skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course I'd bet. I'd bet all the money I have + my firstborn child + my future income for the next 30 years. Only someone without the faintest understanding of economics can think bitcoin will become USA/Europe's official currency.

There are just 2 problems with this bet:

1. There is no escrow I'd trust to hold my money for 5 years.

2. The bet is obviously ridiculous for you to take. If you really believe what you say, then your bitcoins will be worth billions in 5 years and the money you win from me won't matter. Hence in this bet there is only downside for you. Hence, either you're crazy if you take it or you're just talking big trying to manipulate the crowds. I'm betting on the latter.
>That much heat near the display can damage it easily.

Citation needed.
You may sell half. If it crashes you cashed out quite well. If it diesn't and reaches $10K you won't be sad.
How A Data-Driven Site Redesign Lifted Clicks 606% and Purchases 11%
The case for rethinking NATO missile defense plans
The Worlds longest flight is dead. Long live the Worlds Longest Flight
I think you missed a few zeros: $10,000,000 USD/btc. Also, btc is more akin M1 or currency in circulation--not total wealth. I'd guess world M1 supply is more around $10 trillion, so btc needs to go to $500k per USD to have the equivalent value.
Interesting point. Southwest Airline's loyalty program relaunched last year, and brought the budget airline $180 million in incremental revenue.
But what the poster is really thinking of is the JVM. We now have Scala, Clojure, and others that target the JVM as a platform.
Someone pointed out chargebacks, which is one issue. The other is financial regulation aimed at money laundering. Anyone who deals in this much money has lots of questions asked by governments. That's why your best bet for bitcoins is either to buy them locally from someone you meet up with or to use an exchange like Coinbase where you use bank transfer and it's all above board. Everything else is a lot of work.
Yes, and few can really explain why...
I should think there’s quite a lot of overlap between British hackers and Araucaria fans. Certainly among my acquaintances there is.

Less so in other places, no doubt.
Unless it becomes world money. USD is a promise paper like stocks. Bitcoin is like a gold coin. You can fully own the real thing without trusting someone to store it for you.
Thank you for asking these questions! No one seems to be answering them.
That line of reasoning isn't entirely dissimilar to what people were saying about real estate 10 years back.
ahhhhh you may be my soulmate on this thread :)
Growth Hacking For Startups
The article only looks at how many miles it costs to claim a free flight. It doesn't touch on the other half of the complicated mess of the loyalty schemes: how to collect the miles.

These days, it's rare that you get 1 reward mile for every 1 mile that you fly. Instead, there's all kinds of bonuses/penalties and scale factors based upon your ticket class. Discounted ticket types earn fewer miles, first travel earns more, and so on.

So you can't just say that free flight 'costs' have increased if they need more miles to claim them. Perhaps the reward miles are given out more freely than before? Or perhaps less? (I'm guessing less!) In any case, the article leaps to conclusions without the evidence.
The narrative around bitcoin is changing. It can be seen more of an investment now than a bet.

Up until now I think bitcoin has been an "as yet proven, volatile, geeky, alternate, viral internet currency with network effects."

And the conservative are left wondering if it's a fad or a bubble.

Now it's just an emerging asset class with unique fundamentals that could have real utility within the financial services community itself... eg to settle trades.
I don't trust Mt. Gox's prices for this very reason.

Coinbase seems a lot more trustworthy in this department, but I don't fully understand how their exchange works. BTC-e seems to hit a relatively decent middle-ground.
Good point - I meant one codepoint at a time.
1 BTC is worth 1/20000000 th of the entire BTC economy. The current push in price comes mostly from an uptake in China.

Now that's 1 bn people there, so if it finds broader adoption in the country we could see further price increases (if we divide all Bitcoins that will ever exist by the population of China, everyone there will get 0.02 BTC). So if the current trend holds true and the adoption takes on there.. Now let's say India, Africa or most of south america get wind of it.. Africa in particular has difficulty with local currencies and a relatively good mobile network, so it is well possible and the other countries certainly don't want to be left out either. And then there is Europe and the rest of Asia..

