skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope. It's good policy to expect that a govt. can do anything, unless presented with evidence to the contrary.

This is a good rule of thumb, mostly because its true. I'm not sure why people have trouble understanding this (poor civics classes? too dense?) but the US govt. can do anything it physically can. Sure, it may require a constitutional amendment, but if the political will is there the govt. can do anything.

But even in softer formulations, Congress can use general welfare to get away with anything SCOTUS will let them get away with.

Luckily though, unlike everyone else on Hacker News, I actually read the Constitution and thus happen to know this line:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
Maybe it's because progress is faster, but I see a growing divergence between the physical world and the legal world. I've seen some post-Occupy hearings in which police brutality that had been proven beyond a doubt by video from multiple camera angles was deemed to "not count".

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-ans...
Thanks for the support! Actually, we have been using quite a lot technology in the background in order to make geeshenk work.

Client-side, we use Ember.js. Server-side, we use Spring Framework running inside a Jetty servlet container.

Spring includes a component called "Spring Social". It takes care of communicating with Facebook's Graph API. I had to write a shim which adapts Spring Social to my domain model.

For querying Amazon's database, I have written a proprietary library. It connects to Amazon's "Product Advertising API" SOAP endpoint, and caches products in a JPA-accessed MySQL database. Those products can then forwarded to the client in JSON form.
Bring up historic facts in a bitcoin discussion is useless. John Law is always a hero for awhile.
It doesn't work if all the results of the first pages belong to websites on the top x sites specified. Try to search for 'google' and remove the top 1M sites.
If it pointed to a particular individual then people would quickly find corroborating evidence (or not), so the fuzziness doesn't make the analysis useless.
Miley Cyrus Now Leads Edward Snowden for Time POY
Original text, the blog seems down:

Dear 23andMe Customers,

I wanted to reach out to you about the FDA letter that was sent to 23andMe last Friday.

It is absolutely critical that our consumers get high quality genetic data that they can trust. We have worked extensively with our lab partner to make sure that the results we return are accurate. We stand behind the data that we return to customers - but we recognize that the FDA needs to be convinced of the quality of our data as well.

23andMe has been working with the FDA to navigate the correct regulatory path for direct-to-consumer genetic tests. This is new territory, not just for 23andMe, but for the FDA as well. The FDA is an important partner for 23andMe and we will be working hard to move forward with them.

I apologize for the limited response to the questions many of you have raised regarding the letter and its implications for the service. We don't have the answers to all of those questions yet, but as we learn more we will update you.

I am committed to providing each of you with a trusted consumer product rooted in high quality data that adheres to the best scientific standards. All of us at 23andMe believe that genetic information can lead to healthier lives.

Thank you for your loyalty to 23andMe. Please refer to our 23andMe blog for updates on this process.

Anne Wojcicki
Co-founder and CEO, 23andMe
Exactly...

Even if you take the assumption that bitcoin will fail, the problems/issues the protocol or something similar solves are far too beneficial to ignore.

So basically if bitcoin fails, some other similar form of digital currency will rise up in its place. I feel as though its a 'cat is out of the bag' scenario.
Dear Hackathons: You're Pricing Out the Evangelists
Seems like pretty nice product.
Will try it like alarm tomorrow
thank you - M1 is a much better measure.

jeez - 1000 bucks is looking like a bargain.
I don't, sadly. It's just something I've seen the editors do (hey, did the link AND title of this discussion just change? wtflolbbq).
The Ruby Game is back
Wow, you have it pretty bad! Did you ever see yourself in a picture or in a mirror without recognizing it was you?
At 1000 addresses per second (probably wayyy to high) it'd take 6919 average Gregorian years[1] to check all possible passphrases.

1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28%2826%2B26%2B10%...
Is there any chance this could be made to work with international amazon sites? I tried to enter my amazon.fr wishlist URL, but it said that no such wishlist was found on amazon.com

Great concept though!
It's cute as a novelty, but I tried actually using it just now, and giving me a CAPTCHA every few searches makes it unusable as a daily driver.

Which is a shame because I really enjoyed searching with it.
Ask HN: Any non-profits looking for talent?
This post is for non-profits only. Any non-profits looking for Software help? If so, please post location first (and telecommute allowed, if available) along with job and organization description.
Interesting that the speculative wave responsible for the growth of bitcoin is blamed for what is preventing it from growing.

Not very convincing. If anything, the speculative phase matches the growth process bitcoin enthusiasts have predicted.
Schildt's book is riddled with errors.
Absolutely correct reading list.

For those who's giving Name of the Rose a try, just bear with the first 100 pages. It gets extremely better. I liked the first 100 pages anyways.
Nice, somebody already built a solving tool: http://gen.co:4567/
My prediction is that Bitcoin (or some other alt-coin/cryptocurrency) will eventually become a single worldwide currency. It's reached a point where if a government tries to regulate it too tightly, they will effectively be shooting themselves in the foot and cutting their country off from outside trade.

