skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> mainstream .NET and C# community didn't really "get" Open Source

I don't think it's that they don't "get" it....for those who are aware of its existence, I'd suspect it's moreso that they just don't "do" it (for whatever reason), and for others it's simply that they don't care. You can not care about it and you can go on to have a successful career and be an accomplished programmer. The same programmer would be even better if they did embrace the open source community, but not everyone aspires to be in the top x% of programmers.
And yet we have tens of thousands of people bloating up government at all levels with what are essentially "make-work" jobs. Likewise for universities and colleges which are bloated with administrators and other non-essential staff. Our economy is absolutely filled with redundancy for the simple reason that people need to work in order to pay the bills.
First of all, a desktop computer will take far, far more abuse than an instrument like a violin or a guitar. Second, a properly backed up desktop computer is easy to replace if it gets damaged, while an instrument can be pretty much impossible to replace (like a Stradivarius).
C# is basically Java with some minor differences

Just about everyone I see saying this stopped seriously following or working with C# back at 2.0 or earlier. The changes since then have produced a very different beast than Java. Whether it has origins in NIH syndrome is entirely besides the point - MS was bolder with the language and the framework than Java's sluggish committees, and at the end of the day has built the better mousetrap.

IMO any novice who isn't Windows phobic would be better off learning it than Java, in part because it will expose them to a wider range of language constructs and capabilities (pseudo-functional bits, task parallel stuff, etc).

That said, a total novice would probably be better off dabbling in a dynamic language like Python than taking on either Java or C#. Nothing like a REPL for getting your feet wet.
ASIC miners don't use that much electricity.
The real fix for Obamacare's flaws: Medicare for all
The important point about this incident was that there were no real Bitcoins involved. What happened was that someone added coins to an account balance on mtgox and then sold them. When you are using mtgox you are not actually buying and selling bitcoins. You are buying and selling IOUs for bitcoins and that is why MtGox was able to just roll back later.
This is what the banking industry have known for years! Keep clipping the tickets...
> I think marrying yourself to a proprietary language like C# is a mistake, not because of any particular C# language feature, but because it's yet another product of Microsoft's extreme case of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome

That's really inaccurate. Mono aside, C# came up with quite a few innovations of its own, and I'm saying as a 15 year veteran Java developer who would love to see some of these be added to Java (at least we're getting closures next year).

Also, learning C# will teach you a lot of constructs and concepts that will be readily available in other languages such as Java, Kotlin, Ceylon or Scala (and to some extent, even Haskell).

The "proprietary, NIH, blah blah I hate Microsoft" nonsense belongs on slashdot, not here.
No, but talking about the border guards could well be. Then Jim downstairs listens to the clip, gets a laugh, and ims his buddy upstairs "hey Ted, red car says your sunglasses are ugly lol".
This is only one of three similar stores closing. The other two, Radio Center (http://www.radiocenter.jp/) and Tokyo Radio Depart[ment Store] (http://www.tokyoradiodepart.co.jp/), are still alive and kicking... although rather feebly, and it's a probably a matter of time until they go as well.
There is a ~24% gap between the price you pay in ARS for credit card purchases in USD and what the USD sells for in the black market. This opens up all sorts of arbitrage opportunities that the government struggles to plug.

If you have USD in cash, you can sell them for close to 10 ARS and then buy BTC at about 7.34 exchange rate.
Mercury-Redstone 1 - The "Four Inch Flight"
<3 markov chains. I had to do something like this for a homework assignment a long time ago. Here's mine:

PredictionIO – A Simple Explanation for Why HP Abandoned Palm

Obama said the NSA Over Data Collection

NSA collecting phone records for his defense
How to Be Upside-Down

GMail: designer arrogance and the $580 Million Black Hole

Contains a New Type of Employee You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors

How to solve it

Google disables AdSense account of Coinpal shut down a product? Open source dynamic body physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

Google to acquire Nokia

Serving at the Pleasure of the plot

Watch YC Startup with Paying Customers

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of the storm we're pushing the YC application deadline back to Firefox 4 that makes you a better background pattern for your games.

Goodbye Basecamp, This Is All Your Email

37signals invests in synthetic beef

Groupon is a GitHubber

The first Django site to run for Australian Senate

Single page apps in the lab: Apple is back

Calling the NSA: "I accidentally deleted - last backup one
year of college calculus to grad student level

Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the Family of Neil Armstrong on Programmer Productivity

Some advice from Jeff Bezos on Post purchase

Is Google building a TC alternative.

