skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We are planning Clojure/West to take place in San Francisco in the spring (April-ish timeframe).
"There're ample historical counterexamples of currencies that are not tied to a government. Gold is the most obvious example"

...governments were accepting gold for tax purposes, kings were filling their treasuries with gold, armies were sent to steal gold from other countries, etc. Gold was absolutely tied to government when it was used as currency, and I am using the past tense here because gold is not a currency outside of a few highly niche markets.

"What really makes a currency is confidence"

I think you are confusing confidence with demand. What makes currencies work is demand -- the fact that everyone in the market demands the currency. Typically this happens because of a government, or more precisely because of a government that enforces certain laws.

"so can strong crypto"

Oh yeah? Let's just assume that Bitcoin actually qualified as "strong crypto." I'll release my fork of Bitcoin that is identical in every way, but happens to have its own block chain that I started using this post. How successful do you think that will be as a currency? Why can't we all just create our own personal block chains (and thus all be rich)? There is more to the story than "strong crypto."
Well, that seems to be what Google is doing with PNaCl and pepper.js. Pepper.js uses emscripten to compile PNaCl apps so they run in JS (specifically asm.js). In Chrome the PNaCl version can run, and everywhere else it runs in JS. That sounds like what you are proposing?

You can try that approach out right now,

http://www.flohofwoe.net/demos.html

http://trypepperjs.appspot.com/examples.html

Those two sites have the same codebases built for both PNaCl and asm.js. Overall they run pretty well in both, so this doesn't seem to show a clear advantage to either JS or a non-JS bytecode. PNaCl starts more slowly, but then runs more quickly, but even those differences are not that big. And surely both PNaCl will get faster to start up, and JS get faster to run, because there is no reason they both cannot get pretty much to native speed in both startup and execution.

Note though that there are risks to this approach. No one enforces that everyone create dual builds of this nature, and there is no guarantee that the dual builds will be equivalent. So while this is interesting to do, it does open up a whole set of compatibility risks, which could fragment the web.
If you're interested in actively managing your own portfolio, for some reason this isn't mentioned much places, but you need to have a deep understanding of financial accounting. That will allow you to read and make sense of financial statements. There is no other way, if you're an active, vs. passive, investor. Then one easy strategy is to do what Charlie Munger calls, "sit on your ass investing". That's where you wait for bargains in strong companies to come along and you swing real big. Diversification is not as important if you know what you're doing. And you don't have to sit around if the market is fairly priced, just when it's high. During that time, when you're not doing much investing, you should be reading, studying, and aspire to get into more special situations (arbitrage) and look for Ben Graham style net nets with micro to small cap companies that aren't as popular. Even OTC market value investing with your own scuttlebutt. There aren't much of those so you have to see what ratios people substitute for those nowadays. For example, you're not going to find decent insurance companies selling at less than their working capital minus total debt. Those used to exist after the Great Depression. Now you have to find companies say, selling at some higher ratio than what would have made a decent margin of safety in those days. It can take a long time and a lot of watching the market, looking at different stats to know what you should be looking for.
Not sure if your post is sarcasm, but IIRC you need to enable a checkbox before CM sends metrics data back.

Also, by your metric of phoning home, 99.999% of apps in the Play Store should be banned since it's malware. In fact, Android itself meets that definition.
I would have thought that makes it more likely to be from 4chan folks - no intelligence agency or think tank would recruit that broadly.
You'd be surprised. It's not all just NEET neckbeard virgins.
Review my side project: SOVNDWAVE
Sovndwave.com is a collection of incredible, royalty-free music.

The market is video creators, mostly "youtubers" - this has been my favorite niche market for the last 6 years or so for merchandising and live events.

My partner is a crazy popular YouTube creator and musician, Destery: http://youtube.com/desandnate (you are likely not in his target audience)

Our plan started today with a splash page with a signup for 5 free tracks. On Friday we'll send out the download links and pitch 5 additional tracks for the Black Friday only price of $4.

We'll hype it up with a goal of like 50 or 100 sales which will trigger getting 5 more songs free. Then we'll do $6 pricing through Cyber Monday. After that it will be $9 for the next 30 days or so, then $19.

During that first month we'll probably add another track to the paid offer every day - everyone that already paid will get them for free. After that month we'll probably switch to one track weekly (we have ~200 recorded).

The goal is to be a $19 / yr subscription service for music.

Would love any feedback, questions, etc!
It looks better tho
Calm down, go back and re-read the sub-thread. We are talking about general principles behind the practice, not necessarily about this concrete example.
Digital currencies will eventually be the only kind of currency there are; "plastic money" (AKA credit cards) were created to ease the handling of personal and business finances; digital currencies are one step further, were we don't depend on a piece of plastic but paying via web or by proximity and confirming on your personal phone (similar to the way two-factor authentication works).

