skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since I can't edit it, I'll just say that both of the responses below mine are correct in that I shouldn't have made the last paragraph so snarky. I meant that we don't jump on the latest bandwagon technology because there's often a better, more mature one already out there.
> It's a failed idea. Aggregation protocols (RSS and ATOM) abandoned, Friendfeed died. Because gulping from every source possible without digestion (!) means diarrhea

RSS failed because it wasn't user-friendly enough for non-geeks. Other tools that let users drink from a firehose of unrelated info like Reddit and Twitter do just fine. Diarrhea or not, they get users.
man, this has been fascinating to watch (and not just because i have a little skin in the game).

the tech and theory underlying the currency; its mysterious founder; the idea of massive "mining" operations where people are essentially printing their own money; the fact that one of the major exchanges was orginally a MTG exchange; the senate hearings; the tor black markets and FBI "seizures"; the absurdly juvenile chatter in the "troll box" on BTC-E, a major exchange; and of course, the goldrush-like nature of the skyrocketing prices.

i'm looking forward to hearing what people have to say about all this a few years down the line
The congressional hearings were very upbeat about Bitcoin. Once the word got out that there wasn't any intention to ban it, a lot more people got interested.

And China. Which we're working on a short documentary about http://kyledrake.net/bitcoinchina.html
Perl is actually very good with Unicode. Note that a character is "The smallest component of written language that has semantic value" according to the Unicode glossary - I'd say Perl respects that meaning. As noted in the docs, graphemes can be handled with \X in regular expressions (although admittedly that's not pretty):

my $length = 0; $length++ while $dec =~ /\X/g;

Note that a grapheme is defined as "A minimally distinctive unit of writing in the context of a particular writing system" - i.e. context is required to determine what a grapheme actually is. A few others have pointed that out... Given the definitions from Unicode, Perl does a pretty good job (esp. when using Unicode::Normalize to normalize input).

http://www.unicode.org/glossary/
that's the nature of any pyramid scheme -- the potential cashout of any individual is higher when more money is put into the system without being removed. The funny thing about the Bitcoin scheme is that everyone has the ability for the cashout, it's simply a really complex Game Theory scenario (lol, simply complex).

Still though, the early adopters have a much greater shot at grabbin all the marbles, just people suspect they won't because it's been a while and they still haven't. So either they're

A) Absurdly greedy.

B) Asleep at the wheel.

C) True believers in the idea & want to see it succeed.

D) Cashing out coins periodically enough to give them a decent lifestyle without disrupting the ecosystem.
I don't understand this. "1" BTC is an arbitrary amount as well. Perhaps in the long run, mBTC or uBTC will be the perspective we hold of Bitcoin. From some of what I've read, that was sort of the point of the high divisibility.
Very true. We expect users to know explicitly what they want, and be familiar with structured analysis. That's just not the case. This is why prototyping is so important.

It's kind of like, "I don't know what I want at a restaurant until I see what's on the plate of everyone else at my table."
> why is it so complicated to buy bitcoins?

The legacy banking system, rules and regulation in particular.
I'm assuming it actually is the Chinese being the reason for the price skyrocketing?
Corporate social responsibility could be thought of as (a part of) a soul of a company.

http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/people-and-planet/st...
One unicode character at a time or one unicode codepoint at a time? (see character composition)
The Tyrannical World of Airline Loyalty Programs
I thought of that article too, but I think one of the key differences is that neither OS/2 nor Windows had totally taken over the market when the Windows compatibility was introduced. So it turned the 'what to make apps for' question easy to answer.

The smartphone industry is way beyond that - people are making iOS and Android apps, and very little else.
And I'm not the only person on the Internet to know that what Snowden released has been 'known' to the internet community for 20+ years. A release of documents does not consititute proof of what one already knows, because we all knew this type of surveilance was being done on a regular basis BECAUSE IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN DONE[1]. Just because we use wires and bits over pen and paper doesn't mean the governments and people in control don't want to have as much information about who they are 'controlling' as they can:

Don't try to tell me that some power can corrupt a person
You haven't had enough to know what its like[2]

Read some (good) history sometimes too see more startling revelations of the 'unthinkable' things your governments and controllers might be doing[3][4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_room for an example.

[2] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nineinchnails/capitalg.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_Uni...

[4] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subjects/search/?query=histo...
Has Bitcoin been subjected to serious academic research? Quickly scanning this bibliography [1], at least, I don't see many top ACM conferences.

