skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
about a year ago i wrote a paper on bitcoin for a university course entitled "what is money?". my basic thesis regarding the future of btc is the following:
as bitcoin takes over the regulation of the money supply, nation states and their central banks lose much of their agency in respect to economic and fiscal policy. it is thus in the best interest of nation states to restrict the use of bitcoin such that bitcoin will not take over to become more important than national currencies.

since i wrote this bitcoins value has soared, but i still hold that opinion. national governments might tolerate bitcoin as a sandbox playground for now, but once it gets widely adopted and threatens national currencies, they can choose between giving up vast economic and fiscal powers or restricting bitcoin. i see no reason why they should choose the former.

did i convince you? want to get rid of your bitcoins? send me some: 17Dk1cugCynTaNdmQihF7tproJgyKyWiwr :-)
Haven't many detainees in Guantanamo bay been held hostage BY the US, for longer than this?
1) agreed. there's solid evidence that Mars sends junk to us - not sure about the other way around.

2) does that matter, since they're in orbit, thus zero/microgravity? You still need energy to leave an orbit, whether up or down, I don't see how it makes a difference. There's no friction to speak of to make "down" a direction that things are predisposed to move in. Over ridiculous time scales sure, but ridiculous time scales are nothing like human time scales, so we still have many orders of magnitude difference if we fling stuff at Mars intentionally.
Nope. Gold is used in limited quantities for plating pins in electronics, covering space helmets, and probably a few other things. It's really not that valuable for getting shit done and need a lot of it type of stuff.
That clears up the semantic similarity issue for me nicely. Having them as a literal was too awkward, and honestly, pretty ugly.

Thanks for the heads-up!
I wish them the best of luck; I was just explaining why as a developer, I'm a bit leery of a new platform like this. I feel for them, as I know it's a very tough spot to be in.
I can't help but think a lot of these "experts" can ONLY see from their narrow perspective. Bitcoin the protocol is just scratching the surface.
I am on salary, and therefore, I don't get any added benefit by working more than my 40. There are people in other departments that are blatantly taken advantage of, and wind up working 60+ consistently. I love developing software, and I even do it in my free time, but in my freelance projects, I charge by the hour. I don't do a bunch of extra work for free because I love what I do; I love what I do AND I recognize that it has value for the people I'm doing it for, and I should be compensated accordingly.
The New York Times editors write all the headlines, even for op-eds.
> The limit is actually there to limit the size of a block. It has nothing to do with transaction fees.

Again, the limit is there to create a market with transaction fees. People jostle for space in the block and a market develops around how much people are willing to pay to get into the next block. It's based on the assumption that miners pick the transactions with the highest fees to include in their blocks, which does happen to a certain degree.
Yes, although this can be more limited in practice: unless you're using the exact same version of a resource as everyone else you're getting a cache miss. In the case of something like jQuery, there are such a wide range of in-the-wild versions that most users are going to end up with many cached releases other than the one which you're using.

That's not the end of the world as long as the CDN DNS + server connection overhead is reliably better than your own but if you already use a decent CDN that's not a given and it might prove a de-optimization if the resource in question can be delivered in less time than it takes to perform an otherwise unnecessary extra DNS lookup and server connection. For high latency networks that's worth monitoring and reviewing closely as it's often a net-loss.
If this claim is true, the author is certainly not the one you should be listening to for such a topic. I suspect a sponsored article paid by a third party, as it seems to contribute to the confusion of the uninformed about bitcoin. But then they say never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

>> "The developers of bitcoin are trying to show that money can be successfully privatized."

There is so much bias in this sentence that I don't even know where to start.

First of all, the developers of bitcoin are not necessary trying to show anything, are also not necessary the ones or the only ones. Bitcoin is an experiment, and they say that explicitly everywhere. Second, people encouraging the use of bitcoin are way bigger than what the author seems to imply, It's now an economy worth billions, remember?

>> "sophisticated algorithms guaranteeing the anonymity"

Again, bitcoin does not guarantee anonymity. They say that explicitly here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Anonymity

>> "bitcoin is tiny; at the current exaggerated exchange rate, the total projected volume of “coins” is worth less than the gross domestic product of Mongolia"

_is_ tiny now doesn't give you a clue about it's future size.

"But the monetary philosophy behind this web-based phenomenon can be traced back to one of the oldest theories of money."

