skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 'depreciating currency is a problem' argument is true for the existence of any asset having a higher yield than your widget factory. Why wouldn't you invest in that high yield asset instead of your widget factory? In this way, you can view _any_ appreciating asset as a reference unit of account. It is just as easy to see your egg and milk purchases as units of the high yield asset and delay your purchases for the same reason outlined in the article. So, it's a nonsense argument.

If you have a strong prior that stocks are going to be worth 100% more tomorrow than they are today, why would you buy milk and eggs with your spacebux today? You could invest your spacebux in stocks, sell them tomorrow, and buy milk and eggs tomorrow! Therefore, no one will buy milk and eggs today if stocks are expected to rise in price.
I think this article is a little short sighted. DNA profiling may be bad for some people in certain situations (health insurance), but the long term effects, for our species as a whole? I don't have a problem sacrificing my individual genetic privacy if it brings us closer to a Gattaca style utopia.
Why would anyone upload their genome to an unaudited site?
As usual, only a fraction of people who read the sensational headline will read the retraction.

The world goes on :(
what gain?

you are proposing taking for example a $100usb product and selling it for 100btc... which at current market value is the equivalent of over pricing it to $100,000usd. Who would buy that when they could pay $100usd for it instead or convert 1btc and functionally pay 0.1btc for it instead of 100btc. What global goods providers would mark up their wares 1000x and who in their right mind would spend anything on that.

Sure, if BTC was worth > $1usd and you were selling them at 1:1 everyone would leap to do that because now they are GAINING by spending their BTC with you.

But your proposal means they loose 1000%. I don't understand what motivates this switch over.
It's for this reason I'm abstaining from opening up any company in the US and sticking to Europe until the patent trolls are reined in. I can imagine many foreign-born entrepreneurs are now taking the same approach, especially as the number of lawsuits appears to be increasing (800 vs. 2,900 small firms sued in 2005 [0]) with a further ~100,000 receiving letters from patent trolls demanding payment in a single year.[0]

[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/op-ed-how-patent-...
The volatility of Gold and Silver is approximately 20% / year. There was a MASSIVE Gold sell off earlier this year, which caused a temporary spike of Gold Volatility to 60%.

In comparison, the volatility of BTC is approximately 6000% / year.

The magnitude of volatility is straight up ridiculous. The behavior of BTC is more like a penny-stock than any commodity on the market
Currencies are stable (and losing 2% value per year) because governments actively manage the supply of money to keep it stable in the face of very volatile demand (caused by what Keynes called "animal spirits". Since demand will fluctuate Bitcoin will fluctuate wildly for the foreseeable future like the value of gold has done and is doing. Bitcoin will never be a stable, safe place to store wealth for that reason. It might be useful as a payment system where you quicly buy Bitcoin and give it to somebody for a product (who then quickly sells it again), but it will be to volatile for much else except speculation..
To be fair, all property law is just as fictional. I didn't agree to not trespass or use items that other people claim belong to them. I didn't agree to the papers they hold saying that I cannot go for a joyride in my neighbors' car.

The law defines property. Just because IP has different traits then physical property does not make it more real; they are both useful fictions that form the foundation of a functional society. The laws encode our social norms and ideas about property. There is an entirely different set of laws which encodes acceptable behaviors in business practices, such as contract law, which is somewhat of a different area.

There is some very good arguments to be made that the current definitions of intellectual property are severely flawed, and haven't been updated to reflect our social perception or technical needs about what should or shouldn't be property. But there is no reason why "no IP enforcement" is inherently the right solution.
What do you mean? They sold their first 450 handsets today. Although it was a pre-order sales only, but that means something.
I considered getting sheep spit and sending it in claiming that I was welsh.
Wow, America has solved all the social issues that plagues most other countries. No wonder they 'help' so many countries become like them and become 'democratic'.

Thanks for enlightening us with these gems.
Not much surprising, though. The US and their minions.

Full stat for a bigger picture: 148 in favor, 4 against, 27 abstained. It's like 4 against the world.
If it was a institution where people expressly donated their data for research then that is the right way to do it. The concern is about selling that data and using it for other commercial purposes. Another concern is about creating this single repository of data that can then be exploited my incremental updates to TOS that nobody reads or understands.
> A pretty web interface isn't a must-have requirement.

According to most definitions of "CMS", it is. With static website generators, editing, versioning, publishing, etc is done externally. They aren't systems which encompass all of this. They just punch some content into your templates and write the result to disk. That's all they do.
Can I use this to root my printer?
I think these kinds of views are what make the bitcoin community seem ridiculous ... It's just constant downplaying of actual upplaying of conspiracy like goldbugs do and it just seems hard for serious and educated people to take seriously.
The $1 transaction fee seems crazy wasteful to me on purchases under $50 or so. I would consider just buying the whole item for a friend (through Amazon, letting Amazon eat the transaction fee) before I'd give anywhere from 5-10% extra to a third party.