The result is that the cryptocurrency will continue to gain momentum until it is used everywhere worldwide. This will eventually lead to a single worldwide government or an agreement between all countries across the world to act uniformly in regards to the currency. This will become a necessity to properly administer taxes and/or settle cross-border contract disputes.

Once you have a single government, worldwide government ids will be initiated (or all local ids, like driver's licenses will require integration with a wordwide database). At this point, the single government will then co-opt the cryptocurrency or initiate a new cryptocurrency and require everybody to tie their id to their cryptocurrency usage. The reasoning will be to crack down on crime, tax evaders, etc. Because it's a one world government or all governments are working together in lock-step, they would then have the capability of controlling/banning the cryptocurrency. Anyone not properly linking their identity to the currency will be breaking the law, and it will be very difficult to participate in commerce because there will be no more physical cash or coins.

Either way, the only way I see this playing out is a currency that most people assume was initially intended to break from government control will eventually lead to ultimate government control.

As a side note, I realize the concept of a one world government is controversial, but my personal opinion is that it is an eventuality.
Please explain how bitcoin can discern vicarious liability. You're still going to need lawyers.

Please explain how a bitcoin blockchain record can testify in court that a copy of a document is authentic. Hint, you're infront of a jury, you have a blockchain hash, and opposing council has a notary public with 40 years of experience, both copies of the document differ, the original cannot be found.
Hers has an official looking seal, you have some random numbers.

Please explain how I can buy a pack of cigarettes at 11 pm in under 5 minutes with bitcoin.

In short most of your claims are highly exaggerated and don't work beyond the most trivial scenarios.
Here's another thing to consider: the NSA and other intelligence agencies have most likely already figured out who is behind Bitcoin, even if the general public have not.

What does that mean?
"Price fluctuations in the value of currency" is the definition of inflation/deflation. Monetary policy can cause inflation, but it's not the only way inflation can occur.

Wikipedia:
"In economics, inflation is a persistent increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time. When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy."
The author may or may not know what he's talking about when it comes to money; that's not something I have more than a layman's understanding of and so I can't judge his competence.

He doesn't know how Bitcoin works, though. Claiming it's an attempt to "privatize money" (huh?), or that governments will "take it over" (how? Building mining farms forever so as to maintain >50% of the network hashrate?) suggests he thinks there's someone in control of it. That's kind of like suggesting there's someone in control of TCP. There's a standard, sure, and there's people who develop and maintain that standard, but if their actions ever significantly diverged form the interests of users there'd be a brand spanking new standard pretty quickly.
Bitcoin is over $1000.
Black Friday Shopping Scams go Mobile
The irony of paying a well known patent troll to get rid of other patent trolls can't be lost on the people at Ditto, right?

...Right?
I read "I am a bad ass writer and have a crazy resume" and then thought "oh who is this guy?". Then I saw it was Zed lol. yeah, totally a badass writer. Carry on.

So cool that people are stepping up to help instead of kicking someone while they are down. This guy isn't a failure until he gives up. It just wasn't the right time, and I look forward to a future post where he talks about his next shot at doing something.

Good on all of you to redeem the HN community in the eyes of all.
Did it? Or was it Bretton-Woods that failed? If I remember my History, Nixon decoupled the USD from gold to regain the ability to devalue the dollar, as a tool for dealing with the huge debt accrued during the Vietnam war.

It wasn't a gold-currency world, it was a world of gold-backed US dollar. It makes a huge difference. While the advantages of being a reserve currency superceded the disadvantages of not having monetary control, Bretton-Woods stood. Once the tables turned, the US ended the gold backing.

Bretton Woods stood for close to 40yrs. The current system has about the same age and much as Bretton Woods is failing because the US abused its position as reserve currency to wage war financed by debt. History does repeat itself, in slightly different color tones...
The initial job post, to me, was very clearly written to scare some people off, in an attempt to reduce the tidal wave of responses down to a mere flood.

If that flood of respondents doesn't treat their skills (or their life) as having any value, why should Penny Arcade?

This isn't one of those crap IT jobs someone takes out of desperation for work. This is a job that a ton of people are going to be feverishly applying for and calling their "dream job".

If their "dream" is to trade their skills and time for that level of compensation, who am I to start saying PA is in the wrong by not splitting it into two jobs?
Could we combine ASM.js and "native web libraries?" (see https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#51-native-web-libraries)

Compile some non-Javascript code.
Create a package containing the native code.
Serve ASM.js and the native web library.

This package is then installed in the browser and the browser switches to it when it detects code that is about to be used that matches the installed web library signature.

