skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I heard Krebs in a radio interview say that many criminals who are practical experts in the actual use of experimental currencies require something like Liberty Dollars for price stability.

Could a cryptocurrency build price stability in as a feature?

I know this is anathema to one of Bitcoin's founding principles, but what if the payout for each round of mining was adjusted based on the average transaction size in the last few blocks? If transaction sizes are going up, you're getting deflation, so the algorithm would increase the rate at which money is being printed.

Not sure how to control for the opposite, for inflation. Maybe some small percentage of the transaction fees each round would get destroyed by the system, instead of paid out to the miners (it'd have to be a small percentage so you could keep people mining). Maybe better just leaving anti-inflation out of the design, since it isn't yet a demonstrable problem, might not ever be.

You could fiddle with how aggressively the system fights for price stability, trading off against the reliability of profitable mining.
That's something I found myself wandering about sometimes...
IE 10x faster than Chrome for simple a+b func
I'm new to all this stuff.
What's the difference between hosting on a VM and hosting on a VPS?
> Gold and silver have been around a long time, but both are still relatively volatile.

Are gold and silver not less volatile than government-issued currencies, the long-term value of which has traditionally ended at $0?
Yes and no.

As the open letter makes very clear - it was bad behaviour on the part of the agency, and Spike most likely didn't know it was going on (and the letter even suggests the agency was actively lying to him about it).

But - Spike is ultimately the one in control of the money-tap the agency is drinking from. While he had "absolutely nothing to do with this", it was no doubt done on his behalf, and he absolutely has the power to fix it. If he says "No, that's not how we do things", then it'll get fixed. (Arguably there are many other people below Spike who could also make that call, but I have some sympathy for the original poster - it would be a great deal of work if it's possible at all, to find out who in the middle management chain of command has sufficient authority to solve this problem and how to contact them directly.)
How do I verify the integrity of the sandbox JS, especially since I potentially have to download it each time I need it? Similarly, how do I verify the integrity of the asm.js code I'm receiving? Integrity is just as important, if not more important, than static analysis---for example, a malicious JS crypto library could pass a static analysis test, but intentionally generate weak keys.

There are ways to integrity checks manually, of course, but as far as I know the browser does not perform these integrity checks automatically (and it would be difficult to do so--you'd need to implement JS signing, and you'd need to implement PKI to get the right public keys to verify the JS signatures).
> Why?

It's against the law.

> If I own a car made by Toyota, should I need their agreement to offer rides to people?

This argument makes no sense. You can play the music you bought for other people for free, just like giving a free car ride. You did in fact pay for the Toyota, just like you would to purchase an album.
That's one of my favorites, and immediately what came to mind when I started reading this story.
$1000, for 1/12000000th the total current supply of bitcoins in existence? Sounds like a deal to me. The same fraction of USD is $100,000. There are 313 million people in the US. These are the majority of people using the dollar. There are 1.35 billion in China and another 1.2 billion in India. The former has already started using bitcoin. But only just barely. The market for bitcoin is enormous.

Now let me ask you: do you really feel a global currency is worth less than $12 billion USD? The market cap for Facebook is $113 billion. Call me crazy, but I think there is more long term value in a digital currency with the properties of Bitcoin than a social network.

In order for bitcoin to be useful, it's going to have to grow. If it grows fast (network effects) then you'll get instability. I don't think there is a solution to this unique problem. The fiat solution of printing more money doesn't apply here. There has never been a sudden rush to USD like there is to bitcoins. If you can even call a few billion dollars a "rush". If bitcoin is to be used, then it's going to see $1000/coin and beyond.
The app doesn't void your warranty. It encourages you to perform further actions that may void your warranty. Major difference. The article is clear that Google admits the app itself is not harmful.
What do you think determines the price? If you can't sell a bitcoin, you lower the price til you can sell it. If you can't buy a bitcoin, you raise how much you will pay until you can buy one.

The only reasons it is different with houses is because people are emotionally invested in them, not all houses are equivalent (and thus their value is unique per house), and liquidity is hence really low, and market prices adjust slowly.

Bitcoins are worth a thousand dollars because people who own them are not willing to part with them for less, and people who are buying them are willing to pay that much. This is economics 101. You can always cash out at the market price, unless liquidity is low; the only time that happens is in a teeny market or a crash.
Your examples are ugly and most of the options don't have animations.
ناروتو شيبودن 340
Did you actually read beyond the headline?

