skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't underestimate the general public's misunderstanding of bitcoin...
If I avoid all my "info junkie" websites (HN, reddit, political news) between 8am and noon, my productivity skyrockets. It's remarkable.

Most importantly, for me, is to avoid those websites even during my "breaks." If I need a quick break, I'll physically get up and away from my computer. Otherwise that "five minutes" usually ends up being closer to an hour or so.
What does that even mean? It looks like an authentic link to me.
The market selects for amorality; the structure of corporate governance (especially with publicly traded companies) ensures that everything hinting otherwise is really just particularly effective PR.
McDonald's corporate makes money leasing the stores to the franchisees, but the location owners make money the "regular" way, which is how they pay for the real estate back to the mothership, so from one extra step back they are a hamburger company as they appear to be. If Google is going to profit from something other than advertising, somebody somewhere has to take money from customers and give it to them.
In addition, for those using a Windows PC in a remote location (such as travelling and visiting an internet cafe) a simple step you can take to help avoid this issue is to use the on-screen keyboard. It's available as an accessibility option, but you can also open it using "Windows Key + R", and then type "osk"

Of course, you should take care to shield your screen while you type the password, or use a combination of mouse+keyboard when entering it.
[Meta: please submit the direct link, not a link-shortened version]

This arXiv paper[1] is apparently from 2012. A good meta-resource and summary of attempts on P ?= NP, including this one, can be found at [2]. From [2]:

> Among all these papers, there is only a single paper that has appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, that has thoroughly been verified by the experts in the area, and whose correctness is accepted by the general research community: The paper by Mihalis Yannakakis. (And this paper does not settle the P-versus-NP question, but "just" shows that a certain approach to settling this question will never work out.)

[1] arXiv summary: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.0954

[2] http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm
https://sites.google.com/site/sergeyvyakhontov/home/peqnp-pa...
Bitcoin's Dystopian Future (April 2013)
Ask HN: So I got an email from a VC. Now what?
I got an email from a VC about an project that I released recently. I wasn't really expecting anything like that, and not quite sure how to proceed.

I'd love to get some advice, and could provide some more details if someone is willing to advise privately over email.

Thanks!
This is not meant as criticism: Is there any particular reason for all the tr pipes? Is there any advantage to using tr instead of base64?

I essentially use the following:

base64 </dev/urandom | head -c $COUNT | xargs -0
I would like to find the same kind of list about scientific experiments. What would the list be ? Analogy, elimination...
It probably performs pretty well, too. The farther you get away from Xlib, the more likely you are to interact with X correctly.
The Bitcoin ledger doesn't provide credit. There's nothing stoping someone from offering a credit account (e.g. a consumer credit card) denominated in Bitcoin.
I think this is exactly what I needed to hear!
I wouldn't be so sure. The Fed is the root cause of almost all the bubbles we've seen in US markets.
As for Bitcoin he might be right, but I want to hear his opinions on economics about as much as I want to hear Obama's opinions on drone strikes.
I suppose I should have added that the confident pundits were usually wrong because they tended to make more extreme predictions. Most of the time, stuff doesn't change dramatically. Predicting big shifts all the time means that your overall hit rate is terrible, because big shifts are not the most common case.

Luckily there's an extreme predictor for every extreme event, so simple selection happily promotes some loudmouths to guru every now and then.
The fix was deployed. Happy keyboard scrolling.
Because tulips were also the currency of a low-cost, fast and secure international payment platform?
Or you could take the Australian approach: loans from the government are paid back via taxes once you're earning enough.

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

That way they can't be written off, but if you don't make much initially you're not saddled with paying a fixed amount.
Really? It's evil to fund "right wing groups"? Grow up. People you disagree with != evil.
But funding the left isn't evil?
Ask HN: Rileeq
Our goal to help you build your personal filter for the digital world and would appreciate any feedback you have. How can this be improved?
www.rileeq.net
Wasn't this submitted this morning? At which point the community agreed that it was a crackpot?

Why do I get the feeling the same person submitted it again hoping to catch the late-night readers off-guard...
Lifestyle:

* Sleep ... 7.5 to 8 hrs, no more no less

* Wake up at 8/9 to maximize hours of sunlight

* Lift weights 4+ times per week... the four hrs you spend in the gym will be made up for with 10 hrs of productivity throughout the week

* Healthy diet (high protein, low carbs, low sugar, fresh food)

Computer:

* VIM

* Avoid HN

* Start working right when you get up

* Answer emails / do other menial tasks when tired

* Get rid of all notifications: phone silent/vibrate, no Gmail/fb/twitter notifications outside of the platform itself
Although the problem I've been finding recently with SO vs Apple docs (mainly since switching from developing sdks to apps) is a lot of the higher level stuff seems to get changed more frequently, so a lot of SO answers are out of date.

