skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A good predictor of whether you'll repay a new debt is your track record of paying back prior debts. Credit reporting agencies act as a clearinghouse of information on your past and current debt repayment track record. All of that is pretty helpful to a smoothly functioning (and well-priced) lending/credit market.

The only thing that's gone wrong here is a merchant is (to my very lightly informed opinion) abusing that system in a way contrary to the original intent. That will almost surely get cleaned up in due time.
It's like birthdays, completely arbitrary - yet we instill it meaning.
I was following BTC when it had hit $200-300 and was in the news quite often. I considered buying some but after reading lots of opinion pieces, decided against it. Many people were showing graphs comparing the dot com bubble and the bitcoin bubble and warning others that BTC would settle nicely into a lower price. Those people were obviously wrong, wish I hadn't listened to them.
Because it doesn't have chargebacks.

A lot of services that allowed its users to purchase bitcoins without having to verify their identity and buy bitcoin using PP or CCs were abused by people using stolen PP and CC info. So they lost money if the real owner issued chargeback and bitcoins were already transferred.
Is creating new TLD's something that any registrar can initiate now? Who decides when new ones are needed and approves them? Some of these seem extremely niche compared to e.g. "com" or "net."
> Is there a surge in Chinese speculators or users?

Probably both, though its probably not simple to figure out the ratios.
So if in 5 years Bitcoin does not displace half of the sovereign currencies I pay you $10K. But if it does, you pay me 1 BTC. We need to formalise the measurement first, but what about the general outline?
We have been using a variant of this using websockets at work for about a year.
There is an old stockbroker joke about penny stocks.

Broker: "This stock is at 1 cent and could keep on going up."

Client: "BUY!"

The next day:

Broker: "Good news, the stock is at 3 cents and is showing no signs of slowing."

Client: "BUY!"

The next day:

Broker: "Awesome news, the stock is at 10 cents and people think it could hit 50 cents in a week."

Client: "SELL!"

Broker: " . . . to whom?"
So sell them at an exchange that doesn't suck at withdrawals. BTC is trivial to transfer.
Are these just in English, what about translations could be confusing.
Icecast?
Company A can report to the credit reporting agencies that they have an unpaid debt that has been sent to collections. If your furnace dies in the middle of the winter and you don't have enough cash on hand to buy a new one, you might attempt to put the purchase on credit. The store would check your credit status before opening an account with you.

In this case, the company filed a false report and will end up paying for it.
>There is seriously something wrong with an economy when millionaires are made for nothing but being first.

Tell that to every land speculator or homesteader who struck gold, oil or fertile land (but ignore the natives, they only complicate this). Being first is a huge part of any economy. They took the risk with their cpu cycles, electricity or money, if it's successful, they will get the payout.
Is Vimeo a good alternative, or is it also blocked?
Why?

If people are to use it for transactions, stability is useful.

High prices do mean there is more to adopt, true.
EToro are storing unencrypted passwords
See password reset, they have just sent me my password as plain text.
This game is to Balderdash as Cards Against Humanity is to Apples to Apples.

There seems to be a trend of taking classic games and putting up dirty clones of them on indiegogo. Not a bad thing, just an observation. I suppose they are filling a niche that the original game manufacturer can't pursue because it would damage their image to put out a game with naughty ideas.

PS. I would like to hear what actually went into making a physical manufactured party game in only 12 weeks.

EDIT: ultramundane828 expressed the same sentiment as me slightly before me. Having played cards Cards Against Humanity, it does innovate a little grammatically over Apples to Apples by replacing adjective cards with Mad Lib cards.
It's the curation that adds the value. Random words from a dictionary, uncurated, is not nearly as much fun.
This isn't a big deal to me, but considering how most scrappy search engine competitors are taking the maximum privacy angle against Goog, how are you approaching search privacy?
> Your own link shows catastrophic plans are not really catastrophic plans - they cover all sorts of non-catastrophies like preventative care, a therapist, maternity, etc

... Only a percentage (60%) and only after you reach the deductible (in my area that's over $6k), which is how these sort of high-deductible plans work (and is what I currently have because that's what was available before the exchanges). Again, from my link:

> A catastrophic plan generally requires you to pay all of your medical costs up to a certain amount, usually several thousand dollars. Costs for essential health benefits over that are generally paid by the insurance company.

