skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what do you think the definition of "$200,000 in bitcoins" is?
If I remeber correctly the Russians indeed have a special term of getting the crypto key in such manner: Thermorectal Cryptanalysis.
"am now an advisor to the company as well as a happy customer"

From the about page.
When Grails developers talk about the minimum Groovy that must be used instead of Java in their Grails code, it doesnt paint much of a picture for Groovy's future. I've heard Gradle devs want to add Scala as an optional build language in Gradle 2, but is Grails thinking about moving away from Groovy as well?
The French bid was turned down by the President herself after major set backs in the current France-Brazil partnership building a nuclear submarine for the Brazilian Navy.

Not mentioned here is the fact that old conspiracy theories surrounding the explosion that destroyed the Alcantara launch pad and killed the cream of the crop of the Brazilian space program, have recently been resurrected and it's believed plausible by some members of the Brazilian government although not widely publicized. Some blame the French for possible sabotaging it.

Over the years the Brazilian secret service (ABIN), have arrested several French spies around Alcantara - the latest case was that a French spy posing as kitesurf instructor. Other cases include water buoys found at sea near the Air Base loaded with electronics, also blamed on the French.

EDIT: added a few sources (sorry portuguese only)

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/poder/137424-suspeita-de-sa...

http://www.metro.org.br/jose_alves/os-cacas-militares-e-as-b...

http://jornalpequeno.com.br/2013/11/22/governo-confirma-cont...

http://www.planobrazil.com/dez-anos-depois-explosao-de-fogue...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_rocket_explosion
Check out this researcher's papers: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ esp. "Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping Risks of CRT Displays"
If you're to believe the press they've received, Coinbase are basically the most reputable and trustworthy company in Bitcoin and the one that's going to bring it into the mainstream.
Bitcoin does need credibility in the real world.

Consider wire transfers. Those undeniably work, but their reputation has been tarnished to the point that most people who do business online will run the other direction if the other party so much as mentions the concept (see: craigslist).
Most of the concerns people had were Telegram's servers acting maliciously or being coerced into acting maliciously, which is obviously not covered by this contest or the protocol they have designed. It's a bit disingenuous that Telegram is broken but not in a way that this bounty could pay for.
If you ever find yourself complaining about the amount of time wasted on HN, just look at all those millions of hours wasted on facebook, then write some bloody Python.
As a Minnesotan living in SF, this warms my heart. New Glarus is only available in Wisconsin so anyone bringing some back was very popular.
> Silicon Valley ideologues are proposing secession

I believe no one ever said this; it has been misreported by Gawker and others.

If you're curious, the original talk is here with no mention of secession: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A
A huge percentage of full-time residents work in the tourist industry (e.g., hotels, theaters, museums, etc.). And a lot of NYC business sectors would be much smaller without the tourist population, like restaurants and retail stores. Without the tourists, there would be a lot of unemployed New Yorkers.
> Bitcoin doesn't need credibility. It just needs to work.

What currencies need to work, more than anything else, is for people to believe they will work -- i.e., credibility.

That's what, ultimately, discussions of supposedly "intrinsic" value (which are somewhat dubious taken literally, value is, arguably, inherently extrinsic) of commodity currency and the reliability of the particular governments backing fiat currencies are about -- credibility. Because, ultimately, a currency like anything else is worth exactly what people are convinced that its worth.
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that it's secure. If someone breaks it, it means it's broken, but if nobody breaks it, it doesn't mean someone else can't break it (or hasn't already).
The thing though is that the BTC folks laugh and point at the "inefficiencies" of normal currency--and then use the "hurr durr opt-in currency" argument to show that there is no responsibility to those that get burned.

It's an unfair comparison between the two systems.
Bitcoins Spark Regulatory Crackdown as Denmark Drafts Rules
Panel recommends sweeping changes on NSA surveillance
Change is hard, the problem is human nature moves slow. So every now and again you need to shake it up to start moving. Many people want the Utopia, right... now... But the truth is you have to shake it up to even begin to know what the next steps are.

Bitcoin is a shakeup, it is also a hedge on countries falsely holding their currencies higher, which does harm lower class in labor and is deliberate -- China.

It is probably the first in many experiments in digital currency that is not locked to a state that is somewhat accessible by the entire world. There will still be fiat currency issued by countries, that is not going away. It is not a black or white world, it is another investment/hedge out there to keep balance in check. Bitcoin is mainly in early-adoption and now markets are getting into it, typically investors and technologists are the first to new money and innovation, not because they are better but because they are watching earlier. The street is at least 6 months ahead of the rest of the economy if not more.