Edit: Somehow this reply ended up with a different parent than I intended...
We're actually having a hard time reproducing (though we've received some interesting screen shots). Our nexus 4 and Nexus 7 look ok. Rest assured we'll be acquiring more devices and will try and fix.
http://imgur.com/a/Ow9ab

It's funny how when you look at the faces you can probably see the genetic distance. Watson was a kinda weird looking dude.
> In the United States, a verbal contract is valid up to a contract value of $500.

This depends on both what the payment is for, and which US jurisdiction's law binds. There are circumstances in California, e.g., for which there is a $5,000 limit -- and circumstances for which there is a $100,000 limit.

Which is one reason why you should go to a lawyer.
>> The policies advocated by some of the Google’s grantees are in stark contrast with the progressive image that Google has worked to promote.

Hypocrisy is evil.
I don't know any company - even small ones - that keep internal stuff like that in the open. I'm willing to bet the Uber employee was on a VPN at the time, which narrows the search considerably.

I doubt Uber was secure/paranoid enough that the timestamp will immediately yield the leaker - but between webserver logs, VPN logs, etc etc, there's probably enough information there to deduce the culprit, especially if this occurred outside business hours.
I will have more autonomy, using more exciting tech, solving bigger problems, working with movers & shakers, and generally more of a challenge.

Do you know or expect this to be true of the startup offering you the job or is this more your general vision of startup employee life? If it's the latter, that would worry me.

Overall, I don't know that you've provided enough information to go on. The fact that one is a startup and the other is corporate work is, IMHO, of a lot less relevance than most would assume. The devil is in the details. In the end, it will all be about your fit with the team at work, your boss(es), your enjoyment with the content of your work, level of responsibility, and work/life balance. Those can be good or bad in either situation. We've all read many a post of a disgruntled startup employee on HN.

I don't have a recommendation of which one to go with, but what I try to do in these scenarios is think of a range of scenarios (e.g. best, worst, and in-between cases) for each situation and use those as inputs to my decision. It's easy to romanticize the start-up and think of corporate work as boring, but the truth often falls somewhere in between.
This is probably what happened, and not some not very subtle (not to mention completely useless) scheme by the DHS as the title of the article seems to suggest.

I cannot speak for what process the DHS or the TSA use, but what is done in the industry to ensure the person they're transacting with is not on some blacklist (which is mandatory, as per OFAC regulations) is using fuzzy string matching algorithms. Usually it's some variant of measures like the Jaro-Winkler distance [1], which is commonly used to compare names, or phonetic algorithms like Soundex [2], which we know is used by the US government for the census.

Unfortunately, these algorithms tend to work reasonably well for western names but not so much for picking up the subtleties of other languages and cultures, like "islah" (which apparently means "reform") vs. "islam". It wouldn't surprise me if the the DHS simply relies on automatic discovery algorithms and does not have a team of sufficiently trained people with both the language skills on call to do manual checks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaro%E2%80%93Winkler_distance
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
You provided way too little information for anyone to give you any sort of "reasonable" advice. What was the reason the majority holder asked you to leave? What were the terms you left on? Why do you still wish to retain the position? No one can tell you what to do based on three small sentences. I take that back... people can tell you what to do, but you'd be a fool for listening to them based on what they understand of your situation. Good luck though.
One problem with the conventional history is that it's very much oriented around agriculture on plains, using irrigation, with buildings made of stone or clay. This kind of agricultural culture is good for archaeologists because it leaves intact traces that are easy to dig for. But it's not the only kind of agriculture.

There have also been agricultural civilizations that grew rain-fed crops on forest sites and built houses of wood. Like the Maya, or ancient southeast Asian civilizations.

Luckily those peoples did help us out by building stone temples, but I would assume that probably several more civilizations have practiced slash-and-burn jungle agriculture and just not happened to have built monumental temples.

Supporting my hypothesis, one early layer of Jericho seems to reflect a forestal mode of production - something about acorn horticulture[0].

So, I think if we are to find the hidden backstory behind the sudden simultaneous 10,000 YE agricultural revolutions, the place to look would be in the trees. But what do I know.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture#Settlements
"Settlements occur in the woodland belt where oak and Pistacia species dominated...The superstructure was probably made of brushwood. No traces of mudbrick have been found."
I upvoted this 10 times, even though it counts once. Thank you, scoofy.
Or we could just assume that 'he' means 'he or she'.
Bitcoin double-spending
Ah yes, the inevitable fall away from the power users towards the oh-so profitable average-consumer market. It's a sad(ish) story that's seen in too many companies.