If the browser supports native web libraries, it uses that.
Otherwise it falls back to ASM.js.

Either way, we gain performance and we can compile code natively AND to ASM.js.
As "ß" vs. "ss" changes pronunciation of preceding vowels, I can't see how it could be anything other than its own letter.

* "Fuß" ("foot") roughly rhymes with "loose."

* "Fluss" ("river") roughly rhymes with… um, nothing I can think of. It has the vowel sound of "look" and "book," at least as pronounced in the American Northeast.

Since the orthographic reform of 1996, this has become a big deal.
In a mirror I know it's me. Pictures, it's hit or miss.
Sovereignty, Citizen, is an obsolete concept.
Healtcare.gov: Don't worry we're experts
Hiding From Managers Can Increase Your Productivity
Probably intended it to be more of a comment on the size of the budget and the percent allocated for the position than the size of the salary relative to the market. That said, having been involved in a similar set-up, being the lone guy holding up tech for a large organization is a type of hell I wish on no man.
Ohhh nice idea.

It doesn't seem difficult to generate all 8 character alphanumeric strings, but the 30 seconds it takes to generate the scrypt hash is the real challenge here.

218 trillion combinations. Roughly 69 million years to generate hashes on even half of that space.

Essentially, you need to find a hole in the algorithm, right?
Does the robots.txt have any legal significance? I would think that the Terms of Use can be more thorough and are more legally relevant.
1. Modern JavaScript vms are sandboxed, not native plugins with unending security holes.

Flash actually was sandboxed. Poorly, yes -- but so were JS VMs until very recently. It was only a matter of time.

2. It's nearly all open standards and open source, not proprietary closed source controlled by one company. OpenGL, EcmaScript, W3, Mozilla, Chromium, blink, webkit.

While the Flash IDE itself was closed-sourced, the format itself was almost entirely open-source -- and third-party tools have been available for a long time to compile SWFs on the level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_Screen_Project

3. It works on mobile devices, flash doesn't.

Entirely a political argument.

6. Don't think Flash ever had the kind of momentum JavaScript has. Like has anyone ever made a derby.js for Flash? A sharejs? Compiled other languages to ActionScript With source maps to help?

This is a tautological argument. "Javascript is better because Javascript is better"
Wow. This should be a must-read for developers, especially ones working in the content field.

I've made a few complex apps that use Google Spreadsheets as the backend...that is, to hold the public facing data and not, obviously, any proprietary data. This makes it very easy for those who have to maintain the app to enter in data. The downside is, of course, the inability to strongly enforce business rules and to denormalize things...but that forces me to reduce the data design to a bare minimum, which is often the best strategy in the first place.

I hope I never have to be in a situation where I'm building a CMS-type system for a client. People who haven't dealt with data-modeling or relational-databases don't appreciate simplicity...in the end, most people want something that they can type a headline, some text, and attach a photo or two (i.e. a Tumblr). But if you give them reins to design the system, they will inevitably want you to build them something Drupal like. In my experience, I've found that all these different content-relations end up being unused, and the client ends up hacking around them just to get a simple post up.
They are applying old-world money ideas to something that is so new that we don't have useful models yet for deciding how it will behave, thinking that they do apply without loss of content. The rules of supply and demand apply, sure, but none of the other common-sense intuitions about how money works.

BitCoins don't have any resistance to movement, or very little. Physical money does. This means the difference between BitCoins and physical money is perhaps comparable to the difference between massive particles like atoms and massless particles like photons, or to the difference between a classical conductor and a superconductor. Which is only to say that the same rules don't apply - new behaviors are observed.

We are in a new world and the study of economics is about to take a huge left-turn.
EXdupe: Data Deduplication
So, if I could automate this, could I use this to prove in court that logs were created, and not tampered with?

Just trying to think of practical uses of this cool project, and it's the first thing that came to mind.
... oh God. I hadn't even thought of that.

The PA guys were running a one-man show. This isn't going to just be "A system made by somebody else". This is going to be "An entire infrastructure made by one overworked dude who obviously had no time to document anything or make it neatly organized".

Their entire infrastructure is organized and managed in this one guy's head. There will be at best a pile of notebooks and sticky-notes documenting things. Unless he suffers from a severe case of clinical OCD, there is approximately zero chance that the files, the code, the database, the servers, the jobs... anything is any condition to be handled by anything but That One Guy.

This isn't even a two-man job. It's a 10 man job.
Increase? Maybe. Double? I doubt it!
I'm in my second year of a computer science degree, and the advice I would give you is while programming is awesome and essential to succeed, there are really wordy (and mathy) topics that might not come as easily to you - finding the balance is the key.