"They advised us to voluntarily remove the application, or they would be forced to remove it administratively."

Which is like saying "He wasn't fired, he was just forced to resign".
AFAIK, 3 votes is the minimum before something is pushed into the front page queue, though if there are enough hot stories, a 3 vote story may only show up on the second page. Usually 3 votes under 20 min is enough velocity to get to the front page.

Number of comments does not seem to help a ranking...some of he best submissions don't have comments for an hour or so
Or I can use actual money and forget all this nonsense ... Which do I choose?
Reputation counts for something, and reputations can be damaged. A lot of people trust Adi 'The A in RSA' Shamir, because of what he has done in the past. They have to.

It takes a long time to get the background to understand cryptography, or quantum physics. Although you or I might believe we can find holes in a paper (bad stats etc), you have to accept we are less able to judge the merit of a paper than someone with years of study and experience in that field. So we trust people who have done great things.

Now everyone will remember Shamir both by his past works, and this mistake. Next time his paper will hit the news he will be described as 'the father of RSA, who mistakenly accused someone of inventing bitcoin and being a criminal last year'. News sites will definitely say that - it is a really fun addition to the story.

I think Shamir will regret this paper more than most people who have to make a retraction.
I wasn't aware of it before reading into this whole story, but OCZ seemed to have quite a problem with QA. My vertex 2 barely lasted a year before it started going funny, which I put down to bad luck. But now it seems I wasn't the only one.
Take it as an engineer with a psycho manager reaching out to the manager's manager in an effort to right wrongs.
I have a hard time seeing the argument that it should be unilateral. An agreement should be between multiple parties, so if you don't agree to what they're offering, you shouldn't take it. Otherwise it devolves into "I will take it because I can." Why does that make any more sense for instantly-reproducible, yet still not instantly-creatable, goods than for physical ones? If you want to take it, you probably see some value in its creation.
Wait. I thought the ability to fuck up your phone (also known as replacing the shitty UI/crapware that your manufacture forced on you) is a major strength of Android phones?
There's more than a semantic difference between moral and material interests. In fact most "internet hippies" I know wants strong moral protection for authors [0][1]. It's a fairly central concept in the copyright debate, not least since it's part of the universal declaration of human rights.

[0] http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/the-pirate-party-on-c...
[1] http://the1709blog.blogspot.se/2012/05/pirate-party-plans-fo...
[2] http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G06/400/60/PDF/G0...
To be fair, that's a pretty odd way to write jQuery, which is designed to be chained. It could be rewritten as:

$('.nH .if')
.children().eq(1)
.children()
.children().eq(1)
.children().eq(1)

But if you were just pointing out how brittle it is, then yes, that's still apparent.
There will be news about a subset sometime next month!
I really dislike the whole Google point - it just seems to be buying into the Google / privacy hysteria / phobia, and is a really extreme cynical viewpoint on these things. Yes, they want data (both Google and 23andMe). And yes they want to exploit it, and make money from that. But the reason they want to do that is because there is value there. Value to the companies, but the only reason it's valuable to them is because there is much, much greater to the downstream users that they will pass this information on to. I really dislike the exaggerated tone. For example:

> [Google makes money ] ... By parceling out that information to help advertisers target you, with or without your consent

Umm. No. 1) don't use Google services. Or 2) go to your account settings and disable personalised ads or 3) browse in incognito mode, etc. There are loads of ways to choose not to be targeted by ads. People seem to constantly feel a need to exaggerate what Google actually does. They don't "sell your data", they don't "track" you, they don't do anything "without your consent".

Not that I think Google needs any help defending themselves here - but what really concerns me is that we can very quickly slide into a kind of technophobia that will take a cynical viewpoint on every form of new technology. Anyone here involved in a startup can be a victim of that, and the level of acceptance by society of new technologies and change is really, really crucial to moving society forward.
> He had a stroke several years ago that severely hampered his ability to speak — an especially difficult hardship, friends and relatives said, for a loquacious man who had built his life communicating in words.

That is sad to hear, but as Renoir supposedly said when asked why he spent three decades painting with painful arthritis: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

Thank you for your translations, William Weaver.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/astonishing_film_of_arthr...
Yeah, I expect it to push toward more inflation (which should let the Fed go back to actually having an interest rate). I think the proper way to deal with that is have it grow at the inflation rate the Fed is targeting. If there's less inflation, it'll go up (in real terms) and drive a little more. If there's more, it'll go down (in real terms) and drive a little less.

