skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What Bitcoin really needs is a central bank to stabilize its value.

No, a distributed system who's goal is getting rid of central control doesn't need a central point of control.

> When the demand for Bitcoin goes up, they need to print more to keep it from skyrocketing.

And again no; rather, minting more currency can be built into the network algorithmically so that hoarding causes enough inflation to offset it.

Bitcoin's deflationary nature will make it a bad currency, but it's not the only crypt-currency out there, and inflation and deflation can be tied into actual transactions on the block chain to build a self regulating currency that can actually be trusted and more importantly adjusted by the economy itself, unlike central planning.

Peercoin has these attributes, though I'm not convinced in the correct proportions as it's still long term deflationary. Saving causes inflation by minting new coins and spending causes deflation by destroying transaction fees. This is a better strategy for a currency, but it's not quite balanced right yet.
Well this comment thread went about as I expected it to go...
I stopped reading after the patriot paragraph. I don't like concepts that divide people and patriotism is inherently bad for the world. It brings only war and pain.

I love my country but I never met a patriot that could think straight.
While anecdotal, every researcher I know prints papers for reading or reviewing. High-quality typesetting makes printed papers much easier to read.
"I am an American patriot."

If anything scares me, its that. I know what he has written straight afterwards, but it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Its all very well the author trying to define the word to suit their own purpose, but Im afraid its not that easy to get others to accept it. Try using your own definition of the word "Nigr", and see how that flies.

"Patriotism to me simply means that I care about the US and its future."

Yeah, and that is the problem. What is meant buy the "US"? The land on a map? The political system? The people who are also "patriots" and claim to care about this "US", and its future, yet do evil? Do you care about them? Every one uses the word patriot to justify their actions, good or bad.

That the author misses this, but still insists on still using the word suggest a dangerous and blinkered ignorance. TBH, it stinks of years of gentle brain washing. I'll never forget how Bush Jr used the notion of patriotism to garner support.

Im sure the author think he is well meaning, but this honestly reads like loyal, patriotic PR.
The thesis seems way off. I fit the bill of the typical tech industry asshole (though I'm quite aware of my instinctive attitudes and have qualms about them) and I've never even considered the possibility of becoming homeless. If anything I feel that no matter what happens in my life I'll be able to get some job somewhere.

My pet argument is that "we" [1] don't understand the poor, the homeless, and the uneducated. I grew up in a leafy SV neighborhood, went to good schools, and literally never interacted with anyone from the lower half of the economic spectrum through HS. Even in college, my friends were middle class and above. We've largely grown up in stable homes with supportive parent(s) and think this is normal.

Even when we read about the poor, we tend to try to forget it. It's like pushing stuff under the carpet or putting a lid on the unpleasant stuff.

Earlier this year I volunteered at Junior Achievement and taught a few classes at a low income neighborhood in LA. This was literally my first in person encounter with a group of people from this socioeconomic segment. Having this exposure and interaction with them gave me a better sense of the good nature of the kids, the disadvantages they face, and how ridiculously lucky and privileged I have been throughout my life.

With this understanding, I have a bit more empathy for the less fortunate. I understand that a lot of what they face is a matter of circumstance than laziness or delinquency.

If our gentrification and socioeconomic satisfaction were not so pronounced, I suspect that we'd understand the less fortunate better and would no longer "hate the poor" as much as we do now.

----

It's hard though. Gentrification and being around like minded people is comfortable. It's pleasant.

[1] I'm going to generalize by using "we" but obviously there will be exceptions among us. But I imagine at least 80% of us -- or at least the ones guilty of "hating the poor" mostly fit this description.
It is parallel construction

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911150
The most extraordinary thing about Snowden is not that he took the documents: it is that he sacrificed his whole life to make them public.