[1] http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/biblio.html
Mad panic to buy means people aren't price sensitive by a few %. "$930 for $900 of bitcoins? Sure no problem, it'll be $950 tomorrow" kinda thing.
As someone who sold shares for $8 that I got through my employer at $2.50, I always tell the kids nowadays: I should have waited until it hit $80. There are no easy answers.
What makes bitcoin special? It's not like we've seen widespread adoption of this particular cryptocurrency. Do litecoin, feathercoin, et al. use the same algorithm with different seeds? I dont't understand why bitcoin is gaining so much value. It seems that an identical cryptocurrency could be created with or without the coins already mined. It seems to me that $1000 per bc can only be speculation by the wealthy at this point. It is surely a bubble waiting to implode.
All three A, C and D for sure.

Here's a thing: in both cases, when Bitcoin is a fraud and joke, and when Bitcoin is a future world-changing technology, price must grow up like crazy. So the price alone does not give us any clue about the nature of Bitcoin. Only analysis of fundamentals and analysis of the econo-political environment we are in can tell us something about value of Bitcoin.
Obamba...isn't he that guy that won the Nobel Peace Prize?
Actually I think there's a chance they do pick Snowden, but I don't care because it's really of very little consequence. I'm sure Time cares much more about selling magazines than maintaining the political status quo.
The benefit may be not being sued for patent infringement. Sadly.
Access speeds to my SAMBA server are so bad since Mavericks I had to switch to NFS. Even with the workaround to disable Apple's version of sambaV3, I still have issues.
It is now, that's how your supposed to feel. History will tell a very different story. Miley will be just another singer/actress.
Developing the same app for both platforms is a Bad Thing. I want Android apps on Android, iPhone apps on iPhone. Mixing never works out well in the long term.
This is really, really cool!
I waffle on this point. Obviously with limited adoption in terms of actual exchange of goods, $1,000 is an arbitrary threshold. That said, with limite adopton in terms of actual exchange of goods I can't really judge how much bitcoin is worth. I have a good understand of what $1 is work (1/2 of a carton milk, a candy bar, and so on) but really no concept of what a bitcoin buys me. So it makes perfect sense for me to relate its value to something I already understand the value of.
I'm not sure I get you, are you really complaining about motherfuckers refusing to accept cock after slamming assholes, or do I have the wrong end of the stick?
Strictly speaking, a company can charge an individual for breaking terms of a contract, but not fine. The word "fine" is normally reserved for entities with policing powers, although, language being what it is, you may see usage exceptions.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Fines

Quote: "Monetary charges imposed upon individuals who have been convicted of a crime or a lesser offense."
When you're selling an advertising medium, virtually all advertisers will ask how can they "measure ROI". What really seems to me is that most of this is just talk. (http://kariobrien.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/marketing_roi_...)

I'd argue that fraud is a big problem because it affects ROI.

Especially, it affects 40% of mobile ads, which means that you just wasted 40% of your campaign's budget.

It's estimated to be between 2% and 19% on online ads, with those 2% being acknowledged by Google, who is probably one of the few providers that actually does something to prevent it.

I think this is a challenging topic. There's an economical problem in plain view. Why are advertisers ignoring it? Lack of alternatives?
It would be interesting to try and build a signature of the malware invisible windows. When loading an IE browser are there any signs that the page is not visible... would something like https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs uniquely detect the hidden IE windows?

[EDIT] another thing that could be helpful in building a signature is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1060008/is-there-a-way-to...
I think it's naive to think that stokebrokers have not been paying attention for the last few years.
Maybe your competitor is buying their own script to inflate sales numbers in the belief that some potential customers will give weight to the number of recent purchases when choosing between roughly equivalent products - i.e. if the only obvious difference between to products is popularity, then popularity can become meaningful, especially if the difference is an order of magnitude. It's like customer ratings for sellers on eBay.

Good luck.
Imagine there would be a language that would compile to proper bytecode (not JS), that would run on a standardized platform which is present on almost every computer, that is mature, sandboxed, and actually pretty fast. Oh, wait, that already exists and is called Java.

Java has gotten a bad rep lately due to some high-profile drive-by-malware bugs. But if the java codebase would have gotten the same intensive care that the webkit codebase got, this would no longer be an issue.

Many people remember java to be sloooow. When I first came into contact with it in school, that was certainly the case, but since a couple of years it has had a modern JIT that could easily rival native code.

Java applets are ugly, sure, but that is largely due to the decades old AWT, and the poor font support it used to have. With SWT, you can have native widgets (dunno if they work in Applets, but they are nice on the Desktop), and with antialiased drawing you can get the same results as with HTML5 canvas.

Java applets (and Flash, and Silverlight) died for marketing reasons, and political reasons. There were no unsurmountable technical issues. The outcome is that we are stuck with "worse is better" for the foreseeable future, only max. 50% to 1% of the possible native performance, and a bunch of restrictions we only slowly realize what they mean (no sockets, no signed applications, no anonymous/serverless mashups, less hardware access than we used to have, suboptimal caching, suboptimal tooling like languages, debuggers, content creation tools (I haven't seen anything that can replace Flash for simple vector animations yet) and so on.
It's different.

os/2 vs. windows was about two players attempting to prevent each other from monopolizing the industry.