Unlike a high-deductible plan that you may have now, the new ones do provide for 3 primary care visits annually as well as preventative care (essentially screenings and vaccines which end up saving everyone money).

> Lastly my income is low right now since I'm building a startup, so 1% won't hurt me much.

Since your income is low you would qualify for a subsidy and likely be able to get insurance for little to no cost. Or you could be bankrupted by some bad luck and pay a penalty for the privilege.
38% of the United States is farther north than Windsor, Canada
Right but this demand is coming from China (for the last 3 hours) and the other markets are just closing the gap as they catch up (some nice arbitrage opportunities if you have a CNY account).

If the trade spikes were on MtGox for USD I would agree that it is an inaccurate price but as MtGox has more trade volume than CoinBase, I think they just close the gap sooner.
IBM Watson Ecosystem
every web search site ranks results differently than every other one. There is no one 'standard' ranking or anything.

Some of them may rank them in ways more useful to more people of course. Getting ranking working well is pretty much the challenge in making a good web search site, and is how Google originally vaulted over it's competitors.

Asking to know "how the data is collected, collated, and sorted" is… asking for a lot. For one thing, it's pretty much 'trade secrets' -- lots of people would really like to know the answer to those questions about Google, but it would probably take a multi-volume book to answer it completely, and Google generally prefers not to share the details, as they are what makes Google what it is (and would also make it easier for people trying to spam google results)
Linux Black Friday deals
Personally I hate the "slide" animations when e.g. launching a new full-screen window. It takes about a second, but any keys I press during the animation seem to go into a blackhole (repro: full-screen chrome, open new window, start typing 123456789; typically 1-4 or 1-5 are lost).

Other than that, pretty happy (though I don't use many of the Apple apps).
Sad about two things. This didn't happen to me, so I don't have the standing to collect >$75k from this company for blatant FCPA and consumer law violations. And that no one has dropped dox on the principals of KlearGear.
So I watched the video, and I still have no idea what Jolla is.

I was not impressed by anything in the video, but that's besides the point.

If you're a technology company, this hipster crap is ok, but you need to start with explaining what it is and how it's better. Showing a bunch of gestures does nothing - Android can do that.
>In Python 3, you don't care about what they use internally. You don't need to.

I do need to know and I always care. My requirements may be different than those of most others because I write text analysis code and I need to optimize the hell out of every single step. I shiver at the thought that any representation could be chosen for me automatically.

Of course, nothing is stopping me from simply using the bytes type instead of str, but clearly the Python community has decided to go down a road I feel is entirely wrong so I'm not coming along.

>I know that just using UTF-8 everywhere would be cool, but that's not how the world works for various reasons. One is that UTF-8 is a variable length encoding which has some performance issues for some operations (like getting the length of the string. Or finding the n-th character).

I'm bound to live in a variable length character world unless I decide to use 4 byte code points everywhere, which is prohibitive in terms of memory usage. Memory usage is absolutely critical. Iterating over a few characters now and then to count them is almost always negligible.

The need to index into a string to find the nth character only comes up when I know what I'm looking for. Things like parsing syntax or protocol headers come to mind, and they are always ASCII. I don't remember a situation where I needed to know the nth character of some arbitrary piece of text and repeat that operation in a tight loop.

If one day I find myself in such a situation I will have to convert to an array of code points anyway.
I agree - the hearings were great exposure. I disagree with the conclusions people take from them. Quite frankly I can imagine only two futures for Bitcoin: one in which the USG controls it, and one in which the USG destroys it. Still, no telling when it will happen and if its the first case the price may yet double a few more times.

