skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People code bitcoin clients. People vote for a protocol change by using those clients instead of the old ones.

A change can not be enforced. If a significant subset of clients decides on a different path (for example stay on the old protocol), a fork of the blockchain would be the result. I guess then if you would own 1 BTC before, you'd suddenly own one "old Bitcoin" and one "new Bitcoin".

There are already clients that only download parts of the blockchain, trading storage and bandwidth for reduced security - for example the mobile clients, or Multibit (afaik). I suppose they rely on trusted nodes (not sure).

But suppose SHA256 would be broken and the "vote" would be to change the mining protocol to scrypt. Why wouldn't the nodes and miners change? It's not so different from updating your web server when there has been a security bug. Some people forget to update their web servers and get hacked. The next time, maybe they won't forget to update. Maybe if you installed your bitcoin software with a package manager, it will be automatically updated.

It would be interesting if there was an attempt to enforce "tainted coins" (forcing clients to reject bitcoins that are known to have been through criminal hands). I suppose governments could require businesses to only accept btc that are not tainted. I honestly don't know how things would play out - maybe the community would addopt it, maybe not, or maybe there would be a fork...

All just from my limited understanding, please correct me if necessary.
It's an even better idea to make the hardware fail safe, so you can let the program die and not worry too much about it. This does not apply in all cases (cars), but it does apply in many (trains, like a deadman switch for the computer). For a vivid example of why this is an important approach, read about the Therac-25.
>I heard that the Bitcoin block chain is already many gigabytes.

True.

>How is this expected to scale over time and are there any challenges for the network if it becomes too large to quickly/easily share?

This is debated.

>(Or not since only the tail is really needed?)

That's basically the first approach.

If you trust someone else to tell you the state at time X (give you a 'checkpoint' basically), then the volume of data still grows with the number of separate accounts that have 'bitcoins' in them, but [where all the remaining money is as of recent time X] is a lot less information than [the complete set of previous transactions for all time].

Or you could have a thin client, that trusts some other service to maintain and monitor the current state of the system, which your thin client regularly queries.

Both of these schemes cut down the data storage requirement a lot, and sort of solve that scalability problem.

However, both require trusting some third party to supply you with an abbreviated version of the transaction history (or group or parties, or chain of authority, etc.), and its open to debate whether, if you do that, you lose some of the 'decentralised' aspects of the system that make it nice. Or you could say that's "just a philosophical concern" that doesn't really matter.

I personally guess that the various developers will be able to engineer around this problem.

I'd be more worried the system handling real time transaction volume, if it became mass adopted, and people tried to do all transactions on the blockchain.

Check out https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability as a starting point.
So
you mean the Linux kernel was proven secure? When?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/14/critical_linux_bug/

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/linux-finally-fix...

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/06/20/2257229/13-year-old-pa...

You're
trying to apply an impossible standard to closed source software that
software that was that developed from the start to be open source and
developed in the open cannot meet.
Commonalities between the Flynn effect and IQ gains via retesting [pdf]
Not sure about the whole "if you can’t picture it, do you really understand it?" idea - a very touchy subject on that one....but interesting point
My first guess would be affiliate commission from the various services where you can buy the music.
I would check out https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability . In the paper published by "Satoshi Nakamoto" he detailed a technique called pruning in which old transactions that can longer affect other transactions are drop from the blockchain
The original whitepaper already mentions a way to reduce the size of the blockchain using Merkel Hashes (iirc) - they show that it is sufficient to only remember parts of the blockchain. It hasn't been implemented yet, but I suppose if the problem becomes really pressing it will be implemented.

I suppose some of the fun parts would go away then, such as the possibility to view every transaction that has ever been made - in the Merkel Hashed blockchain not all information would be preserved.

Edit: I suppose it would still be possible to monitor all transactions and remember them by some other means, just not in the blockchain.
Do dark skinned folk also get annoyed with you treating them as a homogenous group, by any chance?
Bioinformatics/Genomics have been beginning to use GPUs for their data processing, since there's vast amount of DNA data that can take a long time to get through.
Google's Arizona Time is Wrong
what if the amount of transactions grows exponentially?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

I agree with fragsworth that once Bitcoin is mature the blockchain will grow linearly; in the short term we may see more rapid growth. Most users are not expected to store the whole blockchain; using SPV or UBC a peer can store much less data.
I've argued on G+ that Google's biggest competitor online isn't Facebook but Amazon for pretty much just this reason: intentionality.

