skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, yes -- the Keynesian school of economic thought dominates our political economics right now. The folks in charge tend to subscribe to Keynesian economic theory.

The tl;dr on "inflation is good" is that it benefits people borrowing money. If your wages keep pace with inflation, then things like your car loan and mortgage ultimately cost less, leaving you with more inflation-adjusted money to lubricate the economy with. Inflation stalling (or even receding into deflation) means that it's much more expensive in terms of wage-hours to pay back an existing debt, which discourages people from taking on new debt. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/business/economy/in-fed-an... is a decent article on the concept.

A deflationary currency, by contrast, will heavily discourage borrowing. This analogy is a little stilted by the BTC<->USD conversion, but if I agree to loan you 10 BTC to be paid back over 5 years so you can buy a $10,000 car, and over the term of the car loan, let's say that the value of BTC is going to increase from $1000 to $4000 (that is, the amount of value traded in BTC is increasing faster than the amount of BTC in the market), then you'd be a fool to take my loan, since you would effectively end up paying me $40,000 worth of BTC for a $10,000 car. This would discourage you from taking my loan and buying the car, just because of the behavior of the currency.

(That said currently, since lenders get a chunk taken out of their loan by inflation, they make it up in the interest rate. In a consistently deflationary market, it seems to my non-economist brain that the answer would be a smaller - potentially even negative - interest rate, which would be pegged at a point that the lender still makes money over the course of the loan without being overly discouraging to borrowers.)
Even if it just becomes the primary mechanism for moving money around, that's a multi-billion dollar industry. Think Western Union, ACH, Paypal, etc. To me, that seems like a safe(ish) bet.

Being able to buy bubble gum, well, we'll see :)
Very disturbing indeed. I guess George Orwell was right all along.

YouTube clip mirror for non US viewers:

http://teamcoco.com/video/will-ferrell-hates-russian-gymnast...
And we complain about the right to privacy on HN with all the post about the NSA, Facebook, Google and so on. Whoever he is, it is non of our business. leave the man alone already.
Insurance costs for human-driven vehicles will rise.
I think this is spot on.

All sorts of people I rarely speak with have been coming out of the woodwork to ask about Bitcoin. These people are invariably regular folks that have heard about this thing that has been appreciating at an unbelievable clip. This is extremely alarming for me.
To be honest I think the bottom is going to be around $500. Pretty much everyone I know who is even the slightest bit interested in bitcoin is waiting for this crash to happen so they can jump in. Just a guess though.
I set this up recently and really like it a lot. I had an ASUS AC66U as my home gateway/firewall/router/wap which was beginning to struggle with the crazy home lab setup I was concocting.

pfSense is radical. It's like OpenWRT in that it's a self-contained router/firewall/etc... operating system, with great gui and cli management tools. It's based on FreeBSD and has a very active community of developers and users. There's even a pretty cool subreddit for it: http://reddit.com/r/pfsense

One of the unexpected side-effects of the pfSense box was seeing my internet speeds increase significantly. The only variable that I changed was from the ASUS router to an older system running pfSense. In both scenarios I was hardwired using cat6. Prior to pfSense I would get ~20mbps down and now I am hitting ~30 with no problems.

I've got it setup with a dual gigabit nic. The motherboard ethernet port goes to my cable modem for WAN, and each port on the gig nic corresponds with my LAN and LAB subnets. LAN goes to my house, wifi devices, etc... and the LAB subnet is for my servers.

It's nice having an ipsec VPN running that I can connect to when on the road. For example, I'm in California right now for the holidays and can still hit my Freenas box for file storage/backups that is 3,000 miles away in Northern Virginia.

I built a rack for the setup, you can see the black pfSense box down below: http://instagram.com/p/g4JuvrBf7N/

It's an older Compaq/AMD Sempron system that I refurbished a bit. After installing the HP dual-gig nic, I also threw in a cheap SSD and upgraded the processor to a dual-core AMD Athlon. It was like $6 on Amazon.

Here's a video that I made explaining some of it, for those who are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Lk07vi98o

---

Alternatively, there's some cool hardware out there that is more custom/indie such as Mikrotik (http://www.mikrotik.com) or Netgate (http://store.netgate.com)
Well, now you claim that NK is actually socialist. I dont really think you can find a normal definition of socialism that fits north korea, any more than its a democratic nation. It claims to be both (The full name is Democratic People's Republic of Korea) but I don't think you can claim its anything other than a autocratic dictatorship.
Most alt-coins are thoroughly uninteresting and far less secure from 51% attacks than Bitcoin itself. It may be better to use the concept of "colored coins" on top of the Bitcoin blockchain to transact in other currencies.
Dekhn is calling you out on your qualitative statements: where you live, in your field, in your own mind and to the people you know ("I know a lot of people who have done PhDs") these facts may indeed be true. But I would argue that it's not true elsewhere, such as in the US across scientific disciplines.

