skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bought 0.4 BTC via Coinbase right when the price dipped to $900. Once the price climbs back to $1200/BTC, that'll net me $115 after fees.

When the price suddenly dives, you may want to consider buying. It's always paid off so far. It seems like a solid investment strategy, because Bitcoin is still very young. Therefore it's probable that the infrastructure will continue to grow, and it will continue to become more popular over time.

It's looking like the price is about to enter into a "slow'n'steady" phase of growth... I predict it will rise from $1100 to $1500 over the next month or so.

Consider this: If you have $10k lying around, you can set up a Coinbase account and buy 9.5654BTC right now. Then you can set up an MtGox account and sell those coins when the price climbs to $1500 (which seems pretty inevitable). Therefore your $10k will become $14,262 after fees, which you can then wire back to your bank account. $4k is a pretty nice chunk of change, so you may want to seriously consider it.

But you must be willing to keep your money in BTC if the price tanks. It requires a lot of discipline not to freak out and sell. The overall thing to remember is that BTC will almost certainly hit $1500; it's just a matter of when. So if you have a mutual fund, you may want to redeem it buy BTC instead.

Something else to consider: the price of BTC won't be able to double very many more times. That means an opportunity exists right now; an opportunity that won't exist very much longer. In a year or two, I predict you won't be able to count on BTC steadily rising in value. Whereas you can pretty much count on it between now and then. Anyone who's interested in growing their money on a long-term basis should seriously consider investing now.

EDIT: My comment was written mainly for historical purposes. A year from now I'm going to go back to this comment and see how wrong I am. This is the first time I've been confident in an investment opportunity of any kind, so it'll be interesting to see whether that confidence is misplaced.

EDIT2: Don't invest any money you aren't comfortable with losing, obviously. But it's unlikely you'll lose more than half of it. I'd say there's a 95% chance that putting up $10k now will net you $4k sometime in the future, because BTC is only going to grow in popularity and capability, not diminish. Therefore the question is how long you're comfortable with waiting.

EDIT3: Hm, I've hit a nerve. I wasn't trying to tell anyone what to do... but it probably sounded that way. Sorry. I was just doing a quick writeup of my own personal thoughts regarding Bitcoin's near future outlook. I'm nobody special, so please don't take financial advice from me.
> You should be aware that the left is vehemently against liberalism

What does that statement even mean?
Fair enough. I'll dispense with the snark and provide a more specific summary of my thoughts on the matter:

1) Not everybody who works for the government (either directly or as a contractor) is a power-hungry closet totalitarian. In fact, these people are rare.

2) Nevertheless, these people exist, and the ambitious ones often claw their way to the upper echelons of whatever organization they work for. Their goals are likely not as diabolic or lofty as overthrowing a country or subverting the Constitution, but rather to check the requisite boxes their bosses deem important and to further their own careers by "empire building".

3) The by-product of these goals can result in the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, if they over promise and under deliver. They may exaggerate the scope of a problem in order to make their pet solution seem all the more critical. Technical problems have more taxpayer dollars thrown at them, to ensure a fix. Legal restrictions are tackled by lawyers, who seek to find workarounds.

4) In the end, rules are bent and billions are wasted to solve a "problem" that really wasn't a serious problem. Most of the hands that touched the "solution" did not intend to waste money or subvert laws, but either believed that the end result was for the greater good or simply didn't care one way or the other.

I see Palantir in this light: not an evil entity, not a shadowy puppet master plotting the demise of America. But they happily accept contracts from agencies full of men and women far more interested in checking boxes and furthering personal careers than any effect it may have on spending or the personal liberties of strangers.

I see them in the same light as I do the people who built the backscatter machines used by the TSA in the airports: an interesting tool being misused by the wrong people in power.

Individuals who work on a project that can be turned against their fellow citizens and sleep well at night because the work is interesting or the pay is good have none of my sympathy and are earning an increasing amount of my contempt as the scope of unconstitutional government espionage becomes more and more clear.

The CIA -- as well as any other government agency -- is an organization and has no inherent "right" to do anything, including exist. I don't care about efficiency if it means that my children and their children grow up in a country where every electronic record associated with their lives is harvested and analyzed so they may supposedly be safer from "bad guys".

A pox on anyone who supports this guilt-by-association, pro-precrime, "efficient" America. It is an Orwellian hell.

How's THAT for a comment?
Microsoft Compares NSA to 'Advanced Persistent Threat'
Yep, when starting a company the demand question should be the first one you are trying to answer. Awesome product!
So how are you guys solving the Commercial Mail Receiving Agency (CMRA) problem?

