skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How much is this currency supposed to be worth? According to this argument, any number is potentially valid!

Well, I guess the number is whatever supply-and-demand should happen to say that day. Mostly that'll mean asking "how much do people want gold today?" because the supply is relatively inelastic.

That said, fluctuations in the supply of gold and the price of gold would in fact be catastrophic if the price of gold radically changed. See also: the impact of gold rushes on the US economy (tip: it was inflationary). See also: Bimetallism, William Jennings Bryant, "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!"

> If the exchange rate of the dollar decreases, you'll see the Federal Reserve will start trading some of its goodies from Fort Knox (gold, etc.) for US Dollars, in order to maintain the dollar's exchange rate/value.

... No? Wrong? Lies? What the Federal Reserve does is buy and sell federal debt, creating and destroying dollars such that the supply of dollars matches the demand for dollars and prices are consistent. You could say the dollar is loosely pegged to the value of the consumer bundle, maybe. (See also: http://bls.gov for CPI information.)
please explain the downvote.
Couchsurfing's Sex Secret
I am so sick of this bullshit.

Government has to go. We gave it a good few hundred years to prove itself, and it can't.
Economics is not a morality play, and connecting money to gold has nothing whatsoever to do with honesty.

Look, the most important point of money is to facilitate economic exchange. Yes, rentiers want to store their savings somehow, but there's a reason that the word rentier has negative connotations.

Facilitating economic exchange requires that the amount of money correlates with the size of the economy. Fiat currency can do that (thanks to bank loans, which can shrink and expand based on endogenous demand from the economy), and gold-based currency cannot do that. It's really as simple as that.
I submitted this 14 hours ago and got no upvote...

Anyway, here is the answer of the French Ministry of Finance, who was issuing the certificate (or more exactly, by the ANSSI, but the cert for the the Ministry of Finance):

http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/en/the-anssi/events/revocation-of-an-...
The Internship (2013)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234155/

Good and funny movie, and realistic (if you don't mind the Google logo everywhere)

Antitrust (2001, also known as "Startup")

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218817/

Good movie that shows some C, Java and HTML code and also explains "open source". Miguel de Icaza helped them, so you see GNU/Linux desktops and GNOME shell and bash.
Money is money because people believe it is money.

Right now, you can turn in a $20 for food and booze and whatever. I'll believe that's money. And if people don't have a reason to stop believing, it'll continue to be money.
Do you speak conversational japanese? Are you coping with the language?
I'm confused by the way you say something is "technically" true, then claim you believe it isn not true. Are you really saying that you believe things you know aren't true?

> How much is this currency supposed to be worth?

Whatever we agree it to be worth.

> According to this argument, any number is potentially valid!

Yep. And the value of US dollars, for example, has changed hugely.

> This means that there is absolutely nothing that should hold the value of the currency fixed

Accurate. Note the demise of fixed exchange rate regimes.

> Not true! If the exchange rate of the dollar decreases, you'll see the Federal Reserve will start trading some of its goodies from Fort Knox (gold, etc.) for US Dollars, in order to maintain the dollar's exchange rate/value.

That's not how the Federal Reserve works. Nor exchange rates. Nor US dollars. There's so many errors packed into that sentence, I'm not sure where to begin. There was a time when US dollars were backed by gold, including the gold in Fort Knox; this is no longer the case. And while the Fed does intervene in the markets from time to time, that's not how they do it. Further, the mere fact that interventions are necessary underscores just how arbitrary the valuation is. If, as you argue, USD were backed by gold, the aggregate value of all USD would be US gold reserves; no intervention would be possible, and selling gold reserves would actually lower the value of the dollar. Think about the implications of your argument.
Your own writing style is hardly something to use as an example of correct English. Your usage and placement of ellipsis and commas is fairly non-standard, you repeatedly use semicolons where a full stop would seem more suitable and the liberal use of dashes to form compound swear words seems a somewhat crude and overused device. On first impressions I would say that it is you who gives a less professional impression through your writing and you really are in no position to scream so shrilly from such a very high and ridiculous horse.
I've used (and like) halloc but I found talloc interesting because it also supports memory pools and is well documented.
Oh I get the point completely and am not knocking it.

"If you're not doing it for the LED control experience"

Every project of any significance involves selecting tradeoffs. For example I didn't bother researching but I assume these guys went IKEA for their major non-hack related carpentry rather than breaking out the table saw and doing the whole thing by hand.

Sometimes for financial reasons you "have to" take a certain selection; definitely not the case in this scenario WRT the display technology. Which is cool for people who want to try something similar, but different.

