skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they were all taken for granted in the current discussion.

That's because, as best as we know today, it's what's actually happening. This doesn't mean Position 2 is reasonable. We're already in the process of moving away from oil, but at the same time it's clear that we're going to be needing it for a long time to come. Of course it makes sense to put an infrastructure for that in place.

As far as environmental aspects are concerned, it's not about dialing back the hand of time to the agrarian age just to minimize our impact. It's about managing our impact sensibly and counteracting it where it makes sense.

> Excuse me, but that's a pretty big quantum leap in argumentation.

Well, the way those points were presented is pretty loaded. I think the big leap comes instead right between "fossil fuel is bad" and "so we shouldn't build a more expansive fossil fuel infrastructure, even if it costs some human lives", that's where the non-sequitur happens.

The reason why "fossil fuel is bad" holds true is that we're doing it on such a massive scale that it actually changes our environment in a way that is detrimental to our future. And I'm a technocrat saying this, not what you might call a tree hugger.
> Sure, bitcoin has several terrible characteristics that have been exposed over the past few weeks (volatility, tons of speculation, new users don't understand wallet security, etc.)

None of these are new, bitcoin has been volatile, has had a large speculative market, and a problem with new users understanding it since 2009.
I can't help but sing the article title (which, in case it changes, is "How do you get a job in North Korea?") to the song from The Sound of Music, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?".
A cryptocurrency based on CPUs is just fodder for Botnet herders, like Bitcoin was for quite a period. Amusingly, that was Litecoins original call to action, "GPUs are too centralised, we can only be CPU mined!", except that they implemented scrypt very badly.

> I'd rather have that, than a few groups of people or governments owning a ton of ASIC's, or perhaps a few very expensive quantum computers in the future, that they can use to manipulate the currencies.

Any government worth it's salt has server farms with more CPUs and a bigger budget than you can imagine. It's not really a defence at all. Back when it was profitable, the operators at CERN used to mine to keep the cost of their servers down to a minimum, filling the spare cycles between computations. I imagine their systems are nothing compared with that of someone like the NSA.

> I'm not sure how it can be done, but some of the ones that claim to be CPU-only are using multiple hashing algorithms and ciphers at one, presumably to ensure that the task is too complex for anything less "general purpose" than a CPU (at least until they start making chips with accelerators for each and every one of those hashing algorithms?!).

Won't stop them being GPU or FPGA accelerated. I doubt anybody will ever care enough to do a custom silicon chip for any of the "altcoins".
This is probably similar to "automatische incasso" which probably is also possible in Belgium. But note that an automatic incasso can be reversed, you just have to be aware that it's happening.
Despite common assurances otherwise, this is possibly the case. It's not beyond engineering technology of the era.

When people purchased bunkers post-cold-war, they were confronted with "permanent sealed" doors that cannot be opened within the bunkers. These are welded shut and the ports on the door filled with concrete so that it filled whatever was behind. You can go and see these at Kelvedon Hatch in Essex and could previously see these at Ash Radar Station in Kent (before thebunker.net bought it). Each of these doors is closest to the "London side" of things. When they were built, people spoke of the ground vibrating for months at a time in various places along the routes apparently as well (although I can't find a source for that -it might be well just be rumor).

They would be very small tunnels (pedestrian/small vehicle) sort of like cheesy James Bond bad guy monorail sized outfits but it's not beyond the realms of possibility.

Those who worked on them though are sworn to secrecy or are dead so we'll probably never know. That is until someone has the balls to fight their way through the welded and filled doors which would take weeks and be extortionately expensive due to the diamond belt saws needed I've been assured.
That sounds like a great political strategy to get people off oil. If only that were implemented in US, too.
He's right though that very few accept bitcoin. Almost all use payment gateways that accept bitcoin but pay currency to the merchant.
Thanks for the link! I am taking Andrew Ng's Coursera class now - homework due today. I am finding it to be a good introductory class. I think probably equivalent to an introductory undergraduate class. This is perfect for me because my formal calculus and statistics skills have a atrophied in the 10 years since I took those classes in college. The pace is enough to push be to get back into math shape and learn some base algorithms used in ML applications. I have bookmarked this for follow up since I have a practical need to get deeper into ML.
> quirks of history of USA

