skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those unfamiliar, a good framework for thinking about these choices is the Crossing the Chasm model. A brief summary: you can divide people up into innovators (will try new tech because it's shiny), early adopters (will try new tech because they are willing to work to gain a major advantage), early majority (will use the new thing if it's better, safe, and easy), late majority (will use the new thing if everybody else is), and laggards (death before novelty). The "chasm" bit of the title is that a lot of tech dies between early adopters and early majority because both the product and the marketing have to change to suit the new audience.

I think a "why the shiny thing is unsafe" essay is reasonable from two groups: 1) early majority types telling other early majority types that no, tech X isn't ready for them yet; and 2) people who have been early adopters for other tech, and are investigating whether their particular needs match the benefits of this tech.

I like this essay, and I think it's analysis of people self-justifying is really good. But I think it's a little over-contemptuous of people going with the herd. Animals herd for a reason: there's safety in numbers.

By nature, I'm not herd-oriented. E.g., I'm typing this on a Linux laptop. And when Raganwald was selling Macs, I was doing NeXT development, because it was clearly better tech than PCs, and also way better than Macs. I felt pretty smug, and we wrote some great software. But in a practical sense it was a stupid choice: NeXT only got uptake in a few niche markets, and Jobs promptly fucked all of those people over when he reclaimed his throne at Apple. Commercially, all of the people who chose Windows-based systems over the NeXT platform made the right choice.

If you want to reach the herd, I think you have to, as Crossing the Chasm says, use the innovators and the early adopters to build a beachhead. So yes, don't sell your novel tech to the early majority; they won't buy it. But that's temporary. Dominance among the innovators gives you access to the early adopters. Dominance among the early adopters gives you access to the early majority.
>Is 'page size' alone enough to worry about this sort of thing? We don't download all the assets used every time we load a page.

Actually we do download most of them. Browser caches are mostly useless for most of the stuff, including widely use JS frameworks and fonts. There were a few widely circulated articles on this.
They claim that it's "biodegradable." I don't know the details, but I'm guessing the polymer breaks apart into smaller, benign pieces over time? I wonder if that means they have to make it right before using it, and what, exactly, triggers the breakdown.
> The Navy’s newest warship is powered by WebGL

omg ymmd
The parabola results from assuming that the force due to gravity on the object is constant (which is a decent approximation over short vertical and horizontal distances). In fact it will change magnitude and direction as the projectile moves.
@dmix, good points. However I want to clarify that the point of the article is to provide my counterargument against Zuckerbergian ideology that privacy is not needed/dead. If you are tech savvy enough to escape G/F dragnet surveillance it doesn't mean that others are and there lies the problem.
I had a bit of trouble depositing money (my fault) and their customer service I thought was fine. Did you ask for any help?
I call it bullshit. I just asked that question to a seminar of paedagogic students, without a single person with physics background. 2 Choose answer the first answer, 3 the sencond one, the other 20 choose the correct answer. I expect much better results for students with physics background.

/edit, well bullshit is a bit strong, but replication failed
Does coinbase work in the UK? I thought it was US only.
Why couldn't Ubuntu do that?

Is it because device manufacturers won't put trust in anything but the Android brand?
There's plenty of welfare in the US, and stable and reasonably intelligent individuals (though with dubious ethics) are already capable of exploiting it to never have to work. In some parts of the country homeless people make tens of thousands per year tax-free from panhandling and choose to live the way they do. (For more typical earnings you really have to look on a city-by-city basis. The US spans a continent.) I think the main problem with homelessness though is that there's just not much support or sympathy for the mentally ill -- who make up the majority of homeless people. If you're mentally ill, a lot of places won't even let you in a homeless shelter. Your cost-to-live-stably also goes up a lot due to the prices of medication. Furthermore, low IQ is often found in individuals with the types of mental disorders that can easily lead to homelessness, so you get the double whammy that even if they manage to get stable, they're still limited in what sorts of economic activity they can do since higher wages usually require a higher IQ. Minimum wage is not enough to cover the cost of living and the cost of medication. Some states have better support for the mentally ill than others, but it's a messy problem all around.
It's coming from China[1]. A LOT OF MONEY from China. Like $millions. That's how all these early adopters in the USA are being able to cash out millions and the price is not crashing.

