skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We might have different definitions of "nerd", but I often do events that are not tech-focussed, including conferences for advertising sales people, luncheons for donors to my university, and VIP networking events for functions that are mostly politicians and lawyers. I will admit, though, that I know very very little about designers ;P.

To me, the core problems with the advice in this article are really general. As I primarily complained about, it encourages behaviors that, from talking extensively with female colleagues about "women at tech conferences" issues, I believe if applied by a man to a woman would come off as "not respecting me for my function but instead how I look and my personal life" (which is why I wonder if this advice is specifically targeted to women; but even then I think it would be suboptimal: to a man it will come off as flirting and to a woman you will seem to be promoting a stereotype they are probably trying to avoid).

But additionally, I think it ignores really general "how to make someone want something you have" strategies that apply to all kinds of situations (from sales to dating). These are the complaints I litter through my own advice: that you want to make them ask about you, and you only win if you get them to ask for your card. The article has you introducing yourself with a spiel about how awesome you are and handing the other person your card "because you have too many".

To see how unsuccessful of a strategy that will be in the more general case, redraft the situation to trying to give your phone number to someone at a bar: humorously, now the "don't talk about work" thing could be useful (as they are probably mentally trying to get away from work ;P), but introducing yourself with a spiel that tries to make yourself sound cool that has nothing to do with the other person's interests, and then handing them your phone number with an excuse like "my friend insisted I give my number to 10 people tonight" may get someone desperate who found you amusingly awkward to call you if you "play the numbers game" (and thereby might even feel like "success"), but it wasn't really the winning strategy to obtain high-value connections.

(Note: the part about the "spiel" I'm getting from the section about introductions and specifically the end part with the "biggest tip" that seems to actively discourages saying "hi my name is ___, what's yours?". This tip was very confusing to interpret, however, as it seemed to both provide a valid praise regarding humility when meeting a celebrity while at the same time pointing out that the other person doesn't know who you are and you should explain, seemingly without them asking. It might be that was just a mixed example, showing how Paul Rudd didn't assume you knew his name. Even if I read this wrong, and the more I think about it I wonder if I did, I think much more concrete advice about how to make this work is useful, as I tried to provide in my earlier comment, and my core complaint was around the business card strategy anyway.)
> It may fail as "money" (in a narrow sense) and still succeed as a global platform.

I think that was the author's point.

For example, Paypal, Amazon or the IRS could announce tomorrow they will accept payment in Bitcoins but peg their BTC/USD exchange rate to one.

Speculation would all but stop and Bitcoins would become a transaction platform.
For now, you cannot buy a pack of cigarettes with it, but as more vendords accept it, you will have apps on your phone that will let you easily do that.

Look, bitcoin is a platform and it is in it's infant stages. But, it has huge potential. Potential does not mean odds of success are 100%
You are awesome Zed.
Why all the negativity? I am guessing he doesn't want to reveal his identity and hence created a new account.
There was a reddit casualama a while ago from someone with this same condition and some of her responses were super interesting/frightening. One of her answers that really stuck out was how she sees faces. Basically she says she sees essentially a blank mask. She can't tell if someone is pretty or ugly, she can't even tell someone's race. Would you say the same about yourself?
My confidence in bitcoin has been substantially increased after reading this article. It is becoming increasingly easy to see through the bizarre thought patterns of its doubters.
This is a terrible campaign as many have pointed out and makes Microsoft come across as a little hysterical and rabid (not to mention a tad hypocritical).

Just to be clear, I have no love for either Microsoft or Google. But the irony is that many of the points that Microsoft are trying to put across about ChromeOS are actually legitimate concerns for many users.

For example, you cannot print in ChromeOS when offline and only a limited number of printers are available through Google's cloud print service.

Offline mode is important to many users who may have patchy or non-existent internet access at times.

Apps that run in the browser are still limited compared to their desktop equivalents. This isn't an issue for everyone, but what Microsoft fails to persuade in its copy is how much more capable desktop apps are. And maybe for some users they would be happier with the desktop equivalent rather than the limited web version. (They could have demonstrated this easily by showing some simple but attractive documents or tasks that are impossible to recreate in Google's web apps).

And then, of course, there are the privacy implications of signing into ChromeOS to do anything. Just what does Google track and record? Do they record every print job you send through it's cloud printing service? Do they track your activity in their web apps? I know many users simply don't care, but for me the privacy implications are horrendous. If you're always signed into ChromeOS, Google knows how often you're online, where you browse, how often you use certain apps - basically everything you do on the Chromebook.