I don't think the Jolla guys go into this with a business plan of one day being a monopoly, or preventing another player from dominating the mobile industry.

Jolla is - I think - about offering consumers what nokia under elop was unwilling to give them: a MeeGo device.
Sell into what? Both dotcom shares and USD are promise-papers. Bitcoin is the only money in the entire world that you can truly own. Even gold you can't own completely. At some amount you have to put it in vault and hire people to guard it. But you can put millions of Bitcoins in your brainwallet.

I elaborated on this recently:
http://blog.oleganza.com/post/67362431718/you-can-own-bitcoi...
I'd bet you Ron Paul Fun Bucks don't supplant USD or EUR in five years, but I'd bet you wouldn't be willing to pay out in the filthy fiat currency I'd demand.
I'd say, only sell if you need the money. Otherwise see it as a lottery ticket. Or at least keep some that you can afford to loose for the long gamble.
E-chat - push technology based chatrooms website
Not sure which makes me more sick to my stomach..... having not jumped on BitCoin when it first started and was around a single dollar, or the fact that putting hundreds (or thousands, by the time you read this) of dollars of my hard earned money into a non-existent, unsecured, irrational "currency" of bits that inherently are biased towards inflationary pressures due to its fixed nature.

This is a bubble, clear as day! Some are not going to have a good time at some point, whenever that point comes.

There is seriously something wrong with an economy when millionaires are made for nothing but being first.
So what do you propose? Not have a string type, and let everyone handle all these cases manually instead? That will not end well...
I can assure you that what you are experiencing is not out of the ordinary. Everyone has their struggles. My wife was pregnant with our third child while I was unemployed for 8 months. I encourage you to love that family and be a great husband and father. No business success can outshine what you have.
Microsoft still open sources more technologies than many think
Agreed with most of it except:

"because their string API is correct"

Apparently they have a bug in their UTF-7 parser that can lead to invalid unicode strings. Don't know if it's already fixed.
Hitler probably impacted the world more than all of the above combined.
> Python 3 gets so much of this right

What does it gets right????? It's all broken as nearly everything else!

It's sad 99% comments there are “oh see, I can run some examples from page just fine. So everything's all right, I've got full Unicode!”

The reality is there's 1-2 languages that are trying to make it correct from the beginning (perl6, I'm looking at you). It's 2013 and if language can compose bytes to code points everyone declares a win, sticks "full unicode support" label to it and continues to str[5:9].

”But I've got UnicodeUtils!” — it won't help. People just don't want or cannot write it correctly. Word is not [a-z]. Not [[:alpha:]] either. And not [insert regex here]. You cannot reverse by reversing codepoint list. And you cannot reverse by reversing grapheme list. And string length is hard to compute and then it doesn't any sense. And indexing string doesn't make any sense and it's far away from O(1)
Um, iPhones, Androids and Windows Phones all have at least one front-facing button, either physical or virtual.
This is the thing that worries me.

I have 2 BTC and was hoping to sell to grab a MacBook but I get the feeling turds and fan are going to impact each other soon.
We build our own machines and host them out of a carrier neutral facility in Portland, OR. $200/mo unmetered unlimited 100mbit connection and $1100 for a full rack with redundant 20 amp feeds. It would cost us something like $5k/mo to run our 9 servers on amazon.
There will be just under 21 million in 2140, but you have to remember many BTC private keys have been destroyed over the last few years so those can never be spent (unless they used a deterministic wallet, in which case they will probably be able to be cracked eventually).

I don't think it will ever be equal to the total world asset value. If it succeeds it will be in the short term as an online currency, in which case if it were to have a market cap the size of APPL, it would be around $36000 per coin. If it were to get long term use as a deflationary reserve currency to mitigate inflation and the Triffin Dilemma (which is what China was pushing for in 2009 when Zhou Xiaochuan released his paper[1]) then the price could easily clear $1000000 but keep in mind that is far from guaranteed as BitCoin still has some major scaling issues to sort out.

Too much growth too soon might be a bad thing.

[1] http://www.bis.org/review/r090402c.pdf

EDIT: In response to your edit, it is 2140, not 2030. The block reward (what miners get for solving a block) halves every 4 years and we are at a 25BTC reward (made every 10 minutes) with about 12 million BitCoins in existence, so it will take longer than this century to hit the 21 million mark.
The more this goes on, the more I'm convinced that non-national TLDs was a mistake.

One TLD for each country that their government can manage however they see fit, one TLD for international usage run directly by ICANN, and one reserved TLD for intranet usage. Then you could have the international TLD be implied if you leave it out of a URL.

But ofcourse, this is monday-morning quarterbacking.