Of course, I'd like to hear from someone with more serious models - this didn't even make it to a napkin...
You can't enforce a contract related to creative works without the concept of copyright. Otherwise there is nothing of value upon which to base the contract. That is where copyright came from in the first place.
Couldn't I also publish the checksum on Twitter? Although it's not decentralized, it's probably equally trusted in the eyes of the legal system.
Eh, it's actually a pretty weak argument. It doesn't violate your warranty on a nexus device. If google believes in the nexus program, then this is not a particularly consistent position.
Always about the end user?

Like when Apple said that all Apps needed to be originally written in their crappy language, and that you could not cross-compile to it?

That had literally nothing to do with the end user, and everything to do with trying to enforce a monopoly.
Interest, maybe, but I does it really drum up any actual users? I think most people are sort of waiting to see if it'll fail or not.
Your examples have intrinsic value. This is pretty easy ...
Can't help chuckling as I happily read this on an HP Chromebook 11 because I'm taking a break after the Windows machine died during Windows update.

At least I have a machine to work on while I spend the next six hours reinstalling and patching Windows.
I am surprised that Dart is not mentioned as a comparison in any of the comments. It is also heralded as a better and more performant Javascript. Is it because the use-case of ASM more limited? I would imagine that DOM integration in ASM would be tricky so that would set Dart apart.
How about a pre-holiday Thanksgiving day of travel in the U.S. with subdued posting to Hacker News, hence a speculatively anomalously quiet posting and front- and second-page activity for the day?
To us geeks, yes, but that's still not giving anybody else a single reason to buy the thing.
I agree with your points, but the result will probably just be higher rates, not failure. You can see it start to happen already with the early implementation of the ACA. However, that that isn't what I was talking about, and it doesn't support the parents claim that, "they [insurance companies] can have access to a good set of indicators to remove people with high incidence of diabete, kidney failure or cancer, they will use it."

My point was, no, insurance companies can't use the data, even if they had access to the it, which they won't.
Don't we the customers and the capitalists already have the same situation with dollars? I could either buy a PS4 or I could buy some penny stocks. I could either try my luck with a startup or I could put that seed money into a CD or a fairly low risk index fund.

So it all depends on the actual realistic rate of deflation if Bitcoin ever reaches widespread use.
Anyone remember that old joke where the magical computer took someone's faked up "sample" and said several accurate things, like, "Your wife is cheating on you, your dog ate your golf balls, and if you don't cut back on masturbating you'll never get rid of that tennis elbow"?

It would be a pretty good fit here if I could just remember the details :)
> Are gold and silver not less volatile than government-issued currencies

Which government issued currencies? Government issued currencies are not all alike.

> the long-term value of which has traditionally ended at $0?

Fiat currencies only end if the issuing entity ceases to exist or abandons them, and even so the market value of currency issued may not become zero, so the claim about ending value is suspect.

More importantly, though, volatility isn't even related to ending value, so this claim would be a complete non-sequitur even if it was true.
Fantastic news. Will be looking forward to seeing it.
What I don't understand is: People use 1Password etc to generate arbitrarily secure passwords for Facebook but agree on sending their DNA password (even though its 1B chars) on a postcard to a company (with unknown security credentials and intentions) just to know that they are 29% east-european and probably sleep better at night. Sigh...
Do you not see how this makes bitcoin irrelevant. What do the merchants do after they take the payment, now they have worthless bitcoins.
Bitcoin volatility is the result of thin order books. Look at http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitstamp/USD: you can move the market by 10%+ with "just" a few million dollars. You can't move the market for Euros or Yen with that much money.

In a bitcoin success scenario, this will change once bitcoin is no longer the sole domain of currency speculators, but starts seeing actual commerce. Some places where this could start:

1) International remittance. Wire transfers are slow and expensive. Bitcoin could make moving money internationall much easier. See, for example, YC-backed "Buttercoin": http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/buttercoin/

2) Merchant adoption. Credit card fees for online commerce are in the 2-3% + $.35 range. Bitpay currently offers 0% fees, instead charging a flat $30/month: https://bitpay.com/pricing

3) Micropayments: The "+ $.35" part of credit card fees precludes micropayments. Bitcoin could be used for things like pay-per-minute streaming.