And this should make us scared. A guy like Snowden was extremely improbable, and yet he happened. So, what to think about the far more likely case of NSA employees taking extremely sensitive information and selling it privately? How many of those have there been already?
That's true, although Rust provides for sound enforcement (so if you try to alias the equivalent of two restrict pointers the compiler will catch it at compile time).

(It's also not technically in C++, although in practice it can be achieved through extensions.)
This has always been my issue with these e-mails.

Either way, it will be awkward, and checking in with someone to see if they can be introduced just adds another e-mail to the chain.

Maybe I'm just overly choosy with who I introduce, but I have never had someone not respond, or say "No, I don't want to be introduced to that person." It just always seems to add an unnecessary step.
Silicon Valley Is Living Inside A Bubble Of Tone-Deaf Arrogance
This is something I am looking for to experiment with. Where did you buy your IFC6410? I keep looking for a source of ARM based machines where I can play with Linux or Android...but in a different form factor than a phone (Something I could put on top of my rack), and a little more power than a Raspberry PI.
Yep, basically. But what's your point? I don't want to do the extra work. I consider not having to a perk.
Whether or not the original comparison yields any actual insight, your comment is taking a nuanced view of the present (all inventions are incremental and end up sourced from many places) while taking a simplified view of history. Materials research was happening at many places beyond Bell Labs.
This is pretty cool and (disclaimer) the reason I started Amahi: running a low power home server for my media.

If you are interested in this space, join the Amahi community! People interested in building hardware are especially welcome https://www.amahi.org

Edit: one person asked how to join - there's the forums and there are the github repos to contribute[2]. There is also the developer mailing list[3]

[1] https://forums.amahi.org
[2] https://github.com/amahi
[3] http://sourceforge.net/p/amahi/mailman/amahi-devel/
In pursuing a broader audience, surely they're facing more competition?
VC fundamentals: outliers matter more than loss ratio
Take risks, fail often, win big.
Unboxing Automatic Link : "Fitbit for Cars"- awesome techie gift
Except it wasn't and isn't. And that is the problem. Generally should be always, but we now know it's not.

And then to add to the list. "Collect" should mean "obtain" and not "use", and "metadata" is actually a subset of, and not different from "data". And "transcripts" and "summaries" are actually a form "content". "US Citizen" mean's a person who lives in the US, not "51% likely based on this metric", and "direct access" does not depend on who owns the land in which the particular section of cable is buried. And the list goes on. These words mean something, and when 'always' slips to become 'generally' - we have a problem. And when the one doing the slipping is a titanic behemoth of the size of the NSA, with as little accountability as already exists, we have an even bigger problem.

When the words used to assure us are twisted and misused, then the assurance does little. Trust is hard to earn back. Especially when we intelligent owners (US citizens) of the mechanisms and powers are not given access to their actual processes, or even their legal justifications.
I created the game out of necessity. As mentioned earlier, I had isolated myself for almost a year, working obsessively on my new business. It became fertile ground for social anxiety. Rejection Therapy was a personal challenge to overcome my hyper-sensitivity and meet new people.

If you need/want the cards, email me. I'll send them to you free.
I just checked, and all the buildings near the Googleplex-proximate LinkedIn offices are on Google Maps. The Google buildings even have floorplans.
Thanks! I really enjoyed building the thing :-)
Creating RC Micro Quadcopter
Building photo recommendations for flickr
Yes, this is how beginners should be taught to "back up" in git.
Apple approves first gay app with 12+ rating
The fix for a dysfunctional bureaucratic organization full of in-fighting is not a better software development process. How it usually plays out is that switching to a better software process is a tiny step in the right direction, but the organization is still dysfunctional and bureaucratic.