They didn't really build "a" thing, they made a unique set of their game board, and a homemade display, and custom controllers, etc.

So its a valid point that if you don't care about display tech you're better off economically with an undermount TV (although those are strangely unpopular.. why? Cooling?). However if you care about controlling LED arrays that would kind of invalidate the entire point of that individual hack.

"possible to do another way misses the point, and fun."

I'd disagree in that my comment shows a guy who can't / won't do the LED display thing, can have just as much fun doing something very similar instead using exotic fine woodworking hand carpentry, or more elaborate software, or more elaborate user interface(s). The "LED display" part of the concept is an interesting and cool, but optional, part of the overall project (unless as previously discussed the point of the hack was to use LED displays...)

If you want to invest 100 hours in "build a video game table" there exist some possible substitutions for the recipe that taste just as good. Or if you want to invest 100 hours in "build a big LED array display" there is more than one recipe for that (although I didn't bring it up... how bout some "game of life" software on that microcontroller? That would also look cool.)

(edited to add: we do agree on it being a cool synthesis of your four checkboxes; I'm just saying other recipes also exist)
I'm not sure if this is a good practice. As project grows, running tests takes more time - remember that tests are not only unit tests which should run quickly, there are acceptance tests which can take some time to run. Waiting for commit to finish can become painfully slow.

Additionally, I like to commit partial solutions to feature branch as I work. Later I will fix the mess with rebase - this workflow wouldn't work.

You need CI anyway, so I'd leave tests there, and let the developer decide when to run the unit tests on his machine.
ANSSI is not just a "French certificate authority". It's a government defence agency.

http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/fr/anssi/presentation/
"The agency is attached to the secretary general of defence and national security".

What is the CA hierarchy "linking back to ANSSI" that chrome is/was trusting? Is the root of that hierarchy still trusted by chrome?

Edit: following link from seszett's post below, hierarchy is at: http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/fr/anssi/services-securises/igc-a/ and the IGC/A certificate is under PM/SGDN in Chrome's authority store.
I guess I don't grasp the usefulness/need for the static type using statement. Can someone expand on that a bit more?
My wife started with 3-letter rhyming words. Cat, Bat, Hat. Lists of them. Once the 3-year-old could recognize the 1st letter she changed it up. Cot, Not, Hot.

A couple of weeks of this and they were reading. We continued to read to them but just for fun, for the theatre of it. With voices and acting out, hilarious with young kids.

My youngest got tired of all that and would grab the book and go to his room to read it alone. He was also reading Wizard of Oz when he entered Kindergarten.

Funny, teachers are often highly resistant to admitting any kid is at a different level. They even went so far as to bring in a 'reading expert' to test him. Showed him some stupid picture with a 6-word poem and read it to him, asked him what it 'meant'. Nothing of course. So he 'was reading at a normal 5-year-old level'.

Did they ever just ask him to read a book? No. Why not? What is the deal with teachers? Is it inconvenient to have kids at different levels so they go into denial? Do they feel threatened?

This isn't an isolated case. Its been played out in my experience with my kid and others of my friends. I've been buttonholed by experienced teachers and given a tirade on the evils of teaching kids on your own.

I like teachers, respect them. But they often have a chip on their shoulders, and its holding kids back.
Let's say you want to go buy a loaf of bread. How do you pay for it with knowledge of energy sources? I'm quite sure the cashier would be quite tired after performing the 300th viva of the day.

Some people do trade knowledge of energy sources for stuff, using money as an intermediate store of value, but most people cannot, and it wouldn't be desirable either otherwise we wouldn't have a varied and healthy economy.
I can see this working if you're collaborating without Github's pull requests.

Personally I'd want to scope it to only run the test suite for merge commits onto the master branch since it's reasonable in development branches to commit changes with failing tests.
I bet a significant number of comments here are by people who do not especially value gold. I personally don't care for jewelry and don't have the giant piles of money needed to make gold a useful hedge, so I basically own whatever gold is in my electronics and such.
"To change one color throughout the entire Groupon.com webpage, that was estimated to take three months to do".
... It seems that they rewrite from scratch a terrible mess, the switch to Node is anecdotical
Off the Grid Router to disrupt the ISP industry
This example runs unit tests only, so it doesn't take too long (integration and other tests would still have to be executed on CI).
It's more of a convenience than a practice, so you basically don't have to think about running unit tests.
I pretty much agree - taxation could be the only non-circular source of demand for the USD. But there is also the fact that the Federal Reserve generates demand by offering to buy USDs for other things when the exchange rate of the USD gets low.