They seem to like the fact it separates them from the US dollar, as well as allowing Chinese residents more control over their money and a potential store of wealth comparable to gold (although far more volatile).

Of course I still believe this is unsustainable, but in a strange form this is a wealth rebalancing act on a global scale... the rich Chinese giving money to the US citizens.

As long as the rest of the world doesn't go bitcoin mad and let the Chinese cash out again, then if it ever pops there will be a lot of wealth lost in China.

[1]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-27/bitcoin-surges-to-1...
Local bitcoins.
sure we can detect it from the inside, but its incredibly naive and arrogant imo to assume anything about the outside world. as a programmer i am very aware of exactly how much power i have over the insides of my target hardware - i can easily imagine creating a simulation where any 'life' inside of it would be subject to utterly different rules.

everything like conservation of energy, even the concepts of mass and energy, momentum, velocities, space and time are completely unrequired for the simulation. you would never ben able to guess these constraints from the inside without finding some bug or unintended behaviour - and even then, if you are used to a different set of concepts you wouldn't recognise the artefacts as being due to energy or mass constraints, the dimensionality of space-time or any of those things... there wouldn't be anywhere near enough evidence to draw that conclusion.
Choosing Scala
If "ease of converting to native code" is your criterion for "close to assembly language," then Brainf*ck is about the closest to assembly language you can get, because you can write a BF->x86 JIT in about 100 lines of C: http://blog.reverberate.org/2012/12/hello-jit-world-joy-of-s...

So if that's what we're going for, we should forget asm.js and PNaCl and just use BF and expect very close to native speed.

But this won't in fact give native code speed, despite how easy BF is to JIT. Why do you suppose that is?
Winamp's woes: how the NSA

This was HN just a few days ago.
Not much.

In the current market, you're supposed to upgrade your laptop every 3-4 years anyway.
Hey zrgiu_, there isn't a native observer for that action yet but the closest call is to check if the user is inside an email. I've created a gh issue out of it so hopefully you'll be able to set triggers with the observer method, instead of setInterval
As far as I understood it: the proposal doesn't specify this. This (among other questions) has to be solved by the parliament in case the proposal is accepted.
I would like to point everyone's attention to the fact that the difficulty of buying bitcoins has to do with the current banking system and regulations, not with Bitcoin itself. If you could buy bitcoins by swiping your card, its price would currently be more like $100k, not $1k. Accepting Bitcoin and trading in Bitcoin are the easiest things in the world.
Because the 3% credit card fee is already baked into the price of goods you buy. You just don't realize it because merchants are not allowed to visibly offer a cash discount or charge a credit card fee.
Plenty of private sellers still do.
> There are thousands of similar examples

Not actually
Life evolves to improved fitness.

The polymer works by destabilizing the cell membrane. A mutation which reduces the efficacy of that mechanism would, in fact, promote resistance to the method. Whether or not the polymer design could be modified to adapt to that change (and what the costs of this might be) are an open (and very interesting) question.

However: it's virtually certain that widespread and indiscriminate use would promote resistance to the existing design and method.
Abuse Twitter to get x5 more exposure per tweet
I was with you until the final sentence, which makes you sound emotionally involved rather than putting forward a logical argument.

That aside, let me retort;

> Its supposed to be easy but it isnt

I agree, and I'll be hugely surprised if some enterprising individual doesn't solve the friction soon.

> No I havent handed my photo to my bank and I wont do so for all the shady btc sites mentioned here. I dont hand my ID or "get verified" to amazon when buying stuff or other currencies either.

