skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The card was declined because it was an invalid card number.

"No such issuer" means that the first six digits, Bank Identification Number, are incorrect and card was declined as a result.

We (Balanced) should be doing a better job to make this error more understandable or mask it by returning some invalid card number error.
Affiliates referral. There's a small revenue also on top of the charges and fees that Balanced cost but that part is primarily to cover the cost of shipping.
Agreed. His entire argument boils down to "Money has never worked like bitcoin, so it can't possibly work." It's an absurd line of logic to use as a critique. It's like the RIM guys claiming no one would like iPhones because they don't have physical keyboards, and smartphones "have always had physical keyboards."
I think this guy doesn't get that money is just an efficient way to trade debt. The reason other currencies have failed is that they haven't been as efficient, and also have been illegal. Crytocurrency may end up being more efficient. Especially for international transactions.
I feel you should add an option: I work 35-40 hours and have no problem working a little more when needed.

You seem to have chosen 40 and 45 as points of interest but don't allow anything less than 40 (to me, it seems you imply 40 or more hours, even with "I work roughly 40 hours").
Top 5 trending GitHub projects: PayPal releases the Kraken
I created another item here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6810671
My understanding is that frozen strings (unlike Symbols) are garbage collected. This is useful because symbol construction can be used to DOS an application.

(I agree that it's a weird, low level detail to have to think about.)
Wow, didn't realize that! That's bad news, since the current daily transaction rate (~100k) is within an order of magnitude of the daily limit (~600k = 7 x 3600 x 24).

Fortunately, the doubling time is, from eyeballing the chart below, about 6 months, so that allows ~1-2 years for a fix.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=30day...
For a currency who's primary promise was eliminating the middle man (payment processors, global exchange rates and so on), I find it ironic that it relies heavily on middlemen for adoption.
You're thinking in terms of small-step deviations from our existing society. But that's not what happens without government and civil society. A couple of guns under the bed isn't going to keep the local warlord away. There are no local police, just strongmen.

You already pay for people not to kill you: you fund a government and a military to create civil order, without which you'd be a peasant serving a warlord. Once you create government, you have to pick some way to control it. Democracy seems the most fair, but there is as you point out an incentive for people to vote themselves material comforts.

There is of course alternatives to democracy. Plutocratic libertarianism underwritten by brutal authoritarianism (I.e. Hong Kong) seems to be popular among a certain set these days. I don't think these are fundamentally stable though. Eventually people will realize that they'd be better off under democracy.
I've upgraded one of my Rails4 apps to 2.1.0-preview2. Everything seems to be working fine except pry-debugger.

What is it with the ruby debugger? It has always been problematic for me.
Fix the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6809527
The buttons looks a little pale, but I loved the overall design!
Spot on.

It would be like a textbook case of the Stockholm syndrome -- only, despite trying quite hard, he doesn't come off as that keen about his captors or his environment anyway...
Lists in plural, yes. One single item, not so impersonal.
I kinda think it's neat and very personal to say "This is what Norman REALLY wants".

Did you see, also, that after you've made a contribution you type in your name and message afterwards.
Startups should be http://www.defensivepatentlicense.com/content/frequently-ask... upon formation.

Won't help immediately, probably won't help much anytime soon. But the network effect has to start somewhere, and at least joining now commits startup to doing right thing.
Also, bitcoin is already -much- better at moving money around the world. 8 cents for a bitcoin transfer or the 45 dollar wire transfer?
Neat suggestion. It could totally be uploaded to a cdn where people can simply import it and once a change occurs on Gmail and the script gets updated, everybody benefits.
Did you ever get a response on this? I'd deposit a bitcoin into escrow if he deposits 10,000. Are the terms still 1/2 the sovereign currencies or are we going with your 100% rise in value? I think I'll stick with the 1/2 the sovereign currencies as all sorts of things can cause hyperinflation of commodities prices. Seems like a worthy bet.
I work along all the day. Weekend included. But I do whatever I want in the meantime, like exercises and take naps. So I don't have to stare at a screen 8 hours in a row, but I also don't care about answer some emails and do some bugfixes on sunday 2AM.
No, and it failed as a currency.
A Prediction: All Currencies Are Doomed to Fail (but probably not for a while)
Thanks for the reply. I still need to make a better job of displaying any general errors from Balanced that aren't for a specific input field.
There have been rumours that the Nokia board chairman Ollila would have chosen someone from inside Nokia, but that largest owners of Nokia (some big American funds, who probably own a lot of Microsoft, too) told that this is not acceptable.

One newspaper article (in Finnish) stating this story is here: http://www.itviikko.fi/ihmiset-ja-ura/2011/01/26/kl-elop-ohi...
Rkh.im | Ruby 2.1
Your logic has you backwards.