People on social network sites are largely involved ... in social networking. Discussion and conversation and sharing. Marketing is an intrusion. Facebook suffers in this regard. Sucking down ever greater amounts of personal data to this end starts getting creepier and creepier.

Google's benefited by the match of intentionality to search and capitalizing on the resulting advertising opportunity. Even if only a fraction of searches are associated with intention, Google can act on those.

Amazon cuts out the middle man. It doesn't have to advertise because it is the marketplace. The company hasn't even focused on profitability, keying instead on simple cash flow. So long as it can support current operations, it's doing fine. And it is creating one of the largest marketplaces on the planet. Rather than advertising and its low conversion rates, Amazon is the point of sale.

Disclaimers: I've used G+ for a couple of years, though I'm winding down my use due to privacy concerns. I've never trusted Facebook. I prefer shopping local to using Amazon where at all possible.
just found a banh mi stand outside the SF Fed today ~$4 per sandwich. Was surprised, to say the least:)
From a mathematics point of a view, the entire premise is based on picturing it in order to understand it...
I am about as far from the right as is possible to get.

I am calling special attention to liberals because at this moment liberal media are writing him off as having been a 'peaceful protestor' or some such banality.

I don't know why you are reading so much into this, I meant only what I wrote, I wasn't implying anything else.

I am fully aware (as I assumed most people were) that the right has labelled him a terrorist, and that until as recently as 2008 he was officially a terrorist according to the US.
Android 4.4.1 Changelog
"Long live the Cuban Revolution. Long live comrade Fidel Castro... Cuban internationalists have done so much for African independence, freedom, and justice. We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of a vicious imperialist campaign designed to destroy the advances of the Cuban revolution. We too want to control our destiny... There can be no surrender. It is a case of freedom or death. The Cuban revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people."

Nelson Mandela, 1991

History is truly written by the victorious ones. I find it funny that people praise a communist guerrilla fighter, responsible for so much violence. That's like praising Che Guevara. Oh wait... And don't get me wrong - I hate the apartheid as much.
Mandela isn't a 'celebrity': he's one of the few people in recent times who changed the world we live in for the better. His life's work allows millions of us to have hope.
Bank of America puts a price on Bitcoin
I'm in Arizona and their time matches my time...
I agree with you now. But I keep thinking back ~10 years when seeing a * (or ) was a moment for pause and speculation.

I think it comes down to the address of an int* is a thing, which again makes sense to someone familiar, but to a newcomer means you have a thing at an address that is an address of another thing.
When your market is part of a larger market that is in secular decline, the secular trend eventually tends to dominate any local trends that are present in the sub-market.

That's why companies attempting to get a piece of a growing pie are generally easier to build and more likely to be successful than companies attempting to get a bigger piece of a shrinking pie.
Same cause, different song: Johhny Clegg and Savuka Asimbonanga. Even if you didn't check the liner notes and couldn't understand Zulu (or, I guess, Clegg's rendition of Zulu, which was somewhat click-challenged) the song was heart-rending.
> Reagan has a weird relationship with apartheid

If by "weird relationship" you mean "supported it", then yes. Reagan was an out-and-out racist asshole, whose pro-apartheid policies were so extreme that his own party, despite itself being a party filled with racist fucks, nonetheless felt a need to override his veto to try to distance themselves from his over-the-top level of extremism.
Woodley seems to be gaining a reputation among other intelligence researchers as some kind of nut, which is perhaps why the journal of publication of this article is such a low-impact journal, and not one of the major journals that would be expected to publish a strong article on this topic. I'll look forward to seeing what other intelligence researchers say about this preliminary claim, which seems to provide a contrary-to-fact answer to questions that have been asked and answered for years about the Flynn effect.
South Africa's Nelson Mandela dies in Johannesburg
I'm going to (actually already have) severely cut back on the amount of time I spend at HN, Reddit and other social sites. It's just not a productive use of my time, and life is too short to fritter away the hours doing nothing.
Major supermarkets in Australia give secondary prices with a common unit for easy comparison - so a package of toilet paper might be $4.29 and in smaller text under the price will be "30c per 100 sheets"

No matter how the manufacturers package or price their product a consumer can quickly look at the per-100 sheet price and pick the cheapest one. Other products might give a common price per kilogram, per 100g or per unit depending on what the product is.