(Analogy: the person whose body was riddled with stage 4 cancer started flossing every day. She still died of cancer soon after, but her teeth were cleaner).
You seem to believe that the value of bitcoin could possibly be more predictable than the value of traditional currencies. Since bitcoin will be / is almost exclusively an investment vehicle it will (almost by definition) have an unpredictable value. [1] Traditional currencies will be somewhat predictable because they have a central bank actively managing the supply.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
Then keep notes of your hours. When you leave, you can get paid for them.
YES. I thought I was going crazy for a minute there. Every page on the site looks like it gets a random skew applied.
any .gr would do the job for me :-P
Deflation in a sector != entire economy deflating; this is a red herring.
Thanks for the pointer, I shall play with latexml!
No math gene: Learning mathematics takes practice
A great solution already exists: pandoc.

It allows people to generate the required markup from their favourite mark(down)up.

Focusing on scientific academia, the workflow of data to paper is already solved with ipython+pandoc (ipython notebook).

We have started using ipython notebook 2 months ago, and never looked back. The ipython notebook allows us to do our postprocessing with report write up, making beautiful graphs in matplotlib export it to single file HTML to share with supervisors and collaborators, and then save the entire thing as latex as a starting point for a high quality latex article. When the images are being overhauled we go back to the notebook, save as pdf/svg/png.
San Francisco is a beautiful city. But if there's a place that could do with a bit more shit on the streets it's SF. Homeless people are terrible. They remind us that we, as a society, fail to provide for the weak among us. On the other hand, they're great. They remind us that the world, is a cruel, messy, hard place, and that we're all, quite literally, full of shit.

Unfortunately, I wasn't yet born when San Francisco was a Mecca for those who wanted to live a different kind of life. But I was fortunate to live in the Castro for a few months during YC, and the sight of those naked guys – or those in tight leather skirts – always made me smile. I thought, hmmm, that's what disruption looks like; that's true hacking – really going against the grain rather than pretending you do because you're like, totally ignoring regulation, while, in fact, you're just screwing cab drivers over and serving nothing other than the same old boring consumerist culture, being manipulated to serve the man with true passion, rather than trudge along with quiet desperation but true rebellion in your heart.

Many of the homeless are mentally ill; most of them live a nightmare. But if we can't help them, let them at least help us remember how crazy this world is. So go ahead you wonderful, destitute, unwashed people: save this beautiful city's soul by shitting all over it. Make the streets of San Francisco your toilet! And when you're done, see if there's a way some of you could get back into New York again. God knows that city needs your help, too.
Yes. I read "The Master Switch" and being crowned "The New Bell Labs" to me was synonymous with incredible innovation, which is the buried for decades to protect and entrenched position, which I don't think is google's play. For example, see the history of the answering machine and magnetic tape.

http://io9.com/5691604/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60...
The key here is p. 217. Examples and Exercises that come before p. 217 are:

- Square Roots by Newton's Method
- Testing for Primality
- Arithmetic Operations for Rational Numbers
- Extended Excercise: Interval Arithmetic
- A Picture Language
- Symbolic Differentiation
- Representing Sets
- Huffman Encoding Trees
- Symbolic Algebra

SICP teaches algorithms and data structures before that quote. And goes on to teach more about data structures without doing any of that awful OO modeling exercises you typically do in a typical Java Programming 101.

>But there's a reason why the above passage on real-world representations appears immediately after they mention modularity.

After that quote, you return to data structures. Okay, after lists, queues and tables, there is a chapter about simulating digital circuits, which is both a fairly abstract and a well defined thing. Well, we can disagree on how abstract a digital circuit is, but at least we can agree that its no fucking dog that is_a animal and has_a head and has_a leg array and methods like

bark(int howManyTimes) {
for (int i = 0; i < howManyTimes; i++)
println("woof");
}

Using OOP to model real world stuff wouldn't be so bad if it would happen in the context of real problems, like simulations where you can show how to use the state pattern to model behavior. What I want to see gone is that stuff like inheritance and composition is explained with examples taken from the physical world, completely detached from the programming practice. If you use File, Directory and FileSystemEntry as examples for a hierarchy, you can demonstrate it's usefulness with concrete examples. With Dog, Frog and Animal, not so much.
Why are people replying to this post like OP is some kind of authority? It doesn't sound like he "studied economics" so much as he took a course.