So, is .Bike for motorcycles or bicycles?
> So, greater adoption = higher price.

And higher price will tend to lead towards greater adoption.
I really like the ObjectSpace.trace_object_allocations addition. I had a quick look at the 2.1 docs for ObjectSpace and there seem to be all sorts of interesting methods in there reachable_objects_from(obj) and memsize_of(obj) for example. It looks like understanding memory usage and tracking down memory leaks will get a lot easier with 2.1.

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.1.0/libdoc/objspace/rdoc/Object...
To be fair, a large number of Americans would be of the type to have strong negative opinions of Miley Cyrus's latest antics. It's just they are also not the type to vote in online polls.
For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone-...

I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly talented and passionate the team behind Jolla is.
I'm really looking forward to see how the OS and apps feel on Jolla. The OS also appears to be a lot more open and hackable than Android (although the proof will be in the pudding so we'll see how it all pans out).
Does no-one answer phone calls from their Mom anymore? Just me?
What about using Vagrant with the [vagrant-lxc plugin](http://fabiorehm.com/blog/2013/04/28/lxc-provider-for-vagran...)?
Why is bitstamp the real price?
They don't even support adding funds from US banks without wire transfer.

You can compare bitsmap with EUs market since that's what they seem to support better
> My question is: why is it so complicated to buy bitcoins?

Because bitcoin transfers are irreversible, unlike most methods of transferring currency to pay for them other than direct p2p cash transfer (which is, itself, somewhat inconvenient.)
What I don't get is that the husband went to the website and made the order, but it was the wife that made the review when the order (a gift for her) never showed up... So she and the company have no TOS agreement (there is no contract between them). But this is not even mentioned or used in the lawsuit?

> Michelman also said that the "non-disparagement" clause was not even on the website when John Palmer placed his order in 2008.

So why not get them for fraud and some other federal charges too?
The Cryptolocker malware requires people to pay the ransom for their data in bitcoins. This may help drive up the price if enough people are infected.

However, one of the podcasts I was listening to said that a security company registered one of the random domains that Cryptolocker checks as its master control server so that they could measure the number of people who were infected. Their numbers showed around 15,000 unique IPs per week contacting their server. The ransom has been lowered to 0.5 BTC so if all 15k people paid the ransom this mean about $7.5 million dollars a week at current prices.

I'm not sure how much that would effect the price of bitcoin.
Do you mean "currencies: gold and silver" or "currencies, gold, and silver"? Do you really believe it will replace traditional currencies? Do gold and silver have any real value (as in I can exchange them for good somewhere)?

I wonder because I've noticed that generally people who bet on bitcoin as "world money" seem to forget a few things: 1. the information infrastructure necessary for bitcoin is not universal and requires constant upkeep (thus a stable political and economic climate) and 2. there are currently many currencies and the world seems to get by with them. Is there reason to believe that bitcoin's adoption will be fostered by the necessary stable political climate and if it's enough of an improvement over paper monies to replace them entirely?

EDIT: I guess to summarize what now seems to be a confusing point: my dollar still work fine. What does bitcoin have that will motivate me to replace my dollars?

NOTE: I hold bitcoins and will continue to hold them. I buy webhosting and a few other things with them on a fairly regular basis.
it does not need to displace them I guess - same way Euro does not need to displace USD, just needs to be a viable alternative. Which I suspect means being a viable repository of value of all current wealth so it can have a stable exchange rate

I am interested in its ability to be a more secure Distributed hash table ala namecoin, but the tulip mania has me itching to just start mining. Oh well, why did I not start earlier?

BTW do we know how many coins have been produced to date?
If BTC did become a de facto currency, what's to stop a government printing "I promise to pay the bearer 10BTC" notes, and just carry on "printing money" (I know it's not literally done these days but it's the effect) as they always have done?

The gold standard was broken, can they not have a "bitcoin standard" and then break that in the same way?
>when millionaires are made for nothing but being first.

Manifest destiny.
Hopefully someone can clear this up for me: With the price rising so quickly what incentive is there to actually use BTC as intended, as a currency?

Because the maximum number of coins is fixed it's pretty easy to project where the valuation is headed, and so anyone in their right mind should just hoard their BTC instead of spending it, which in turn should drive the price down, no?
Show HN: Quistic
You can turn this off if you don't want the dock and menu bar across all screens and don't use full screen. Then it operates the old way.

I have to admit to being a bit befuddled-- I don't understand the desire for full screen when you've got big monitors attached, so either and all options have always worked fine for me. I agree it was silly that full screen meant losing a second screen-- but I don't see what's wrong with this compromise.
I'd love to have it explained if it wasn't a sarcasm.

I'm not trying to challenge you, but as an employee I'd always thought that a tech company that supports the infrastructure would look better on resume than one that depends on it. I'd like to hear why.