It's a very useful feature, especially when price is your major decision factor for a product.
See the roll call for your congressman. [1] Roll 629 "On Passage" is the vote on final House passage.

Summary of the amendments extracted from the report (only the Rohrabacher amendment passed; Goodlatte's was automatically added since he's the committee chair):

(see also Thomas's Rules Committee report [1])

Goodlatte's has technical changes.

Watt's amendment weakens the loser-pays provision

Polis's Requires claimants to provide additional
disclosure information in any pre-suit notification to
establish a willful infringement claim. (no vote)

Massie's Strikes section 5, the ``Customer-suit
exception'' provision.

Jackson Lee's first Expands covered customer definition to
all small businesses so long as their annual revenue does not
exceed $25 million.

Jackson Lee's second Requires the Director to conduct a
study regarding the economic impact of the changes in current
law resulting from Sections 3, 4, and 5 of the bill on the
ability of individuals and small businesses owned by women,
veterans, and minorities to assert, secure, and vindicate their constitutionally guaranteed exclusive right to their inventions and discoveries.

Rohrabacher's moves patent applicant appeals back to district courts such as the Eastern District of Texas instead of the CAFC as the original bill specified. (This is the amendment that passed.)

Conyers's essentially waters down the entire bill and replaces it with the much weaker and pro-troll Senate bill. Anybody who voted for this is not really our friend (roll call 628)[1]. This would drop the pleading reform, discovery reform, and loser-pays provisions that constitute essentially all the effective reforms in the bill.

[0] http://beta.congress.gov/congressional-report/113th-congress...

[1] http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2013/index.asp
> Without exceptions this is tougher as you need to unroll everything manually in order to retry.

I don't get why you think this is a problem. You can trivially "unroll" it by explicitly writing your functions to be single-exit and "unrolling" at the end before returning whatever your result is.

"Exception handling" without "real" exceptions is then also trivial: just check the appropriate error code and take whatever action is suitable at the time.
Cryptographically signed receipts, of course.

sigh sometimes I hate the people on HN.
In this interview, Gentry Underwood explains why good design is based upon constant iteration. He sheds light on the importance of having a desire in solving a particular problem. We also talk about getting acquired, working at IDEO, and the role Human Centred Design played within Mailbox.
Neither did Nelson Mandela, if that's what you're implying.

To wit, the Church Street bombing (which is presumably what you're referring to by the Pretoria car bomb) by the MK happened in 1983. That's 20 years after Mandela was imprisoned.

Unless you have some credible evidence that he was somehow the kingpin behind all the violent activities of the ANC and/or MK during the time that he was in prison, I think it's fair to say you're wrong.
Facebook Admits Organic Reach Is Falling Short, Urges Marketers to Buy Ads
It doesn't benefit the US taxpayer. How much aid has gone down the hole?
I disagree.

I quit smoking easily last year on January 1st. I decided to quit a month prior to Christmas, but I was afraid of the jolliness of the season making me slip. I assume it is the same for exercise, portion control, and alcohol consumption moderation.

Sometimes it is nice to have a clean break in a month where nobody bothers you and where you haven't had a routine for a couple of weeks.

Although I really wish the gym wouldn't pack up so much.
> Copying doesn't take someone's work from them, he or she still has access to it. Right or wrong, good or bad, it's not theft.

This is probably an incomplete conception of theft.

For example if you steal a TV, the value of the theft is set at the retail price of the TV, even though the store only paid wholesale. That is because you have deprived them of not only the TV itself, but also the revenue they could have earned by selling the TV.

Digital copies are so cheap that the "wholesale" is effectively zero, so it's true that the owner is not deprived of any property. But there is still the question of the opportunity to earn revenue.
> it is at least years ahead of Go,

Yes, Erlang has admittedly had decades to improve the scheduler (versus a couple of years for the gc compiler in Go), so this is quite literally true.

However, you should know that goroutines are pre-emptively scheduled now; the "scare quotes in your comment seem to imply that they aren't: http://golang.org/doc/go1.2#preemption
I think you're still misunderstanding. This doesn't have anything to do with the motivations of the soldiers.

I have friends who are absolutist peacenik liberals, who thing that GWB should burn in hell for all eternity for inveigling us in Iraq, because of "war for oil", "Halliburton will destroy the country", etc. From the point of view of one of these people, there is no moral authority to wage the war; to them, it IS black and white. Yet these very same people utter the "support our heroic troops" mantra.