Of course, Microsoft are no better on the privacy front, but they don't have the online reach of Google. Windows 8.1 requires signing into the OS with an email address (but it can be bypassed quite easily), and when you're using a desktop app you're not generally being tracked. In other words, you can have pretty good privacy on a desktop system. Can the same be said for ChromeOS?
It's in Polish and you won't know what it says but hey, look at those cats
http://whyart.pl/artysci/the-cat-ladies-kalua-k-krynska-wie-jak-podejsc-kota/<p>This is not another cat meme!
No, because no one would give them bitcoins at 1:1 and they can't magic up their own, they 'd have to buy them at market price and then sell them at a hilarious loss.
Pingdom does not offer servers in these locations.
Other services do but we can't afford them. Pingdom is actually sponsoring us with free Pro account :)

If Facebook or Google would be interested to sponsor us then sure, we can add more locations and do more awesome stuff.
Show HN: My first iOS app
I'm a 16yo developer and my first app just got accepted.

Flash Study is an easy to use flashcards app. It's clean, no ads and simple so you can focus on what's important: study.

I'd love some feedback.

Here's the AppStore link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id761476004
Also - and much more profitable - you can just buy as many bitcoins as you can afford right now and sell them when they reach a value of 10^6 USD.
Just because you use a CMS doesn't mean you have to use it for everything. If you're managing content (blog content?) use a CMS. If you're making PPC pages, host them statically somewhere. If you sell something, use ecommerce software for that part.

The right tool for the right job.
HS: The Transcontinental Railroad Of The Internet Things
This makes no sense. If, say the IRS, pegged the exchange at 1 what difference does that make? There are not infinite bitcoins and the IRS certainly wouldn't have all of them. People VALUE bitcoins which is why they pay a lot of USD for them.
Clickable link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id761476004
Bitcoin won't fail because the criminal underground have accepted it. It is the perfect way to pay for drugs or other illegal activities. No way to stop, no way to trace. They reduce the risk of acting out their criminal affairs. They no longer need to move money across boarders, thus basically halving the risk of smuggling things.

Power to the people, right?
Seiko Epson Shows Off Its Dual-Arm Robot
Err, with more money you'll have to spend less time on making money you know :-)
Show HN: Beneath the Ink - App-less Enhancements for eBooks
Interview with [Damien George], Creator of the Micro Python project
The reversal of the decomposed noël doesn't produce the right result. Converting baﬄe to uppercase does do the right thing though, and the rest works as expected.
Someone's bull got a double doze of attention.
23andMe Is Terrifying, But Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks
> That isn't how pricing works.

Its how pricing works in a competitive market where even a loose approximation of rationality applies.

> Your competitors would raise prices, not lower them.

"Lower" relative to yours (or compared to incumbents, in the case of new entrants.)

> Either way there are only like 3 players in the "basics" market anyway so we're closer to a monopoly as it is.

To the extent that the absence of a competitive market in basics is a problem, its a problem independently of basic income and needs to be addressed whether or not a basic income is adopted.
Out of curiosity, why only have one string type? We don't do the same for numbers. Many languages don't have "number", they have int, float, long, etc.

Instead of just String, maybe we should have ASCIIString, UTF8String, and UTF16String.
I also read it as a public apology.
Don't worry. I didn't feel attacked at all. I understand the need to get feedback from users (or non-user in my case) to improve things. And it was not even the concept that held me back... just lack of need at this time. Generally speaking, I'm not one to sign up for something until I actually plan to use it.
The iPod for television? I can't even imagine what that is supposed to do.

It's a Chromecast/Airplay type device, stream stuff on to your TV from your wifi.
Lifestyle Hacking: Automation Part One
The big thing they're crowing about is because you can spin something like this up quickly on demand in the G cloud.

Most sites aren't remotely close to this artificial traffic pattern (1 packet request, 1 packet response).

It's kinda cool from an L4 load balancing perspective that it's only one fault tolerant IP address. In terms of L4 LB throughput though, a single box with IPVS will happily do 1M pps.
That's because Bitcoins are relatively easy to buy and very difficult to cash out into real currency. Once enough people see how hard it is to liquidate their Bitcoins back to USD the realization will follow.
Definitely not. I can certainly tell attractiveness, race, etc etc. I just can't tie the face to an identity.
I assumed this was going to be an article about the worker cubicles at Amazon HQ being surrounded by Windows.
> The ladder is about the ping pong league they run, and he's joking that it's not a benefit because he's not winning.

