skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember readying an magazine article (K-Power?) about the 1983 TV series "Whiz Kids". They used a similar typing simulation to make the hacker kids appear to be perfect speed typists. The magazine even include a BASIC program so you could run it on your home computer, too. :)

The Associated Press review of the show said: "Whiz Kids does not make a whimper on the sex-and-violence scale, yet it may be more dangerous to children than anything on television this season. Our adolescent heroes – sort of Hardy Boys high on silicon chips – engage, willy-nilly, in assorted illegal activities: computer tampering, driving without licenses and grave-robbing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_%28TV_series%29
Bitcoin only gets its value from scarcity if you look at it from the context of a traditional currency.

It's volatile because there is a lot of speculation going on; there is a lot of speculation going on because nobody has figured out how to value it against a traditional currency yet (in other words: speculation transactions outweigh productive transactions e.g. the proverbial alpaca sock).

While there is scarcity - and said scarcity is driving speculation - the intrinsic value of btc derives from the cryptographic trust in the validation of the Bitcoin blockchain, and the promise that a btc will always be accepted as a bounty on the validation of a btc transaction.

It's fundamentally different than the promise inherent in traditional currency: that a unit of currency must be accepted for the repayment of debt. Instead, a unit of currency must be accepted as a bounty on the cryptographic assurance that a transaction is not fraudulent.

What defines trust in a system, and when does that come in to play in the valuation a system?

With a satoshi sent to an address that cannot spend its balance along with the cryptographic signature of a document, you can execute a proof of existence. Distributed, mathematically validated notary.

It can also be used as a decentralized, trust-based escrow system.

The value inherent in a single btc is more abstract than a brick of gold, and has more to do with Bitcoin itself.
As with any population, Kickstarter backers definitely also contain the gullible target audience that spammers want. Why do you think that it's special? Maybe it was in the early days, but now it's just as mass-market as the audience watching TV 'special sales'.
For what it's worth:

Bitcoin Valued At $1300 By Bank of America Analysts

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/05/bank-of-a...
I can speak for myself. I would very much like to change structures and reduce the power of the state. Sometimes I feel very motivated.

On the other hand, I have been struggling for years with health problems and just in general to get by financially. I suspect that I may not be alone in that.

I always think that if I become independently wealthy, then I might be able to take political action. I would have resources to release technologies that could make a difference, or to run media campaigns. And I would be able to pay lawyers.

But as it is, besides clicking on a few petitions online or some such, I don't feel like I am able to take political action. I don't have the energy for it. And to be honest, I don't know what I would do. I do not believe that voting or making efforts inside of the current system will make a significant difference. I get the impression that we need to do some experimentation with some fairly radical changes to ordinary societal structures. And those types of changes, I don't even mention specifics anymore because they are rejected immediately or not understood.

I think that we need improved belief systems and structures, rather than incremental modification or adjustments. People aren't buying those types of ideas though. So it seems like everyone is too stupid or conservative to recognize and support ideas that are radical enough to make a difference. But like I said, I don't even present those ideas anymore, because I don't have the resources to try them, and no one is listening, and there is no point in presenting an idea just to have everyone shit on it.
I think I found the source of the original quote here:

http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/doc_kay_oop_en
There's some value in press/notoriety, if you think you'd be reaching eyes and ears for those who care about that sort of thing.
Bitcoin is maturing from a small stock to a growth stock then a value stock. But in comparison with other currencies, simply retaining its value is better than some fiat currency holdings and it is a wonderful hedge against it as long as it can hold its value. It could even go down but at a slower rate than nation currencies and still be useful as a hedge.

Some people are treating it as a stock currently expecting huge upsides, adoption will bring that but eventually it will calm down and if it just retains value over time it will beat out most fiat currencies.

There is obvious value to fiat currencies and inflation for fueling investment (I need to grow my shrinking dollars) but it is always nice to hedge in case.
Looks like its making a move now. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25233224
This will never happen. Canadians don't want to merge with the US. We (subjectively) think our country is much nicer, despite it being encased in snow and ice for half the year (it's minus 30 degrees with over a foot of snow right now!).

Our cultures are quite different, and only the US has anything to gain from a merger. We have everything to lose.
I think his final conclusion of "the problem isn't the internet, it's myself" is a clear indication that he realizes those things.
They're not "honoring" him, and they're not trying either.

Mandela stood against inequality and injustice, which these corporate giants are massive facilitators of. Apple in particular exploit the very people who produce their products in China, while sitting on vast wealth. As global inequality is on the rise, record profits are announced, and despite their position to make a real positive effect on humanity, increasing shareholders profits comes first.

While they stick up a nice picture or some text of a great man on their webpages, they stand for completely the opposite. They've completely failed to honor anything about the man, or his ideals.

