skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah but that's not some fundamental property of fiat, there can be bitcoin banks that offer protection in exchange for fees/longer waits as well, USD cash doesn't magically have these properties, its a function of the services built on top of it. This is the point where most people would come in and say "How hypocritical! I thought the WHOLE point of bitcoin was instant transfer etc etc and now you've just reduced it to the same as USD". No, that is not the whole point of bitcoin. That's the whole point of bitcoin for some people. The real power of bitcoin is choice.

Today if I want to do an instant transfer it is flat out impossible at certain times. I've been in situations where I needed to desperately get money to an individual past 8PM for an emergency and the feeling was absolutely debilitating having him on the phone and literally having no options because he had no Western Union next to him. I am happy to have tradeoffs, and sometimes choose less security.

To me what is important is the experiment. Just like I wouldn't want to try to make ONE company by trying to pontificate what the perfect P/E ratio should be, but instead am happy to have lots of companies and allowing experimentation and evolution with different monetization strategies, so to I feel that a world of many different freely available currencies would be far more useful in determining good monetary theory than writing tons of papers and then committing our ONE currency to it for decades.
I haven't had time to delve into the details of this attack, but I do want to note that adding randomization usually doesn't do much for security in these situations. Essentially, randomization usually just increases the number of samples needed for the attack, so it just ups the computational cost a bit. The same is true in timing attacks, for example, and I very strongly suspect that's the case here too.

The authors give some ideas for mitigation, however, in section 11 of their paper [1] (appropriately titled "Mitigation").

[1] http://www.tau.ac.il/~tromer/papers/acoustic-20131218.pdf
"I'm not sure how that guy got the CEO of the company to intercede on his behalf"

Well, he did so by raising a public fuss about it, that much seems obvious. The OP of this thread seems (quite reasonably) to be attempting to achieve the same outcome by the same method.

Taking this OP’s claims at face value, it seems like the support person quoted was trying to be helpful (or at least empathetic). Unfortunately, on a basic customer-service level, the response fails spectacularly.

I fail to believe that a company such as coinbase would neglect to have some mechanism where staffers can escalate support tickets (as is apparently being claimed). Jeez, it doesn’t even have to go directly to the CEO skipping all intermediate steps: just bump it up the chain!

That CEO intervention should be necessary to achieve basic customer satisfaction is crazy to begin with. Either empower the hierarchy to solve problems, or give them access to someone who can.

OP did you try emailing brian@coinbase.com directly? (I’m not revealing any information here that a quick googling doesn’t).
Day 18 – A Grammar with Duplicate checking
Dutch railways has silent carriages too. Most people don't notice / care, but when told off they usually move or shut up :-)

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&pr... (Google Translate)
Compare your observations of this project, with what you may feel about the 6502 emulator in oriculator:

https://code.google.com/p/oriculator/source/browse/trunk/650...

Which do you find easier to read/understand/work on? In my case, I still think the #include'd switch case's to be less readable in comparison .. although it must be admitted that oriculator uses the C macro processor in its own nefarious ways .. "READ_ZIX;" indeed .. ;)

(BTW, oriculator is a very mature 6502 emulator .. and also rocks as a way to return to the glory days of the 80's machines that never got enough love: the Oric-1 and Atmos...)
All Packt ebooks are $5
You're going on and on about how huge and important and valuable this insight is, like a kid saying "look how smart I am"; I suspect people are downvoting because of the tone rather than the content. Hell, the GRATUITOUS CAPITAL LETTERS in your post justify a downvote by themselves.

I don't think it's a great idea. It's been tried in various ways (you assert that C# wasn't designed from the ground up to be automatically refactored, but actually easy manipulation of the code by IDEs was a key design goal - not the only goal to be sure, but a major one), and it doesn't seem to have worked. But don't let me stop you; try and build something useful out of this. I suspect you'll quickly see the problems with the idea, but if it actually works then we'll all be very grateful.
You mean there was some license-protected application that they cracked? I didn't see that in the article ;)

Seriously though, these words changed their meaning many times. Cracker is not even seen that often and I would really argue against the meaning you expect.
And Buffett's was Carnegie, Rockefeller and other titans of the industrial revolution that gave away a huge portion of their wealth, setting the standard.
Question: some species of animals are happy to have sex while being watched by their own kind, or humans. Some are more private.