Congress passed a law in 2001 regarding CMRAs and directed the USPS to establish regulations regarding them. What it boils down to is that in order to receive USPS mail on someone's behalf as a commercial entity, you've got to register with your local post office AND have all your customers do so as well.

http://www.rscentral.org/Programs/USPS-Retail-Programs/USPS-...

If you only accept UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc but no USPS you're in a legally grey area. Most reasonably adults would suggest that FedEx isn't "mail" the same way that what the USPS delivers IS mail. But I haven't seen any case law either way on this but I'm not a lawyer so it could be out there.

The reason this is a problem is that the purchaser (the SwapBox customer) doesn't always have control over how the items he/she purchases will be shipped. Think Amazon Marketplace or eBay; they often go "whatever's cheapest" and you don't get a choice since it's a $10 item with free shipping. When that happens the USPS can't legally deliver the items to the SwapBox and will return them to the shipper.

If SwapBox does go the route of registering with the local post office(s) as a CMRA it gets worse. According to the regs you have to register as a customer at a particular address. So if you want to get mail at SwapBox A you have to fill out paperwork and get it delivered to the post office for SwapBox A. Now if you want to get deliveries at SwapBox B, which is at a different physical address than A? You got it, another set of paperwork for the post office that delivers to SwapBox B.

This is not a trivial problem to solve. I know, I used to work at a mid-sized CMRA and there's no way around it, legally, without lobbying Congress to change the law. At least that I could come up with.

EDIT: Transcript from Congressional Hearing is here http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg61646/pdf/CHRG-106h...

EDIT2: I don't want to discourage you guys, there may be a way around this. I suppose that might be some kind of competitive advantage so you might not disclose it publicly. If you didn't know about this already and you want I'd be happy to explain this whole thing in detail and/or give you some things I already looked into as ways to ease the pain. I'm not sure what the proper "get in touch in real life protocol" is here on HN.
To paraphrase James Bond: "Some Freedom Fighters are not interested in anyone's freedom"
A month ago we lost the Covered Business Method review that would have been so valuable. Then today we lost venue improvements for patent applicant appeals which is a small issue.

We'll see the bill stripped even more in the Senate. That's the essential battle now. Then the conference committee that reconciles the bills will be very important.
Chip investment languishes
Justin Bieber wanted $200k to represent BlackBerry, advertises iPhone for free
I read what you wrote, I still have no idea what you meant.
An Equation For Intelligence
+Satoshi Obana
In my opinion, regular people will always be struggling agains the power structures that control their lives.

Just because we're subject to or even party to a government that commits atrocities doesn't mean we should give up trying to fight against other injustices.

I don't feel there is any inconsistency in using our government to expose or stop other government's problems even when we have our own, so long as we're working against our own country's injustices, too.

I do recognize that people could read this and think it's only 'others' that are bad, but I believe there will always be a percent of people that misinterpret or warp anything to suit their own ends, and that fact doesn't mean we should stop trying to make things better.
Announcing TypeScript 0.9.5
Fwiw, SpoonRocket is $6 a meal, and I love the concept but the food just isn't good enough for me to order regularly. I do think it's a great deal for $6 though.

Maybe if they had another $3 per meal they could make more food I'd want to eat.
Does that mean someone can denial-of-service all of bitcoin just by moving a balance between a couple wallets repeatedly? Can one person (or group)'s activity crowd out other people so their transactions can't be added to the blockchain? What prevents that from happening?

25,000/hour is a shockingly small number to me. I feel like I must be misunderstanding something, or else someone from 4chan would have already DOS'd bitcoin for fun.
> "Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it."

Maybe they have strong opinions precisely because they don't find C to be a language which is easy to "really" program in?
Er you are pulling words our of some hole and putting them in my mouth...
There goes my evening :-) It would be remarkable if we could engineer a structural material that had as its sole purpose to be a durable Fermi surface for cooper pairs.
Margaret Thatcher (to pick one) was a terrible idiot, but not a terrorist.
Ask HN: Best way to query mainframe data using SQL?
Old mainframe system which we need to query using SQL. Any ideas appreciated.
Cafe Algiers @ Beale and Mission (financial district)

$5 sandwiches
Knuth loves his type-setting. He created TeX for crying out loud! I'm sure he detests what epub readers do to his works. And I'm sure he is no fan of how pdfs look on e-readers either.
Box Secures $100 Million Funding at $2 Billion Valuation
Amazon Fresh isn't new -- it's been around in Seattle since 2007. What appears to be new is the Prime Fresh offering as a new gating mechanism for it: $299 per annum (effectively $220 if you're already a Prime customer), which also cuts away the delivery cost.

At first blush, I'm not sure if the value proposition is attractive enough for me, even though I'm more or less the target demographic (upper-middle-class, 20's, who lives alone, without car). $200/year is not an insignificant amount of money: I can get a ZipCar for an hour for $10, and hop over to the Trader Joe's at Capitol Hill and get cheaper, higher quality food.