If they wanted to honor him, they could for example, boycott Israel, or doing at least make an effort to actually put an end apartheid.
Yeah, it is a pretty nice shortcut. They also added it to PHP in 5.3 so you can do something like this now:

$var = trim($_POST['var']) ?: 0;
Bullet Time Effect – Frozen Raspberry Pi
Well, you sure showed me. I'll think twice before contradicting you ever again.
4 Ways To Find Your Market Online
No, my arguments do not fall down. You are making the terribly flawed assumption that bitcoin will always be this volatile. Bitcoin is less volatile than it used to be, and with greater adoption will continue to decrease in volatility.

The volatility in bitcoin today is nothing compared to 2011. Is it still bad ? Yes. Will it continue being bad ? Probably not. The long term trend supports the assumption that volatility will decrease with greater adoption.

Furthermore volatility has little effect on the 'money transmission' element of bitcoin as long as transfers and conversions take place immediately. It's still a viable way to legally move USD from the USA to Singapore with very low fees.

Another example, I'd like to add is that I had a large part of my savings in Indian Rupees. They depreciated by 30% over the past 2 years. That's definitely pretty bad but it didn't prevent me from buying coffee. Euros have also swung around by 15-20% over the past 2-3 years. The Brazilian Real lost 25% of it's value last year. Does that make them as bad as bitcoin ?

Your motivation for getting into bitcoin is your personal choice and I certainly hope that you profit from it. However, don't forget that bitcoin is an emerging technology going through fairly rapid adoption, as such, volatility, crashing exchanges, bubbles, bubble pops, etc. will be a part of it. And of course, I have to convert money from USD to BTC. Or from Marks to Euros. Or from escudos to Euros. That's just how it works.
"that they could spend on education, or applying for jobs, or starting new businesses."

Your difficulty would be to ensure the realisation of the benefit, and that there actually are jobs available that provide for these people.

I would prefer to approach the same issue in the reverse fashion, providing a job/ education with housing and minor allowances, requiring that the person start and complete a certain amount of work before any monetary incentive is provided. Available office space could be used, old buildings fallen into disuse can be repossessed to allow startup businesses some working space. This way you actually guarantee some economic value and proper utilisation of the funds. What you would end up with is the government incorporating businesses that mimic private enterprise, have stricter rules and hire from a different pool of people.

If I were homeless and or couldn't afford education, all I need is a warm bed, hot shower, library card, three square meals and google. (Not some arbitrary handout I would not be able to allocate properly, or in effect be compelled to spend unwisely because I know not the value of working for it.) The idea of a basic income is flawed if it allows comfortable survival without working, no different from communal distribution.

All that being said, I'm not American. What do I know.
It's about taste. You're comparing a likely barely noticeable line on Google's homepage to a near shill tactic in your face 'look at us we've got Mandela on our homepage'.

If Coca-cola started putting Mandela on it's cans, would you be as supportive? They are using the death of an incredible figure as a promotional tool.
Not just Muslim, but a brown urban policy geek! It's a point of local pride that we got him while Toronto got Rob Ford; imagine what a fiasco the reverse would have been.
I specifically remember George Harrison and Rosa Parks in addition to Steve Jobs.
I agree that allowing independent invention to be a defense to patent infringement would solve almost all of the problems we see with software patents. But it seems to have some different trouble.

If you allow competitors to use the invention if they pay the cost of duplicating the research, you cap the value of the patent at the cost of doing the research rather than the value of the result in the market, because anything more than that and you cause competitors to [band together to] duplicate the research rather than paying you for a license. In general this is a good thing because monopoly rents are bad, and it allows the original party to recover their costs by licensing without allowing inefficient monopoly rents in excess of the original cost. The trouble seems to be that it doesn't provide an incentive to actually be the one who does the original research, because if the research pans out then you can only recover up to the cost of duplicating the research, but meanwhile you have to take the risk of the research not finding a solution.

The other trouble is, how do you prove or disprove independent invention after something is published?
Maybe not directly but it sure does feel like they are 'whoring out' his image in order to build up their brand.
Corporations are sociopathic entities; it's a given that everything they do serves their self-interest in some way or another. Knowing this, all that's worth remarking on is what they do (and whether that action is, in all consequence, a good thing for the world), not the motivations behind it.

I think splashing Mandella's face on one more screen is probably (some puny amount of) net positive, if it by chance gets a few more people to read up on what he was about. Of course there's something in it for Apple; otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Otherwise no corporation would do it. The point is what's in it for everyone else.
The rule is to use the same pronoun you'd use as if you didn't have two parties involved, right? "My friends and I did X" is right because "I did X" is, and "Me and my friends did X" is wrong because "Me did X" is obviously wrong.
Come to the UK, it's free.
I like the idea and the effort.