I agree. I used bitbargain which was essentially as easy - and documentation free - as using my internet banking to transfer some funds to some bloke's bank account, who then released coin to me. It made me nervous doing it (what other system asks you to log in to your internet banking and xfer funds to some guy's account, simply trusting that they will deliver?) but it's about as easy as it gets currently.

It's a new frontier, it's bound to be rough around the edges. And make no mistake, buying BTC is the edge. Once you've passed that hurdle, the simplicity is beautiful.
5 latest social networks you don't know about
Does this still work in Unicode? It seems like it'd cause the Boyer-Moore lookup tables to blow up in size.
Thanks for the suggestion. Should be fixed by now.
The only practical way to buy litecoins right now is buying bitcoins first, then buying litecoins with bitcoins.
Kraken.com: Up to 10.000$ a month _without_ the need to be verified (SEPA transfer). I signed up and had my EURs on the platform after two days of SEPA transfer.
no matter how much the presentation tries to play down the () issue, it's there.

I'm getting tired of statements like this. I've been using Clojure for a couple of years now. I got over the () "issue" after a couple of weeks, once I discovered Counterclockwise for Eclipse (and, eventually, Emacs paredit or smartparens). You just don't notice them after a short period.

In general, editors that "understand" Lisp-like syntax are more powerful than other code editors. Being able to select forms - anything enclosed in a (), {} or [] - with a key combination and move them easily around the hierarchy (also see barfage & slurpage in the paredit cheatsheet: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PareditCheatsheet) makes editing code faster than other languages.

As for the "easy to read" argument, I now find Clojure easier to read than, say, Java because there's generally less of it.
You're right, it should be easier, there's some startups trying to fix this (coinbase, most notably), but there's still a long way to go.

>I dont hand my ID or "get verified" to amazon when buying stuff or other currencies either.

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

This is for legal compliance w/ anti-money laundering laws that many financial institutions, currency transmitters etc have to follow
Although I agree with many things that the author says, I wouldn't say practically impossible.

I, myself, have bought bitcoins and set up wallets for two friends and a family member, regular people as the author would say. After seriously warning them, and letting them know that chances are that they will lose all their investment, they transferred me the money and I gave them the instructions for the wallet.

However, I believe that the more the bitcoin economy grows the easier will be for people to acquire them. I also hope that people will start spending them, instead of just keeping them as an investment.
Then again, RSS is how "tech savvy" (incl developers) would use twitter. Sorry I digress, maybe I do take RSS too seriously. But for me it is really important to draw a distinction in how a service is consumed. Using a website often means the possibility of being unconsciously engaged, thus spending there more than the desired time.
This is so self-evident, that I consider every talk of 'minimum income' to be populist bullshit.

It's also evil, as a large part of this income would go to funding alcohol and drug makers. If anyone needs further evidence, consider the costs of healthcare in the US vs Europe
College is different than food. Everyone cares about going to most prestigious school they can afford (that will accept them), which creates a bidding war. This is actualy very similar to housing markets in desirable neighourhoods - everyone wants to live there while there's room for maybe one person in ten, so the market forces set the price at a level beyond the means of the bottom 90%.

Food, on the other hand, is a globally traded commodity. There's no reason for the food prices in the US to go up if basic income was to be introduced there.
I'm a Dutch citizen with a Dutch bank account (with online banking) who can do European transfers with ease. It doesn't matter where I live, as far as this concerned I'm the same as any Dutch/European citizen.
Most interesting amazon reviews ever
Ask HN: Has anyone heard from Georgia Tech OMSCS admissions yet?
Their FAQ says all decisions will be out by Dec 1st. I was wondering if anyone has heard back yet?
It's basically that, formulated into a reinforcement learning algorithm.

It's innovative because this combination which is unique to Marcus Hutter's Ph.D. thesis basically "solves" the problem of general AI.. if given infinite computation resources. It's provable mathmatically to the be the best possible artificial general intelligence, with constant-time operation.. it's just that constant happens to be larger than the known universe.

