skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I frankly just thought this was poorly written. I tried to do a tl;dr, but found it hard. Here is my best shot:

1) "currencies...increase the efficiency of barter"
2) "Barter played a tiny role in all premodern economies"
3) governments have tended to issue currencies
4) Bitcoin is inferior because it lacks "the backing of a political authority" or the ability to "raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses"
5) private money generally has uncertain value and legal status
6) government might shut Bitcoin down
7) Bitcoin is a part of "Right Wing Money"
8) all effective money is "left money" and "state backed. The recent banking system is a part of "Right Wing Money".
9) Bitcoin is for criminals and speculators

I think there have been much more intelligent and nuanced opinions on why Bitcoin might fail, I wouldn't put this on the list.
Goldieblox letter to the Beastie Boys
I'm not complaining, but I was hoping that someone would articulate it for my benefit. Having been here a while I am familiar with the guidelines.
Heh - I suspect the main difference between your description of the process and mine is that I'm in a "third cup of coffee, should be on my way to the office" timezone, and I'm guessing your in a "finished at the office, savouring the third beer" timezone, and hence we've got slightly different sates of mind and social inhibitions. But I'm sure we both know exactly what each other is describing.

(Surely you have seen the occasional great non-literal-ass-licking salespeople working for genuinely great marketing agencies? And agencies that deliver _spectacular_ word and achive magnificent results for clients? I'm quite proud to have been told I came in second with pitches against a few agencies I'm particularly impressed by in my small space here… But I will beat them one day, Oh yes…)
I've had to have them replace my OCZ Vertex 2 three times.
It would be a sad thing to be if I did it with no reason. But I've been a huge open source supporter all my life, and I've always found Apple strategies to be undesirable, to say the least. Their products have always been overpriced and hard to use if you're not into their ecosystem (say, transfering a mp3 file from Linux to an iPod nano).
So it's because you don't want to recreate the track from point data on each request. I can see why that's advantageous.

OK, new dumb question. It sounds like you're serving gzip'd JSON straight off the disk with nginx (serving gzip'd files direct from disk is one of my favourite nginx features). Where does Mongo come into the picture?
Show HN: A Chrome extension to help clarify confusing Python documentation
The article uses 90% as the sample figure. There is no direct statement that this is the type of deflation that will occur, but it seems unlikely that bitcoin prices will increase 10x every year, which is what it would take to have that level of deflation in the long run.

Using a lower number, like 5%, would have been more reasonable, IMO.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fined+for+downloading
this is market driven. sorry, it's just not worth that much to the "soul-sucking intermediaries". this guy shined through, but the agency is correct on one count, you need to pay dues until your reputation gives you demonstrable leverage. clearly, mr Garcia doesn't have that. if the agency misrepresented payment if he won the contract, that is a fair gripe, however.
How long did the transaction take?
Glenn Block on Hypermedia
Reminds me of old school mafias and their protection rackets. I'm surprised patent trolls didn't start doing this sooner.
The author is mostly the blind pig bumping into aspects of bitcoin without seeing them for what they are. But in the end he stumbles across the proverbial truffle: "Bitcoin appeals because governments are not fully living up to the responsibility that comes with state-sponsored money. Bitcoin, or something like it, will thrive until the authorities do better."

And when, in the time of QE, does he expect that it will come to pass that "authorities do better?"
"But they said that the important thing wasn’t the money it was the exposure and potential for more work. After thinking about it long and hard I had to decline. "

Because the exposure was more important than the money. Would have of course been nice if they stated this upfront but they didn't. That's water under the dam at this point.

I have regularly done work for people at no charge.

This has not only led to a great amount of paid work but I've thrown around the names that I've done work for quite liberally and use it the same way the company that sold a treadmill to the White House used to scream in their ads "only one chosen to be used by the President in the White House!!"
(when in fact it is a competitive bid almost certainly). So I use those names to book more work. I've even used the names with success when cold emailing here and there. Right on the subject line.