Sorry, I don't get how the history of the USA applies in this context?
Litecoin does not solve any problem, just the proof of work algorithm is changed. The block time has nothing to do with it really, it just makes people believe one confirmation is as strong as any other (Litecoin's are actually just 4 times weaker).
China has its own distinctive version of the maker movement
yeah, it seems like the author (and many of the commenters) are just using ponzi as a synonym for a "pump and dump" or a speculative gold rush
This kinda goes against the grain of Vagrant, but VMware + NFS + PHP still seemed slow to me and I switched things around to use Samba. Now my code/tests run "locally" to the VM and I edit code over samba
If you buy Bitcoin at $1,000 and it stays above $1,000 ... and then at $100,000 per Bitcoin value if it only fluctuates $200 per day, that's not really volatile.
You are correct. I was using the article's language, which I agree is not right. It should be called a bubble, not a ponzi scheme.

They are similar in that the price rise is being sustained by many new speculators/investors, and at some point, that will inevitably collapse.

I am reminded of the story that Joseph Kennedy predicted the 1920's stock market crash after receiving stock tips from his shoe-shine boy. He realized that if his shoe shiner was also partaking in the rampant speculation, there were probably few fools left to join in.
Things like this can end up like steam trains and classic cars - very nice, certainly wouldn't want to see them abandoned or destroyed, but expensive to maintain due to the poor availability of spare parts or experienced workers.
A Vegan No More - The Story of a Recovering Vegan
The problem is that the heavily restricted money supply and inherent deflationary pressure built into the currency make it a poor medium of exchange, since they provide an incentive to hoard Bitcoin rather than spend it.

Something that is scarce, restricted in future supply, and of high demand will tend to serve as a magnet for speculation.
It also has virtual smartcard support using TPM which is such a good idea...
[irony] If we try not to offend anyone, we should ban word 'slave' completely [/irony]

The word 'slave' is garbled version of 'slav' or 'slovo'; an ethnic group enslaved by Byzantine empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slav#Ethnonym
Extending ElmahR using Nancy to receive errors from anywhere
Gary North is Austrian?
Some features of the quoted 'Austrian School's theory' seem remarkably close to Bitcoin: it "arises out of an unplanned, decentralized process. This takes time. It takes a lot of time. It spreads slowly, as new people discover it as a tool of production..." and "becomes widely used as money as a result of innumerable transactions within the economy".

It's arguable that the 'unplanned' part is not a necessary feature of a currency. In fact, no fiat currency in circulation today has survived without a significant amount of planning.

In contrast, the planning which went into Bitcoin seems to have made it closely fit the theory's description of money. Arguing that its planned nature negates its 'moneyhood' (to coin a phrase... sorry...) seems a little like arguing that an artificial organ won't work due to not having been grown within the host, or that a genetically engineered organism will fail due to not having gone through an evolutionary process.
Trse
URL Shortener
If you buy Bitcoin at $1,000 and it drops to $70 ... and then to $50 per Bitcoin value if it fluctuates $4 per day, that's really volatile.
Thanks for adding that, I am of course personally aware that these discussions have taken place time and again on bitcointalk.

I meant to say that these problems have been exposed more by the general press, etc. lately.

There are other issues that the recent spike in value/volume have introduced:

- bitcoin clients, usage, security are too complex for the average consumer

- minimum miners fee is now too high ($0.10)

- some miners are cherry picking transactions with higher fees so some transactions are taking longer to confirm

- fear that the transaction bottleneck might be hit (imagine if all the internal movements on exchanges were on chain transactions, this would've already happened)

- a lot of ill feeling and negativity from tech folks who could've been early adopters but missed the bus. Truth is, it's still early times. Also, services still need to be built, tech folks can always do that! :)
Right, and so that depends on adoption and acceptance rates, and so making it as attractive of an alternate currency as possible should be the goal of the ecosystem - which includes making it secure.
Yes. Sometimes he's good but definitely not on this topic.
The Flow Fallacy
Yes, but the volatility nobody is debating is that it was below $1 in 2011 before it shot up above $33 and then came down to $2 at the bottom again. A similar development could be observed earlier 2013 where it started the year around $10, then shot up to $266 and came down again to $80.

It should clear to everybody who holds bitcoin, that there is massive volatility, and that you might buy your coins at a time, which can be very dammaging.