If taxation were the only form of backing, things would be a little more strange. The currency could work, but taxes would have to be defined differently. Somewhere in the tax rules, there would have to be some statement that pins the value of the USD.
Not to be confused with code of color

http://www.colorforth.com/
A number of things stood out to me in this piece.

First was the fact of confession bias: even if unconsciously, once we've heard a confession, we tend to discount information which would contradict it. I've seen a similar general trend: if someone tells us something we tend to believe them, reality notwithstanding. People pay attention to words.

There's the PEACE model for ferreting out truth and falsehoods, which dismisses many of the "physical indicators of lying" notions:

That model is: Lying and anxiety have nothing to do with each other, and lying and body language have nothing to do with each other. However, lying creates a cognitive load, and the more you lie, the more elements you have to juggle, and if you keep going back and asking for more and more details, eventually that system breaks down. ... What the PEACE technique helps you do is find out which part of the story is verifiable and which part isn't.

I've found that cues of coherence and specificity in stories are helpful to me in assessing the veracity of both personal interactions and of academic / topical research.

In the interview, Douglas Starr also mentions the case of people who've appeared on TV or in public making appeals to find the perpetrator of crimes for which they were later convicted on evidence (and by all appearances accurately) -- the displays of emotion these people present don't show any of the physical signs of lying that the Reid method is based on.

And finally, the behavioral tricks employed by investigators and by which subjects operate which tend to result in false confessions are telling. The pressure to confess, and the sense of the subject that confessing will somehow make things better (it almost always doesn't) are both psychological traps which tend to produce a false result.

Even in areas far removed from law enforcement or interrogation, I see valuable lessons here.
If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.
How a single news subject can cause mass hysteria and obsession, even in a community of highly educated/successful individuals such as HN.

See: Snowden, Bitcoin, etc.
Fun camp tradition! But wandering at night, sneaking out with a buddy, is one of the great delights of camp. So no I'm not sure that is a good goal.

How exciting to sneak out with a buddy at night, looking for Kahn! They'd remember that for a lifetime.
No, scars imply you were wounded and you still bear marks. Nothing more.

It is an attempt to pass off your reaction as not legitimate, yes, because it's not. I'll say it again - you didn't have to be there, nobody was forcing you to be in that classroom, that was your parents choice. The only choice they didn't have was not to educate you at all.

--edit-- Further on the scars thing - in your first post in this thread you explicitly talk of emotional abuse and deliberate traumatisation during your schooling, I'm not sure why you would think my suggestion you talk to someone about this is so offensive?
> But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there.

This is a common argument but I think it's kind of irrelevant. It's not untrue, but it doesn't suggest that there is no bias against other groups (women, blacks, hispanics, etc.). I think it's fair to say Americans by and large are extremely comfortable around Asian people and not so comfortable around blacks or Mexicans. Programmers are no different.
Lack of time is a lame excuse. Always. I often use it, but I'm not lying to myself, blaming stuff on something else. It's just an excuse.
There is 24 hours in a day. If you sleep for 8 hours like I do, you still have time for 8 hours of work, and spend 3 hours with your kids, you still have 5 hours to do something productive. Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting or watching television you still have 2 hours to do something productive.. And we should not forget about the weekend and holidays where you have eight hours that are usually spend working, freed up.
And working hard? I'm lazy and I hate working hard, that's why I'm a soft dev. :)
> colored people

Just for your own sake, in case you're not a native speaker: you shouldn't ever, ever say this. The words you use send social signals to others, and 'colored people' sounds really, really, really racist.

This is distinct from 'person of color,' which is not. Use it instead.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
Wrecking kids is hard to do, as long as you are paying attention to them you're doing pretty good. Better than the average in fact.
>I don't understand why people keep talking about barriers to software development.

Because 'white guilt', and people need _something_ to post about in their tumblr blogs. ;)

I'd like to see some specific cases of racism in open source. I've been working professionally for 7 years, and I haven't seen a single case of racism anywhere in open source. I just can't imagine it; who would put themselves out there like that doing something terrible, and what community would allow that?
Democracy. The environmental movement uses anti-nuclear propaganda to get votes.
Nice blog post. One thing I would add is that we could optimize the performance problem by peeling one iteration off the front of the loop, thereby making the rest of the loop type-stable. However, this exposes another problem with this code – the return type of the function depends on the value of n: for n ≤ 0 it returns an Int, while for n > 0 it returns a Float64. Thus, even though we could make this code run faster, any code calling this function would have to code with its poor type behavior in turn.
Joules (or kWH). An energy backed currency.
So yes, let's not do anything and blame stuff on some lame stuff like lack of time.
Linus is Finnish and Theo is South African.
Interesting article. The article claims that gold has no intrinsic value. I may be wrong, but I can't think of any entity that has intrinsic value, or, "value in and of itself." On the other hand, I can think of countless things that have value in relation to other things, such as, a loaf of bread and a hungry man.