If the average item was $20 and the average contribution was $5, banks would also be making 10% or more per wishlist item when they would normally make 3% or less.

That just rubs my cost-effectiveness sensitivities the wrong way.
Not all, it is perfectly possible to read this as saying that a phone running Jolla is capable of running Android apps.

It's entirely possible to interpret the blurb as saying that Jolla is some kind of framework running on an OS called Sailfish, which adds Android compatibility and a gesture-based UI.
102TB of New Crawl Data Available
So who is the authority about correct unicode implementations, exactly?

The Unicode Consortium[1] publishes standards. If a language advertises unicode support, I expect it to follow that standard.

Look, I'm all for open standards, but saying that standards are required to be adhered to at the programming language level is just ignorance of the real world

I'm not saying a language has to do anything, but if it's advertising support for a well defined feature, and does not deliver correctly on that, I will call them out on it, and support anyone else who does as well. Should we all just throw our hands up and say "Well, it's done now, no point in making a big deal of it?" I would rather apply pressure to get things fixed, or at least make it well known enough that future language designers give it the care and attention it's due.

There is no idea here other than the writer's unjustified expectation that he should just know how every language handles Unicode because??? Because Unicode is a standard? No..

Are you under the impression that what the author is attempting is not well defined? The unicode standard has conformance clauses about how to interpret unicode strings[2]. That means that if a language advertises it has/supports unicode strings, and fails the tests we've just seen, it's not conformant with the unicode standard. That would make this useful because it's pointing out bugs. If a language does not advertise unicode support, but supports some unicode features, then this is useful because it's making sure people are aware of the limits of their language. All too often people refer to the native string implementation in their language as supporting unicode, when clearly there are problems.

1: http://www.unicode.org/

2: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch03.pdf (see section 3.2)
> Bitcoin has already failed as a currency. It is subject to incredible moodiness and instability, which are the characteristics of a very poor currency indeed

Bitcoin has to climb up to a stable value, once.

The idea is that it will be stable once it did.
On a related note, are there anything preventing a language like Clojure(script) that already targets the browser to target asm.js instead? What would the advantages and disadvantages be (if any)?
These comments are actually making me think of this case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howland_will_forgery_trial
Why would deflation converge to the rate of global economic growth? I'd think that the opposite tends to be true, eg. the inflation is often correlated with growth.
"They will fail, because money that is not issued by governments is always doomed to failure. Money is inevitably a tool of the state."

How about gold? Bitcoin can just as easily be seen as a limited commodity as as currency. It's even mined :).
>>Did it? Or was it Bretton-Woods that failed? If I remember my History, Nixon decoupled the USD from gold to regain the ability to devalue the dollar, as a tool for dealing with the huge debt accrued during the Vietnam war.

The point is that it failed as a currency as soon as it lost the government's backing.
Hello from the rest of the world outside of your small part of North America!
Personally, I say thank god it was poorly researched. If the whole thing was inundated with 20 pages of obscure terminology and various arcane inequalities far fewer people would have understood it. Also, Bitcoin takes such a completely different tack from existing digital cash and SMPC schemes that I think including any discussion on those would have been distracting.
how about charging you more because you have a higher risk of a certain disease?
sounds exciting - I've pinged you an email and am keen to check it out!
Are there any reasonable escrow services out there for designers? It seems that a third party with a list of conditions for both sides could hang on to a predetermined amount of money and the digital assets until both parties agree to release.

There are perhaps caveats that I've not considered, but this idea comes to me again and again when I hear this kind of story (again).

Edit: Guess I also have to throw in here that I am continually amazed at the number of people who are afraid to do the dirty work of being in business (drawing up contacts, negotiating, calculating margin, saying NO, etc).
Hi there. I have some experience with building user generated content communities. If you'd like to talk, feel free to email me.
> While not posing much of a real-world threat now, Darlloz demonstrates a major shortcoming with most Internet-of-things devices available today—they typically run Linux or other types of open source code that are woefully out of date.

This make no sense. Running Linux (or an OSS stack in general) is not what makes devices out of date. Not updating them does.

If updates are not automatic then the vast majority of people will not perform them. If they're not automatic and a pain in the ass to do (ever tried updating the firmware on a TV?) then even less will do it.

