minted coin creates a discrepancy between its face value (which it has, since it's minted) and its value by weight. Forging an adulterated coin does the same. Clipping only makes sense for "non-fiat" coins; it would be pointless to clip a fiat coin as they are not made from precious metals. The value of a traditional, minted coin of precious metal was entirely in the weight; the minting was a QA program.

Anyway, I don't think a fiat currency can be said to "use silver" in any sense, which is why I was confused at your distinction between using silver by weight or face value. The GBP is named the "pound sterling", but that's just a name. I guess in my mind, if we use $10 of platinum to mint commemorative not-intended-for-use $500 coins, the use of platinum is more of a coincidence than an actual use of metal-based currency.
I think the idea there is people would rather see ads than pay the mi h larger sum that would be required to fund those shows without ads ... Funny thing, economics.
They couldn't, because Javascript etc are turing complete, so you can't predict if they're going to end (halting problem). With bitcoin you know that the script will end and that the running time will correlate loosely with the size of the script, so you can't really use it to mess up network nodes. Butcoin scripts have no loops or goto.
Haskell, Scala, and Python drones? I've never heard of those before. Could you expand on your point please?
I'm just gonna leave this here: http://www.gadgetsandgear.com/flying-fuck.html
When a user shares a photo, or video, with several people, Snapchat counts each recipient as an upload. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/19/snapchat-users-upload...
I believe the question is much, much bigger than simply the involvement of life support. Just address that issue, and you've ignored many people who suffer unnecessarily with no reasonable hope. For example, ALS sufferers don't require life support until the very late stages of the disease. This is long after they've lost the ability to move, speak, or interact meaningfully with those around them.
Actually you could. Just limit the max. number of instructions that are allowed to be executed in order for a script to be valid.
Please stop confusing psychology and psychiatry. That was the point of my post. You're using these two words as if they are synonyms. They are not. In fact they have little in common. One is a science (psychology), the other mostly (not completely) pseudo-medical quackery with little to no basis in the actual science it's supposed to be grounded in.

As for the DSM, I'm afraid the highest ranking (what they have ranks in psychiatry now? ;)) psychiatrist's idea will lead to even more quackery. DSM isn't perfect, there is a lot to complain about theoretically and practically, but it was at least a working attempt at objectivity. Abandoning the idea of having a list of (at least somewhat well) operationally defined disorders and working to improve that will again lead psychiatry to a state where a psychiatric diagnosis is no better than a random choice of an arbitrary label (it really was like that in the first half of 20th century, later things stated getting a little better).
I can see encapsulation being useful in that case, though I'm of the opinion the use-cases for encapsulation don't outweigh the disadvantages it brings.
Why is that? It is a remake of a PC game, from a traditionally PC game developer, and the interface is PC-centric. It's a PC game with console ports.
Many people may not perceive the importance of Bitcoin, hence the need to educate the public about it. Decentralized digital currency really has the potential to profoundly change society, on the same scale as the Internet changed it. As Jeremy Allaire [1] put it: "global digital currency represents one of the most important technical and economic innovations of our time".

[1] Multi-millionaire, creator of ColdFusion, CTO at Macromedia, now founded a $9 million-backed startup on Bitcoin (http://circle.com)
Play, Scala, and Iteratees vs. Node.js, JavaScript, and Socket.io
I always see Yusuf Islam as equating to a 'culture bomb' from Civilization V.
This requires empirical support.
Only by creating pages as if it was 1999 (but with better taste). Removing all styling functionality from HTML in favor of using HTML for structure only and CSS for styling has been an explicit goal over the last decade.
Yes, this is the most exciting part of Bitcoin, IMHO. It's quite amazing what sort of problems you can solve.

I highly recommend watching this talk by Mike Hearn, as well as reading the links in NhanH's comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD4L7xDNCmA
> You're saying you think of classes as inheritance and polymorphism without encapsulation

I don't know whatever gave you that idea, but it's quite the opposite, unless we have completely different definitions for what encapsulation is.
Yes, it makes it possible to clearly see all the errors.

Someone remarked that the numbers add up to more than hundred percent for the first year, and the confusion is because the y axis is mislabelled. It should say "Cost for team as percentage of revenue".

Also, the first two years shouldn't be plotted as part of the line as they are just two data points in total for these years and since there is considerable spread in better represented data we know any single data point is probably not representative. At least not if you insist on using decimals.