Most of those who are either lazy or unable to find work are poor. Many who are unable to find work are in that situation through no fault of their own.
> People who have earned money are perfectly entitled to have their earned economic power, they just aren't entitled to keep getting more powerful off everyone else's back simply by sitting on cash. Sitting on cash is not an economically useful activity, it's a null operation, and setting a system up to reward it is foolish.

So tell me. If I work for a year and save up $10,000, and when 10 years have passed a car can be made using only 50% of the labor that was required 10 years ago - and, consequently, the car is cheaper than it was 10 years ago - who is more entitled to this increased in wealth than me?

The increased productivity has to benefit someone. I don't think money producers deserve the benefit more than the saver.
Sugarcube - the iPod for television
bitcoin inflation would actually mean price deflation in an economy where bitcoin was widely prevalent.
He is essentially giving the chartalist theory of money. Money cannot arise except through the fiat of the state. Chartalists hate the Mengerian theory on the origin of money because it posits that money arises as a market phenomena. Eventually the state co-opted money, but that does not mean money arose because of the state. The emergence of bitcoin is a thorn in the side to chartalists. We can't really go back and figure out the exact history of how gold emerged as money, but bitcoin is being monetized right before our eyes. The angst felt by chartalists is also felt by inflationists. They hate the idea that you could have a successful currency that cannot be inflated beyond a fixed supply. So they are naturally defensive. Every success bitcoin has undermines their world view.
> Will this have legal weight?

I doubt it. If I have to fax something for it to be a legal document, such an antiquated system will ignore any advances made around it.
Great answer, that's exactly how I feel. It's all a question of expected return. With one small difference ...

I have a 3-year old son. Working day and night is always within reason for me, because no matter how much I could gain, I'll always regret the time I haven't spent with my son. Therefore I work in waves. I have weeks in which I work 14-18 hours per day, followed by weeks in which I spend more quality time with my family.

The effort also has to be rationalized. Working long hours for sustained periods leads to stress and mental exhaustion, which ultimately impacts your productivity negatively. You always have to (1) be careful and listen to your body when it shows signs that you need to rest and (2) reflect on your productivity, because it doesn't matter if you work 14-hour days if you don't get anything done. Sometimes taking a step back and relaxing for a bit does wonders for productivity.
Give Bill Gates a trillion dollars though and there's zero tax revenue on that.

Obviously I'm not advocating giving $1T to Bill Gates, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding that gets repeated over and over again. Rich people do not keep their money under their mattresses. Much of it they keep in a variety of financial instruments, most commonly stocks and bonds. Sale of stock is how many companies finance their operations, which includes, among other things, hiring people who pay taxes. Bonds are how corporations and governments fund things like building factories, roads and schools.

Even if Bill just kept it in the bank, the bank now has more money to lend at easier terms to businesses needing capital.

There is a serious economic study and debate about how much of a "multiplier" effect you get from handing money to a poor person vs. to a rich person. It wouldn't surprise me if it were higher for the poor person, but it's surely not 0 for the rich person.
In news organizations, titles are usually written by editors, not writers.
I work all the time. I wake up, start working, eat my meals at my desk, unwind at home for an hour or two before bed while answering some emails or working on my laptop, and go to sleep. The most time I spend not working is my commute (I listen to audiobooks while driving). I spent last Christmas Day and Thanksgiving Day in my lab. I have a PhD from a top school and am paid about $50000 / year because I work in Academia in a "training" (postdoc) position. The system I'm a part of is an unsustainable pyramid scheme in many ways, that I wouldn't recommend to most people, but this structural problem is hardly limited to academia. Nevertheless I'm very happy: I am intensely interested in the problem that I study (lifespan extension) and there's nothing else I'd rather be doing.
Yes the two nic[k] collinses had a big fight once.
http://www.nicolascollins.com/collinscup.htm
IPhone Users Lose Privacy Lawsuit Against Apple
Or you know, maybe others missing this are not very good at reading obvious stuff between the lines and need everything spelled out...
I'm not seeing the HN angle here.
> BitCoin can support 7 transactions per second

It doesn't really matter, it's not like they're at all close to that limit. The limit is there to create a market with transaction fees, so it's not just going to be "removed" any time soon.
I agree every hour over 40 to mean is more valuable to me so my 41st hour might be 1.1 times my standard rate, however my 60th hour might be 2 times my standard rate (the multipliers here mentioned are only for illustrative purposes).

It would seem strange that a company would wish to purchase more hours at an increasing rate since the quality of the output from the later hours is likely diminishing.
Thinking more about this, I find a good measure of a success of a currency is to just look at how much of your monthly transactions are conducted with said currency.

Now I believe a persons wage is the biggest monthly transaction they perform - work and monthly wage pays out, in what currency?