One thing I hate about it, though:

Again, third party javascripts are loaded in the background (Google, as usual, for example).

Come on people, you know this tracks everybody around the entire Web, stop using those scripts (is it so hard to use local js scripts? For example, find local "Web analytics" here: https://prism-break.org/).

What you're asking your users to do here is: telling Google (and the NSA, etc.) about your health problems. Not smart. At all.
Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
---
So much for a code school
> a European-style union between the two countries would be a good idea

The E.U. was primarily a union between 4 equally-sized countries, i.e. Britain, France, Italy, and West Germany, each having about 60 million people and similar-sized economies. No single nation could lord it over the others, as would the US over Canada in a North American union.
Ask HN: Why is setting up mail server so hard?
A friend of mine said it took him 15 days to get the mail server working on his VPS and he is actually quite smart programmer. I have read numerous times how difficult the task is. Why setting up a mail server so tough anyway? Are there any solutions?
Be warned: if you type like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sffBHGpIRZE

...people will know that you're faking it.
Ask HN: Why are new nosql databases a dime a dozen?
I don't understand this phenomenon; even I want to make one for my application domain, but at the same time, all of this seems intuitively wrong. Perhaps some of you have some insight, thanks!
Which makes me wonder why they aren't doing the same thing but focusing on Java or .NET.
And...the site is down.
> because you're not doing it in Boston or SF

...or NY!
You can send a single satoshi* to an address that cannot spend said satoshi with the cryptographic signature of a document as the notation on it. Once the transaction is validated in the blockchain, you can prove mathematically that the document (while keeping secret the contents of the document) was published (created) on a given datetime.

*1 satoshi = 5.8e-6 USD @ current coinbase exchange, Sat Dec 07 2013 02:59:12 GMT-0500
The Portlandia Nerd PSA hits on this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir3v5yDk9Ws
Thanks!

Yes, we would love to take our app to the next stage by providing more comparison functionalities. One of the reason why we skipped quite a bit of the metric is that we don't want to make the users to be too much confused with choices.

This is one of the problems with the current health care system. There are too many choices, and there is no simple way to do any sort of quick decision like renting care, etc.
Sorry guys, not a native here. I am sorry if I upset you with my poor English.

I learnt my lesson :)
this hardly belongs on the front page of hn.
Flipboard vs Medium, native vs Web
I'm very for alternative education, but this trend of for-profit (or, more accurately, cash-up-front, as I think Hacker Schools is the exception) code schools is a little unsettlingly. I guess it's because it'd be very easy for them to prey upon people in the same way that for-profit universities do ("Earn $70k after three short months!").

On the other hand, they're not funded by student loans, so at least they can't prey on poor people. Still, they can go after someone who's desperate and just happens to be sitting on some cash.
Would succulents be easier to maintain?
Perhaps we should ban webcams and poles because they could be used to spy on neighbors too. This is one of the weakest arguments I've ever read.
Thanks for the correction, I didn't realize that was the case.
That being said, I just don't see how this is "whoring out" (as adamnemecek points out), when the simpler explanation is that this is their way of paying an homage to a great man.
Steve Jobs, of course.

ducks
Does this mean that it always uses CrossCat for predictions, or is there some other mechanism?
Every bitcoin badmouther is using the price crash to tell everyone how right they were. Not really unexpected.

Speculative price swings are largely irrelevant, and bitcoin has value as a service regardless of the current price.
Damn, can we get a break in this infinite loop of blog posts where the author confidently sets us straight about the inevitable fate of bitcoin? Bitcoin market activity is a Rorschach test for your own personal biases, be you an economist or a cryptographer, you're just going to rationalize the current state of the market with your own future expectations.

The rumor of a butteryfly fart can send shockwaves through the bitcoin markets, everybody knows this, we're not getting any new information by exclaiming how volatile the market is every time the price shifts as if it's somehow surprising.
Highly articulate back-end developer with wide range of experience in trenches available for hire on contract. Has predominantly worked with Python, Django, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, AWS Services, Mongodb, Celery, ZeroMQ, REST APIs, JSON. Currently residing in Delhi, India (UTC + 5:30), willing to work in clients timezone. Technology in this case is not a barrier as long as product and business model is sound. He is ready to furnish resume, code samples and references. Visit profile to get his email address.
The failure rate of floppy disks (or rather, the incidents of uncorrectable bad sectors) is dramatically higher than newer media like flash thumbdrives.
Why do people equate being a terrorist with being a terrible person?

If you're being oppressed and can't fix it by 'soap box/ballot box', then going to 'ammo box' and killing your oppressors is morally just and proper.

Is your country counquered by a foreign military occupation, as say, France in 1940's but also many other cases? Then participating in guerilla warfare and terrorism is perfectly understandable for morally sound, ethical people.