The research of Paula Stephan covers the economic decisions made by US science research institutions[1]. Her hypothesis is that academia maximizes PhD student numbers while the number of tenure-track faculty positions decline. This presents an untenable situation in the long term, where a flood of researchers with PhDs will be unable to find permanent employment, and yet the demand for cheap labor filled by PhD students intensifies.

As you can imagine, this type of trend can be terrifying to some PhD students, despite the "freedom" that their research allows. A lack of job security makes one question their salary as an extension of their worth.

[1] Her latest book is an exhaustive look at the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Shapes-Science-Paula-Stephan...
Bitcoin always makes me think of the tulip bubble of 1637[1] where tulips became more expensive than gold, and people purchased them as a speculative commodity.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Will it be cheaper than PayPal? A believer in Murphy's Law might speculate that the package of services needed to make Bitcoin reliable enough for regular consumer use, will also involve a level of fees comparable to PayPal.
Is the implication here that pedestrians will simply walk into the street at random and the AIs will handle that? I find myself a little uncomfortable at the thought, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about driverless cars for most of the reasons you stated.
Oh it's effective alright, it's just that keeping you safe from terrorist attacks is not what it's effective at.
speaking of monoculture: https://twitter.com/bcantrill/status/407228751731101696
Because the value illegal actors find in Bitcoin isn't in its role as a currency, but rather in its role as an anonymous method to globally transfer wealth.

Even if millions of people use Bitcoin for that use case, it doesn't mean Bitcoin will ever have staying power for the "reserve currency" use case.
Remember when people genuinely enjoyed riding horses?
Just to reply in my own words without being labelled as "having my stake in the Keynesian camp". I don't know what that means (not exactly anyway) but that does not seem like a compliment here on HN. I'm a regular IT guy, unless I create a hot startup I will always be a guy whose influence can only be measured by statisticians.

With that out of the way. I don't want to live in a country or principally trade in a currency that can react as bitcoin. I don't have a lot of cash sitting in my bank account, instead I have a small amount of debt (only Banker salary allow you to buy a flat cash in London) so I fail to see any situation where a 10,000 % deflation rate can affect me positively. (Similarly 10,000% inflation - actually 0% inflation is the stuff I can deal and be happy with)

So I don't mind a uncontrollable currency as I don't mind the wind being uncontrollable. I mind hurricane and if I cannot afford to deal with it, I simply prefer to live in an area without hurricane or as a last resort, government provided countermeasures. So in my situation, one I share with the majority of the first world, I prefer a currency controlled by FED-like central banks, than a currency without control that can increase my debt by 2 order of magnitude and at the same time likely put me out of work. So it is a choice 100% pragmatic rather than based on any type of economic theory.

I would not mind to be convinced otherwise, preferably without assumption like "when everybody uses it", or "if a country like China uses it as its currency".

But right now, it seems opinion are split between people in denial with 10,000 bitcoin in their wallet assuring me that what is happening with bitcoin right now is Good (sometime with the argument "deflanationary currency is good" as if that did not require further explanation). Others are blog like this one made by doomsayer simply angry they didn't buy 10,000 bitcoin last year.
I've been watching bitcoin since $30, bought at $80, and sold last night. I think that Stefan Molyneux (or however you spell it) is right on when he says that bitcoin is "a revolutionary protocol for information synchronization." However, it is by no means unique, and as we've seen, anyone can start their own bitcoin-type cryptocurrency. Apparently, the Canadian government is working on their own, and I don't think it will be long before other central banks begin to follow suit by adapting the bitcoin protocol for their own purposes and presumably solving some of its myriad problems in the process. And of course, when given the choice between a new-and-improved cryptocurrency that's guaranteed by a central bank and the old one that's guaranteed by nothing, Joe Blow is going to pick the former. Bitcoin is an amazing idea and I do believe that the idea behind it it will revolutionize transactions, but it won't be alone for long, and once the improved versions begin showing up, those who've held on to bitcoin because it's an amazing idea (it is) without realizing that bitcoin itself has only a very thin economic moat are probably going to have a bad day.