I would argue however that this isn't an unsurmountable obstacle. A person can substantially lower the volatility he's exposed to at least in the buying phase by dollar cost averaging. An advise btw. that Warren Buffet has publicly given about the current stock market as well.
No, but it can be assumed that modern OSs make few "trivial mistakes" that can be used for "Privilege Escalation/Buffer Overflow". Thus it is rather probable that a nontrivial bug was used for this. But since this kind of bugs were not found by the BSD developers until this potential exploit, you better understand the root cause and audit the code for it, since there are good reasons to believe that there could be similar bugs.
They forgot to mention the most important thing about the system from Moixa: It's variable voltage and devices generate the needed stable voltages themselves.
That's because pretty much everyone who is raving about Bitcoin is just looking at the BTC/USD rates and hoping to cash in when selling their bitcoin for USD.
Protests in Ukraine
A simple questionnaire a nurse could look over first - or anyone who's trained on what to look for.
You can, but you need to make two tunnels (GRE, IPIP or whatever you fancy) over those two uplinks, then create a bond over those - if that's technically possible (I believe interfaces must at least have equal MTUs, can't remember what other requirements are). Obviously, this requires configuration on both sides of the bond.

And, ahem, correct load balancing over bonded interfaces is not trivial as it may seem (although, usually it's more likely you'll be able to distribute approximately evenly than not)
OpenPhoenux Neo900: Phase I results - OHSW showcase
Yup, projects like openldap switched to provider/consumer, which does more accurately describe the arrangement.
USAans believe that we have the strongest history of (a) racial-based slavery systems (b) whose victim's descendants are still here to be concerned about, (c) recently enough to still feel relevant (not ancient Rome)

What are other examples that match?
This is a fun NPR "Planet Money" podcast where they travel to a libertarian summer festival dedicated to trading goods and services strictly in gold and silver. It's...awkward.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/07/05/198413086/episode-...

One of the biggest problems is that the rate is constantly changing just like Bitcoin. And that rate is in US Dollars, the currency they're trying to abandon.
Comedian gets the last laugh over FCUK logo row
All these people talking about Ponzi schemes are ignoring a few things.

Bitcoin is a useful technology.

It's is in limited supply, as money pretty much has to be.

It's not backed by commodities, and can't be, if you want to avoid vulnerability to the sort of government attack that shut down E-gold.

When you're starting out with an intrinsic value of zero, and you have limited supply, there's no way for a currency to gain substantial real-world usefulness without a large price increase along the way.

People hoping for gain still spend bitcoins, they just replace them right away.
There is existing data that strongly suggests corroboration here. Isolationist and/or segregated communities breed distrust of those outside the community. Cul de sacs are but a softer implementation of that segregation. Buying trends indicate that in most cases, cul de sac purchases are done with less diversity in mind -- whites buy in predominately white cul de sacs, minorities do the same; which just compounds the self-reinforcing price strata already existing within neighborhood communities.

That said, despite your low-brow dismissal, I'm not suggesting that cul de sacs are evil. They are very good at building close-knit, but very small communities. Kids that play in cul de sacs generally do so in plain view of everybody else, and with less traffic interruption, encouraging play and discouraging deviant behavior.

Cul de sac kids have a greater sense of trust with those within the immediate community, but at the expense of less trust for those outside that community -- just as isolated communities tend to do.

[1] - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1523709
[2] - http://chd.sagepub.com/content/20/2/229.full.pdf+html
All money is a bubble, IMO.

>> price rise is being sustained by many new speculators/investors, and at some point, that will inevitably collapse

It may but I don't think its inevitable. Many speculators/investors are buying bitcoins because they believe bitcoins will be used in the future as an important currency. If that happens, there will be even more demand for bitcoin and the price will be high forever.

Its speculative, but it's not nonsensical.
Why "under 18 only"? My 19 year old live-at-home student doesn't count?
This is why IT people have a bad reputation in the world of socially adjusted adults.

BTW "master/slave" words don't even make sense for databases. They are "authoritative / possibiy-stale-replica". In many setups, the master doesn't care if the slave exists-- this is an important feature to protect the master if the slave fails, avoiding "many points of failure"

In IDE cables (remember that case, from Oakland CA a few years back?) master/slave means something different again (but I don't remember how IDE works -- it was something like primary/secondary,though, not one controlling the other)
A little URL shortener.
Britain targets Guardian paper over intelligence leaks related to Edward Snowden
Why is mining necessary in a digital currency? There are plenty of other solutions to creation/distribution of tokens.
Anotherfox - a tabless browser UI design
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. We propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. The network timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without redoing the proof-of-work. The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers.

http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
This is maybe a stupid question but what does it mean to be Austrian in this context? Is he born in Austria or is this a reference to the Austrian School of Economics?
It seems that a lot of workplaces don't even have any work for the assigned workers to do (e.g. factories are out of raw materials), and no salary to pay, so the "employees" just go freelancing elsewhere. This is worse than slavery. With slavery, at least there's a general expectation that the master will feed his slaves.