Web-based? Seriously?

I honestly stopped reading to do my brain a favor.
1) Comments are enabled as a service by blockchain.info. For details on how the Genesis Block (and comment by Satoshi) was formed, look at the Bitcoin Wiki[1]

2) Coins are being sent. The Developer page says you must send at least 0.00000001 BTC. Edit: actually 500000 Satoshi.

3) Agree. So does the service. See the Developer Page[2]

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

[2] http://www.proofofexistence.com/developers
This article gives many headaches. It's a bit nonsensical to try and peg Bitcoin to right wing ideology. It's even more nonsensical to associate Hayek with Thatcher and call Hayek a "darling of the right".

The guy was every bit a classical liberal, like nearly all of the US' founding fathers, emancipationists and suffragettes. Classical liberalism is decidedly anti-collectivist and modern conservatives are much more collectivist than individualist: "support our troops", faith-based education, corporations as people. Classical liberal ideology predates the modern conservative and liberal thought that grew from it and you can't just decide to associate him with modern ideology.

I'd even say this article is deliberately deceptive.
This pull request makes the Octocat sad
Using samba is legitimately less painful.
JavaScript everywhere ...
Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.

E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings

Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.

The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.

Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.

Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.
Rose to stardom? Where did you read that in my comment?

All I'm saying is that career trajectories are very different between the two industries. Of course you won't see people with entertainment-type careers in the video games industry. They're two totally different types of sausage.
I'm not completely cynical about the general public. I firmly believe that most people are good trustworthy people who are kept in line by their own sense of what is right and wrong, not the law. However I am aware that there is a small fraction of the general public that makes a living scamming the largely innocent and trusting general public.

If I hear about somebody's house burning down on the local news, I might chip in a few dollars so that they can get their kids new clothes or whatever. I hear the same story, on reddit, 4chan, HN, whatever, from the alleged victim, and they are coming to me with this story and a collection jar? I'm sorry, I am going to require at least some local news confirmation, and it seems like even that isn't good enough with some of these scams.

And don't even get me started on how in most of these cases the jump from "here is my sob story" to "and that is why I need money" is completely missing. The connection there is clear when a house burns down, but "I threw something out, then later learned it was worth a lot"? "I am a server who was insulted/was not tipped"? Uhuh. If I see a donation cup, and no connection between "sob story"->"now I need lots of money", I don't think that there is any rational conclusion besides "it's a scam".
Latest Lie: Obama Says He Never Made Fun of “Teabaggers” …Not True
Musically yes, code-as-performance no. Indeed, this mainly demonstrates a) what a bad interface text is and b) how heavily some proponents are leaning on using samples of other music. I think it's significant that Autechre (generally acknowledged as the the kings of experimental electronic music) compose mainly within Max and build their live performances around a mix of their own sample library and abstractions of their Max tools to the rather simpler patching of the Nord Modular G2.
I'm having trouble seeing what you're balking at. The title is accurate. Do you think that it's somehow immoral or unethical for her to focus on Levinson's plight?
Thanks Ilya, great article and overview!
Todo List App using C and Backbone
The whole article (willfully?) misunderstood Bitcoin's nature. It even implied that Bitcoins are issued by Satoshi himself.

I think it's good to take a critical look at Bitcoin when the price rises so rapidly, but this article is more like a political hit piece than anything with economic merit.
Bike, Ethiopia maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike

Let alone other languages...
So your choices are to maintain cash resertves in USD and take a guaranteed 2% inflation loss on the chin, or keep it in Bitcoin with unpredictable, but upward trending movement (as coins are removed from the pool with loss, death, etc.). I'm not sure that decision is so clear-cut.
I don't think gold failed as a currency, I could pretty much go anywhere in the world with a bar of gold and exchange it for currency to buy whatever I want. It is still a universal currency, although not an everyday currency.
Inflation definitely isn't a separate issue. It's a fundamental issue in the topic of currencies and money, as in deflation.

Inflation is the expansion of money supply. Once bitcoin reaches full supply, by definition there can be no further inflation from bitcoin. There can be price fluctuations in the value of bitcoin, but not inflation. It's necessary to differentiate between prices going up / down, as opposed to inflation / deflation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti_EP
Zed, you are my fucking hero. Seriously.
Right, but consider it in terms of what you gain, and what you lose.