"Real" money is just a piece of paper that represents value supported by the government behind it; so representing it on bytes supported by the open-source cryptography behind it is less dramatic than most people would assume.
Please, someone, get this trash off of the front page. Not only is this entire article completely content-less, but the number of fallacies in it is palpable.

I wasn't going to waste my time on this, but after skimming for 20 seconds I came to this:

> In many ways, Litecoin is looking like a better investment. For Litecoin it is still early days because the infrastructure is not quite there. However, it looks to be a more promising currency from the technical standpoint, e.g., allowing faster transactions and a longer time until the end of the mining cycle.

Faster confirmations DON'T MEAN SHIT. Just because it takes 2.5 minutes for a Litecoin confirmation doesn't mean it is any better. Yeah, a Litecoin confirmation is 4x faster than a Bitcoin confirmation, but all that means is that a Litecoin confirmation is 1/4 as secure as a Bitcoin confirmation. Which is actually worse, when you think about it because the blockchain is more bloated.

>Its current market capitalization is $215 million, giving a factor of 45 potential growth to simply catch up with Bitcoin.

Are you fucking serious?
Seems like an elaborate ruse.
No need. Like most people I just post on hn to make myself feel smarter. ahem I mean to make the world better.
Article was a transparent attempt to pump Litecoin.
Litecoin is just a me-too bitcoin clone. I see it as analogous to PhpOnTrax, Groovy on Grails, or Castle vs. Ruby on Rails. Although, it is actually worse than that as it is mostly a fork stealing the original codebase and repurposing it for spurious reasons, I believe.

For some reason, with open source projects like this, the real innovations usually continue to flow from the original project, not the clones.
C is not sandboxed, and C has lots of undefined behavior. For those reasons, it is problematic for the web, which needs to let people view any site from any browser and platform, in a safe way.

People have tried to "fix" those issues with C, and usually they end up going pretty far, ending up with stuff like the JVM or CLR.
I'm not sure of your children's ages, but my daughter, who's 12 took about 75 nanoseconds to adjust to ios7. She loves it, the flashlight app from the control center screen gets a lot of use and of course 90% of ios7 is the same as ios6.
You have the right idea. It's important to remember what we'd want if we didn't have any concerns about power abuse. In a perfect world, anyone would be excited that some of the world's best scientists were studying the secrets of their body and would soon be able to offer them opportunities to take control of their health and ageing rather than leaving it to chance. Even better if an enormous sample was pooled for study. This is the only realistic way to move toward a complete understanding of how our bodies work.

There are real potential abuses of privacy, but we shouldn't let those scare us into failing to progress. The fact is, you leave your genetic information everywhere you go. If any restaurant wanted to get into the DNA collection business, they would never run out of material. In the near future, I wouldn't be surprised if some people argued that any genetic material left at their business was their rightful property, and since you made no effort to hide the fact that you were eating off that particular fork, they shouldn't have to avert their eyes from your DNA or deny its association with you. Perhaps on your next visit to any chain restaurant, they could suggest a menu more appropriate to your specific health needs.
While I love bitcoin and have some myself, I think the number of stories is approaching spammy. Not complaining about this story in particular.
URL: http://sovndwave.com

Stack: Currently static HTML via yeoman generator-webapp, hosted on Heroku, MailChimp for signups. Will launch with payments via Stripe and probably ExpressJS / PassportJS for the real site with user logins / downloads.

We've got 50 signups from Destery's tweet (and my retweet) tonight, will send out another one from my account now and see if there is interest.
s3cmd ls s3://aws-publicdatasets/common-crawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/

That should get you about 90% on your way.
"it" being? my co-reference parser raised an exception
Great write up! Only fools think that a $100 investment in bitcoin today will turn them into millionaires. This has to do with risk vs reward. A $100 investment in 2009 may have turned people into millionaires but at that time the chances of losing $100 were quite high. Now, with a lower risk than back in 2009 you're going to have to have greater skin in the game. $10,000 may see you with some good returns. You may still lose it but the chances are lower than back in 2009.

How high can it go? While your analysis based on market cap is mostly correct, unfortunately it's just a good guess. Bitcoin has the potential to replace currencies, MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and more! Which of these will it do (if any)? Nobody knows. But if it replaced stuff, it's market cap would be way higher than the conservative 1% of X niche that you've estimated.

Personally, I'm optimistic for $10k. That's 10x now vs the 10,000x gain already seen since '09.

I have no clue whether it will go to 10k, 100k, or 1MM per bit coin. I'm on for the ride though and it's been pretty fun so far. I'm excited to see which problems bitcoin will solve and which industries it will disrupt.
9. Bitcoin has a mining system that produces a maximum
number of 21 million coins at the end. Its really not
clear what the long term viability of this exponential
drop in mining activity will be and whether it will
cause problems in time.