Once these types of things start adding volume and depth to the exchanges, it will be harder to move the market, and that will add stability. Obviously, this will take a few years.
I didn't read the OP as advocating 900 static HTML pages... just using static pages as a first strategy, until reality, not your conjecture, tells you what you need.
Outstanding explanation, +1 and thanks for blowing my mind. I find myself sorely tempted to drop everything and throw myself into this exciting new world. One thing that always bothers me with these xyz.js technologies; Is there an explicit or implicit implication that they are actually implemented wholly or partially in an actual file called xyz.js ? In the particular rather than the general; Is there actually an important javascript source code file involved called asm.js ?
> Once-great

They were never great.

They lied to their customers by selling hardware under the same name as previously produced hardware with cheaper components and lesser specs.

They built hardware that was simply off-spec, an example being drives where the connectors were an entire millimeter shifted, such that when installed in certain machines the connectors literally could not make contact with the corresponding metal.

They built drives with extreme speeds while entirely sacrificing longevity and reliability.

At best they had a great marketing department that made it possible for them to peddle their crap to the public for so long.

I'm glad to see them go.

Edit:

For those who must have numbers, return statistics:

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=2&h...

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html
It seems like no matter how blatantly Google carries out it's updated "Microsoft from the 1990's" act there will be a coterie of apologists on HN explaining away it's actions. The Cold War provided an appropriate label for this crowd: "useful idiots".
Bitcoin Myths
The most recent version... that I cannot install in my Galaxy Nexus, which is barely two years old.

I've been an Apple hater all my life, but this, Google, this is epic bullshit.
Scarcity is what sustains private property, as a way to control conflicts when multiple people want to access rivalrous goods. Intellectual property is a collection of disparate concepts, but if we take copyright, there's no similar justification for it.

See Against Intellectual Property, by Stephan Kinsella: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Agencies are giant corporations these days.

http://vitamintalent.com/common/img/vitabites/vitamin-t-agen...

They will screw you every chance they get.
An Interview About .GURU With Mason Cole, VP Communications of Donuts Inc.
> Clarification: while 23andMe could fully sequence your genome using the sample you provide (which I assume they bank...)

I'm not sure they bank it. They offer an upgrade that includes more tests, but to take advantage of it you have to send a new sample. An upgrade that did not require sending a new sample would surely have a much higher conversion rate, so I'd expect they would offer that if it were feasible.
I think this is completely reasonable. If people want to sideload the app then by all means go for it. The Play Store shouldn't allow apps that can potentially damage your device (or void your warranty).
Much like human brains, and business processes.
You're missing the point, the app is in violation of the TOS, the fact that Google is in contact with the CyanogenMod team about the issues means that it's just an adjustment that is required for it to comply. There have been reports about people bricking their deviced with the app, requiring a proper warning would not be out of line.
I was familiar with the story, but had never seen that video before. Thanks for that, tremendous insights in that short clip.
> they as an organization are completely deprecated

What deprecates them is countries like the US who don't give a shit about international agreements.
Are there any CMS that have a "pretty web interface" ?

From what I've seen of Drupal, the interface exposed to content creators is awful. It works (mostly), but it ain't pretty.
Show HN: my first webapp - a photostream for the last 10 pictures uploaded
The actuarial cost of any event is integral( cost x P(cost) dP ). There is no population involved.
> My advice to all freelance hackers and designers: if you meet someone who says they work at an agency, (a) tell them you're a janitor and (b) run away.

c) Tell them you don't do spec work, because you're not a moron - fuck you pay me.

Agency finds naive freelancer, offers a job for exposure & other bullshit, overwhelms with fixes/updates, pretends being dissatisfied/offended, refuses to pay. This kind of story is as old as freelancing itself, only the names of parties involved change.

PSA for inexperienced freelancers: Nobody will unclog your crapper for a promise of future gigs, designers and programmers shouldn't put up with such scams either. Too many of us gained this wisdom the hard way.
There's no such thing as free money. It's gotta come from somewhere, and it has to impose a cost somewhere.

Inflation in other currencies has a moderate, and mostly beneficial, cost. It encourages people to invest their money instead of just saving it, which leads to enhanced economic activity. Deflation in bitcoin only has value to the people "saving" their bitcoins, which sets up perverse incentives in regards to use of the currency as a medium of exchange.