Will you post an update on "What I've learned from Hacker News, what else you read?
There's enough volume now to space a quarter of a billion dollar exit out over two quarters, and most likely at or above $1,000 per. Volume and demand will continue to increase predictably for while yet, making it even easier as each day passes.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O4V7JfeTSU
Yes. Just do a cursory search on the internet, and you'll see many musicians shipping their instruments in very solid and well protected cases still getting their instruments destroyed.
Is there any statistic showing "people are doing well" that you wouldn't dismiss as a sign of "gentrification"?
I'm surprised there's no reference to computational complexity. I can give a perfectly fine example of a machine that satisfies their definition but would not be considered intelligent because it's inefficient.
Does anyone know of an overview for people who already know the relevant mathematics? Does their "English" definition have a corresponding mathematical definition?
Going from Scheme to asm and then on to C would take a lot of personal dedication into learning how computers work. Much of the interest to learn programming is to make something cool. I made a small game in Delphi when I was younger. I toyed with Basic to ensure that my gorilla's bananas would always destroy the computer's gorilla. It was basic, simple and I learned a lot of new concepts. I'm sure you did the same thing.

I wish I learned asm and C when I was younger but honestly, I don't think I would have stuck it out. So while my first thought right now would to say "learn C as it will help you understand many other programming languages," my honest advice would be to "make something in any language you want, just have fun."
Last time I was in China, no one had ever heard of General Tso. From what I gather, he was a bloodthirsty tyrant, but made an excellent chicken.
Neutrino radiation
Bitcoin under pressure
One day I was waiting to meet somebody and I ended up loitering by that GameStop for a good chunk of time on a weekend afternoon, as such I watched a lot of people window shopping or making occasional purchases.

First thing that surprised me: they seemed to sell more used iOS devices than anything else.

I don't know if it's always like this, but most people I observed in there did not look all that well-to-do. They seemed like mostly local kids (not kids of yuppies) who just hopped off muni and aspired to save up for months to buy a refurbished 3-generations-ago iPod touch. I saw a few kids of that description make purchases. Nobody all that ostentatious, or anything like all the "playground for the rich" stuff that people in SF rail against. It was actually refreshing to see kids excited about what most HNers would consider "unusable" tech.
Why isn't it? Max learning, min effort.

According to the article you can have an email MVP, but a landing page that collects emails isn't an MVP.
I have a relative who lives in a Canadian border town

She might have simply lied to you about the whole incident.
How Unique - and Trackable - Is Your Browser?
Ask PG: HN Ngram Viewer?
Since writing a scraper to discover and parse all historical comments/submissions on HN would obviously get me in trouble, would the HN admins be willing to provide a dump of the historical text/metadata from all comments and [local] submissions so I can make a HN Ngram Viewer for the HN public?

I work in an academic lab where I'm one of the developers of a system that generates ngram viewers from large corpuses of text, which we call "Bookworms". Here are a few Bookworms we've created:

arXiv scientific publications: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/arxiv/

US Congress legislation: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/congress/

Open Library books: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/OL/

Chronicling America historical newspapers: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/ChronAm/

Social Science Research Network research paper abstracts: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/ssrn/

We have more Bookworms in the pipeline, including historical legislation in the UK and a massive corpus of texts (70MM+ documents) from the National Library of Australia (Trove) spanning multiple centuries. A new GUI for all our Bookworms will also be rolling out shortly. (Preview: http://bookworm.culturomics.org/new_gui_teaser.png).

In my opinion, HN be an awesome candidate for an ngram viewer because there are so many subsets of topics that come/go/stay here, such as the frequency of discussions about web technologies, programming languages, companies/services, the NSA, etc.

If this is something the HN admins would be interested in, I'd be happy to put it together. If a privacy agreement is desired before passing off any bulk data, that is not a problem as we've gone this route before, albeit only for private ngram viewers we've created for companies, like the NYT, to use internally.
nothing too original in this post, just wanted to offer some words of encouragement, and possibly give you some perspective from a different point of view.

i myself have been in this situation, although it was my father in your shoes and i was the child. i also remember the police knocking at the door and our family having to pick up and move.

your courage and commitment to chase your idea and pursue your dream is part of who you are. i know it may be hard to see this now, but it is this ambition and bravery that your family will always remember and love you for. as children, we knew that our dad was having some tough times and that there would be changes in our lives because of it, but none of this ever gave rise to any questions of his love. we always knew that our dad loved us, and that in the end, that was all that mattered.

i know its hard to see the good things now, but just remember that your family is there for you, through the good times and the bad. your children will always love and respect you - not for how well or how bad your business did, but for the parts of you that made you give it a shot.

i dont have many resources myself, and even fewer industry connections, but if you are ever in/around the pittsburgh area id be more than happy to lend an ear or do what i can to help.
Yep, There are a few that have sunk and some learning to swim. We'll see plenty of both over the next two years.
A basic income may or may not be a good policy, but people like Milton Friedman and Charles Murray weren't trying to perpetrate a dishonest fraud (or convince people it's a "free lunch") when they outlined its potential benefits over alternate existing patchwork systems of redistribution.