Is your country ruled by an oppressive dictator? Revolution, including terrorism against the ruling clique and military, and followed by armed rebellion (as, say, founding of USA) is morally justified in many such casses; simply allowing your nation to lose another generation while waiting for the dictator to go away is the immoral option.

It might be in my personal and my countries best interests for that particular occupation or that dictator to stay in power, and those particular terrorists to lose - indeed, it probably is so for some current global hotspots - but it doesn't mean that these terrorists/freedom fighters are evil people; they're simply fighting on another side, but if the fighting was needed to defend my community or nation, I'd consider such violence as not only ethically permissable, but as an ethical duty to take up arms and do as much as you can.
See pedalpete's comment below

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6865812
This brings to mind the idea of an amphibious quadcopter. That's not what this is, but that's what I thought of.

I wonder if a waterproof quadcopter would navigate well underwater. It seems like it could be an interesting environment to experiment with advanced acrobatic maneuvers at lower speeds.
Ah, good question. Currently, it's implemented to only use CrossCat for predictions.

However, the great thing about the Bayesian Query Language (BQL, BayesDB's extension of SQL) is that it can be implemented by any joint density estimator. So, you could implement BayesDB with Bayes net structure learning, kernel density estimation, or almost anything else instead of CrossCat, if you wanted.
Because you can go to any community college for that?
Just wondering what happens when a person is working after sunset - the plants would generate carbon dioxide then :)

That would not be healthy.
Oh, c'mon, don't act like this reflects poorly on them. This hit Hacker News at midnight on Friday, I seriously doubt they self-submitted or expected it at all. For all we know, this could just be a demo site still running on a single Heroku instance they were waiting to scale up.
Ripple is a petty scam. Please don't advertise that horse dung to HN, we are smarter than that. Ripple generated 10 billion coins, they call them XRP. Of course this amount and even XRP aren't mentioned on that page you linked, an obvious bait. Ripple started giving away millions to generate buzz and use, they've yet to even give away 10% though, and the idea is to create enough value that they can eventually dump all their "genesis" currency and reap the rewards. They recently started giving away a few thousand a day with their ComputingForGood campaign, a pittance to create buzz for their scamware.
Mastercoin's done the same thing with no real benefits over Bitcoin itself. Seriously getting tired of these fiat fiascos. I guess creating derivative cryptocurrencies is the new version of the classic pyramid scheme.
Some people call Bitcoin a pyramid scheme because of the speculative bubble, fair enough. But these currencies, Ripple and Mastercoin, are true pyramid schemes. Founders plan to get mega-rich based on the illicit adoption of their scamware.
>Once you've got a canonical AST defined, syntax should, in theory, be like CSS chrome

This is an awesome idea. Are there any projects working on this concept? I guess multiple languages targeting the same bytecode is as-close-as-practical at the moment.
Marc, are you aware that Satoshi referenced you by name? I always found that unexpected and hilarious.

http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/bitcoin-satoshi/email-p2presearc...
The same Yegge implemented JavaScript in Emacs Lisp...
How to Keep up to Speed in the Microsoft Web Development World
This winter is their first session.
There is no point to be made here. This kind of trivia is sometimes a good break from "Why I am right and the world is wrong type posts" on HN.
I solved this problem too. People know that I hardly ever answer my phone either, unless you arranged to call me. If it's important, leave a voicemail with a reason why you called not just some "call me back" contextless shit. By "arranged to call me" I mean sending me an email and asking if you can call and at what time. I check mail about 3 times a day.

We really new to get over this instant communication fad. It's counterproductive.
Code schools are the auto tech schools of our generation.
I came out of a coding school in New York, had a little background in freelancing, no degree, and found work in Omaha. I'm certainly not paid the salary of a senior level, but I did get a great job where I can get the experience I need.
Ask HN: How does one help a teenager teach himself how to read?
I live in Africa, and in many houses there are these "gateboys" who are typically teenage boys that came from some small village far away to the cities looking for work. Their jobs involve opening the gates for visitors, gardening, cleaning and so on. They have a lot of free time on their hand. And many of them are saving up with these jobs to be able to go back to school and learn to read.

With the power of the internet, surely there must be some kind of material that one can print out that can act as a self-learning course for a person to learn how to read. The boys may or may not know how to read the alphabet, but they certainly know how to read numbers (from their phones).

My ideal would be if one could print out some kind of book that the teens can use to figure out how to read, and just distribute it to them. What is the best approach to go about this?
In 2001, when George Harrison died
In 2002, when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize
In 2003, when Gregory Hines died
In 2005, when Rosa Parks died
In 2007, when Al Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize
In 2011, when Steve Jobs died

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different