That sounds useless, but it's not. What is shows is that artificial (general) intelligence is really an optimization problem, and provides a (theoretical) benchmark comparison, and directs current research into more practical algorithms which approximate that ideal within realistic space and time constraints.
Original submission title was: "The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing."
I had a good experience buying via: http://bitbargain.co.uk
I'll join, this is fun:

- Thank HN: 127 days since I quit Facebook

- Dropbox: The Hottest Startup You've Never Heard of

- Facebook detects if you are not a pilot

- Reddit traffic doubles in less than 600 bytes

- How to break in Gmail & Major Torrent client for work on Jeopardy
I'd be interested to see if this has changed much in the almost 7 years since that study was done.
When the primary way of trading bitcoin is through unregulated exchanges based in Slovenia and Bulgaria the bigger concern should be your ability to get your money out in the future.
This was a DESIGNED polymer, made explicitely through chemistry to attack a particular animicule.

So are HIV protease inhibitors. Go read the facts on those, at CDC, FDA and elsewhere.

Modern drugs are designed, just like this polymer.

And your 'glib' comments are still glib.
A few months ago, I decided to buy some bitcoin. I did a little research, ended up on coinbase, and linked my bank account and my phone number, and a few days later, I owned a few bitcoin. It was a pretty straightforward process, and as far as I know, they're the only straightforward way to buy bitcoin.

I predict that in a few years, Coinbase will be a billion dollar concern as long as they keep doing a good job and their system isn't compromised. Keep it up!
You should make this into a twitter bot, à la Two Headlines https://twitter.com/TwoHeadlines.
I don't agree. The first time I acquired bitcoins it was through this website: https://localbitcoins.com
I signed up, posted a request for a meeting and two hours later I met a guy at a main station of a European capital where I got my bitcoins.
Few days later I signed up for MtGox. Again, the verification process took around 24 hours and from that point I was able to buy and sell bitcoins using my regular bank account.
If 47% of students fail that "pen on the Moon" question -- that means that about half of professionals are clueless about physics.

On the other hand, most professionals are quite functional in their role (if it wasn't the case, why would employers pay them?).

These two observations mean that understanding of physics is not mandatory for being functional professional.
Advertising and linking to every social network under the sun. As well as a lot of gratuitous javascript dancing baloney.
>> "The gravity of the moon can be said to be negligible, and also the moon's a vacuum, there is no external force on the pen. Therefore it will float where it is."

That one's almost correct; it's just an issue of scale; they don't realize how big/heavy the moon actually is.
This is amazing!

I got:

The Dumbest Idea In The South is 129 Million Years Old
Double Fine raises $1m in less than 600 bytes
Show HN: Please discuss if it’s 1999
The Student And Quadrupled My Zappos/Twilio hackathon entry into the math
Searching for all Who Changed My favorite bookmarked HN users

Also

How Khan Academy is the Future of Education
What it’s like to work for Google

I'm pretty sure these are actual titles (lookback = 3)

Thanks for the laugh :)
Really? You think it's OK that hundreds of thousands of people strangely only have access to pre-processed foodstuffs, because shipping and storage regulations, geographical distances, poverty etc mean they can't put fresh healthy items alongside their emblazoned Coca-Cola refrigerators? In rural areas like Mexico where tomatoes are left on the vine because NAFTA made it cheaper to buy U.S. vegetables and corn (thanks subsidies), and a bottle of water DOES cost more than a can of coke and it's still owned by Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kellogs, Kraft: they all make sugar water and empty calorie products, providing cheap consumables to the population thanks to agricultural subsides and tax breaks. There is nothing good, at all, about these companies and if they all disappeared tomorrow perhaps for a day or two we'd be oh! where's my coke! And then buy some caramel coloured pop from somewhere else. Do you miss Asbestos and CFCs? Weren't they convenient also?
Not really, just use http://virwox.com/ and you can Bitcoins through credit card or paypal instantly.