Also you said that programming has come easily to you during school, and while I don't know the US school system you seem to be doing great; my advice is don't get complacent when you transition. It's way too easy to nail exams in school and then figure you can keep up without trying in university; for me it was a lot easier said than done. I don't know the community college->university system so maybe it'll be different, but it's something to keep in mind.
New Linux worm targets routers, cameras, “Internet of things” devices
You should take a quick look at Bower together with GruntJS and maybe Yeoman if you start many projects over and over again. Otherwise Bower + Grunt covers most of your pain points.
This intrinsic value can be mirrored by any cryptocurrency or even just a parallel network of Bitcoin. It is no justification for $1000/coin the way overzealous BTC investors claim.
No, it's probably bitterness. Most americans wouldn't understand.
Here is another article (in Finnish), telling the same story, by Kauppalehti, the largest business-oriented newspaper in Finland.

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/etusivu/elop+ajoi+vanjoen+ohi+kalk...
I like the way you described the difference between various positive attitudes. Thanks!
Adding several thousand dollars of incentive to commit tax evasion is also a risk.
Amazon Workspaces: Hope you like Windows
http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/details/

"All WorkSpaces Bundles provide the Windows 7 Experience"

Linux is OK for Amazon to run its business on:

http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture

Millions of Linux Desktop users are ignored if they choose this service for the Cloud Desktop.
They are...

s = "hello"
s << " world"
s # hello world
How about miner's fee, is that added to the transaction?

In the About, they say that they make 2 undependable dust transactions.

Would there be any incentive for miners to confirm these transactions and store them in the blockchain? If there's no incentive to confirm the transactions, then the miners might find a way to filter these out of the blockchain.

See also dust transactions:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10986/what-is-mea...

http://bitcoinfees.com/
Dear Spike Lee
That's not an "update" - it's corporate bullshit that says nothing.

23andMe is finally learning that there are actual, legitimate reasons why regulations exist around medical testing.

Off topic: when did the smarmy cliche "reach out to you" become the ubiquitous way to say "contact you"?
Amazingly useless!
Fantastic article. And nice demo of Drake. ;-)
So, they put forward a theory, it turned out to be wrong, they said "ok, we agree, we were wrong". I think this is how the science is supposed to work, not? Vast number of theories and ideas are put out and most of them prove to be wrong, some prove to be true. I think it is a very normal and healthy process and I wonder why so many people feel the need to attack the researchers personally just because one of their ideas turned out to be wrong.
Actually a good lesson about being an optimist vs pessimist.

Many of us wrote it off.

I dug up a year old hard drive to get back 0.05 BTC the other day :-)
See where the puck is going. Bitcoin goes to more and more hands. It can stabilize only when everyone who might want it, knows about it and has some of it. By that time BTC price will be 1000x higher than today, that's why many are rushing in to get it while it does not cost millions.

Secondly, only very recent investors may worry about volatility. Everyone who bought in 1 or more ago don't care about volatility. All fluctuations are well above their nice profit and they can spend 1% of their stash comfortably, knowing that the remaining 99% are growing in value faster that the stash is being depleted. Today's investors would have to wait another month or year before they also get 10x return and won't worry about volatility.

"Store of value" works pretty well when your value not only stays the same, but increases over time. 10% jumps do not matter if you have 10x more than a year ago.
I do like windows.
> Never forget, the one single thing governments are afraid of is the electorate. No terrorist group has toppled a western government as far as I know, but voters do it all the time.

For a certain definition of "government", sure. The elected leadership may change, but think of the (hundreds of) thousands of civil servants who survive in their jobs in the executives and legislatures over the lifetime of many governments...
It's been hacked, probably repeatedly. https://www.dailydot.com/news/time-person-of-the-year-miley-...
Seahorses stalk their prey by stealth
It wouldn't necessarily need to be code. It could just be JSON data with updated selectors, etc. Just make sure you use JSON.parse on it, and there aren't any security issues from just fetching the data.
The current gold standard in CDN measurement ishttp://www.cedexis.com/country-reports/

It uses instrumented JavaScript on real user's browsers to check latency.

That seems a better method IMHO.
The Gift of Privacy
This article is two months old. Just noting for anyone that feels like they might have read it already.
VPN! What a perfect launch partnership. The ability to buy a completely anonymous VPN is invaluable in this age.
5 thoughts on Bitcoin $1000
As I see it, both governments (states) and the bitcoin algorithm are mechanisms that are endorsed by their community to simplify a control problem.

Governments have more mechanisms to adapt to changes in public opinion, while bitcoin deals with a more specific problem. If bitcoin loses endorsement, it will be replaced (traded) for other goods, probably the next generation cryptocurrency. The same goes for governments that don't adapt, and their currencies.
Reminds me of the infamous Office 365 tone-deaf infographic:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/nov13/11-06ge...

Doubly ironic given Krahulik's famous love for the Surface Pro, the flagship device of this new platform.