North Koreans are getting the worst possible form of communism (indentured servitude in a micromanaged economy) and the worst possible form of capitalism (must earn your own survival, no safety nets whatsoever) at the same time. That's crazy.
From the intro:

"Note: This is the story of a former hardcore vegan who quit and went back to eating meat. Veganism, it turned out, was killing her physically, and it led to a epiphany for her – humans are supposed to eat meat. She decided that veganism was a direct contradiction of her being human. It is perhaps a sad commentary on the radicalism in the vegan movement that this person received tons of hate messages as a result of telling her story, including threats against her and her family. For those who may wish to debate the story, I also posted this in the Vegetarian Debate forum."
Well the Windows System tray crapshot makes a reappearance again!
LBJ did more to address poverty than any president save Roosevelt. If you're going to ask that specific question, ask about the money wasted on the Vietnam war and mayne the space program -- medicare/medicaid and the "Great Society" programd directly tackled poverty, and LBJ passed the civil rights act which, oh by the way, was Kennedy's legacy. Fixing healthcare is one way of directly addressing poverty. You can argue the methods (I would prefer single payer) but the intent is at least pointing in the right direction.
"It's is in limited supply, as money pretty much has to be."

An adjustable and growing money supply is much more the norm.
It is if you don't use it on Ubuntu+Unity. It's totally unusable on that on 12.04 at least.
Ask HN: Why there is no fresh entries of posts by bot:whoishiring?
Just wondering..
or am I missing something?
True. But some ppl are paying with Bitcoins & more websites adding this payment option, and recently it became a trend so it brings Bitcoin few steps further to become "real money".
What Piracy? Removing DRM Boosts Music Sales by 10 Percent
Ask HN: I cannot do competitive programming or solve puzzles, would you hire me?
I have decent experience working on open source projects[1] (Firefox OS, bower, yeoman etc). I was a Google Summer of Code student this year with Mozilla.Apart from this, I can program in 3-4 languages with ability to learn anything that is required for the job.Also, worked on some projects at my leisure.
However, I cannot solve competitive programming or puzzle problems. Is it possible to pull off a good software engineering job?
[1] http://github.com/MrDHat
Given enough eyeballs, all jokes are shallow.
Lol a history PHD commenting on tech economics.
Boom: Boosts sound output volume - http://www.globaldelight.com/boom/

Why does Apple limit Macbooks volume to such a low level?
> It should be called a bubble, not a ponzi scheme.

This is a first bubble which is popular mainly among tech geeks :)

What is strange, nobody is asking what problem Bitcoin really solves. As far I know it failed as a protection for silk road types. Silk road was compromised and Bitcoin didn't helped them.
You could say the same thing about African slaves in the Antebellum US.
Do you live in the city with public transportation? Then I would definitely agree.

Otherwise, Canada can be really big and rural. Not having access to car (or in this case, potentially not being able to afford it) can be really damaging to your career, lifestyle, social life.

I grew up in the interior of BC 9 hours East of Vancouver. All of our driving policy (new driver rules and licensing) was dreamed up by street racing ridden Vancouver politics. The result was really damaging in small communities, as 18 year olds could only drive with 1 passenger. In effect, this eliminated young peoples ability to designate a DD. People didn't stop partying...they just drove.

Point being, policies designed for city residents don't always fit out in the rural areas.
Calling people asshole and "firing" them instead of initiating a discussion is also bad attitude.
"I made it with a vanity generator on an offline computer. I have the public and private key. No software is currently managing the wallet and its not online anywhere."

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rs2zf/on_college_g...
I can't wait for widespread adoption of electric cars and reduced pollution.
Putnam's data aside, we've seen the Contact Hypothesis show true in regards to homosexuals. Once a pariah, a generation of contact with homosexuals has trended towards acceptance.

Also interesting is that in Putnam's hypothesis, the last bullet relating to diversity indicates media influence -- "More time spent watching television and more agreement that 'television is my most important form of entertainment'".

I'm interested in Putnam's work though, but I'd like to see if other causes can't be seen as contributing factors. Thanks for the link.