I'm not saying I want auto updates for everything (I personally don't like them though the option is nice) but for the vast majority of folks it's the right option. $NON_TECH_SAVVY_RELATIVE is not going to keep tabs on the latest exploits for her router and know when to login to the management console (assuming she can login) and apply an update.
'Warcraft' movie gets pushed to 2016 to avoid 'Star Wars' onslaught
This is complete bullshit, they've improved the runtime and performance in the most recent version among other things.

It's not at all surprising that this application was removed would you expect to see an install Ubuntu application in the Mac or Windows app stores?
Seriously, what is it with "Agencies" lately? Who the F--k are these people?

I have heard/experienced a dozen similar stories recently. I have a friend who left a huge agency to freelance–only to have another small agency work him to the bone and take advantage of him almost exactly like the story here.

YES I ABSOLUTELY GET THAT THE ONUS IS ON THE FREELANCER/SUB TO GET THEIR CONTRACTS IN PLACE ...

But, seriously, these people are ridiculous. A bunch of salespeople in suits tossing around buzzwords so they can land a job taking advantage of a big company's big budget. Everything is a pitch or a comp or a big lead.

My advice to all freelance hackers and designers: if you meet someone who says they work at an agency, (a) tell them you're a janitor and (b) run away.
Are you all really having trouble understanding how instability in currency makes it difficult to trade in a currency?

Also there is some basic lapse in logic here. Just because a WoW nerd can trace the currency on a technical level, does not mean it is "easy."
Made an account just to remind you that Cyanogenmod installer brickled many phones. It's totally normal for them to remove it.
People are building those gmail extensions because people already use gmail.
Not because they couldn't build a nicer interface.

It would be great if Gmail would officially support extensions. Their current approach is very limited.
Alternately, you could submit your own spit to Wisdom Panel.
right, they just charge everyone more now.
The UN is deprecated? Any evidence for that?
The Real Walter White
This should be marketed to charities, then the public. Unless peace on earth and good will toward all mankind is available on Amazon.
Ask HN: Why does using voice to interact with my phone feel weird?
Especially in public, is it just a matter of time and it will begin to feel normal. I remember trying out the bluetooth headset and felt really weird, especially in public so i didn't use it. I don't see anyone leaving those headsets in their ears anymore as well.
What Is Litecoin
Suppose the only good in the world is apples, and the only currency is bitcoins. There are 21 million bitcoins in existence.

In 2013, we produce 21 million apples, so we could say that each bitcoin is worth 1 apple. In 2014, we produce 42 million apples, which is 100% annual GDP growth. Each bitcoin is worth 2 apples, which is a 100% appreciation in the value of the currency, aka. deflation.
But if you don't agree, you shouldn't watch it.

Why?

when did the artist agree to you watching it without paying

If I own a car made by Toyota, should I need their agreement to offer rides to people?
I don't understand the anger and animosity at 23andme I've seen on HN lately. Maybe I'm not understanding something the way you are.

My understanding is they sequence some of your dna, and then link to various publicly available studies to show users "This paper showed this mutation correlates with this disease".

Is that not a correct description of their service? Why do you want them shut down?
If they don't think FDA rules apply to them, why would they think HIPAA rules do?
Clarification: while 23andMe could fully sequence your genome using the sample you provide (which I assume they bank...), that's not what they actually do currently - your DNA is instead chopped up into short segments and run on an Illumina SNP genotyping microarray (to obtain variant calls at thousands of genomic loci found to be relevant in various association studies).

Your DNA is never actually fully sequenced, because that is currently too cost prohibitive...
Because Internet. Because disruption.
How patent trolls doomed themselves by targeting Main Street
Has anyone done any A&B testing about whether this is more effective than normal forms?
Okay, it seems I was trigger-happy in excluding nonprofits that accept donations. Maybe "accept payments for products or services" would work better? Not sure how to formalize that though.

More generally, I don't have anything against any sites, I'm trying to come up with a way of viewing the internet that would have a high signal to noise ratio. It seems plausible to me that excluding all sites with ads would improve the signal to noise ratio over what we have today. If you think the signal to noise ratio would be improved further by carefully including some sites with ads (SO is a good example), can you take a stab at defining the criteria?

Maybe include only sites whose ads are deemed acceptable by adblock? But then we might include many content farms...
When it comes to fundraising, she's a machine
Not true at all. If you know you are at higher risk thanks to your personal genetic test, you are more likely to buy yourself good insurance coverage.

1) More high risk customers buying the insurance concentrates the 'pool' of insured risks...

2) ...leading to more payouts

3) ...leading to higher insurance

4) ...leading to those without the risks opting to take cheaper, lower level coverage

5) ...leading to more concentrated risk in the pool of insured people in the good coverage

6) ...and back to step 2. The insurance fails, or becomes too high a cost to be worthwhile for anyone.
A lot of people commenting seem to think that salary is the only form of compensation in a job, as well. I'd gladly trade a few thousand dollars a year to be excited to go to work, with people I enjoy, instead of working a corporate gig where I'm miserable and working on boring projects.
SF loves Sardinia: a charity event after hurricane Cleopatra
As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this, I think the implementation is slightly misdirected.