While it is not great that he was lied to, he did agree to put in the work with no guarantee of getting anything.

Consequently the way I look at it even if he feels he was screwed he
should have sucked it up and let Spike use it, even for free, and then
bragged and gotten out of that what he could until the cows came home.

Instead he reacted emotionally and ends up with nothing. Understanding of course that this is upsetting.

Separately, in looking at his site he does really nice work. So perhaps he shouldn't have done the work on spec in the first place but then again he did say that "the idea of working for you and having my design represent your film blinded me."

In other words if anyone of us had approached him to do work on spec he most likely would have declined very quickly or not treated the transaction the same way.
"Real-world cryptography often doesn't have security definitions, e.g. AES"

Block ciphers do have security definitions; what AES lacks is a rigorous proof that it satisfies the definition of security for a block cipher. There are different definitions for different notions of security, but that does not mean there is no security definition. It is also untrue to suggest that security parameters are fixed in practice; this is certainly false for public-key cryptography, but Rijndael was designed to support arbitrary parameters, as are many other practical block ciphers and hash functions.

"Coming up with a good security definition is hard, the 2013 Turing award was given for one."

Not one definition, but several definitions and an entire paradigm for definitions. The work also set the groundwork for proving that cryptosystems and cryptographic constructions meet such definitions.

Really, the importance of having a security definition cannot be understated. Without a security definition, you cannot have any falsifiable claims about security. If I claim a system without a definition is insecure, you can always refute me by claiming that the system was never designed to defend against my attack -- which is technically correct, because without a definition the system cannot be said to be designed to defend against any attacks.

Also, note that I did not say that Satoshi failed to give a good security definition for Bitcoin. What I said is that Satoshi failed to give any security definition. If Satoshi had given an unrealistic or otherwise bad security definition, then we could have a productive conversation about the definition and about whether or not Bitcoin satisfies it.

"I think it will take a long time before we get a realistic security definition for Bitcoin."

The thing is that we do have realisitic security definitions for digital cash -- the definitions just happen to rely on the existence of a central authority that issues the currency, which is a deal-breaker for the Bitcoin community.
Oh good! I'd posted specifically to ensure just you were happy, but it warms my heart to know that the entirety of HN is officially glad that I'm happy too!
I voted it down because these kind of dumb one-liner jokes are a waste of space.
>So you think that a user should be able install an OS that bricks their phone and still have the phone still covered by warranty?

Yes

>How does that make sense?

It makes sense the same way that installing Linux and/or wiping Windows doesn't void a PCs warranty.

Should users be allowed to install any programs including keylogging malware on Windows computers? Shouldn't Microsoft protect them by locking it down so that only approved apps from their app store can be installed? Like mobile app stores?
> There's was an implied agreement.

There is also an implied agreement that when an artist asks you to pay $12 for a CD, that you pay for it. This isn't very hard to understand.
What guarantees do I have that you won't pour muriatic acid into my skull after I eat the poisoned tofurky? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer
No, I don't agree with that. It's a dog-eat-dog world if you make it. But world is so far and wide that you can bypass all that crap for the most part.

I am not (well, trying not too when I'm zen enough, unlike now with all this ranting) taking up working with anyone who doesn't see our collaboration as pure win-win situation, and will provide me with more than I ask for, and I provide him with more than he bargained for.

Stress-B-Gone, and life become a real page-turner!
Even in a non-debt driven economy debt plays a useful role at a micro level in terms of financing productive investment, not just discretionary consumption. Deflation will increase the real value of debt, making it increasingly difficult to service the debt over time (since your wages would probably be falling), whereas inflation reduces the real value of debt over time.
Really fast on Nokia 920
No, since gold has varied far more in value than any inflationary/deflationary measure of USD.
You're missing the point entirely. It's about opportunity costs.

If you try to use a deflationary currency for any economic activity then you get bitten by deflation, you end up losing money. The fact that the total revenue you get back is still worth the same (in butter or what-have-you) is irrelevant. You still had to buy equipment, you still had to pay people wages, and so forth in that currency to start with.