Of course you can have a deflationary currency. The problem is that people won't spend it. The dollar is not naturally inflationary. Instead, the fed allows for a controlled amount of inflation every year to encourage spending. Automatically managed currencies like you discuss still suffer from inflexibility—as our understanding of monetary economics adjusts, or qualities of the economy change (as with the change in velocity of money during the 80's-90's), it would be difficult to adjust the algorithm to better stabilize the money supply.

More importantly, cryptocurrencies are region agnostic. I take it you learned about optimal currency area in your studies? Any arbitrary threshold would risk having inconsistent effects in different places. Expansion may be just the thing to encourage additional transactions in a recessionary region, but may encourage rapid inflation elsewhere. The result is always high volatility, making it unfit as a store of value.
9 Things You Would Immediately Fail Without Your Smartphone
Rewriting the client is not sufficient. You need to convince everybody to run the new client. I don't see that happening as easily as you presume. It is highly likely that cryptobanks will come into place in the future (cryptocurrencies are not very layperson friendly right now), with traditional contractual law ensuring the cryptobanks do not suddenly change the rules under client's noses.

I disagree regarding cash. You're making a blanket statement and I'm saying there are niches where cash sucks.

Aside from the M-PESA example I've given, another is overseas travel. Cash can be a big waste of time - depending on your local laws, obtaining forex prior to departure can be a pain (e.g. in South Africa), the withdrawal fees are exorbitant and often unclear, the risk of theft significant, you have to be aware of local exchange rates and if you want to save money you have to be aware of the exchange rate of the cash you have on hand vs. your debit and/or credit card processor etc., then when you get back (again in South Africa at least) you have to resell your forex within 30 days, and you also have limitations on how much you can purchase in a year.

Another is cash payments over a certain value -- again in South Africa, walking around with more than a certain amount of cash in your pocket is asking for trouble.
https://twitter.com/homakov/status/387805705669206016
https://twitter.com/homakov/status/345544666483130368
https://twitter.com/homakov/status/218630370231451648
The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release.

The notes I linked are the ones linked from the post page on where the upgrade instructions can be found.
And before that, the alias issue in C compilers was one of the reasons why number crunching in Fortran could outperform C.
I've never really suffered from any of these problems. Every day I set myself up for 7.5 hours of work, and 2 hours of breaks/checking email in the morning/lunch. After those 9.5 hours are up, I'm free to do what I want. At a bare minimum I do 37.5 hours a week.
2013: The year in pop culture in one large illustration.
It would definitely be interesting. I'm having trouble thinking of a way that metric could be gathered with any reliability, given that merchants typically generate new bitcoin addresses for each purchase.
IF it ever were to be used as a currency. Obviously the author knows that a central bank is not a part of bitcoin today or ever could be. So his whole point is that it can never be used as a currency.
Does AT&T have international business? It seems like a key point of the suit is that the Chinese government cancelled IBM contracts due to these worries, which translates to actual shareholder damages. I don't see any indication AT&T has lost business as a result.
While I would agree this attitude stems from fear, I'm not so sure it's rooted in fatalism; or the idea that homelessness represents some "bad roll of the dice" that could happen to anyone. It more likely stems from not understanding the circumstances that led people to being on the street.

One of the first things learned when volunteering with a social services non-profit organization is that many homeless are there by choice; the result of their own actions and decisions. Drug and alcohol abuse are almost always at the root cause.

Fortunately, the culture in SF tends to approach this problem as an illness, and doesn't assume every homeless person is a criminal.﻿
I wouldn't like to sound too harsh, but honestly, it seems like the author doesn't have any idea about what LaTeX can do, or what is it used for. Many of us would prefer LaTeX over HTML for almost any kind of document, without hesitation. It has many more functions both at lower and higher level, it's easily extendable (tired about \left( and \right)? Just define a \paren{} function! And that's just a tiny example), it has guaranteed support for certain characters (in HTML+CSS+Js, the browser can affect the font and possibly the encoding), etc., etc., etc. Well, yeah, it probably can't be used to create a web app, but, you know, most documents don't have the slightest need to behave like a web app.