I've been trading and investing stocks for about 7 years now, and I think I've learned a thing or two in that time, but one of the most important things I've learned is that if holding onto something is making me uncomfortable, it's time to sell. Holding my bitcoin was making me uncomfortable as of a couple of days ago, so I sold. On the other hand, I've also learned that if everyone is expecting something to do one thing, it usually does the opposite, and it seems that pretty much everyone agrees that bitcoin is in a bubble. If it does crash, I'll get back in, but if it doesn't, I won't regret selling. I've been on the emotional rollercoaster of watching relatively large sums of money invested in a volatile asset fluctuate wildly, and I'd rather not go through that again. Just my two cents.
10 gotchas with MongoDB Development [video]
Okay, all this witch hunt is becoming crazy. I'll come clean: I am Satoshi.

And Spartacus. And possibly Batman. Any questions?

(Related: http://www.leasticoulddo.com/comic/20090330/)
The Internet is all about free exchange of information... Copyright be darned. :-)

Worse it isn't really even a good copy paste.

I don't even like WikiPedia, and it is a much better explanation on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments

I consider this the definitive origin story of RFC:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/steve-crocker/a...
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The metric of "legitimate transactions" is interesting, but I don't see an easy way of tracking it. http://coinmap.org/ tracks brick-and-mortar retailers that accept bitcoin. Maybe there should be an opt-in registry, like a global Bitcoin YellowPages?
personally, this kind of thing seems obvious. i would be surprised if the person who wrote the paper didn't take cute things like this into account
Bitcoin Crashing
I've been generally impressed with TP-Link's kit, although it is cheap, so don't expect it to hold up in a hostile environment (e.g. lots of dust).
> What jingoistic people like you don't understand is that the ability to tolerate criticism is equally important.

Don't you realize the same thing can be said about you :)

I criticized your criticism and you went all "jingoistic nut" on me. Sigh.

The problem is for any good action X that any government does as long as it has any side effect other than getting people out of poverty, it would get criticized as unnecessary. That leaves out only giving money to people directly.
Getting Past Superficial
It is not a low brow dismissal, appealing to a HN meme doesn't save your position. :) A cul-de-sac is hardly an isolationist community. If anything you could probably go find data these people are more naive or trusting than the norm. Your position is just a rehash of the unquestioned assumptions of "suburbanites" that I think probably have a little but more to do, ironically, with "media conditioning" than even you might think.
International transfers are not intrinsically difficult or expensive, the real cost is in pennies. The reason why cross border payments are priced like they are is due to the lack of incentive, either economic or regulatory. BTC is a massive economic incentive for banks to charge more in line with the their true costs. Even if BTC fails as a currency itself, its greatest success might be catalysing innovation on prices and products at the incumbents.
This is great. I am just jumping into open source from an academic background. I had assumed that open source was great for directly practical website creating and hosting (back-end, client side etc...) but weaker in terms of learning for OS / compilers. This post and its comments (with linked resources) are making me unsure about this assumption. What do you think?
Hm, it doesn't claim it's one language. And it has indeed C code and C++ code...
This is interesting, but I'm not really sure what you get from it.

d3 and direct manipulation of SVGs are both so low level that make a decent looking chart requires a bit of boilerplate. That boilerplate should get wrapped inside of a directive and once you've done that, the specifics of how the directive is implemented don't matter too much.

It would be nice to use one language for data binding; I think angular would end up being a lot more verbose and prevent some of the nice things you can do with .call() and .transition() though. Additionally, I don't think 'creating a hole in the DOM' is necessary a bad thing. Sending graphs only the information that they need separates concerns nicely, resulting in more modular and maintainable code.

If you haven't read it, http://bleedingedgepress.com/our-books/developing-a-d3-js-ed... is pretty good.
I would think that is only true for 'rail designed for cargo' or 'rail in not too densely populated areas'. Isn't rail designed for humans as used in subways efficient almost everywhere? I would think it definitely beats private cars.

I think that one reason for that is that, for reliable connections, one needs a multiple-connected graph. Users must be able to 'go around' any disturbance that arises.
I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.
I usually use tp-link gear for openwrt, it's readily available from our distributor and dirt cheap. Don't just look for recent models, pick your hardware from the openwrt hardware compatibility list based on the specs you need.

If you can disregard the fact that the firmware isn't open source, have a look at www.ubnt.com and www.routerboard.com . Those don't run openwrt, but price/performance and features beat everything else that's on the market. The mikrotik routers are performing so well and have so many features it's ridiculous. If you really need Cisco, you'll know. If you're not sure, get a mikrotik, it will cover everything you'll ever need.
You're pretty easily baffled.
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fta : "The avoidance of accidents will cut insurance costs".