When bitcoin reaches that point, if ever, where employers pay their employees and taxes in BTC. Then its a currency. Now its a speculative bubble - for which it may still be a good idea to get behind and compete with all the other gamblers.
I think Bitcoin's doomed to fail, but not for the reasons the article suggest.

There're ample historical counterexamples of currencies that are not tied to a government. Gold is the most obvious example; if currency was inextricably tied to governments, there would not have been a mad rush to colonize the New World (and extract its gold reserves). In prisons cigarettes frequently serve as currency, as a medium of exchange that is widely valued.

What really makes a currency is confidence. People have to believe that other people will continue to value the currency later. Government backing can provide one source of confidence. But so can strong crypto, and one could argue that these days people have more confidence in crypto than in governments.

What'll really kill Bitcoin is that this speculative wave has made the price incredibly volatile, so volatile that real merchants selling real goods have no idea what to price things at. So everyone holding Bitcoins purchases them for investment value, and then the price will crash when it stops going up. That destroys confidence in the currency, which destroys the currency.

I could easily see a successor currency based on the Bitcoin protocol emerging from the ashes, though. By then the speculators will have been burned so badly that they'll stay far away, so it'll quietly gain adoption in the background, and then eventually become the new currency of choice when inflation starts to make it's way through current fiat currencies.
And then you exclude the 70% of 16-24 year olds that don't even regularly read, and have no use for either ebooks or paper books...
Sure, he says as such. And abused spouses say they fell on the door knob and that "everything is fine", sending just as much mixed signals as the ones you listed above.
FlightAware MiseryMap — visualization of the state of Thanksgiving flight delays
Agree with it, people here in Brazil prefer to hire 2 bad developers rather than 1 really good one.
The Homebrew Brewfile
Sorry if my question sounded personally attacking. I'm just a web geek trying to improve what I build.

So, it sounds like it was the concept that held you back. Not something that I was doing wrong on the site per se.
I used to be in this position and yeah it wasn't nice. We also didn't get overtime, so nobody was motivated when we had to work weekends because something was promised to a client. I'm contracting now though, so yeah, I don't mind :)
Pornhub Traffic Trends Driven by Worldwide Events
Ultimately they'll have to, but not because of any outrage about under compensation. This is only possible for Mr. Kuan because he built the systems he maintains. The next person is going to have to maintain systems someone else built. That will be a lot harder, and my guess is ultimately impossible for one person.
Letter to all customers from the CEO of 23andMe
Isn't this pretty damn hard as well?

Nah. If all the govt. does is says that every merchant cannot accept bitcoin for transactions, that's enough to render every bitcoin market black.
That probably won't work. The add-on reviewers are very strict about running arbitrary code loaded from somewhere else, and no add-on using it would be approved. (After all, you could change your code and store people's emails.)

That being said, you should be able to use this to load new selector strings for the API:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/latest/...

http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest.html
The large pools do levy taxes against the miners.
A weapon for self defense as a last resort is fine, but I'd also want a good social net as well. The problem with self-reliance for security is that eventually, you must sleep.
Penalties work best when they are large enough to hurt, but without causing irreversible harm. There's lots of research on what humans find pleasant and unpleasant (Thinking: Fast and Slow, etc.), which is often unrelated to any actual damage. This seems like an example of one such idea that I'll call unrealized opportunity cost. Seeing what might have been won't matter in the long run, but perhaps it'll rise up in people's psyche enough to alter their behavior.
There's probably a way to say, with reassuring confidence, that you aren't good with faces, so if they bump into you again to just remind them what you talked about. I think some things, like not remembering faces (or sometimes in my case, names) are awkward barriers until they're explicitly mentioned and explained.
A Plea to Avoid Crush of Users at Healthcare.gov
So, this raises an interesting question for me. Since the total supply of Bitcoins is limited by design, doesn't every forgotten or lost Bitcoin reduce the total supply?

In other words, suppose, hypothetically, that after all Bitcoins have been mined, I bought them all, stored them on a hard drive (with no backup, obviously), and then destroyed that hard drive (let's say I threw it into a black hole). Does Bitcoin still exist?
The worst common day offender being .io.
>why does it have to be "if you're a Nerd"

Because, as mentioned upthread, it's not really good enough to stand alone as dance music. It's only worth listening to if you're interested in the generative aspect.
that and my PC/browser is set to en-US but I am in Eastern Europe and my results are only for .ru (even though I'm not in Russia).
I agree. I guessed quickly that it was a phone but all the networking junk it was sitting on top of in the top photo made me wonder if it was supposed to be something else. The first two questions I ask about anything technical (consumer product, programming language, branch of mathematics, ...) are 'what is this?' and 'when would I use this?' and it's depressing how poorly most advertising/documentation answers those.
RoR is cool but it narrows down your career opportunities. I would learn a modern mainstream language as well, e.g. Scala or C#, they can be used outside of scope of small/medium size web apps.
The short answer is, no.