Could it be that gold makes a good currency, and a good currency makes trading easier, and people value the ability to trade with one another, and therefore, gold has value?
While OSS is not 'just' a US thing, it is probably heavily weighted toward US participation. Although India and China have huge populations of technically educated people, the language barrier is probably a factor there.

I would imagine that the region with next highest contribution is Europe, which comprehensive English teaching. (also: mostly white)
They would, just not in the US or anywhere else where such concepts can be patented.
> In both teaching/coursework and research, academia is extremely detail-obsessed, constantly burrowing away from larger, important questions towards small, easily-answerable ones.

In the research circles, this is simply because smaller, easily-answerable questions are the ones that fit the short-term grant applications. It's very unfortunate, indeed.

In the teaching circles, there is a slightly related case, which manifests through this:

> For a good example, look at how many different kinds of differential equations the average engineering major at a really good university is required to learn to solve, and then check how often they actually solve those equations in either original research or in their jobs.

This is because the mathematics courses need to reach a compromise between teaching enough fundamentals to be meaningful as math courses, and enough "practical" applications to warrant their presence in an engineering curricula.

I was also annoyed by taking math courses for three. Fucking. Semesters. But looking back to it, while I have forgotten much of the actual details they taught me, the type of reasoning they taught me stuck with me, and it's ok. I'm not sure if there's a better way to teach that.

> Oh God. You just described my life last year.

I hope it gets better. Cheers!
This is the core problem of 'trusting trust' in the certificate chain. I explicitly do not trust most of the top-level CA's - they have repeatedly been proved untrustworthy by both mistakes and intentional malice, so the whole current chain is useless.

I'd prefer trusting a much more limited (i.e., specifically excluding 99% of national government CAs) set of CAs; and for the major providers that hold my data, including Google, I'd only trust a chain where they themselves are at the top, i.e., where companies such as Equifax and Geotrust (who currently sign google.com certificate) and anyone else is physically unable to issue new certificates for google sites.
I value gold because you value gold.
I love all the commenters in uproar: this can't be racism!!! Notice that the word "racism" was used in the article 0 times.

>[Open source software] contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time.

>Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.
> What is the CA hierarchy "linking back to ANSSI" that chrome is/was trusting? Is the root of that hierarchy still trusted by chrome?

Chrome gets the list of root certificates from the underlying operating system. Since ANSSI is in the Mozilla root set, it is quite widely distributed.

(Although note that it may be listed under ANSSI's old name: DCSSI, or as "IGC/A".)
Really? I think he nailed it.
> The mistake has had no consequences on the overall network security, either for the French administration or the general public.

Wrong. It had huge consequences. Users within the French administration lost their ability to securely communicate with Google and who knows what other sites. Additionally, the overall network security was hit by another blow against the SSL trust infrastructure.

This is a seriously bad issue and downplaying hopefully won't do them any good. "We only spied in a very sneaky way on our employees, undermining the trust given us by all browser and OS vendors. Don't worry. Nothing to see here. Too bad we got caught - if we hadn't, we'd just continue".

By having their root accepted into the browsers stores, they took on a huge responsibility which they have now betrayed and IMHO it doesn't matter whether that was the root or one of their intermediates: if they can't control them, they never should have issued these intermediate certificates.

Browser vendors need to set an example and do a Diginotar here: remove that root from the stores. There are already too many supposedly trusted and hopefully competent ones in there, no need for the devious or incompetent ones.
Yes, what I described is not actually how the Federal Reserve works. I was trying to give the essence of what it does in a single sentence.

The USD is not literally backed by gold, but part of the Federal Reserve's mission is to moderate the rate of inflation; that means holding the value of the USD steady. And the way they do it is beyond the scope of this discussion, but it certainly depends on the Federal Reserve trading its holdings on the market (which, as you point out, is mainly debt (in terms of USD), not gold).
Earlier in the thread knowtheory describes a specific situation that happens over and over and over again.
Hampton Creek Foods Looks To Crack The Egg Industry
Thank you for this. It's hilarious.
Thanks for your comment. In fact, you are not the first one complaining about that (another reader named it as 'user-hostile blog'), and I guess this is an invaluable insight for improving http://manycontacts.com