Something I've noticed a bit of though is that this "shift" is generally only a perceived shift - it's usually not the case that the high-end is abandoned entirely, usually it's just an expansion to include crappy, cheap, consumer stuff.

Take for example Dell; Dell has one foot in the horrible world of consumer computers, with loads of crap. However, they still produce the totally excellent (at least last time I used them) Optiplex line of workstations for businesses. Those things are nicely laid out internally, with good support and pretty solid reliability.

Dell also produces some of the nicest monitors you can buy; I've lusted after one of those beautiful 30-inch 2560x1600 monitors for pretty much my entire life.

I don't have much experience with HP, but I've owned their inkjet printers, and they're total garbage. However, I also know that their larger business-oriented printers are durable workhorses that plenty of people will swear by.

So, yeah, often we think the companies we know and love go to crap, but in reality it's just us not spending the money on a worthwhile product (from them or any other company).
Quoting Roper: The complexity of iteratees comes because they handle many different things at once - async io, backpressure, producing results, composition on multiple different axes. Most other APIs that they get compared to only handle one or max two of these, so the complexity of those APIs is not in what they do, but what they don't do that you have to implement yourself.
"I think he behaved poorly in relation to two topics I care
about: leading open source projects, and ending sexism."

I would think that the best way to do that is to lead by example by leading and open source project and combatting sexism in the project(s) you lead instead of knocking down my strawmen.

If you lead an open source project and fight to end sexism, then great. If not, you are in no position to criticize Ben.

"I also think people [who have contributed to] the project have
a right to criticize him. [Everyone else can GTFO]. He does owe
them an explanation; any action taken in the project's name is
subject to review by the project community."

FTFY. This entire ordeal would have been a non-issue if you could mute non-contributors.

My true agenda? Establishing a culture where non-contributors don't waste the time of contributors with their bikeshedding.

What excludes someone from the category of non-contributor? They submit test cases. They clarify documentation to make it clearer how to use the code or understand the algorithms in the code. They implement features. They participate in design discussions. They contribute use cases and elaborate on why those use cases are important. They fix bugs in the open source code instead of simply hacking around it in their own code. They write blog posts on how to use the open source code. They publish examples of the open source code in use. They give talks on how to use the open-source code.
USB (a relatively novel rectangular connector) is physically identical to PS/2 (a historically standard round mini DIN connector)? This sort of reasoning is completely alien to me, which is probably why I'll never be as rich as Jobs.
It's not. The lawyer who made the statement is Paul Freeborne. He's not outside counsel, he's a DOJ employee. His salary is unlikely to be surprising to, say, a Silicon Valley programmer. If he's been around a while, he's probably somewhere between $100-150k with locality adjustments.

He'd be doing much better in the private sector, even as an associate in a law firm.
Economists' tips for writing
John Chochrane's writing tips for Econ Ph.D students
"May economists falsely think of themselves as scientists who just “write up” research. We are not; we are primarily writers. Economics and finance papers are essays. Most good economists spend at least 50% of the time they put into any project on writing. For me, it’s more like 80%."
Still very unimaginative thinking right there. Releasing human resources from current tasks, combined with greater purchasing power of those with more disposable income creates new opportunities for products and businesses.

Unemployment could be solved tomorrow if we banned large trucks and mandated all goods be transported in little 3wheel delivery vans like they have in little Italian towns. But that would be bad for society as the price of everything skyrocketed to cover the inefficient delivery. Or we could tear down power stations and make people carry buckets of water up a hill to run a hydro electric plant. These are absurd scenarios yet illustrate the reverse of the problem.

Technology happens, and it is generally good for humanity. Only a pessimist can looks at the enormous progress made in productivity through automation, and then confidently declare that from this point forwards, things can only get worse.

Entirely new businesses requiring lots of people are yet to be created. Detroit didn't happen 'just at the right time', Detroit happened precisely because it could - labor was freed up from producing the food supply, and disposable income increased because the cost of food dropped through automation.

It might be uncomfortable - change always is - but the alternatives are horrifying, like regulating new tech away and forcing people to keep those jobs. I for one never want someone metaphorically carrying a bucket of water up a hill for me so I can feel superior about makign sure they are still employed.
Yep I do this everyday. I used to think TODO lists were for people who weren't disciplined enough to get stuff done. But it keeps me concentrated on what task needs to be done instead of reading every blog post in the world.
The original article [http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/rymde-fran-anstalt-for-att-...] and Google translate [http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...].

Summary: He was serving a 1-month sentence at an open prison. When he left the building, the electronic monitoring system was triggered. After returning, he was given a warning, an additional day was added to his sentence, and he was moved to a closed prison.
Honestly? Not worrying about my productivity has done wonders.
The majority holder has asked me to resign the seat to ensure that they can keep the board in a better position for future investment they are pursuing.