But if you had not invested that money to start with you'd be even wealthier.

The major point is that bitcoins or dollars aren't actually worth anything intrinsically. They have no value. Value exists in goods and services. With a deflationary currency people are discouraged from economic activity which produces more goods and services because it causes them to lose money.
> Consequently you can not live in the USA without USD and in Europe without EUR.

The 33 countries of Europe that are not in the euro zone would beg to differ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currencies_of_the_European_Unio...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...
Also it would by hypocritical that it would block sites with ads but likely have to use ads to generate revenue.

As the owner of a search engine I can tell you search ain't cheap.
Totally true. Smaller versions are not helpful for just casual/student use; it also helps in code development and debugging. Otherwise, algorithm development gets impeded by scaling issues.
Bitcoins Have Just Reached A Whopping $1094
Enjoy:

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

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/911-7/ssd.html
An application that only runs if your warranty is already voided, and an application that actually voids your warranty are two very different things.

You've got to remember google's position here - for the majority of phones sold, they aren't the manufacturer or the warranty provider. If they allow cyanogen in the play store and it creates a huge warranty headache for Samsung or Sony or any other OEM that includes the play store by default, it jeopardizes google's ability to distribute the Play Store.
Out of curiosity, are people seriously using bitcoin stocks as a bank? Or are they just investing part of their money in bitcoin and hoping it goes somewhere? This requirement of conversion only makes sense if people are fully and completely invested. I would be shocked if there were such people at this stage.
How to Analyze Your Facebook Friends with R
Probably more to do with him already taking content down to avoid their litigation - avoiding naming them looks like it follows on from that.
It makes complete sense because it shouldn't be possible to brick the phone just from trying to install a different OS, and installing software shouldn't make it possible to void the warranty. Hardware and software should be separate.
What Happened to TermKit
I wish I knew! From our perspective, because our total risk exposure is very minimal (again less than 1% of total revenue has come in from Bitcoin) we don't have a need to convert into cash immediately and can instead hold on to them for future use. I imagine every business does this risk assessment to determine their bitcoin conversion policy and all have different sensitivity to risk (i.e. silk road 100% bitcoin revenue > soylent 1% bitcoin revenue).
Uniloc sued Mojang (makers of Minecraft), which is a Swedish company. In Texas of course.

Mojang is bigger than many small companies, but is still quite small.
How does that help the 'normal people are confused' argument?
How are you measuring gold's value?
Probably because it isn't really necessary — it's easier just to own the user's PC the old-fashioned way.
I'm not downplaying anyting. Bitcoins intention is to be a real currency. You don't turn your dollars into Canadian Tire money to shop at Canadian Tire.

Saying you're not supposed to convert bitcoin is the statement of someone who thinks bitcoin is NOT an investment. So... not a goldbug.
Given that the only information we've got to go on is the open letter - I'll point out this bit and take it at face value: "They forwarded me an email you sent them asking for an explanation but of course they lied to you and said they didn’t know who was responsible."

I think it's 100% plausible that the agency accepted Lee's decision on which poster design to use as "last word", while not fully disclosing (and perhaps even actively deceiving him about) the payment/negotiations/contracts/copyrights with the designer.
.io is a generic TLD in most books now anyway. There's lots of other ccTLD that are fairly useless, though it's obvious why ones like .co.ck (the uninhabited Cook Islands) were never picked up as generics.
To me, Numpy/SciPy are Pythons "killer apps". I would say the plurality of times I have decided to use Python in the past two or three years, it was because of them.
Thanks for the offer! Looks like too many other engineers bailed and now we are shutting our doors.
Besides the limitations spelled out in the TOS and the often reported issues with that, there are the invisible issues with developers not creating products which they know won't be approved.