There is a daily account limit though of $110 for new accounts, after 10 days of $150 etc.
They also provide escrow. The seller can release funds on their phone, and you'll get an authenticated notification on your phone immediately.
Suggestion: filter the titles that are identical to real ones. Or maybe it was part of the plan, demonstrating how they are indistinguishable.

My deadly disease was just a website.

IBM's "Watson" finally ready for preorder.

TileMill — an application for making my daughter cry.

"Anonymous" Hackers Take Down Megaupload Video

Google finally has a natural, almost visceral aversion to complexity

Syrian Internet Is a Hero

IRS claims it does not compute

Stripe raises $18 million from affiliate links on "Ad-Free" blog

Why I use paper to wipe my butt every day.

Apple not providing LGPL webkit source code 23 years later and you're still loving
Getting somewhat off topic, but from the article he's referencing:

>Top-notch functional programming

What exactly is it that makes people who have never done functional programming think javascript offers "top-notch" functional programming? It offers the bare minimum to be able to do functional programming, but that is a far cry from "top-notch".
$ touch foo
$ chmod +x foo
$ ./foo
$ echo $?
0
Everyone of consequence understands it has to be paid for, and thus it's not a net income win for everyone. So you're refuting an obtuse interpretation of "everyone gets it" that only the very naive might believe.

The point of "everyone gets it" is to simplify administration, soften the stigma, and eliminate the sort of marginal-disincentive cliffs that patchwork 'progressive' benefits often create.
This article goes over useful debugging technique using Eclipse:

http://www.cavdar.net/2008/09/13/5-tips-for-debugging-java-c...

- You can set breakpoint only for "Exception"

- You can set "Step Filtering" to avoid JDK standard classes (or libraries that you know won't cause the bugs)

- The Expression Evaluation also supports code-assist/code-completion

It's really tough to beat IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ these days with plenty contributors and strong companies behind them churning new features everyday.
Why is the price so high above the norm on Bittylicious ?
What are you talking about? You can buy AND sell in coinbase.
Negative income tax is one way to implement basic income. There are others.
I'm more worried what the effect of the Chinese government potentially outlawing BitCoin would have.

Both China and the US government have given BitCoin a tacit (and not-so-tacit) endorsement, China with a pro-BitCoin documentary on state television, and the US with Senate hearings that appeared to suggest the US is not going to move to outlaw it but rather regulate it. I do not see the US government giving its citizens the impression that using BitCoin would be legitimate and then going back on that suggestion - there would be too many vested interests, with a lot to lose, and they would not be cool with that.

The Chinese government is more powerful than the US government, however. There is a chance that they could see their citizens pour their savings into BitCoin and still move for a regulatory crackdown. I'm still concerned that they will believe BitCoin is getting out of control and their ability to control the funds exiting and entering the country through BitCoin is diminished.

The bottom line: the more countries that start using BitCoin, that more stable it will become, the less a single country's regulatory action will impact the price.
what about https://safello.com/ ? worked perfect for me - at least here in sweden.
> How many times do we need to re-define the same concept? Artificial Intelligence, Human Level Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Strong Artificial Intelligence etc....

Every time the name gets co-opted to mean something else. These days "artificial intelligence" == "machine learning and natural language processing" which is most definitely not what TFA is about.
The article mentions the difference in times from forcing mmap.

$ grep --mmap "fleagle" *
grep: the --mmap option has been a no-op since 2010
...

Coincidentally, the article is from 2010.
My browsers are all set to dump cache and cookies upon exit.
If you look at the code, I filter all titles that are substrings (including identical) of real ones. Sometimes the Markov chain will simply add a single word to it, though, so it gets through the filter. Any suggestions on how to improve it?
This is kinda true but at lease on your first point still not for regular people. My brother wants to buy some and If I told him, "yeah just go get a pile of asics and sell them on craigslist" I'm sure that would be just as difficult for him. Then he needs to keep a wallet, regular backups and a marginal level of network security.
Yes I have, they have not responded to my support tickets in 7 days now.