I am on reasonably good terms with the company. I just don't know if I am going to screw myself in the future by not having a say (even a small one) in the future of the company. But then again, I imagine that there is no real advantage to the board seat in that besides knowing what is happening.

And it seems to me like I basically have to resign the seat: if I don't, I'd just get booted off rather than a neutral resignation.
Criticism welcome. Yours is nicer.
<!-- yes, I know...wanna fight about it? -->

Best laugh I've had all day.
> Can you do the same thing with Mac OS?

Nope. Apple has based Macs on 6 different architectures ["24-bit" 68000, 32-bit 680x0, 32-bit PowerPC, 64-bit PowerPC, x86, x86-64]. Each migration has had a few years of backward compatibility that was phased out in favor of the new architecture.
Ahh, looking forward to this. I'll be talking about a thing I made for self-referential composition: https://github.com/tkell/theultimatemachine
That's because biases are, by their definition, not correct.
> I'm guessing that a few years from now the bumps in rolling out Obamacare are going to be no more memorable than the bumps in rolling out Medicare ~50 years ago.

Yes, of course. By that point, they would have gotten used to the incompetence and stupidity, fully expecting it.

Based on your reply, I can surmise that you haven't even tried to use the system and sign up for a plan.
Easily searchable and constantly updated form.

And free of vendor BS, too.
Reading a book vs. reading news sites trains your brain to focus, a capacity we all seem to have lost in the last decade due to excessive bite-sized-attention-grabbing apps.
Yup. They're talking about the recent spiderlabs report it seems.
He had a one month sentence in a no-walls prison, probably with signs saying "it is forbidden to go beyond this sign". Those places are typically used for people just caught drunk in traffic. More or less a way to keep people with alcohol problems off the booze for a month.

I assume people with longer sentences will get health care.

(People with long sentences also spend the last time before they leave prison in those institutions, to get used to not be locked in.)

A one-day extension isn't exactly serious, either. I believe it could have been much worse.

(Disclaimer: A bit old information, but probably still correct.)
no it isn't. Lying to the court is nothing; it has to rise to the incredible level of prenda for anything to actually happen to the lawyers involved.
Not really. You can create an infinite number of cryptocoin currencies. Look at the proliferation of them.
Do you have a link to that please?
We don't choose to be annoyed, but we allow ourselves to be. Being annoyed never has a logical reason to it; it's an emotion; so by reminding myself of that I can make sure it doesn't negatively affect me. (Not that emotions are bad, but this one seems to only negatively affect me, so I don't want it.)

For example, when someone insults you in an offensive way. Why be annoyed? If it's true you should fix it; if it's false then he's mistaken. By remembering that, when I see that I'm about to become annoyed, my list reminds me to stay mellow.
I'm not totally sure about that, if for the sole reason that SO/SE has such a huge volume of answered questions already. Unless they make those answers harder to access, I think there will always be a contingent of people who'll need them.

However, I do hope that we get an even better discussion platform than the ones we have now. I really look forward to even cooler products in the future.
Looking forward to it! The raising of awareness about security is alone pretty awe-inspiring, so the fact that I'm equally piqued by such technical details as the site's backend is really saying something about the impressiveness of the execution
If Gruber's take is true, then why Mac doesn't have a Lightning port? Or at least a Lightning to Thunderbolt cable.
You don't explain why you want to keep the board seat. Being a director comes with fiduciary obligations, some of which could turn out painful, like taxation. Shareholders earn dividends.

AFAIK the shareholders vote who gets seats on the board. So unless you can get other shareholders on your side, you could be "removed".
I'll throw my hat in the ring:

- Not have young kids
- Sleep
- Make a todo list the night before, and give yourself an easy goal to start the day.
- Consider your brain to be a muscle, and treat it as such: nurture it, exercise it, let it rest. Let it rest can be things like spending time with friends, or doing whatever you want.
- Mindful meditation.

(Edit: typo, formatting)
I dumped my gaming pc for an iMac a couple of months ago as I got sick of rebooting linux > windows and back to get shit done when I wasn't playing games, and figured OSX was a good middle ground.

It really depends what you're interested in as to whether that's possible for you at the moment. The Blizzard titles all run, the Valve titles all run, LoL runs, and as mentioned in this thread a good portion of my steam library is available.

The big missing pieces for many are the Battlefield series and the CoD series, but since I don't play that type of game I'm fine - ymmv
I've seen the idea batted around that the hybridization of neanderthals and cromagnons set off something of an explosion in evolutionary terms. Art and technology only started getting anywhere in the areas where they had contact some 50,000 years ago. Modern humans are apparently something like 4% neanderthal.