So let's say 5 bn people want some part of it (just to buy 1/2 carton of milk), we are at 0.004 BTC. But then, some are greedy and want more than average, so.. you might get the idea.

Edit: thinking about it, at current price ca. 0.001 BTC / 1/2 carton of milk, you could actually buy all those people one serving (excluding shipping). Now if people want to buy cars or houses or ponies, we have to split that a bit further.
As a trading currency, it works fine.

As a store of value, it's deflationary nature makes it unsuitable for widespread adoption. An economy doesn't function well if people get rich merely by holding the currency (as opposed to investing the currency).
I wish there were more posts here on HN where the OP linked items such as yours, but alas, clickbait rules apply.

I think I'm going to play with your script package over the long weekend in our dev cluster - Thanks! And nice work!
How easy is it to sell bitcoins now? Especially for large amounts, can someone just cash 1000BTC on mtgox now?
It seems rather that it is the other way around - the US dominated (and still does) the computer industry, and so ASCII, the English-centered character set, became the standard. ASCII is good enough (you might lose some accents on certain characters in certain words and such, but nothing much) for English but has no consideration for any other characters that might be used in other languages.

If Turkey was the dominant country in IT, I don't see why they wouldn't do the same thing only for their own alphabet; include all the characters of their alphabet (latin alphabet plus a few more), plus some more common characters used in math etc.
Codepoint. Java 5 also added new string APIs for this.

IIRC, Cocoa is one of the very few frameworks/languages/whatever which provides APIs for manipulating and iterating on grapheme clusters out of the box. And provides a page explaining some of the unicode concepts and how they map to NSString: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...
Interesting. I had no problem reading that (except for 'arsing' which I thought I'd misread). The ability of the brain to pattern-match upside down is amazing.
EXtremeWeb Ltd. - Website Design and Development in London
If BTC is to become a reserve currency then it seems to me it would replace/compliment SDR's and precious metals as an international reserve currency and not a national one. In that hypothetical situation BTC solves the Triffin Dilemma for all those who use the USD as a foriegn reserve but the USD would likely still be used in American territory and still backed by confidence (in its ability to be productive and thus pay its debts).

Don't think of it as dollars, think of it as gold (especially when gold was broken down in smaller bits and traded in streets or held in the form of gold bars).
Not to my knowledge.

C++ and Java are statically typed and they, as far as I know, don't have distinction between string interface and implementation, just a standard string type. You can't make your own string implementation and make others (given that - would it exist - they use standard string interface) transparently accept them instead of language's standard string implementation.

Even Haskell (with standard Prelude) doesn't have a readily available and widely accepted typeclass for strings. As String is just an alias to [Char], if library writer used that, they won't accept, say, Data.Text (I know, it's a bit distinct thing, but...)
The audience of the (dying) magazine industry doesn't come close to the audience of snowden's message. your comment kind of proves that snowden doesn't have a chance, because choosing him won't increase sales.
Within regulation, you can refuse goods and services to anyone. However, as far as I know, if someone owes you money they can always pay you in an equivalent amount of [local currency]. Isn't that the whole point of a legal tender?

If I lend someone 1 BTC, can I force the borrower to repay me in BTC? How would that even work if the borrower has already spent the BTC?
Impressive effort! Thanks for sharing - looking forward to browsing the source this afternoon
TopSecret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits In Plan 2 Discredit Radicals
Can you provide some examples of Python 3 getting strings wrong?

Between strings being native unicode code points (you have to encode to bytes to get UTF-8) and unicodedata for normalization and decomposition (http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/unicodedata.html) I've found Python 3 pretty robust. Python 3.3 also uses appropriate Unicode data for regular expressions, as mentioned on http://docs.python.org/3.3/howto/regex.html.