On the flipside if bitcoin is libertarian, healthcare shake up going on right now is also one of those moments. Yes it isn't perfect but it is eventually moving us away from company insurance to individual insurance and where needed help with that. Just like retirement funds are better managed by individuals with their own advisors or independently than to trust putting all your retirement in a companies fund like Enron. Competition and not pegging your success to one thing is good.

In the end I see it as a good thing, bitcoin just shook up the currency world and we are watching it play out in all its ways through the differentiation machine that is the human network.
I disagree. I really do think that most people have a deep love for government, or at least their own government. People love taxes (although they often think the taxes on themselves are too high), they consider government to be virtuous ("who would take care of the poor without government"), and they believe that (and are grateful that) they are completely dependent on government for their own welfare and safety. It's not surprising, given the large amount of resources that governments spend on making people love government.

Now obviously I'm not saying that people are for any type of government or any specific action of government. But most people will adamantly defend the goodness and necessity of government in the face of any undesirable action or aspect of a particular government. It's very common to hear phrases like "democracy isn't perfect, but it's the best system there is," or "if you don't like something, you can vote to change it," or "government represents the people," etc.
I think the lesson is that networking isn't a goal per se. Networking should be done with a purpose in mind; it should be a byproduct of getting stuff done. Networking for the sake of networking will get you nowhere fast.
Ask HN: Is there a commercial version of Boxen?
Is there some site that works like GitHub's Boxen where I can create a profile and setup my machine online the way I want it and then just log into this site when I need to build a new Mac out and install all of the dependencies?
Protections systems failing isn't a reason to completely get rid of them, it is a reason to reform them.

Using an analogy that has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, think of your front door lock and your home. Would you get ride of all locks because someone robbed your house? Or would you invest in some other type of lock and security that might not have the same vulnerabilities?
> If Bitcoin’s strength comes from decentralization, why pour millions into a single company? Ah, because Coinbase provides an “accessible interface to the Bitcoin protocol”, we’re told. We must centralize to decentralize...

This article is filled with hyperbolic nonsense like this, parading as real arguments. A 25M investment is not "pouring millions". And Coinbase is but one service in the Bitcoin ecosystem. There are and will be more competitors. Coinbase changes nothing about the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.
Why does an app and the exchange of money make that different?

They don't. The introduction of a corporate mediator does. The idea that corporations, chartered by the government and relying heavily on public infrastructure to function, should have social obligations is simply common sense. Even individual property owners have always had social obligations with regard to the manner in which they use and maintain their property. Why do you believe corporations do not?
It actually makes things worse really "no hackers can break this!" sounds good on paper, but it could just mean your adversary has more to gain by the system not being publicly broken.
I think it means its 200k in "bitcoin" thats near impossible to cash out at such volumes. So I think this is a PR stunt and nothing more.

Rolling your own encryption has always been proven to be the worst idea.
Does the secret email address change every day? Or is it the same one from now until the close of the contest?
I think it is outrageous to consider bittorrent 'not successful'. Perhaps not ideal; but wide adoption, serves its purpose, clearly cannot be shutdown despite effort from some of the most powerful agencies on earth. I think bittorrent-like 'success' ('failure' if you prefer) is the worst-case scenario for bitcoin barring any flaws in the crypto.

The unbanked stand the most to gain from bitcoin. There are many, many reasons why people are unbanked, but by and large it is because they are poor and in poor economies. Sometimes it's because they owe banks money (as is the case for most unbanked in the usa). It seems to me self-evident how bitcoin impacts the unbanked.. they can now receive money where before they couldn't. There is no legal framework or local institution necessary to create a bitcoin wallet. You just do it with maths. I have personally sent bitcoin to an unbanked friend (owed money for years to a bank from an overdraft charge and enver dealt with it) who was able to get cash for it in a pinch. Western union doesn't work when one doesn't have an ID. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rjvby/why_i_really...

My last point was really meant to point out that the author isn't saying anything at all other than hand-wavy attacks. What is the authors stance? Does he think it will fail? Does he think it will succeed? He seem sto strongly imply that it is dumb, stupid, overhyped, etc etc; but stops short of actually making any type of reality-prediction.

I think cryptocurrencies are here to stay; bitcoin's likely, but im less "certain" of that. High valuation? Well.. eventually; but again that may end up being spread out across many cryptos rather than just bitcoin, but I do think it is about 100x as likely that bitcoin gets to 10k than 0. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is obvious this is all true; but if you ask what I think, then yes.. I do think it is a 'foregone' conclusion that cryptocurrency will acheive s-curve adoption. Of course these things are not prove-able; and I don't have a crystal ball.. but distributed consensus to a limited digital asset is the perfect avenue for money. It clicked for me the first moment I read about it in 2010; and it clicked for many others in the same way. Other's took more convincing. I see about a 1000-1 ratio of people who go from thinking bitcoin is trash to believing in cryptocurrencies vs the other-way around. Literally every metric I have looked at over years points to continued increased adoption; continued minds being changed in the same direction and no sign of slowing down.
Agreed, but the tone of the previous discussion was definitely more along the lines of "This could never work, you guys don't know what you're doing."