Disclaimer: I have 4 BTC and probably will not cash out for less than $100K per.
I'm afraid of Bitcoin becoming the world's only currency. Someone with enough computing power can massively game the system. I'm not saying that that can't happen with today's government driven currencies, but that there are at least other options right now. Maybe we shouldn't all switch to Bitcoin.
indeed, i assumed they were handing out a /128 because their ipv6 faq said they were handing out a /128.
If you can find a place to buy a macbook directly with bitcoins, you'll be OK. Selling BTC for dollars is whats tricky, as it requires money to pass through Gox's bank account. The banks don't really like BTC that much, so it's a pain. I've bought things directly with BTC before and it's an easy process.
Suggestion: add a text "elevator pitch" on a front page.

Forcing me to watch video is a sure way to Ctrl+F4
As someone who bought a single Bitcoin at $20, I think I'll hold on and enjoy the ride :)
http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/
because it's faster to serve the full fidelity track, with all sensor data for every lat/lng pair, straight from disk as a gzipped file. I can store a point reduced version in postgis for actual geo operations, since that only needs lat/lng pairs, and not at 1hz sampling.

Pulling 21k points (1.8mb of JSON) for a single recording out of disk into memory, turning it into JSON, sending it over the wire to the client, is slow (500ms just to query, pull off disk and turn into JSON). Serving the same data pre-compressed, is 2ms. This isn't even considering what it takes nginx to compress it on the fly for every request.
Or serious flaw will be discovered and it will go from $? to being worthless.

Or it will be declared illegal (unlikely IMO) so the businesses won't be able to accept it and it will be only used in markets dealing with illegal stuff, like SilkRoad.

Or it will be stable enough to be used as currency, and it will coexists with EUR/USD and other currencies.

I think that any of the above is more likely than your scenario.
Using BTC as money is an independent decision from holding BTC as an "investment."

If you have 0.02 BTC (~$20), you can spend $20 on a pizza, keeping your 0.02 BTC. Or you can spend 0.02 BTC on the pizza, and have $20 more USD to buy BTC with.

This of course assumes you can easily transact with BTC, and convert USD <-> BTC, which seems to be anything but a sure thing.
I think you're conflating frontend and back end. As they currently exist both asm.js and PNaCl frontends are LLVM, if just because it's a good C/C++ solution to parse and optimize. The backend is indeed an LLVM subset as of today for PNaCl and not asm.js, but it's a very restricted subset because the complex bitcode definition LLVM has was pruned a lot for PNaCl, both to distance it from LLVM churn and to make it implementable in another VM.

It is definitely possible to implement a non LLVM back end for PNaCl.

The bug you quote is quite the opposite of what you state: Mark was explaining how complex and potentially often varying LLVM's representation of atomics was. There is a need for atomics to express the full breadth of capabilities C11/C++11 has, but it has to be solved in a way that is close to the standard and no more, non of LLVM's quirks and legacy cruft (LLVM predates these standards, launched PNaCl does not). The primitives also have to be packaged portably so that they can be expressed correctly on any hardware targets (this happens to be tricky to get right, especially since Clang usually makes assumptions about the target). I think PNaCl got this one exactly right, but then again I'm the one who implemented this. :-)
Apperian Announces Strategic Partnership with IBM
Innovathon - Pitch for Dubai
Want to validate your early stage project? Live for 3 months in Dubai? Get some seed funding? Get product development and commercialization support?

If you can easily get to Gdynia in Poland (Central Europe) on Dec 13th-14th I encourage you to register for our event :-)

We're organizing Innovathon - live pitching to http://TURN8.co acceleration program powered by http://i360accelerator.com . Pitching will take place in cinema room at Pomeranian Science & Technology Park (http://ppnt.pl/en).