The big thing here is the time savings (which is valid: ordering off of Fresh is just as easy as ordering off of Amazon itself).
I really admire his ability to walk away from power. Instead of making himself indispensable and hanging on to power indefinitely, he understood the importance of grooming the next generation, walking away, and letting the others to continue the work.
Would it be outrageous to ask them to slap an MIT (or equivalent) license on some of the 51,000+ patents that they hold that are somewhat "expected behaviors" these days and aren't critical to their infrastructure? In my mind it would be an incredible PR move and would probably inhibit some of my hesitations of trusting Google.
Hoover would have killed for the kind of capabilities that Palantir provides.

But then again, so would have the KGB and East German Stasi.

Palantir's developers aren't evil, but the fact that so many folks wish to don the rose-colored glasses and assume that their work cannot be used for the wrong things makes me nauseous.
Some clarification on a few of these...

Writeboard, Tada, and Backpack were not shut down, they were sunsetted. That's a fundamentally different thing. What it means is that anyone who used Tada, Writeboard, or Backpack can continue to use these products just as they always have. No one was kicked off, no one has to stop using them. We just aren't selling them anymore to new customers.

Answers... we've tried a variety of customer forums over the years, but we just didn't find them effective. We're no longer trying these.

The Product Blog was basically consolidated into Signal vs. Noise, our blog. We'll be making more changes to how, what, and where we publish next year. I imagine we'll continue to tweak the mix over time.

Breeze we did close down completely. We refunded every customer who paid (which was about 1000 customers) and sent them their subscriber lists.

The podcast wasn't "shut down", we just haven't had time to do another one. I'd like to do more of these when we have some spare time. Some of what was in the podcast has been absorbed by other channels (Twitter, more interviews on other people's podcasts and sites, etc).

Sortfolio was sold and is alive and well at http://sortfolio.com. No one was left hanging here. From what we hear, revenue is up since the sale.

Basecamp Classic was absolutely not shut down. It remains a huge product for us - a significant number of our Basecamp customers happily remain on Classic and we'll support those customers forever. However, we don't sell it anymore - the flavor of Basecamp we sell today is the all new generation of Basecamp at basecamp.com.

Hope that helps clear a few things up.
Do you accept that the NSL is a gag order in addition to a request? 200k was a low ball.
Your figure of 192k is from 2006. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Is Bitcoin's rising difficulty responsible for its increasing price?
I would have thought the same, but damn.... that Soylent Green is just so darn tasty.
I've definitely never arrived at an address to find a gaping crater myself.
Dynamic Infographic of Founders Fund Investments
Reagan actually vetoed it, what i find funny is this line: " President Reagan enlisted South African foreign minister Pik Botha to call Republicans on the fence." Pik Botha was one of the hardest apartheid officials, he held out until the end and wanted war. Source below.

'''Veto by President Reagan[edit]
Reagan vetoed the compromised bill on September 26, calling it "economic warfare" and alleging that it would mostly hurt the impoverished black majority and lead to more civil strife.[10] He again offered to impose sanctions via executive order, while also working with Senate Republicans on concessions to avoid them overriding his veto. Reagan's veto was attacked harshly by anti-Apartheid leaders like Desmond Tutu who said Reagan would be "judged harshly by history".[11] In the week leading up to the subsequent vote, President Reagan enlisted South African foreign minister Pik Botha to call Republicans on the fence, though this was seen to backfire.[12]
Veto override[edit]
Reagan's veto was overridden by Congress (by the Senate 78 to 21, the House by 313 to 83) on October 2.[13] This override marked the first time in the twentieth century that a president had a foreign policy veto overridden.[2] Apartheid opponents in America and South Africa applauded the vote, while critics argued that it would be either ineffectual or lead to more violence.[12][14]'''
Buy the Knuth book. You can get it used for ~$25 on Amazon, and if it gathers dust or you dislike it, sell it and buy something like Programming Collective Intelligence for some fun motivating problems and to learn Python.

In Knuth's book you learn about and work with the details of how computers work that Mathematica handles itself and explicitly hides from you. If you ever wondered, for example, how Mathematica might store a matrix in memory, or why when you evaluate 1/.99999 it returns .00001, but if you add one more 9 to the denominator it returns 1., then Knuth's book is a good one to turn to.

Knuth does not use a high-level language to describe computations--instead he uses a made-up computer called the MIX 1009, which has its own machine language. He came up with 1009 by taking 16 of the machines at the time and taking the average of their numbers (360, 650, 709, 7070, U3, SS80, 1107, 1604, G20, B220, S2000, 920, 601, H800, PDP-4, and II) He also points out that you can derive the same number by taking the name as Roman numerals. If that makes you laugh, you will also find it to be a deeply funny book.
I'm sure the Germans would have. Which is the point really; terrorism vs freedom fighter, war vs cou, revolution vs insurgency.