If you want to compare strings you should really normalize them first, which is where unicodedata comes in. In my programming situations it would be wrong to conflate different decomposition of the same unicode string. Why is this? Because other software you interact with uses encodings and the UTF-8 encoding of two different decompositions if different. I've run into this with UTF-8 filenames on OS X when working with Subversion.
OSX(n) release fails to fix all other OSX(n-1) problems. Ho-hum.
This is exactly my process for using Facebook.
On the contrary. Higher price means more hoarding.

Anyone who purchased _anything_ using BTC is kicking themselves right now. The current market conditions discourage spending of any kind.
HubSpot Brings Aboard Joe Chernov as New VP of Content
The JVM doesn't run on Android or iOS, and never will. That's a huge chunk of users they can't touch, but the web can.
I think there's actually a very good chance. These are journalists doing the picking after all although their selection will likely have pretty much zero to do with the results of an Internet poll. (The chances of it being Miley Cyrus on the other hand are about as close to zero as you can get.)
You really think Bitcoin will make it as a usable currency?

You know deflationary = hold and never spend, right? Not much use as a currency if there's no flow or will to exchange for goods.
Good luck deleting it.
it hasn't always been easy. I have taken contract work when things are slow or I am struggling to achieve the goals for the startup. I have also taken time off between and worked for companies. My wife has always worked full-time too.
The past couple of years have seen some major fuckups in the desktop OS space for usability.

Windows 8, and now this. Although this is no where near as bad.
This is a valid question. One that I think about often.

It's not easy to predict the valuation. For that, we would need to know how much business is done in bitcoin in the future. That's anyone's guess. Will it do $1 trillion or will it do more ?

The price isn't always going to rise at this rate. That's for certain. However, yes, there will probably be a long term rise until bitcoin finds it true usage, market cap, and as a result of this, it's value with steady deflation going forward.

While, I'm not sure what an economist's opinion on this is, the fact that you are encouraged to spend money because it's worth less in the future (inflationary fiat money) leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Consumerism is a horrible disease and our planet is suffering from it every. single. day.

That brings me to bitcoin and it's deflationary nature. Well, you're still going to buy the stuff you want to buy. Then, you'll save more because you know it'll be worth more later. Why wouldn't you buy the things you always need ? (food, shelter, a few gadgets, etc.) Should I spend on a new iPad when I might be able to buy 6 months worth of food with that money a year or two later ?

You'll save as much as you can. You'll consume less junk. Isn't that a good thing ? Shouldn't we ask ourselves if we really need all the crap we keep buying ?

These are interesting questions that challenge the entire nature of mindless consumerism that most of us indulge in these days.

Also, if the only reason you spend your money is because it's going to be worth less tomorrow then you have bigger problems than bitcoin ;)

PS - I don't mean you personally, just stating some thoughts.
Stalin and Hitler didn't upset the status quo?
heh this is funny to me (though i'm sorry for you, i don't mean to rub it in) only because when i suggested dollar-backed or gold-backed bitcoin a lot of people made fun of me saying "oh it's been done & it was corrupted" "mannnnn" "original sin" "blahhhhhh"

but.... whos to say the Bitcoin exchanges are better at banking than traditional banking industries? I understand they represent individual points of failure in the ecosystem, but soooooooo many users have gotten screwed by them thus far.
A fair point, but the scaling granularity advantage is a powerful cost win nonetheless
Witch Hunts and Public Data
Stateless Company Incorporated In And By The Bitcoin Blockchain
Python 3 gets that one, but python 2.7 doesn't:

$ python3 -c 'print("baﬄe".upper())'
BAFFLE
$ python -c 'print "baﬄe".upper()'
BAﬄE
$ python -c 'print u"baﬄe".upper()'
BAÏ¬E
I think it's even more mundane and evil than perceiving us as threats.

They perceive us as a resource of arrests and prosecutions, for good job performance evaluations.
I was referring to physical buttons.

Like I said, if your hands are wet, or you sneeze on the screen, or it is raining, or whatever, virtual buttons fail.
The answer is a bit counterinuitive:

If the price keeps rising, you are right a smaller percentage of all bitcoins will be in active circulation, because people want to save their coins instead of spending them. However, SOME coins will always be spent (people gotta eat.)