In terms of what you gain, encapsulation might save time, as in some circumstances you can keep the same API without changing the underlying representation of data.

But the price you pay is that you need to reimplement some subset of the functionality a data structure already has, every time you write a new class. You might need to write accessors, iteration, transversal, searches, serialisation, merging, and a whole bunch of other things you get for free with a data structure. Encapsulation means continually re-implementing the wheel, which takes time.

Another huge problem with encapsulation is that you lose transparency and constraints. If I have a system represented fully or in part by a data structure, it gives me visibility and certain guarantees. For example, if I set a key in a map to a value, I know that when I read that key I'll get the same value out. You have no such guarantees with objects.

Encapsulation trades possible gains for certain losses. This might be acceptable, if you had some reason to believe you stood to gain a lot more than you'd lose. But there's no empirical evidence to suggest that there are any significant gains in practice from encapsulation. However you look at it, it seems a really bad trade.

Purely anecdotally, my own experience is that idiomatic OOP design requires an order of magnitude more refactoring than data-driven design.
Are they American by citizenship ? If not, your statement is useless as it is outside the scope of the article which is clearly about an American hostage.
That's not my reading; I believe what he is getting at (similarly brought up in Graeber's book) is that when the government controls a large enough share of the economy, the sine qua non of "money" is that you can pay taxes with it. That doesn't require anything about the historical origins of money.
Yeah, so all this just points to an opportunity within the ebook realm to create a more refined experience. It does not necessarily mean physical books are superior in any way.
Hi, well done for starting something.

Your biggest challenges without knowing you or your business idea as well as you do are:

………Who are my customers?
………What problem am I solving for them?
………What is the solution?
………Will they pay me for the solution?

So what you should be doing is resolving those challenges.

I would go lean and do the following

Come up with a startup idea - you have done this
Document your major assumptions/risks - I have done this above but you could tailor it a bit more for your idea
Develop an interview script to test the assumption
Find customers to interview
Interview the customers
Interpret your results, and
Go back to Step 1
> No, its flat. A flat tax is not progressive. The point of a progressive tax system is that the marginal impact is greater at higher income levels.

Marginal impact is greater. Using the numbers I listed above your marginal tax rate at a income of $10k/year is NEGATIVE 100%, at an income of $100k/year it would be 0%, at $500k/year it would be 8%, at $1m/year it would be 9%... asymptotic increasing towards 10%.

> ...there is always a positive incentive to higher income

Sorry, you are correct. I should have said there is increased income doesn't increase disincentives.

> Only if the flat rate is set very high compared to the existing rates paid by most of the population.

The point wasn't being made on total net revenue but on cost per dollar collected due to compliance enforcement and bureaucratic overhead. Regardless the flat tax rate CAN be set very high as long as there is a corresponding offset in the MBI. Ultimately the ACTUAL rate people pay could be similar to the amount they currently pay but normalized over the population as a whole.

> If this includes taxing capital gains as income

> To do this, government has to alter the definition of taxable income

Which is why I specifically mentioned ALL income.

> This does not eliminate their ability to make similar decisions in the future

This is very true, and probably the strongest argument you made in your post. Hopefully such exemptions would "stand out" with such a simplified tax structure but any government that exists will continually work to expand it's power at the expense of the governed.

> Everybody feels the effect of rate changes now

Everybody does NOT feel the effects of a rate change as often lower tax rates are unmodified while higher tax rates are adjusted.

> Define "market freedom".

Sorry, "market freedom" is both to general and arguable incorrectly used in this case. I should have said it equalizes market manipulation by the government.
2) Those 500000 satoshis are sent to the proofofexistence people and they keep them. In the actual proof transaction only 1 satoshi is sent to each of the proof addresses.
But silver was successfully used as a currency for a long time in history of certain countries.
Start-up Metrics that Matter by Dave McClure
Heroku lets you use ClearDB which is a MySQL clone - 100% compatible with MySQL.

As far as the underlying OS goes, it is Linux - but that shouldn't matter to you since your interaction with the servers your application is running on will be limited.
"After all, no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government..."

Ahem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

You can't slap a sticker saying "public-minded!" on a government, and expect it to therefore be public-minded, any more than you can slap an "environmentally friendly!" sticker on a coal power plant and expect it to stop polluting.