"Everyone gets it" means to avoid the complexity, corruption, and gaming that comes with an eligibility-testing bureaucracy. "Softens the stigma" means the marginal incentives, especially for the working poor and near poor, aren't muddied by taboos around other welfare programs. (And "softens the stigma" is a honest way to describe that part of the rationale, as well... because some listeners will consider the stigma a good thing, while others see it as a barrier to the policy's intended effects. Universal eligibility does, in actual fact, alter the stigma associated with receiving government income – and people can still argue about whether that's a good thing or not, without allegations of bad-faith fraud.)
Wait... is that how an exchange works? or just gox? I mean, so do they only actually buy the bitcoins when the user wants to cash out from the account?
EDIT: Fortunately VirWox was nice to refund the Paypal payment that I made since the amount that I deposited there was not enough to buy Bitcoins with it.
Probably because they implemented the game themselves and took some shortcuts. But it still seems like pretty much the same game.

I doubt it would do better than humans because it's not very efficient, but a better AI running on the same principles could be smarter than even humans and outperform us outside the virtual world.
And its still got a dodgy reputation, due to the difficulty of withdrawing USD, which can currently take weeks to arrive your account. Other services like bitstamp and coinbase have been eating their lunch.
And they also blocked python.org, freebsd.org, sourceforge.org,google code. Orz...
They turned you down even though you are already working for someone?
ISON AND FUCKU?
Yes. It is not related to political reasons.
Those words are pretty much meaningless. Of course everyone is already trying to survive and recognize patterns and all that.
Yes. The core of AIXI is the part that figures out the nature of the universe in which it finds itself (a formalization of induction), and the algorithm for that is essentially "simulate all possible universes and see which ones give data that matches our observations, then apply Occam's razor and assume the simplest one is true".

It will not have escaped your notice that "simulate all possible universes" would require an infinitely powerful computer, and even finite approximations quickly become wildly intractable, making the algorithm unusable for anything significantly more complex than Pac-Man. Thus AIXI is interesting for philosophical purposes, being a mathematical formalization of intelligence, but not useful for engineering purposes.
I believe some, like Bitstamp, trade by connecting actual buyers to actual sellers in the transaction, to limit their own amount of BTC and USD holdings. That's what it says on the FAQ anyway.
Except, that's how every store on the internet works, and they're doing fine.
HNDoSed again...
Where did you find out that "someone added coins to tan account balance on mtgox and then sold them"? If that's true, that is really irresponsible for MtGox in terms in security.
I suspect that the "Chinese" food here is adapted to comply with US law.
C# is great. But it really doesn't matter what you learn as your first language. Programming is a craft. You're expected to keep yourself up to date. You're expected to read-up on new techniques, and all the goings-on outside of your day job programming language. You're expected to perfect your craft.
Usual google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.d...
What, the katana wasn't enough?
No-one said the whole point of the phone is HTML5 apps. The reviewer thinks HTML5 apps are the future, that's all. Native Sailfish apps are Qt based; with android apps as a secondary thing, presumably to kick-start the platform while they try to build an ecosystem. (Which makes sense, developers won't come unless people are using it but people won't use it if there are no apps.)
The World Is Changing In Front Of Your Eyes
Thats why I avoid flying in the US/stopping there. I often visit Central America and just take the flight which don't go through US territory. I had some incidents with us customs too, those guys are nuts. If they want, they put you in interrogation room for hours or just don't let you pass for shady "reasons". Or literally harass you with questions. Thanks.
If you are thinking of getting a visa for a different country and working in Berlin, I don't think it works like that.

EU citizens have the right to work anywhere in the EU, but a visa is still granted by an individual country and only gives the ability to work in that country.
Its not a minimum viable PRODUCT but it is a minimum viable experiment.
It also occurred to me that with Nokia's history as a rubber manufacturer they're bound to have made rubber rafts at some point (which would indeed be called `jolla').

Or I could be completely overreading this...
Ask HN: Joining the Military?
Has anyone from the HN community served in the military? if so what are the pros and cons of joining? I'm only 21 and at this stage of my life I feel hopeless and not sure what I want to do with my life. I enjoy programming but sometimes I get distracted and bored easily siting and programming all day I guess I need some kind of adventure or challenge I feel like I want to help others in a way that changes their life.