If it proves resilient over 2.5 months of highly motivated attacks (motivated by both the money / "I-Told-You-So" factor), I think that's a fairly strong statement in their favor.
And I'm sure he's severed all his ties to the payment space, right? No more friends or stocks at Simple? No future ventures planned?

If not, he's got a very good reason to talk down Bitcoin, since it's catching on and he's smart enough to recognize the threat that this poses to traditional banks and banking.

Add to that his political biases, and there's no way he could ever form a positive opinion of Bitcoin, no matter how innovative or positive a force in society.
Bitcoin was never meant to be an investment vehicle.
The article does not source the claim about the Super Hornet being the front-runner, although previous reports have claimed that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff preferred the Super Hornet for political reasons.

The part of the sentence that's an actual quote doesn't contradict my post.
There are lots of problems with Bitcoin, but to my thinking by far the biggest is that widespread use would actually remove the few purported value propositions.

There are basically four value propositions for Bitcoin, that I've been able to discern:

1) It has "no" (really: fixed) monetary policy; I view this as a weakness, but I will treat it as a strength for the purpose of this post.

2) It does something of an end-run around banking systems, at least democratizing transaction fees

3) There are ways of obtaining bitcoin that are largely untraceable (mining), which make it usable for black-market activities

4) Novelty

#4 obviously goes away with time, but nobody is suggesting that as a serious long-term value proposition so that's not a big deal.

It's well-documented that #2 goes away when the transaction volume gets high enough: the solution to the protocol-inherent transaction volume limit is to move most transactions off the blockchain, which means using something that at least parallels the modern banking system.

Arguably, this also defeats #3, but #3 has the greater problem that it is actively undesirable to most people.

#1 thus remains as the only value proposition, but this value proposition is fundamentally based on a lie. The monetary policy of Bitcoin is not set in stone; it is in fact controlled by a quorum of the existing mining capacity.

If Bitcoin becomes popular with the general populace, however, at some point a large enough coalition of actors will emerge who can adjust monetary policy to their advantage -- specifically, by increasing block rewards, making their hardware more valuable. The incentives actively encourage this manipulation in the long term, and the group to which the incentives apply (mining hardware owners) are precisely the group empowered to do the manipulation.

There are only two things preventing this from happening right now: first, many hardware owners are either in it for the ideology or have substantial speculative positions in Bitcoin that would be endangered by manipulation of monetary policy, and second, that such a shift in monetary policy would discourage adoption (after all, this is one of the purported benefits of Bitcoin). Both of these impediments go away with widespread adoption.

Government central banks may do this now, sure, but they generally have a little more accountability than an anonymous coalition of hardware owners.
I worry about any economic system that is defended almost entirely with a verse that, at best, belongs on a coffee cup.
I own no bitcoin, and I don't feel like I understand it well enough to make a judgement either way, but I know a bit about writing. The people who write "anti-bitcoin" posts, like this one, generally adopt a patronizing, propagandizing tone, with shallow arguments and an almost technophobic cynicism.

One typical example is how often people write that bitcoin will not be widely adopted because it is so widely used for criminal activity. A journalist on the FT blog, discussing this, told the story of how he had asked the head of a major company in an interview how he could consider moving the business to the web when so much of the internet (at the time, 20 years ago) was devoted to criminal activity. It seems like a stupid question now.
Well that is a fair enough reason to be bemusedly annoyed, but I don't see a rational way to jump from that state to "morally outraged" or "angry".

It'd be like being angry at base-jumpers. Base-jumpers can call us "boring ground-whores" all they want, but so long as I am not forced to take up base-jumping then I don't see any reason to become upset. If they eschew the benefits of a life set firmly on the ground, then go splat, it is no skin off my back.

I would not think to ask them how they "dare take moral ground" against a normal risk-adverse lifestyle.
Works fine on FF except the slinky, and all of it works on Chrome for me. OSX
founders@coinbase.com :)
PS4's LLVM-based Developer Toolchain [pdf]
Indulge me here for a bit; but how does a multi-million dollar investment (raised from the same existing authoritarian framework) into Bitcoins make it anti-authoritarian?