Registration open till Dec 9th! Any questions? Post here or sent to info@3hack.pl
Would you mind expounding a bit on what open source options you've tried so far? I've got an itch for a side project and I'd be extremely interested in exploring this space.
Well, say a company is looking for an Angular expert -- are they going to hire someone who's spent the last year doing Angular, along with 50 other things, or someone who's spent the last year hyper-focused on Angular? I think there are jobs for generalists for sure, but there are also jobs for super-pressing needs (read as $$$) for specific strengths. If you spread yourself too thin, you're not going to get the job for that one skill-set they need. I could be totally wrong, but that's how I approach it. Also note that it's assumed devs have some knowledge of other technologies, so I'm not saying don't learn plenty of stuff.
If bitcoin concept gets popular, why would the next set of adopters buy into btc instead of trying to be early adopters in a different technically equivalent cryptocurrency?
well the thing is.... all economic analyses seem to conclude that it is ridiculous.

The only thing keeping it alive is that people are still willing to buy/trade it. As long as that is the case, it will exist. But I don't agree with this idea that it could be rapidly increasing in price because its "a future world-changing technology". This argument has never made sense to me because it's simply 1 implementation of cryptocurrency and has not even performed its function as such. I'm sure there are better possible versions. In fact, I highly suspect that a better alternative has ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED!

The only reason Bitcoin is the giant that can't be defeated is because of the lure as an investment, and this is all a sham. Early adopters probably are doing "option D" and even though it's somewhat unnoticeable to consumers it is likely sowing the seeds of destruction for the environment. Perhaps because they're abusing users trust by selling for high prices that are bound to crash. I'm not sure... but the point is, eventually people will stop buying when they realize they're paying $1000 for a coin and they don't even know wtf it is.

As you said, only analysis of the fundamentals achieves anything. And these analyses have been done. And can be seen in the market. It's obvious at this point -- Bitcoin is worth what people believe it's worth. Fundamentally, it's nothing. They are sold for cash & then that cash is gone. Spent. The currency doesn't retain anything on it's own. The burden of maintaining the ecosystem stability is passed on to those who now have the money.

Similarly to the way in MLM a salesman's sub-tree is responsible for making the product move, unless they can find another to pass the product along to.
Nothing could keep them from doing that, except the unwillingness of users to use the government paper money instead of the real thing.

Gold has to be "converted" to paper to be practical. Bitcoin is already a whole lot more practical than almost any aspect of the modern money infrastructure, so there's no "killer app" for Bitcoin-backed currency.
Hi HN. Long-time reader, I rarely post but am very inspired by what I've read on HN over the years. Please critique the new creation!
The credit reporting system has long since gone beyond its original purpose and turned into a corporate tool of abuse. People are getting denied for jobs for their credit history.
Because increasing price will raise its visibility and attract more people to invest in bitcoins - and the more people hold bitcoins the more merchants will want to accept them
Now that you mention it, the first time I logged in on mavericks, I noticed a delay, akin to using msysgit on windows. I did fix this, I think by altering some of the parameters passed to the login command. Breaks a lot of other functionality, but it works.
Hello World Processing
Timely Dataflow in Naiad - video from RICON West 2013
I hadn't noticed the power button migrating into the keyboard until now (still have a 2010 MBP), that's a real step backwards in design / usability.
A supply-side model kinda sweeps all that under the rug. If everything else stays the same, and the difficulty of mining increases, the model predicts that the price will rise proportionally. Since it's rising really fast, that means something has changed on the demand side.
Agreed. Someone running the company was not smart enough to realize that the likelihood of them collecting the $3500 was low, and when the couple first hit the press with the "fine" they should have backed off and claimed it was some mistake. I don't know what blinds people from what seems like common sense.
It's probably a combination of general cleanliness and a desire to avoid mildew (one spore + humidity = army of spores).
There is nothing stopping a government from doing that. Anyone with the choice to receive 10 BTC or a 10 BTC fractional reserve-backed note may, however, have a strong preference for the 10 BTC due to a lack of trust of the reserve institution.
Bitcoin is not a traditional currency.