Give me some pros and cons of joining the Military I'm thinking either Air force or Navy, thanks.
It's 6-12 months.
https://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20110630.html

"On June 20th at approximately 3:00am JST (Japan Time), an unknown person logged in to the
compromised admin account, and with the permissions of that account was able to arbitrarily assign
himself a large number of Bitcoins"
I'm not so sure (although I haven't informed better) -- how was Kevin able to retrieve Bitcoins then?

Also there are people on the thread claiming they traced the wallet that had those coins.
A little late, but I believe this is the paper mentioned:
https://socrates1024.s3.amazonaws.com/consensus.pdf
From my days as a release/build manager, the most common cause of this was people merging code from branches where fixes had been overlooked and similar horrors. The second highest would be people fixing something that "looked wrong" but was actually there to solve a problem.
It is the law. You're confused. It's a law that has a leniency in it.
A landing page used to test the product concept before building your MVP is just keeping it lean.
Yep, bitcoin is being heralded as the great successor to malignant bankers and their greed only to be almost completely reliant on shady exchanges.
Cheers mate, that explains it. I was struggling to reconcile the Bay Area's famed leftie tendencies with the realities of inequality on the ground.
Last year I just moved to San Francisco and attended. I had a great time meeting a lot of people with various interests. Huge thanks to Matt for doing this again.
Will novice programmers be using pseudo-functional bits and running parallel tasks? IIRC we're talking about someone's first language, i.e. they're at the hello world stage.

I don't see that person running parallelization schemes in their first 3 years.
How do you know? I know they blocked YouTube and liveleak for political reasons.
Any decent guides on how to mine some of the altcoins like ppc, xpm, or qrk?
Eh, there are plenty of public records - births, deaths, real estate transactions, tax records, lawsuits, etc.

It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.
Helicopter drones level up, gain belly-mounted robotic limbs
I don't think there is such thing as a bad choice for a first language, barring obscene languages like Brainfuck.
Hi Gus!Yes,its clearly way out of porpotion, that i have no doubts about. I was just wondering how the value of a start up company should ideally be calculated, so that one´s proposal is well informed, rather than throwing numbers in the air :)

Re your 2nd question, he doesn´t have a software company, he outsourced development to create his application.
C# is basically Java with some minor differences

That's absolutely not true, and everybody that has programmed in both languages know that's not true.
An exchange is nothing more than a marketplace for buyers and sellers. They could in theory not buy the coins till you wanted to cash out, that would be a Ponzi scheme. That happened recently with a small exchange site. See this article:

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=2013...

In general the way it works for a non ponzi scheme setup is that another user on MtGox is selling, and you are buying, so essentially if you buy, your account balance of coins goes up and at the same time the seller's balance goes down. Keep in mind though, no actual bitcoins moves because MtGox is holding them all in their account. It's exactly like what happens when you transfer money to someone who banks at the same bank as you. The money moves from one account to the other on the ledger, but really no money moved at all.
Dinner with a Bletchley Park cryptographer
Important Hygiene Info On Thanksgiving: How to Handle a Shart (HILARIOUS VIDEO)
No, unless you want to shut yourself out of non-Miscrosoft ecosystem. Considering that learning a language is a long term investment and MS's star is waning, it's probably not a good idea.
C# is in high demand in many cities around the country.
while we're at it, here's from ICML2013

http://icml.cc/2013/?page_id=47 (click on the schedule images)
Submitter puts in whatever, then when a mod notices it the title often gets changed.
Why don't people buy Bitcoin at one exchange and sell at another?
Cyborg Industries - Vaporware solutions to Computer Science's unsolved problems
just put the facebook addresses in your hosts file, f.e.

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 facebook.com
0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 fbcdn.net
0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.net
0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com
0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com
0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net
0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.net
0.0.0.0 www.connect.facebook.net
0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com
Exchange was rolled back to before the hack, so all transactions after that point were voided. In the end nothing happened except that people had their trades reverted during that time.
Calm Down - The Government Doesn't Care About Your Data
There was a real post called "Papers Every Hacker Should Read (At Least Twice)" and another called "Design Books Every Hacker Should Read"

The program spliced them together.
Mods edit titles all the time.
If only C# programming skills (and programming skills in general) were transferable to other languages. Oh wait.
They will be exposed to higher-order functions very early on, as LINQ is one of the most popular features. You get early exposure to lambdas, functions as parameters, generators, and probably closures.

These are valuable concepts to be exposed to, and IMO provide an advantage over learning Java.
I was wondering about this myself. I've been developing a Chrome extension off/on for the past year and did moderate reading into Chrome, Chromium and how user data is handled. Seemed ok to me. Wireshark doesn't show anything particularly alarming, either. Can anyone else confirm/deny?