It's also a bit unclear what the line for "more than seven years since funding" comes from, since the provided summary table only shows up to year 7. It seems the data table truncates, but there are two companies that cover age 16-24 in the spreadsheet, once again giving a very small sample.
It comes down to economics and politics.

Suppose for every $1000,000 you spend you could

a) save one childhood cancer patient

b) save 20 patients with more common cancers

c) save a thousand starving African children

To the family of the child with cancer, (a) is the preferred option. To most Americans, (b) is the preferred option. To the starving people in Africa, (c) is the preferred option.
When GoLang was first announced, it began an never-ending amount of confusion for me (a Go board game player), as I started to see all these articles around Go on HN, just to be continually disappointed.

As a Mesh Networking Practitioner, I see I'm once again going to have to deal with namespace collision. (Ripple has been well used name in another domain: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/75/slides/roll-2/roll-2_file...)

Interesting - Ripple the routing protocol is primarily about Directed Acyclic Graphs, while Ripple, the payment network, works with merkle trees.

Combine the two concepts together, a directed acyclic graph of tags stored as a merkle tree, and you basically have git.
The swearing has no connection to being unfunny, it's just unfunny writing. Language is a way to select your audience, consider yourself out of this particular range. I'm out of range because it's not funny.
You could require all scripting to be done in a language supporting total functional programming, like Epigram. That would be fairly hilarious (also counterproductive, because the increased script size would cause blockchain bloat).
Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

I know this guideline is meant for comments, but I would consider it equal for submitted articles. The only thing a discussion around this article can create is a classic flamewar over bsd vs linux, or bsd vs gpl. Neither would bring genuinely new and interesting comments, but simply a "I will uppvote anyone posting positive things about my sport team, and I will downvote anyone who posts positives things about the opposing team".
What happens when Bitcoin mining no longer yields new coins?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

> Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions. This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere.

The current incentive for helping validate the block chain is a mining reward. This is an award given for discovering a block. However, the total number of Bitcoins cannot exceed 21 million, so this reward will taper off. But there is also a fee mechanism:

> Additionally, the miner is awarded the fees paid by users sending transactions. The fee is an incentive for the miner to include the transaction in their block. In the future, as the number of new bitcoins miners are allowed to create in each block dwindles, the fees will make up a much more important percentage of mining income.

This suggests that fees will become the new incentive for "miners" (who at this point are no longer "mining" new coins, but rather just validating transactions in exchange for the fee). What will this fee become at 21 million coins, such that those validating the block chain have an incentive to do so?

Moreover, what institutions could take advantage of validating the block chain, if fees were low enough that it were not profitable?
A hackathon to change the world
It's not to say Starcraft isn't a challenging game or there isn't any depth to it, but I am saying if 4 pooling is considered deep stuff, you have to realize that something like chess is on a completely different level.

I'm quite sure you could put all you would ever need to know about Starcraft strategy into a single 300 page volume, whereas there are entire libraries full of chess books, databases of millions of games and 3300-rated computers slugging it out constantly, and the game still hasn't been completely exhausted yet.
I can see how some of it does read as "fluff" or cliche, it probably would be more beneficial if I did a short paragraph on how I learned each point.
I've found content on Youtube by independent productions to be far better than what is on Netflix, so perhaps it is not that tragic. My tastes are probably not representative, but those types of productions are bound to improve as mainstream production quality declines, kind of like we've seen with music.
Possible, You need 33 answers but more than 33 questions.
Python 3.4 Beta 1 Released
Provably Prune-able Outputs! See https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=290. The idea is to support adding a little bit (80 bytes) of extra data to a transaction, while signalling to people who don't need to know about it (i.e. almost everyone) that they can happily ignore any such data and thus avoid downloading it.
And this month's winner of Contingencies' Catch-22 Job Title of the Month is ... drumroll please ... Professor of Education Reform.
There's a difference between "going for another 24 hours, lucid and able to wrap up lose ends" and "going for another 24 hours, unconscious" and "going for another 24 hours in constant debilitating pain".

Most people would choose the first of those three. For the other ones, I'm not sure. And if you replace "24 hours" with "a few months" I certainly wouldn't choose either of the latter two options. And neither would most people I've actually talked to about the issue in person. Would you?