Neither page popularity or query popularity are necessarily proportional to domain popularity (eg, *.github.com). Ruling out the most popular domains is therefore, I suspect, neither good or bad in terms of the quality of results it produces on the whole. Sometimes it will produce better results, sometimes it will produce worse, sometimes the same.

If a search engine/tool is going to add value, imho, the very difficult problem that it must solve is to improve the quality of results. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see that here (yet).
I read this the other day and am surprised to discover it's only getting posted to HN now. Thanks for posting it. This is a story that should be getting a lot more attention.

Sadly, there are still a lot of voters in the states who embrace American exceptionalism and are perfectly content with an NSA that targets foreigners so long as it keeps us safe. But it's another thing entirely for the FBI to turn around and deploy that same technology on its own citizens.

The FBI has a long history of abusing power, and they're not exactly popular with the political base of either pole. Their role in this needs to be included within the national discussion.
The grass is greener on the other side of the fire hydrant. I wish I could teach my dog _not_ to slobber his DNA all over everything. If my home were ever a crime scene, CSI would be barking up the wrong tree looking for suspects.
If you sell to the US it does not matter.
Livescribe 3 smartpen review: This high-tech stylus could save handwriting
Seems like every attempt at disturbing Bitcoin ends up reinforcing the strength and the interest in the ecosystem.
Yep. They do not want the fact that a major weakness of Android as a platform (openness = the ability to fuck up your phone) is being highlighted.
If my fear was that an organization holding genetic data was going to break policies and law against my interests, I'd be at least as concerned about the State of California (and other states). Every state (by federal law since 1963) screens almost every newborn baby, via a blood test, for genetic diseases:

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/19/opinion/la-oe-timmer...

California retains the residual blood spots for followup studies, apparently indefinitely – see the section "Storage and Use of Dried Blood Spots":

http://www.babysfirsttest.org/newborn-screening/states/calif...

California currently screens for 79 disorders:

http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Documents/NBS-DisordersD...

And, results lookup long afterward by disorder is possible, since there's a routine, by-email procedure for checking the sickle-cell status of NCAA athletes:

http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/nbs/Pages/NBSFAQTraitAthlete...

The policies for the data and the retained sample are described by the 'babysfirsttest' site above as allowing use "for medical intervention, counseling or specific research projects which the California Board of Health approves" and "anonymous research studies". Those sound about equivalent to the 23andMe policy... and at a similar risk of reinterpretation or rule-bending if organizational priorities or technology change.
I was under the impression that this code has to be really fast. I wonder how much computation they can get away with.
Did you actually read beyond the headline?! Google didn't remove the app they contacted CyanogenMod about the app being in violation of TOS because it ‘encourages users to void their warranty’ (a totally valid reason) so they voluntarily removed it to sort things out, probably will need to add a disclaimer or something.

I'm not quite sure what you find so objectionable, or how relevant is you comment here.
Reviving the Unofficial UNData API
It'll be quaint looking back in a few years thinking $1000 per bitcoin was a big deal.
While I view this move as hypocritical of Google, it does feel like it's in their customers' best interest.

Think about it from a less technical perspective: I can install an app from the official Google Play store that voids my warranty.

They can't have that on their public facing store. Google wants users to install apps, they don't want them to be afraid of voiding their warranty.

It's interesting to see how things played out over the last few years.

Google has been moving towards a more controlled environment, from something that was initially billed as open.

Apple started completely locked down with a strong customer focus, and has cautiously been making their policies more developer friendly.

I personally prefer Apple's approach, as it was always about the end user — but as a developer I was sometimes envious of Google's lenient policy. Google's assertion of control now makes me more interested in developing for their platform.
Litecoin's market cap increases 8 fold within a few days
I love common crawl, but as I commented before I still want to see a subset available for download, something like the top million sites or something like that. Certainly a few steps of data, say 50GB 100GB and 200GB.

I really think a subset like this will increase the value as it would allow people writing search engines (for fun or profit) to suck a copy down locally and work away. Its something I would like to do for sure.
However, a long string of failures across several of its product lines (most notably the high-performance Vertex family) took a lot of the shine off of OCZ's name

Although only anecdotal, we ditched OCZ at my last company because of their high failure rate; never risked going back. No such issue with Intel or others
> I think having other "Android"-compatible phones out there is very interesting.

It would be interesting if I understood what particular problem it solves, which I don't really.
e-mailing you right now.