Given that someone is such an extremist in their opposition to the war, it's impossible to square that person's professed beliefs with their support of the soldiers waging that war.

That is, unless we're willing to discard the idea that all people are morally bound to refuse to execute immoral commands.
> Indeed, let's not allow anyone to sanitise history. It's a fact that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and PW Botha all called him a terrorist.

That says more about them than it says about Mandela.
You can play WoW and Guild Wars 2 on a Mac. Doesn't that mean they are OpenGL?
Osama Bin Laden? Hugo Chavez? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
I'm going to try to go the whole year without killing a single hobo.
This is a brilliant example of why you'd want exceptions. Look at what you're doing for error handling, manually every time.

Exceptions do the exact same thing, except:
1) automatically
2) type-safe
3) allow you to give extra detail about the error
4) tools can actually follow the control flow and tell you what's happening and why
5) debuggers can break on all exceptions. Try breaking on "any error" in your code (I do know how C programmers "solve" that : single-stepping. Ugh)

In this case, they are better in every way.

This is almost as bad as the code in the linux kernel and GNOME where they "don't ever use C++ objects !", and proceed to manually encode virtual method tables. And then you have have 2 object types that "inherit" from eachother (copy the virtual method table) and then proceed to overwrite the wrong indices with the overridden methods (and God forbid you forget to lock down alignment, resulting in having different function pointers overwritten on different architectures). Debugging that will cost you the rest of the week.

When it comes to bashing exceptions, it would be better to give people the real reason C++ programmers hate them, it's because of the major unsolvable problem you'll suddenly run in to when using them. In C and C++ you can use exceptions XOR not using exceptions.

This sounds like it's not a big deal, until you consider libraries. You want to use old libraries ? No exceptions for you ! (unless you rewrite them) You want to use newer libraries : you don't get to not use exceptions anymore ! You want to combine the two ? That's actually possible but if any exception library interacts with a non-exception library in the call-stack boom.

Exceptions are a great idea, but they don't offer a graceful upgrade path. Starting to use exceptions in C++ code is a major rewrite of the code. I guess if you follow the logic of the article that "would be a good thing", but given ... euhm ... reality ... I disagree. Try explaining "I'm adding exceptions to our code, rewriting 3 external libraries in the process" to your boss.
How to tell when the NSA is lying
Really? I'd love to have a chat to you - contact details are in my profile.
I am neither a right-winger nor an American. I am very much left-wing.

You should be aware that the left is vehemently against liberalism, as it presents such a rosy view of current society that it reduces the terrible things happening to being some floaty idea that doesn't apply to Me. As liberal media are doing currently by saying that Mandela was just a peaceful protestor.
I thought about it before my first response, and I'm not sure there is a good way. Anything that comes off as correcting grammar is difficult to do politely, especially in a mixed group of native and non-native speakers.

I think most people (including me) didn't consider the 'I was declassified' interpretation because there was little else in the parent to suggest it, and because the phrasing was odd. Usually it is information that is declassified rather than individuals.

But if one was to ask for clarification, I think your second comment would be a good pattern: "I'm genuinely confused: did you mean X or Y?" Putting the burden on yourself as reader often comes off better than implying that the writer made a mistake, even if the real problem is that writer made a mistake.

(This isn't to mean that you shouldn't ever bluntly correct writers when they are wrong, just that in the absence of a pre-existing relationship it often doesn't go over well with the writer)
Could it be China already has covertly taken over NK, in as much as it feels it's worthy of doing? Maybe they have a big lever to control the place, or maybe they have a small one (that's still large enough to influence as needed).
This looks very good. I'll consider this for my next project.

A few things I really like
1. Applies to tables, lists etc
2. Nice progress indicator. This is missing in datatables and is a pain point in my current deployment.
3. stylized lists and charts. Very cool

what i didnt see
1. filtering. eg: find in column x where string not equal to blah
2. Searching specific column rather than entire table.

I apologize if this exists and I missed it. Overall, look great. Best wishes on this.
I agree. The concept may be simple, but when you're just starting out as a C++ newbie and you've got pointers-to-pointers-to-pointers flying all over the place in this ugly syntax trying to satisfy some contrived homework assignment on a short deadline, things can get confusing rather quickly.