I did not get that after re-reading the post. While I thank you for clarifying the point which changed the tone of the post dramatically(bad juxtaposition if you ask me, really), I'd also like to point out allegations of did you read the post are, in general, not constructive ad hominem(that whoever you're replying to is incapable of reading and etc.) and uncalled for.
Actually, you have an expert (or more than one expert) who can testify to the nature of the block chain and the difficulty and expense involved in altering its history.
Thanks for your feedback. I agree, which is why i decided to put it out there because I use the library in a chrome extension and if something breaks, I would be trying to get the extension fixed - patching gmail.js. Still better than finding random solutions from here and there or duplicating efforts. :-) I'd be interested in seeing what you guys are working so, so I'll ping you soon
Of course it is completely ideologically bankrupt, but so is virtually everything else about our political and cultural institutions. Not a whole lot has changed on this front since Galileo was thrown into prison, at least not in terms of ideological fundamentals.
Article about this topic: http://erratasec.blogspot.de/2013/05/bitcoin-is-public-ledge...
Sure, it's a monetary phenomenon, but that doesn't mean it always comes from monetary policy. In fact, the big reason monetary policy exists is to control inflation. Without monetary policy, inflation and deflation depend solely on the production of the economy compared to the relatively fixed supply of money. Which is what will happen if bitcoin takes off. Growing economy + fixed money supply = deflation.

So the GP was wrong when he said there can be no inflation by definition once all the bitcoins have been mined and the supply is fixed. Deflation (negative inflation) is pretty much guaranteed with a fixed money supply. There's more stuff to buy with the same amount of money, so things will cost less.

Consistent deflation will be very upsetting for the status quo. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, but when the incentives shift towards keeping your money in a shoebox, and against using banks, taking or giving out loans, investing and spending, that's going to be a huge change.
So basically Spike Lee doesn't do the right thing?
You might like my screencast, Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript. It covers everything you're talking about.

http://www.letscodejavascript.com
At Soylent, we have been accepting Bitcoin using coinbase. The decision to do so was based on marketing and the anticipation that not many people would actually use Bitcoin and we wouldn't have a large risk exposure. To date only 130 people out of 12,000 have pre-ordered Spylent using Bitcoin. Our total risk exposure was less than 1% of total revenue. The recent rocket ship rise in a Bitcoin valuation has valued our Bitcoins at 10% of total cash from revenue. So far, the decision to accept Bitcoin has been a tremendous success.

The recent rise in Bitcoin valuation is speculation based on merchant trends. Well established merchants in Asia are starting to accept Bitcoin. The total valuation of Bitcoin is still around $15Bn. The total value of annual US domestic cash flow is somewhere around $15T. Think about the potential of Bitcoin. Highly unlikely? Absolutely! But think about if you woke up tomorrow and Amazon or Apple announced that they would start accepting Bitcoin? What do you think the valuation would be?
Meh, delivering a bunch of text with some images and hyperlinks inbetween was pretty much a solved problem twenty years ago. It's nice that there's still progress being made towards doing more interesting things on the web, but if you have trouble pushing text and images to IE the problem might not lie with IE.
This is why you should always have your contracts reviewed by a lawyer. See Mike Monteiro's Fuck You, Pay Me: http://vimeo.com/22053820
> outstanding innovations

Which proposal from your first paragraph is going to ensure outstanding-ness of inventions? I recall company lawyers making the rounds asking us to write down any possible inventions among the things we'd already built. I don't remember the lawyers ever asking whether those possible inventions were outstanding.
Once you delete your account and leave it alone for 90 days, its gone. It will never be linked to you again. Thanks, Irish Data Protection Commissioner!
If you want to email me a gzipped callgrind or two, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can make any suggestions. You can reach me at cheald @ gmail.
PaaS for a LAMP service?
Currently, I run a LAMP stack on a simple web hosting platform at $7 a month with a dedicated IP. I've decided to ditch them for various reasons.

I've been told that launching a service with a simple hosting service is a bad idea and that I should use a PaaS to scale. While maintaining my online anonymity, my web service is nothing more than a simple upload service for all intent and purposes. There is no user-user interaction. The experience is as follows: log in, upload, view history. At least,that's how it will be for the time being. I also run a couple of cron jobs to send users reminders and to scan the DB for changes.
Although I expect my storage needs to multiply over time, I don't see why I can't just purchase more storage from my web hosting guys.

Why do I need to use a PaaS, and furthermore, is Heroku something to look at especially if my whole website is written in PHP? I checked it out, and I have no idea what's going on on. Seems super convoluted. But then again, I'm a CS-gradguy just doing a simple side-project.
@rudyrigot and the team @prismicio http://prismic.io really have a handle on this problem.
They believe a github-esq content management system makes the most sense for content creators, and a content API makes most sense for engineers to distribute that content inside of a variety of platforms (mobile, a rails app, whatever). Saw Rudy speak at Zendesk/Rails meetup this month, it was a very good presentation (I am not affiliated with Prismic).