Ha ha. No. Any freed-up cash will result in an increase in gas-prices, taxes or whatever. The cost living will continue to be just a bit more than you can afford no matter what. Any "avoidance of accidents" will just translate into profits for somebody, not you. The cost-environment is entirely artificial and is designed to exploit you right down to the bones and gristle. You don't get to enjoy the fruits of progress except in ways that make you a more efficient worker. Sorry.
It depends on what your background is. And what the role looks for. There is a wide spectrum of programming vs statistics background that may be required for a job. Having said that, here is a list of basic stuff that may be useful to know.

1. Computer Science:

- Algorithms/D.S. Enough to be able to identify what sort of problems are C.S. problems or statistics problems.

- Systems. You may not have to build a system but it is useful to know how the real world systems are built, what sort of constraints come into play, what trade-offs are there. Especially, if you will be working with large scale datasets. You don't want to be remembered as the dude who did a select * order by rand limit 10 on an HBase table.

- Programming Language: Learn one programming language well. Depending on your job, you may need to learn more than one. Python is a nice starting language. One useful trick to learning more languages is to learn one language really well and see how stuff you can do changes in the other language. Also, side note: don't get into one true language debates. They are useless. Every language has its pros and cons.

2. Stats/Math/ML:

This is tough to kind of characterize. Because the field is so diverse.

- Probability: Get some basic probability under your belt. Getting the intuition right is more useful than learning a lot of stuff. You can pick up more complicated stuff (Stochastic processes, Stochastic Calculus stuff) as and when you progress further anyway.

- Statistics: At the very least, figure out hypothesis testing, biases, p-values, estimators and regression. The more statistics I learn the more I am of the opinion that the tools matter less as much as a critical understanding of where statistics should apply. What biases are there and how you can identify them.

- Linear Algebra: Again a very basic undergraduate linear algebra course (with vector spaces) should help you understand say Matrix completion stuff. Of the top of my head, I think grokking how vector spaces work, what independence means, how dimensionality reduction, kernels work is useful.

- Machine Learning: This is mostly a tie up of the kind of stuff you learn in the math courses. My basic 101 ML grad school covered the following: Unsupervised Learning (KMeans or some clustering algorithms), Supervised Learning (Discriminative, Generative approaches, bias - variance tradeoffs etc). I also learnt some silly bullshit on Genetic algorithms.

So yeah, as long as you learn the basic fundamentals really well, you should be able to pick up stuff fairly easily.

E.g. Recommendation systems, I never learnt most of this in school as part of a specific course. However, once you know what goes on in Matrix decomposition and know what regression is, you can understand the why of why people do what they do when they solve these problems.
Active rectifiers (ie. transistor based) are common in various high current applications. One quite weird example are line-interactive UPSes, which often use topology that allows same MOSFET bridge to be used as both rectifier when charging and frequency converter when discharging. Somewhat more representative application are various high current DC supplies, for example Vcore DC/DC converters on PC motherboards (12V DC -> <1V DC) almost invariably use active rectification.
SEEKING WORK - Remote preferred, based in Virginia

I'm a full-stack engineer with a decade of experience. I've written everything from visualizations in Rails/D3/CoffeeScript to big-data clustering algorithms in C++ to embedded bit-banging code in C.

Here's a blog post detailing a product I recently built for ProjectLocker: http://blog.projectlocker.com/2013/08/29/introducing-the-pro...

Shoot me an email at caleb@acceliva.com
Optimizely - San Francisco, CA / Amsterdam, NL - Fulltime, Permanant. Intern/H1-B Transfer okay as well.

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Optimizely is a website optimization platform. We enable businesses to show the right thing to the right person at the right time. Our first product makes A/B Testing easy. In 2 years we’ve grown to become #1 in the category with 4,000+ paying customers including Starbucks, Disney, and Marketo. We're profitable and our revenue is growing 400% year-over-year. Join us in our mission to empower businesses to make better data-driven decisions.

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We have scale: 15 billion server requests/month. You’ll work on our amazing visual editor - a cutting edge tool / high performance low footprint iOS SDK or scaling our system to new heights in a continuous integration environment; we’re fast and nimble: 1-2 deployments every day.

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Dependents 100% covered for medical, dental, and vision. Unlimited vacation policy.
401k benefit.
Top-of-the-line MacBook Pro or MacBook Air and 30" monitor. Working with a great team and having a huge impact!
Re the back hijacking, I will check that out. I recently rewrote the embed view.
A soft landing on the moon! The first in 37 years!

A lunar rover!!!

The launch video was amazing, rocketcam all the way out to orbit. The final stage separation was absolutely gorgeous.