There is a basic freedom lost when you allow yourself (the entire software market) to be subject to arbitrary corporate control especially when there is inadequate competition. It's clear that the terms are there only to serve the corporate interests and can change at any time if corporate interests change (hello G+ & YouTube)
I saw the reference to PayGarden, but I was curious how it worked on a technical level.
If you're using Rails, the ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars library (#mb_chars on any string) passes all these tests except the upcase of baffle:

irb(main):001:0> RUBY_VERSION
=> "1.9.3"
irb(main):002:0> Rails.version
=> "3.2.14"
irb(main):003:0> # example 1
irb(main):004:0* example1 = "noe\u0308l".mb_chars
=> noël
irb(main):005:0> example1.reverse
=> lëon
irb(main):006:0> example1.compose.slice(0,3)
=> noë
irb(main):007:0> example1.g_length #grapheme_length
=> 4
irb(main):008:0> example1.compose.length
=> 4
irb(main):009:0> # example 2
irb(main):010:0* example2 = "😸😾".mb_chars
=> 😸😾
irb(main):011:0> example2.length
=> 2
irb(main):012:0> example2.slice(1,1)
=> 😾
irb(main):013:0> example2.reverse
=> 😾😸
irb(main):014:0> # example 3
irb(main):015:0* example3 = "baﬄe".mb_chars
=> baﬄe
irb(main):016:0> example3.upcase
=> BAﬄE
irb(main):017:0> # example 4
irb(main):018:0* example4 = "noël".mb_chars
=> noël
irb(main):019:0> example4 == example1
=> false
irb(main):020:0> example4 == example1.compose
=> true
I'm 98% sure that when I signed up it was presented as a choice: "Do you want us to bank your DNA for free?". I signed up after they changed SNP arrays (I think it was v2 -> v3 that the above poster is referencing offered upgraded reporting). I'm not sure if the banking was only implemented post v3, or if they had some other reason to re-collect spit despite having some DNA banked.
I still like this CSS implementation better, rather than a whole jQuery plugin. Works great on mobile as well.

http://jsbin.com/OTaYIFE/2/
Hmmm, I guess the title is a bit confusing. I was expecting a different article.. But thanks for the info though!
How long do those samples last?
Consider how a blackmailer's power evaporates when the information they possess is made public.

The blackmailer's power to exploit the victim evaporates, but the victim's situation may still deteriorate. For example, you discover that I am a former stripper, but nowadays I teach elementary school. You contact me and threaten me with exposure. I turn the matter over to the police. Through police carelessness or some other unrelated cause,t he information becomes public anyway. Your abaility to exort money in return for silence is gone, but I get kicked out of my teaching job anyway and can't find another one, so I lose several years of my economic life, and possibly social standing etc.

A common problem with blackmail/privacy hypotheticals is an ambiguity over the moral culpability of the secret information. I personally don't think being a former stripper is a moral impediment to teaching elementary school but )a many disagree and b) I can think of many other things that I would consider a moral impediment but not one that I could necessarily justify on objective grounds.
do you really need it spelled out that it's a phone??
And so I ask again, when did I agree to that, in an explicit or implicit way? And you yourself answered, "you didn't if you downloaded it without paying". So no, there isn't.
We have switched the metadata files from JSON to WAT files. The JSON format did not allow specifying the multiple offsets to files necessary for the WARC upgrade and WAT files provide more detail.

Where can I read more about this?
As Richard Pryor once said "don't be messing wit dem Jews if you ain't got no money".

Welcome to the world of people who give you praise and acolades but give you nothing in return. They are consumate smoke blowing up your ass thieves.

Contract in hand and no matter what you should own all intelectual property rights. The reason they chose you was because they thought you would roll over for a belly rub and instead all you got for your efforts was a kick in the head.

Ever go see a movie and see all these companies that flash accross the screen before the movie starts? You have no idea what they do? well those are the companies subcontracted out to market, advertise, invest and promote the movie and those adds are important because if you are somehow in the privy of someone who promises 20% of your investment return if you fund a movie they will mention those companies and your will say "OH! so thats who you are!" RUN QUICK!
But the piece was not about using CMSs where code would be more appropriate. It was about turning your bespoke application into something like a CMS by architecting for maximum flexibility and configurability everywhere, building complex "admin" interfaces, and implementing data-driven runtime behavior before any of that is really necessary.