This last point is completely wrong I think.

There won't be an "exponential drop" in mining activity, because mining rewards exponentially decay anyway, so the system involves no sudden changes at all.
Just out of curiosity, are start ups in other countries like Canada and Europe subject to patent trolling as well or do patent trolls avoid suing outside of America?
I find it curious and funny that it's always Apple that gets such benefits of doubt. When they have the best hardware, it's because they're years ahead of everyone else in their supply chain strategies. When they have the worst, it's because they must be hobbled by the same supply chain.

Would you have expressed the same comment for Google/Amazon if the Nexus or Kindle had the worst screen?
The problem is its current value. Its a bubble.
Ask HN: What's the best bitcoin exchange?
I've seen plenty of people recommend Coinbase, but I've heard some bad stories that make me believe they (and their founders) are somewhat sketchy.

Would anybody be able to give me an idea of the most trustworthy place to buy bitcoin?
According to Shamir's paper, that's 95% accurate. Theoretically you're right. Practically, you're wrong.
If Apple didn't have this restriction, it wouldn't just the Kindle app, of course. It would also be Nook, Kobo, Google Books, Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music, HMV, ...

Superficially, this sounds even worse, but this is exactly the situation on Android. I've never heard of an Android user being confused by it, so I suspect this behavior far more intuitive than you think. On the other side of the ledger, I've heard of more than a few users (including tech-savvy ones who were previously familiar with the relevant history) being confused about not being able to buy books in the iOS Kindle app.

Separately, you didn't address Apple's prohibition of links to the relevant web store / website through which the store can be reached. At that point the purchase isn't even in-app (and the relevant purchase flow is exactly the same except that the user has to remember how to get to the website on their own), so...
Probably the best thing you can say about OCZ is that they played a huge role in establishing the consumer SSD market.

Their original Vertex series had its rough edges but was a real breakthrough - they were the first to really push a "modern" SSD controller in the form of the Indilinx Barefoot. At the time, most other SSD drives on the market used horrible JMicron flash controllers that were more suitable for your camera's memory card; they were not really designed to cope with the traffic a desktop operating system would throw at them.

Back in the Vertex/Vertex2 days they really were the ones to beat for the most part. But then Intel came along with their incredibly stable SSDs and frankly, OCZ's drives started to seem like toys.

Part of OCZ's problem is that, starting with the Vertex 2 era, dozens of other companies used Sandforce controllers just like OCZ did. At that point OCZ obviously tried to compete on price and we can see what it did to their quality. To their credit, they made a really commendable last stab at relevance when they bought Indilinx so they could have their own custom controller and (maybe?) stop competing on price. Those drives got some great reviews although I don't know if they were reliable or what.
myspace, facebook
Deloitte... vision for 2020... hmm, I smell an IPO.

(I love Envato btw. You've founded a great company that executes very well. But you sure do charge developers a lot -- 20%? Really? Another company will inevitably overtake you on that basis alone.)
"I would argue that if the global economy operated on a fixed-supply currency, there would be no aristocracy. Those with the largest stash of currency would have to spend some of their wealth in order to realize its benefits. This spending would naturally result on a more even distribution of wealth."

You are assuming that the richest people in the market would not have any income at all. I think that assumption is pretty dubious. Sure, they will spend some money; but all they would need to do is balance their budget, and they would remain rich perpetually since the currency has a fixed supply. In fact, if their income was larger than their spending, they would actually become wealthier over time, as they removed more and more money from the market and took advantage of deflationary effects.
I'm not sure why the over use of capitals makes it hard to read, it seems very trivial to me to parse the over abundance of proper nouns. I suspect it was written this way to help NNP detection, possibly the author uses a service like AlchemyAPI and unknown runs of init-capitalized text causes NN to be parsed as NNP.
That's the point - you get O(1) functions that work on codepoints. Since for pretty much all practical purposes you don't want to work on codepoints but on characters, then codepoint-function efficiency is pretty much irrelevant.

I'm actually hard-pressed to find any example where I'd want to use a function that works on codepoints. Text editor internals and direct implementation of keyboard input? For what I'd say 99% of usecases, if codepoint-level functions are used then that's simply a bug (the code would break on valid text that has composite characters, say, a foreign surname) that's not yet discovered.

If a programmer doesn't want to go into detail of encodings, then I'd much prefer for the default option for string functions to be 'safe but less efficient' instead of 'faster but gives wrong results on some valid data'.
>In fact, the ability to install something outside of the Play store framework seems like one good test for whether someone is ready to make the jump.

The exact same thing can be said about turning off UEFI Secure boot in Windows 8 and installing Linux... but alas, the uproar over that was deafening, even though it had an actual purpose of stopping undetectable bootkits.
One issue with ad-blocking, or in fact any other addon which may be user-configured, is that they may produce browsers which have a unique fingerprint, which will undermine any anonymity offered by Tor. It's important that all installations of an anonymity software offer the same, or a restricted number of fingerprints, and they restrict the ability of the user to modify it by mistake.