I've been playing with their ruby-kit, so far so good, really liking this approach and plan to see awesome things ahead.
An unfortunate but common sequence of events, where this:

We never signed any contracts or work-for-hire agreements

...leads to these:

The agency told me that I could publish the work as my own for the "exposure"

I never even got paid the peanuts they owed me

The agency responded by threatening me with legal action and worse

Whenever a client states or implies that "the exposure" will be payment enough, alarm bells should be ringing.
True, but if he can prove he created them, he has a copyright on the work just by creating it.
> Because, unlike current poverty support programs, where the having a benefit program that gives you $X and a job that gives you $X the most you can get is $X, with basic income, you can have the basic income of $X and the job of $X and have $2X.

This is the point that I didn't understand.
WePay (YC S09) is hiring a lead API Product Manager
The main benefit isn't any of this "cached forever" business, although thats great. It's the fact that the download is coming from 1 or 2 hops away instead of all the way across the country or world.
13 Startup Tools We Are Thankful For
So the agency played hardball but the guy didn't budge, then tried to rip him off? Their bad faith effort seems to deserve punitive damages, I hope he takes them to court.
Any recommendations on how to inexpensively (free) experiment in making techno music? I downloaded some synth programs on my iPad (HexASound, Synth) to play with. Would something like Algorave, Archaeopteryx, or Overtone be better?
That price is due to the rarity of gold. If it were as common as copper, 400 tons would be worth a lot less than $150 billion a year.
> I think that might partly explain the advertising, they seem to be modelling themselves on that Central/Northern European, Berlin counter-culture, Girl-with-a-Dragon-Tattoo, techy-savvy hacker kind of thing.

woo, lots of stereotypes here..i found the video to be really likeable.

> Also, personally speaking, it's nice to see an open source OS made by a company apparently looking to make money from selling hardware and software, as a product, rather than from leveraging user data.

That works as long as arent very successful and others start to use Sailfish
AngularJS + CoffeeScript + TDD Workshop
This is the first part of our AngularJS + CoffeeScript + TDD Workshop. Are you ready Shinobi?
The chain has already forked before. The community so far has managed to agree on which to follow. That might not be the case if a government like China interferes with the protocol, splitting it into two very active forks.
You should tweet your address to him so he knows how to find you.
So is this nothing more than a $50 box that runs Tor for you, which is already freely available?
Whew...I thought this was going to be an indictment of the Oldboy remake. Sure, the original was great, but I was interested in how an American director would handle the material.

That said, this was probably not the kind of controversy Spike Lee needs attached to this project.

side note: Roger Ebert's raving review of Oldboy was what got me to watch the original Oldboy and that spurred a whole new appreciation of independent foreign films for me:

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2005

Would've loved to see what he thought about this one, though Ebert's successor only gave the remake 3 stars

http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2013
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/oldboy-2013
The iPod let you access your entire music library in your pocket. Sugarcube lets you share the media that your accessing on your mobile device on your TV!
In practice, no because

1) New Bitcoins are created every 10 minutes until we reach ~21M bitcoins.

2) Some people will refuse to sell their Bitcoin to you.

In theory, if you can wait until year ~2140, send all the Bitcoins in the world to your address and delete the private key from your hard drive (and brain), then yes. But then, maybe someone could get really lucky and guess your private key. But both those scenarios are uninteresting because they are impossible in practice (they are about as likely as the Flying Spaghetti Monster being real).

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_if_someone_bought_up_all...
Bum-rushing is, IMO, strong, but the problem with striking up a conversation with someone in a line, is that they're more or less a captive audience. If, for some reason, they'd prefer not to speak with you, they have to leave their place in order to do so, and forcing that on them isn't really polite, or fair.
Grunt is not a great build tool. It's not terrible, either, but it puts too much emphasis on a giant declarative config object.

But Grunt has a huge library of plugins that cover all your build automation needs, and that's made it the de-facto standard for build automation in the JavaScript world.

I'm working on a universal build format that would allow you bring the convenience of Grunt plugins to other tools as well. (I'm fond of Jake, myself.) PM me or follow my Github [1] for more. The first version's going up next week.

[1] https://github.com/jamesshore/
If you're sitting on substantial gains, I would consider liquidating half, and letting the rest ride for the long term.

Simple example. You mined 1,000 a long time ago, and held on to them.

Now you're sitting on a million dollars in 'paper' gains. Take half a million out, do whatever makes sense with the gains.

If bitcoin goes to $100,000 down the road, you've still got a massive holding worth $50 million. You're not going to miss the other $50 million so much, frankly. You just won the lottery. Most likely bitcoin is either going to soar a lot higher, or crash into some disaster (for any number of reasons).
Check out SuperCollider [1] and Csound [2] as well.

[1] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net
[2] http://www.csounds.com/
Spike, you have 5 days...