"What kind of role, if any, should a government take in supervising a parent's choice of genes for their child? Could parents deliberately choose genes for schizophrenia? If enhancing a child's intelligence is expensive, should governments help ensure access, to prevent the emergence of a cognitive elite? You can propose various institutions to answer these policy questions—for example, that private charities should provide financial aid for intelligence enhancement—but the obvious next question is, "Will this institution be effective?" If we rely on product liability lawsuits to prevent corporations from building harmful nanotech, will that really work?

I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is "Liberal democracy!" That's it. That's his answer. If you ask the obvious question of "How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?" or "What if liberal democracy does something stupid?" then you're an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

I once called this kind of thinking "the divine right of democracy". But it is more precise to say that "Democracy!" functioned for him as a semantic stopsign. If anyone had said to him "Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!", he would have asked the obvious next questions: "Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?""

http://lesswrong.com/lw/it/semantic_stopsigns/
I had the same problem with Chinese people but I'm much better now (I live in China). Here's a funny story. I had been dating this girl for a few days and I once walked past her on the street without recognizing her. She said something like "Hey Oli" and I immediately realized it was the girl I was dating. I had to pretend I was looking at the floor and didn't see her face but that was a lie.
I find the Kindle app for Android and Kindle Cloud Reader have pretty good support for electronic highlighting and note-taking. Not sure about the Kindle hardware devices though.
Sony's Digital Paper looks promising... and pricey! [1]

[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sony-Digital-Paper-Has-13-3-I...
https://sailfishos.org/about-license.html

Our goal with the Sailfish OS is to develop an open source operating system in co-operation with the community, thus ensuring the development of a best-of-breed operating system.

So it looks like the software will be open source. I just hope that the device will not be locked down..
Obama NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit Enemies
Clickable
http://www.ommageo.com/
http://solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown_new/index.php
The future of dance music is to get even more fragmented. There have been many scenes in the past and there will be more in future that never get near radio or festival stages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Networ...
It probably will, but that doesn't matter

Other crypto-currencies already exist and there will only be more. Paul Graham was right when he pointed out that "hackers love it"—that key point means people are going to continue to evolve the general idea. If deflation proves to always be a serious problem, I'm sure hackers will build in something to solve that. Anonymity is a problem, so Zerocoin is tackling that. And Litecoin tackles other problems.
White Wine and Beer Important Sources of Arsenic
"and it could easily become valueless if users lose faith."
About as easily as religion losing its grip if believers lost faith...
This can happen, but not "easily".
"An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion", is what I'd like to think about this.
If by limited quantities you mean "about 400 tons a year" (and that's not counting dentistry or jewelry) then yes.

11,666,666 troy ounces

$15,108,332,470 at today's prices.

If you do count jewelry, increase those figured by approx. an order of magnitude.
"Experts are clueless" -Steve Jobs
It's tough on one hand, and it's a wild frontier waiting for more pioneers on the other hand, since there is lack of innovation (Android and iOS are pretty much stalled when it comes to introducing new ideas). So newcomers have good chances of providing interesting alternatives. I'd worry more about the sickening patents situation, than about lack of interest in new platforms.

But surely they'll need to attract developers more, since many aren't familiar with Sailfish. There was a recent post about from Mer folks:

http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2013/11/a-sailfishos-co-crea...
UTF-8 is a legacy mechanism now?
python.org isn't in the top million most popular! What's wrong with people :)
And apparently a basic plan starts at $9 just for the datastore + 9.99 for ClearDB? Meaning that it will cost me 18.99 a month from the get go? Is that how it works?

I know this sounds silly, but where would I even start if I wanted to move my site over to heroku?
1) AFAIK BitCoin doesn't have comments[1]. When people have stored data in the blockchain in the past, it was by making a series of transactions in order so later those markers could be decoded to represent something else. Some services allow comments to be layered on top of transactions but that doesn't exist in the blockchain.

2) Money is sent and is rendered unspendable[2] afterwards, so I assume the idea is to send the smallest amount possible (although it seems the service takes a fee).

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block#Block_structure
[2] http://www.proofofexistence.com/about
Also, don't forget that people like to come out on record for/against hot ideas/topics/predictions. In the event they are right, they ride the success all the way to the fame and monetary bank. If they're wrong, such an article is usually forgotten and lost in the sea of bitcoin press.
I think there's a MySQL DB or two somewhere in the back

This line scared me the most...