It's more like gold or another scarce commodity.

Bitcoin is an electronic commodity with no intrinsic value that has been rigged to be perfect for speculation.

What would a national bank do if the value of its currency exploded like this?

It would print more money, regulate interest rate or take other actions to keep the currency value more stable compared to other currencies.

There is no "bank" supporting Bitcoin.

Comparing Bitcoin to traditional currencies make people think about Bitcoin the wrong way.
It's almost worth creating a Facebook account just to bring justice to this... and then deleting it.
>Nuclear war is peanuts compared to climate change; this is an issue several orders of magnitude worse.

Hyperbole undermines veracity.
http://bitcoinity.org/markets/
Personally, I think loyalty programs should be broken up. Their very existence is premised on creating monopoly and cartel outcomes by round-about ways of curtailing competition; remember, that thing that our corporations pay lip-service to?

This may sound strange, but the best way to break up loyalty programs for, not only the airlines, but also hotels, is for someone to sue and get the IRS to start collecting taxes on income gained from loyalty programs. The hassle would not be worth it and they would die off; leading to more competition and lower rates.....actual free market competition.
Not only prove your identity, but also fork over your friends list. http://i.imgur.com/ATUOa9T.png
Bitcoin virtual currency breaks $1,000 mark
That's a perfect book topic, congratulations.

Do you have any interest in translating them to other languages? I would love to republish it in brazilian portuguese.
That's a good thing.

We spend too much time developing languages instead of environments. Unity is a good environment for developing games. If your goal is to make a game you should use Unity (or whatever... GameMaker has an HTML5 export module; use that). Javascript has nothing to offer you to enhance your productivity and develop your game.
Foreclosure is so common that a decent landlord will understand the situation. I'm a landlord myself and income trumps credit in most situations.

Bad credit can be overcome with a bigger deposit, higher rate, and proof of income. In the end those things still mean more money in his pocket as opposed to spending a few extra months futily trying to save a home in foreclosure.
About 12 million coins have been produced. The reward halved a few months ago, so mining is probably not your best bet now. Of course, if the value increases, then I'm wrong, but mining is quickly becoming a professionals game.
Cycling Clothing from Alimay Sports
Bitcoin is special because it has more users and recognition than litecoin, and it has more users and recognition because it's special.

A currency gets its value from the recognition by others of its use for trade. Bitcoin has more of that than the others.
While working at KPCC, a Los Angeles-area NPR affiliate, I wrote a Shoutcast replacement in Node.js that the station has been running in production for the past 18 months. It is open-sourced and lives at:

https://github.com/StreamMachine/StreamMachine

I'd love to get others involved in the project. It's been doing great work on the bread-and-butter live listeners, but there's so much more potential out there for building smarter clients and listening models.
Blackberry has no front-facing buttons and also uses only a gestures-based interface.
Governments money is 'backed up' by the need to pay taxes in it which in the US is a multi trillion a year demand and creates a lot of stability. aka Get paid in bitcoins? The IRS does not care you need to pay taxes in USD which means you need to sell bitcoins and buy USD.

As to being a fixed currency there would be a lot more bitcoins in circulation than actually exist as soon as banks started lending money and no you don't want to try and keep 100+k USD worth of bitcoins secure by your self it's just a fucking bad idea. Which means banks which means loans which inflates the currency. Of course because governments can't print money to bail out banks when they fail you just lose your money anyway and they will fail.

PS: Non private wallet = bank. The reason we don't see loans is because people don't want to borrow money in bitcoins.
I can fully recognize that Java is a fast and powerful language, but it also makes me want to shove huge wooden slivers up my fingernails. That doesn't change despite the truth of your statements.
Vimeo is terribly slow, at least from here in India.
Quora: What tools does Facebook use for internal communication?
The lesson you've learned is to pile on technical debt?

The real lesson is: if you can write your app in a much faster framework with equivalent development speed, why even waste time to write it in Rails.
Quora: How is Spotify so fast?