Here's the counterintuitive part: The currency "notices" the low rate of spending and will increase its own value to make sure the amount being circulated, though lower in face value, remains constant in its real value.

In short: Hoarding is fine, because the un-hoarded coins increase in value to compensate. As economists say, this is not a "zero sum game", we can have high spending AND high hoarding without difficulty, if the currency has a large enough market cap.
Isn't the string type immutable in many (most?) other languages as well? In Objective-C the default is an immutable string (though optionally

one can create mutable strings as well). Lua also uses immutable strings. In Java and C# I think the situation is the same, since if you want

to use high performance string manipulation, you'll generally resort some form of StringBuilder helper class.
The point is not to reduce the number of options (everyone going back to arrays of characters) but to put the spotlight on some problems where going a level lower could help a lot.

> *Strings work fine for the vast majority of use cases

In the CKJ space (a third of the population ?) strings are "broken" in the vast majority of use cases (really, things like what format you should accept for a telephone number). It get exponentially dirty as you try more complex manipulations, and I think these are interesting problems. It helps discussing them from time to time.
I won't bet because, as someone pointed out, it's an infeasible option.

I work indirectly with the publishing business (librarian) so I'll use a publishing analogy. Someone asked me if e-books would replace books and I generally say "Maybe, but probably not until after I retire". The truth is "no". Why? Because right now, at least, there's nothing wrong with the book. Zilch. And we've seen e-book purchasing level off because people who want to read e-books read them and people who don't want to don't and most people do both. Right now there's absolutly nothing wrong with my dollars. I can still buy stuff, wire them places, get them from ATMs and so on. The point at which that stops (major political meltdown) is also the point at which bitcoin is likely to become impractical as well (infrastructure failure) unless the transition happens so slowly a bet is pointless.
Canonical refused to offer Android emulation for that reason. They didn't think it would be beneficial for Ubuntu Touch in the long term.
> - Python < 3 treats strings as byte arrays or UCS-2 depending on whether you use the byte type or the Unicode type. As such, it has all the same issues as all other UCS-2 libraries

It's Python < 3.3 (the Flexible String Represrntation was introduced in 3.3), there's a byte array type (str in P2, bytes in P3) and a string type (unicode/str), which may be UCS2 ("narrow" builds, the default) or UCS4 ("wide" builds, set by many linux distros)
This is just a rather superficial interview with Mr. Eco. He does touch on the medieval belief in a spherical world but they don't go into detail about such things. Interesting, but brief and not what the title promised.
Please update the title and make it clear that it's Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Miley Cyrus : a degenerated girl who can't sing without auto-tune.
It's amazing you can see the reflection through the raindrops change as well.
If you don't like them don't use them! It's their ball, they can take it home if they want to.
Click: http://www.ghift.com/
All new gTLDs are required to offer a sunrise period during which rights holders can register names corresponding to their marks. (Mostly trademark holders, but other rights may be recognized at the discretion of the registry.) During sunrise, names are not generally available, so registrar guarantees of pre-registration before sunrise should be carefully examined. If there is contention during sunrise registrations, registries generally will have a way to work it out, with auction being a frequent mechanism. Because of the extra mechanisms associated with operating the sunrise period, many registries and registrars may impose additional fees during sunrise. (As a registrant, you'll only see fees from the registrar.)

URGENT public service announcement: Many of the new gTLD registries will use the Trademark Clearinghouse (http://trademark-clearinghouse.com/) to determine who owns what rights. If you have a trademark, it's really in your interests to register it there, as it will be available to all the new gTLD registries. If you look at the new gTLD rules, it's important to register your marks before expiration of the sunrise for the first new gTLD to go live.
http://www.bbb.org/western-michigan/business-reviews/novelti...

They have alert on their site.
My Thoughts on Digital Marketing in 2013 in 140 Character Chunks
I think "libertarian socialism" is a worse than worthless contradiction.

There is a simple solution to all the problems you mention, which is to have a government that uses retaliatory force, but not initiatory force.