Also, eliminating the surface area for fingerprinting a browser is useful - so for example, removing flash (which can fingerprint you based on installed fonts), having NoScript enabled, and having a default web-bug blocking setup (such as disconnect.me), and self-destructing cookies should be a must.
not to mention that being constantly irradiated in space will kill practically everything.
Litecoin is much less innovative than either of those.

A better analogy is me downloading the ark source that runs Hacker News and launching mycombinator.com with "bigger upvote icons."
How Grep Got its Name
Indeed. If bitcoin were to go from $1K to $1M in the near future, we would be talking a 12 trillion USD market cap - roughly on par with the US GDP. Not to say it is an impossible scenario, but like you said, the implications are much greater.

The other interesting aspect is the existence of other alt currencies. For example, the so called "silver" Litecoin (as compared to the "gold" bitcoin), has increased almost 1000% in the last two weeks. Litecoin itself is up to a $1 billion market cap. Basically, we now have an alt currency at 10% of bitcoin's already impressive market cap.

I do wonder if some of these alt currencies will be where some of the big gains will next be seen. If crypto currencies become widely established, I imagine the environment would support multiple currencies.
Alleged CIA Chief of Station Islamabad
What's with the anti-nature attitude? Bugs perform tons of ecosystem services like pollination, food, decomposition, eating pests, fertilization, etc. A complete food web is dynamically stable, preventing infestations. This is why monoculture agriculture necessitates pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, btw.

Insects could live without us. We couldn't live without the insects. My interest is entirely selfish. ;)

Of course, this is getting into much bigger issues than just streetlights...

Further reading: http://lighting.com/light-pollution-wildlife/
Get LED lights in your house then?

http://news.discovery.com/animals/zoo-animals/bugs-streetlig...

> People with homes closer to street lights may be at greater risk for exposure to certain insects, and even the diseases some of them could harbor. For example, another recent study showed that Triatoma dimidiate, an insect that can carry Chagas disease (an inflammatory, infectious illness), infested houses that were in closer proximity to street lighting, Davies said.
I hope you take a moment to post this to /r/bitcoin.
Naval, founder of Angel List, has described[1] this and many other excitign usages of Bitcoin, going beyond basic money transfer:

Everyone has a copy of the Bitcoin block chain, so anyone can verify your transactions. You can write software that will crawl the block chain and generate automatic accounting histories for tax and verification purposes. You can engaged in “Trusted Timestamping” – take a cryptographic signature of any document, timestamp it, and put it into the block chain. Anyone can verify that the document existed at a given time. If you sign the document with your private key and another party signs it with theirs, it becomes an undeniable mutually-signed contract. This entirely eliminates notaries and websites like https://www.proofofexistence.com/ are showing the concept. The Namecoin project is building a distributed Domain Name System that allocates and resolve Domain Names without needing ICANN or Verisign, by using the block chain to establish proof-of-ownership.

Really worth a read.

[1] http://startupboy.com/2013/11/07/bitcoin-the-internet-of-mon...
Ask HN: Why does Facebook respect my data more than HN?
I don't mean for the tone of this submission to be confrontational — I'm a big fan of the HN community and consume much of my news here — but I was recently troubled to learn that HN doesn't let users delete some of their content (most notably, user accounts).

Granted, this isn't a new issue. I see that, according to The Unofficial HN Blog, the solution is to keep your profile anonymous.

Still, HN's treatment of personal data is somewhat surprising, considering that this community is so progressive when it comes to discussing privacy issues. In fact, some of the privacy-related HN posts about Facebook inspired me to delete my personal data from that site.

Why does Facebook seem to be more accommodating than HN when it comes to giving me the freedom to access my own data?
I wouldn't have - because they won't be selling anywhere near as many. What do you do if you have a choice to sell a few of a great product, or heaps of a slightly inferior one? I know which I'd choose, but Apple took the money and ran. I don't know what the figures will be, but I'd bet an order of magnitude more iPads are sold. Can the manufacturers of the better screen produce that many? I'm guessing no, but someone out there knows the answer.
You have to constantly clean the lights that are full of baked on bugs, for one.
I believe that I responded to that paper at least once. By my memory, the formalization of Bitcoin's security left room for a polynomial time attack on the system. That is a fine restatement of what we already know about Bitcoin, but:

1. It is irrelevant to this thread, because I was only talking about Satoshi's paper.

2. It is not the sort of security people demand out of other cryptosystems. There is a reason nobody uses this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle%27s_Puzzles
Cheers for a great synopsis that I intend to inflict upon my coworkers at the first available opportunity. :D
Thousands of Ruby on Rails sites leave logins lying around