Best case scenario is that this is a good hedge with decent risks, worst case scenario is that it is a worthwhile asset class to manipulate at a lower cost compared to other asset classes.

EDIT: I don't agree with the larger tone of the article, but there are merit-worthy points that are made in it.
Even if the NSA's spying program ended up not affecting the outcome of the fighter decision, it can still be worthwhile to claim that it did if they have an independent goal of reducing that program.
Ok educate me, because I really don't know (my grandmothers both lived in the US): what's wrong with Western Union or PayPal for this purpose?

In many ways this simply moves the problem (overall complication) from a private sector solution much closer to a government solution because it means exchanging bitcoin for real currency will be intensely regulated and have its own fees associated with it.

And maybe someday bitcoin will be worth some monetary value other than the currencies you can exchange it for, but we are not near that.
$200k in Bitcoin is relatively easy to cash out without affecting the market much these days.
Some people have GPG configured to sign every email they send. Would that be enough activity to compromise the key?
'any state regulation is inherently coercive' is a far cry from 'full coercive power of the state'. Obviously any regulation requires state coercion, that's how it works. So are you saying that anyone who advocates regulation of any kind is implicitly advocating the full force of the state being brought to bear on that particular problem? If so, I have news for you: That's very much not how this country works, at least.

If anything, we have a vast set of regulations that are enforced with an insufficient amount of coercive force, sometimes with no coercive force at all. Many of those said regulations are ignored by people like bankers who know that any defiance will at most be punished with small fines.
I don't find it convincing at all.

When I was in college, I hated banks. Once I bought a cup of coffee for $2 only to find I had racked up $40 worth of NSF fees accidentally. I'm sure this happens to poor folks all the time. Poor people often don't use banks because banks prey on the poor and often make them poorer.

Why didn't I just use cash? Because I wanted to buy things online, accept payments from others, and didn't want to carry cash around all the time.

If Bitcoin was less volatile, it would actually do a good job of solving some of the issues faced by poorer "underbanked" people.
If he was all for deregulation then why was he in charge of setting the interest rates? Shouldn't that have been left for the markets?
Care to cite your sources? (en/fr/pt)
Or at least, temporarily one or the other.
> Why do you believe corporations do not?

Because if the social obligation isn't codified into law, it doesn't exist. "Morality" does not equal legal obligation.
Londoners Don't Give a Sh*t About Google Glass
Why not just read about Bitcoin itself, on a technical level? All politics and economics aside, it's a remarkable technical achievement, even if you just phrase the problem it solves as "how can we coordinate and agree upon a list of arbitrary transactions without a central authority that we have to agree to trust?"

Obviously, anyone who realized that Bitcoin provides a solution to this problem will immediately theorize that it could potentially replace things in the world they don't like (and thus really like Bitcoin), and anyone who likes those things which could be replaced will really dislike Bitcoin, and maybe most of them will be so passionate that they become untrustworthy. But still, the technical marvel of Bitcoin is still there and can still be enjoyed.
You can easily cash that out today. $200k is not a huge deal.
It's not difficult, but it makes the system unflexible...

Um. That would be exactly the point of doing it, in this case. The camera indicator (and the microphone indicator that every laptop should but currently does not have) should be completely inflexible.

What "flexibility" is added by having an indicator that only sort-of indicates, anyway?
200k USD will be paid in BTC
A man is hired and paid money to stand that close to world leaders not to flap his arms around and make normal people feel good, but to let those who can't hear understand what's going on. I find the article's premise silly.
Surely not "because NSA" entirely.

It could also be because the USA has stopped a big sale from Embraer to Venezuela years ago.

And earlier this year the USA annulled a contract that Embraer had won to supply Super Tucano to the US Air force in favour of a local plane maker.

EDIT:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/03/15/u-s-air-for...
This is great! I just sent them $100 in BTC! I love what WhisperSystems is doing!
Excellent work here!
This is like putting messages encrypted with ANY encryption algorithm, and ask people to guess the key. This has nothing to do with whether the communication protocol is secure or not.
Someone should invent some sort of general modulator/demodulator and use sound to connect computers to the Internet!
I don't see how it makes things worse. Surely it shows more if you gave hackers a big incentive to crack your encryption and they still didn't, compared to them not cracking it when there was no incentive. It is evidence that the reason they did not crack it was the difficulty of the problem, not just indifference.
Of course you don't need anything approaching OGG or HDMI fidelity in the attack described.
There's more than enough volume on any established exchange. $200,000 is roughly 380 BTC at the current price on Bitstamp (~$530). If you were to sell 380 BTC now on Bitstamp there are enough buy orders for the entire sell to be filled before the price got to $525.
The tears... they just aren't coming.