America had one for about a century, and now there is the intellectual machinery needed to go back to that system and to define and defend it much more vigorously. Unfortunately, a majority of "advocates for freedom" are mucking around with things like "libertarian socialism" and "anarcho-capitalism" which are contradictions in terms and won't work.
Ugh your post is totally breaking the page layout!
Is as much android as BB10, in fact have a lot in common with Blackberry 10 like the user interface or being based on QT/QML for native apps.

If you want, is a maemo/meego fork, with a compatibility layer to run Android apps, and won't be surprised if it runs also Firefox OS, Tizen and Ubuntu Touch apps in some moment.
Hidden tunnels under San Francisco
This post has a lot of good points, but i'd like to counter some too.

If your nature is to be creepy, trying to fight it isn't going to work; you can't fix creepy, as a friend once told me. But you can learn to be creepy in a good way (that is far too long for me to explain here). Just be friendly, confident, happy, and talk like you don't care what people think of you. If you don't normally do those things, fake it. If you find that difficult, fake it harder.

If you go to a party alone you'll seem extra creepy because you have no friends and nobody to build social karma off of. If you're going to be creepy, make it seem like people enjoy your creepiness - the best way to do this is to bring a non-creepy friend to talk to occasionally. But you won't stick to them the whole party. Also, nobody introduces themselves at the bar line unless they want something from you, so don't worry about how seeming popular might put them off of talking to you.

Interrupting people has to do with opening up groups and changing conversations. You can do it and risk seeming rude, but if properly executed you can join someone else's group dynamic and refocus the conversation.

Don't fall for the passive/submissive greeting crap. How you greet someone, and how you let them greet you, matters greatly - especially in unknown power dynamics where you're trying to get a leg up in social or business standing. Only greet people the way you want to greet them. You do not have an obligation to please everyone or bow to whatever awkward/unwanted social norms they conform to. In the worst case, you trying to mimic their custom might come out even more awkward, which isn't helping your creepy case. You don't have to give every stranger consent to grope or kiss you if you don't want.

The best way to introduce yourself to someone you admire is to feign ignorance and treat them like a random joe schmoe. Don't fawn over their clothes or their work. Basically, don't worry about anything at all; make small talk if you want, but don't think too hard about it. Ask them direct questions about a subject you're interested in, as being genuine is hard to fake. And don't be more respectful of their time than any other random at the bar; they're an adult, they'll move on if they feel like it.

And honestly, if you find yourself still talking when the place closes down? Good on you! Life's too short to head home before you seem "awkward".
How do we quantitatively tell when they started paying attention?
Money is valuable for "reservation demand". The more people want to hold it, the more useful it is to everyone. Only this way it can become a currency. You can't have currency without value and can't have value without holding and having many hands to hold.

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/66953255676/transactional-curr...

http://blog.oleganza.com/post/43378777734/on-circulation-of-...
No, if that was true there would be an easy arbitrage that would cancel this effect.
Thanks! What do you think?
> But you can only grow up once.

True in so many ways.
30 Day Firefox OS Challenge – The Closing Statement
Ah, there's the kicker: "if everything else stays the same". Definitely not the case with the news going more and more crazy about bitcoin every time it spikes.
Ask HN: Eloquent Ruby for Python?
Eloquent Ruby is my favorite programming book of all time. It takes you deeper into the language than the syntax alone. I'm a much better Ruby hacker after reading this book. I'd like to have the same enlightenment and transformation with Python. Does such a book exist?
[video] Amazon Warehouse working conditions - I new it was bad but not this bad
>Edit: ok there is a limit of 21million bitcoins by 2030, and a world assignable wealth of ~210 trillion USD. So, if bitcoin works and can be the repository for all worlds currency, it would have to be worth 10,000 USD per bitcoin.

By my math, that's 10,000,000 USD per BTC.
They're deeply dependent on each other. Both kinds of user are strongly influenced by BTC exchange rates, and BTC has the same exchange rate regardless of how you intend to use it.

I encourage you to read up on the recent history of Iceland's currency.