It all depends which side your on.
There already is a transaction fee - miners will ignore your transaction if you pay too little or nothing.
I think the news about China is pretty bad as it cut off one of the arms of Bitcoin - being used as currency. With very limited use in e-commerce so far, I think it will stay as a speculation tool for a while. I personally think it will drop below $1,000 as it ran out of steam trying to break $1,200 several times without much success. The drop in transaction volume after it passed $1,000 speaks for itself, too. Also, a lot of speculators are now looking into altcoins, which hurts Bitcoin, too.
Also, taxes
In other words, Gandhi should be shunned because he was a sleazy lawyer who was screwing his wife while his father was dying across the hall.

We respect our heroes not for their flaws, but for their feats. It's no secret to anybody that the ANC used terror for political causes; what followed Mandela's jail term, however, is far more important. He didn't fix South Africa completely. Nobody could have, but the forgiveness he showed during his tenure, to both blacks and whites alike, is the notable part of his life. To myopically describe Mandela's actions as terroristic is to do a disgrace to one of the great leaders of our time.
I'm only made to feel better by knowledge that the last Swiss canton held out on women's suffrage until 1990.
On the other hand, having no cached result for the branch probably correlates strongly with not having the target in I-cache, which means you may be stalling out anyway. It also implies that the branch is not in the middle of a tight loop.

Regarding the size of the ROB, I was wondering about the size a while ago and found an interesting post from someone who measured it for modern Intel processors: Ivy Bridge (168), Sandy Bridge (168), Lynnfield (128), Northwood (126), Yorkfield (96), Palermo (72), and Coppermine (40). http://blog.stuffedcow.net/2013/05/measuring-rob-capacity/

I agree with you on the virtual part. I'm actually a C programmer more interested in how to implement efficient dispatch for interpreters. Eli (the original author) has some good posts on that as well: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2012/07/12/computed-goto-for-ef...
I was taught a similar thing when practicing juggling. It was quite a revelation to me.

In juggling especially, if you practice until you fail each time you waste a lot of time picking things back up.

Whereas if you practice an amount you are more than capable of you spend more time practicing properly and also spend time learning how to finish properly.
Is there a canonical source for tracking the price of BTC? Would be nice to set up an alert for large downward swings to take advantage of lows without having to watch the ticker all day.

http://bitcoinity.org/markets seems handy for this.
I'm going to stop cutting into my sleep schedule, especially my REM sleep, for pointless matters. By increasing my sleep from 4 to 7 hours, my mood's gone up, my depression has near disappeared, my energy has risen, and my confidence is finally back to where I want it to be.
Transactions normally include a small fee, to incentivize miners and disincentivize abuse. You don't have to pay the fee, but if there are more transactions being broadcast than the blockchain can accommodate, the fee-paying ones get priority. (It's a little more complicated than that: when you generate a transaction, you choose whatever fee you want, and they get prioritized based on a combination of the fee, the transaction size in KB, and how long it's been since those coins were last moved.)

Current transaction fees are typically in the range of 0.1-0.5mBTC, so in order to continuously flood out everyone else, you'd need to spend more than 2.5BTC/hour in fees.
I'm all for more lunch options. Can you please offer a healthy snack solution as well? I'd pay out of pocket for this. 4pm is my hunger-witching time.
I just spent a month getting back into Android development with writing an app. I can't express how many times I knew the answer would be easily findable in the docs but I also knew that by searching on Google it would give me a SO link where it takes about 5-10s to have the answer. While looking it up and reading the SDK documentation would more likely lead to 60-90s with presenting me less information and alternatives.
There was a recent update to Font Awesome, which required new syntax. Tindrlabs might be referring to that.
So you won't see the code until hired? Not very smart, I'm afraid.
> Most sane languages [3] give you exception hierarchy

Go being a glaring exception -- and this is a good thing.
... or way ahead of us ....... (ominous gloomy face)
Have fun waiting 3 months for Mt Gox to send you your money. There's a reason the price is higher on that exchange...

I would use btc-e or bitstamp over Mt Gox.
Thanks for posting this.

Tangent, I was thinking about Toyota's software process failure and how they _invented_ industrial level mistake proofing yet did not apply it their engine throttle code.

C is obviously the wrong language, but from a software perspective they should have at least tested the engine controller from an adversarial standpoint (salt water on the board, stuck sensors). That is the crappy thing about Harvard architecture cpu (separate instruction and data memory), you can have while loops that NEVER crash controlling a machine that continues to wreck havoc, sometimes you want a hard reset and a fast recovery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash-only_software