A digital currency could be designed with this in mind, but it would seemingly require an official ownership registry or something equally effective on identification (if you can't prove loss, you can't return them to circulation).

Much like with physical currencies, or gold, the reduction of outstanding supply increases the value for everyone else holding. There's no across-the-board right argument to whether that's a good thing or not.
It's easy to make money on anything that is popular.
The "profit" made on top of adding a small fee. on top of Balanced's fee, is so minuscule and quickly eaten by shipping costs.

Right now, I'm more interested in building something that makes a profit just for the hell of it. All my other side-projects are making me absolutely nothing. ...nothing but resume padding :)
Man Accidentally Throws Away $7.5 Million Worth of Bitcoins
Inflation is a separate issue. That comes from the nature of money, not its source. You can have a decentralized, distributed inflationary currency. See Freicoin for example.
> 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.

Indeed, this is somewhat surprising. And so many people here had no clue what Jolla and Sailfish are.
I hope that 23andMe can get this sorted out soon. I'm a customer for many years and have purchased a number of kits as gifts. Of course I bought a kit as a gift on Sunday, the day before the FDA letter. Good luck 23andMe!
It seems to me that the incentive to hoard is counter-balanced by the seller's incentive to lower prices and invest themselves, causing the two to meet in the middle.

Can you cite a real-world example of a deflationary "economic basket case"?
"Sounds wholly or partly characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals."

This is a fun play on the words of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which criminalized the huge underground rave scene in the UK. (It's 'repetitive beats' in the text of the Act).

Knowing that wouldn't really have changed the article much, but it's not as po-faced a definition as the author might have thought.
The point is, while it may have started out as a ligature (of either ſs or ſz, no one really knows for sure), it has long become a letter in its own right. You cannot treat it like a display-only ligature without throwing away information, e.g. the difference between Maße (measurements) and Masse (mass). People in Switzerland made a conscious decision not to use ß anymore, but that's not the case in other countries where the language is used.
>> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.

I'd say this is the key variable in the set.

Another example:

>"The only reason I haven’t bought an e-reader is because I love the feeling of holding a book in hand and seeing the creases in the spine when I'm done. It’s like a little trophy."

I was the exact same way -- right down to the explanation as to why I didn't want an ereader. I just loved everything about physical books. The texture, the smell, and, embarrassingly, the vanity of having an apartment filled with books. And then my work bought me an iPad. Everything changed almost immediately.

I absolutely love being able to have an army of books with me at all times. As a guy whose still a student, 95% of my time is spent with technical books. It is absolutely amazing to have everything at my fingertips at all times. I can pull up whatever I feel like studying at any point throughout the day. Few minutes of downtime at work? Maybe I'll read a chapter in my Patterns book. If I'm not feeling that, I just swipe over to Programming in Scala and have some fun. Also, being able to search a book is worth its weight in gold.

That said, there are a few draw backs which irk me. Though, I think these can really be solved with better software.

Firstly, referencing two places in the book at once. How many times have you been reading a textbook and kept your finger in one section while reading another so that you can quickly hop back and forth? Impossible to do quickly with readers. You got to create bookmarks, with each "flip" open the bookmarks, find the one you need, and finally select it to view the page. With physical, all you need to do is flip to where your finger is and presto! Done. The digital equivalent requires multiple taps and a good bit of waiting.

The other drawback is DRM. After a fiasco with Amazon (which I otherwise love), It became clear to me that DRM books are not worth owning. I purchase almost exclusively from O'Reilly due to the fact that they offer a plain old, DRM free PDF. I give them money, then give me the product -- not a licence to use the product under their terms, the actual product for me to do with as I wish. Currently, it's very tough to find all the books I want to read as DRM-free pdfs. I'm doing my best to vote with my wallet, so that means there are many books that I simply don't buy anymore because I like actually owning the things that I purchase.

Other than those caveats, eBooks have completely replaced physical ones for me. The article is kind of pointless given that so few of the people sampled have any actual reference point.
WINAMP memory site. Leave some words about...
Well I was expecting there would be a significant jump in transaction volume as news spreads, prices rise, more services were offered in BTC and more countries get local exchanges. You also seem to miss that its not the total number of transactions per day you need to worry about, its the transactions per second.

There are surely periods of frenzy in the day where we cannot support 7 transactions per second as more economic activity takes place, even if the total transactions for the day is well under 600000. Its not like the transactions are neatly distributed on a flat line throughout the day.

There must also be some consideration that each time this is done, the BTC in the transaction is rendered unspendable and so it is taken out of the market. So I guess its not good if something like this could scale on top of BitCoin.
http://www.colourtime.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Domtar-...

This one?