You can do all of these things with 100% test coverage, but that doesn't relieve you from dealing with the weight of the architecture and extra work when you try to add or change functionality later.
I am not an economist, but I thought that both Austrians and Keynsians agree that fiat currency with steady, moderate inflation will increase economic activity versus a steady deflationary currency.

The disagreement is whether or not artificially generating economic activity by inducing inflation is a good thing or a bad thing.

The Austrians think that the increased economic activity consists largely of malinvestments due to artificially cheap credit, which will cause a short-term boom, followed by a subsequent crash.

The Keynsian view is that you can ease out of the boom without a crash, and that the markets will take too long to equilibrate without such an artificial increase in monetary supply ("In the long term, we're all dead").
well use it as it's intended, buy something in bitcoins.

There's even projects that accept donations in bitcoins, you'll see wallet addresses like this: 1JBEGFXW6ywMtZnCbjvKGJXDtdR6g6KmMi

Their utility isn't tied to the fact that you can turn them into more of your favorite currency later, that stupidity is what's driving the current bitcoin bubble. Wait till people realize what you can do with them.
Wrong. Have you actually tried to buy a Bitcoin? If not, ask someone who has. At the moment, it's hard for Bitcoin novices to buy Bitcoins, and much less hard to sell them.

Actually, once you've been verified by an exchange (required prior to buying Bitcoins unless you do a private party sale), selling Bitcoins is easy; it's getting your USD wired/ACHed to your bank account that can be time-consuming. This is due to the legacy banking system, and not some problem inherent to Bitcoin.

EDIT: By the way, it's not "very difficult" to sell Bitcoins. If I want to sell a Bitcoin, I log onto my Bitstamp account, put in a limit order. When the sale is executed, I submit a short, pre-filled form for a wire transfer to my bank. I then wait a few days and the money is in my bank account, in USD. Not hard.
> I see plenty of reason to keep betting on evolution

So why Mozilla helped to kill WebSQL? Because NoSQL (IndexedDB) is so much better than SQLite?

Mozilla is too much focused on Brendan Eich baby. They should really move forward because JavaScript is becoming new IE6.
CQ5 looks better (but isn't).
As a primarily Python dev (read: PEP-8 fan) who writes CoffeeScript as much as possible and wraps CS at ~100 cols, at what point is the ternary operator used on Line 22[1] actually readable and useful as a shortcut?

Honest question, because I see lots of people use the ternary operator to shortcut writing out a complete if statement but when the lines get that long I never do. Even on my 27" screen I use a tiling WM and Sublime cuts off at 120 cols and that line is >200.

[1] https://github.com/ENFOS/FlowupLabels.js/blob/master/src/jqu...
The interesting thing to this old fart as a newcomer to HN is that it really does not make much difference whether or not he is a troll. Unless of course he opens that PayPal account.

What I am fascinated by is the unquestioning support from so many. It speaks to a community with a strong "we're all in this together vibe".

Whether or not the OP is a troll or a psych grad doing research does not change what came after, and what came after to me is the big story here. my2.
The points of the article summarized:
1) money must come from the state (because I say so)
2) bitcoin is bad because it appeals to "right wing" people and I'm (presumably) left wing (my enemies friend is my enemy?)
3) again, money must come from the state (because I say so)
4) free markets caused the financial crisis (not massive gov money printing and trillions in implicit backing of credit markets) so free market money must also be bad
5) the value of bitcoin disappears if people loose trust but this could never happen to a gov currency (even though it happens several times a year with fiat currencies around the world)
6) fiat is fine so we don't need any replacement (as long as we ignore the trillions in debt transfer from the bankrupt banks to the bankrupt governments)
The FDA has bent over backwards - pretty much everything that 23andMe needs to do in order to sell legally has been laid out, and ignored.

The Google egotistic approach is well ensconced in 23andme