It reminds me of the people who want to "fix email", without realizing that the only problem is that email doesn't cover certain use case that affects them, but it's fine for a lot of purposes.
Peaceful Lake
I might be biased on "majority of researchers read papers on computer". As to "high-quality typesetting", I think that depends on your standard of "high-quality". If the goal is "easier to read", then it doesn't have to be traditional typesetting. LaTex is not the only way to make authentic typesetting (and don't get me wrong; I use LaTex a lot myself). You can do that in HTML/CSS too. Actually HTML is more flexible on this because you can provide different views (e.g. Sans-Serif vs Serif fonts) for your reader for on-display reading and printed-out reading.

EDIT: typo
Older generation, sure. But add about 80 that I know that prefer iAnnotate and an iPad or Surface to your list.
Given equal liquidity, a purer market should deliver less volatility than an actively managed one.
Why would it be expected that do-not-disclose agreements cover all employees or owners? Most top secret information is handled on a need-to-know basis; it is only given to people who are deemed to need to know it. Even within IBM (or any other large company that was involved in PRISM or other NSA programs), most people in the company wouldn't know about it. In general, there are only a few people within the company, who have a secret or top secret clearance, who get to know about what's going on.

Furthermore, owners don't know everything about a company either; shareholders in a public company have no greater insight into the company than the general public.
> Bitcoin is currently NOT deflationary.

Incorrect, demand alone has made it hugely deflationary; if everything were priced in Bitcoin right now, prices would have to be adjusted downward constantly, that's deflation. Money supply inflation is not inflation which generally refers to the overall prices of goods and services rising and money supply deflation is not deflation which is the fall of overall prices of goods and services. Bitcoin is currently hugely deflationary.
It smells like some Terry Gilliam inspired fascist utopia where a mid level tech in the security apparatus shills for the state/employer while hocking their caveman mayonnaise.

It must indeed have all of the electrolytes. Big brother would put THAT on his bun!

The unexamined life isn't worth living or watching. Those with nothing to hide offer nothing of interest.
The author claims to be a patriot but I would like to ask him how can he justify mass surveillance and/or entrusting a government agency with so much power while forgetting the Fourth Amendment which was enacted just for this purpose. There is a reason that such protections exist because it is almost certain that people in power will exploit them. And yet, he claims to be a patriot while being oblivious to the basic civil liberties and the Bill of Rights that the United States was formed on.
TinyBlog by Kevin Rose
Hmm, that FAQ isn't the best (will fix). This explanation is better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888514.

If you install Disconnect first on Firefox then install other filtering add-ons (ABP et al.), you should get faster overall performance. The reason is Disconnect filters faster, so requests that Disconnect blocks won't have to be processed by your other add-ons. All other requests will still be processed by them.
The NSA did these things both pre-FISA and post-FISA. For example:

* 1980-present. MAIN CORE, which is shared between CIA, FBI, NSA, Contains data on 8 million Americans and is used by LE. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core

* ?-Present the DEA SOD program which uses NSA intelligence for drug cases. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05...

And these are just the cases we know about, they are likely only the tip of the iceberg.

Lorendsr, given this evidence and your previous statements that, "If I thought there was much chance that in the future, law enforcement and intelligence would not remain separate, my decision would change.", are you considering changing your decision?
<cynical thought>Remotely piloted by guys who aren't sitting at the pointy end of 100 tons of jetfuel doing 600mph, and therefore might not be quite as well motivated to succeed as their in-jetliner colleagues…
Er, you know that CMU and Berkeley hired those people, too, right?