How much effort should we expend training modest animals to have sex in front of humans? Is it a problem that they don't like to?
IIRC email inboxes of some state's legislature blocked emails about same-sex marriage due to the word "lesbian"
How the first PHP functions were named
Waartaa - IRC Client as a Service
Or your house insurance will cover accidental damage (as well as theft of your bag on a train/in a cafe, etc).

I was delighted when my house insurance bill went down considerably, because my newer Macbook was worth just less than £1000, where the previous one had been just over - meaning it became covered by the policy without a separate declaration, and an additional fee.
Chromebase: ChromeOS coming to the desktop
Reminds me of this video, from The Onion: "Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village" http://www.theonion.com/video/google-opt-out-feature-lets-us...
I just wanted to say that 'code smell' predates hipsters as a term, yo, and a lot of very experience engineers are right when they say 'this code smells' (i.e. I am suspicious of its suitability for consumption..) In my experience the term is something I learned in the 70's from the smelly retiring hippies whose code I had to maintain for a decade or so. ;)
> they do not have police powers and thus cannot arrest people

Let's face it, that's not exactly what their website says.
A translation would be more like ... policing is beyond their "job scope" and detaining, arresting and interrogating are activities incompatible with the Intelligence work they do - for obvious reasons.

So, saying that they don't detain nor arrest people is fair point.
Although they could detain and so could any other Brazilian citizen detain any person caught red handed (Latin In flagrante delicto) as stated in the Brazilian constitution.
Of course you don't know how many of them have proxy PR people that are good enough to not get caught out.
Google launch public URL removal tool
I wonder. We have automated tools that can notice when a method is too complicated, or when two types are frequently used next to each other. There's a cool program that converts Haskell expressions to pointfree style. Would it be too hard to have a system that could suggest when several parameters should be grouped into a container object, or when a common piece of logic can be factored out of several methods? I think it's worth looking at.
If you find it please say so, that sounds like something I'd be interested in reading.
One of the biggest Starcraft progamers is known as Jaedong (realname is Lee Jae Dong) everywhere, but can't use this nick in the game client..
I suspect the percentage of programmers who actually had bad experience with goto is now vanishingly small. I'm not downplaying the harm that goto can cause - but to have experienced it, you have had to experience old basic, fortran 77 or COBOL before learning C or Java. That probably describes 0.1% of people doing programming. Maybe less.

The averse reaction to goto is conditioned response, not learned experience.
It's a tiny amount of money for a financial services company - because they need money not for expenses & salaries (as a software company), but as a pure instrument in their everyday transactions. I can easily imagine Coinbase needing ten times more working capital than that simply to function properly (i.e., not as they seem to function now).
Would the same method not work against a one-time pad?
ennef is not charlieflowers (in fact he is Andrew Gerrand, one of the official Go devs).
It's really too bad that Haskell, with it's referential transparency, doesn't have a way to rewrite things programmatically (well, none that I know of). Rewriting terms would be great in a language like that. It seems that when a typeclass has some laws, and you want to show that an instance of it obeys the laws, you have to bust out the pen and paper. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like a language like that could support computer-aided rewriting.

Then there are languages whose evaluation is based on term rewriting, like the language Pure.

EDIT: You do have HLint, and the bot that rewrites expressions to point-free style.
Depending on the CPU, the compiler, and a whole host of other variables, a switch statement can be one of the better performing ways to write a virtual machine. You certainly want to avoid the overhead of many function calls.

And if you're writing a program that does one of hundreds of things based on the value of a byte, the options for really clean code are limited, and you can do a lot worse than a huge switch statement.

Here is an interesting article on the topic:

http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threading/
I think Coinbase ought to be aware we know their customer service needs work & when stuff comes on HN and it looks bad for them its just damage control to give a false impression of competence when they respond.
Why are people even posting on HN? The easy answer is do an ACH chargeback and be done with it. Do it quickly as well since the price has plummeted. Don't even bother with contacting customer support.
For those interested in this history, I can't recommend this book enough:

http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Stupidity-Marketing-Disaster...

In short, his thesis is that a lot of the successful companies got that way by f'ing up less than the competition, which in many cases managed to make really, really bad mistakes.
We've had our moments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants'_Revolt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_I_of_England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_Tax_Riots

I'd argue the British _had_ a default intolerance for authoritarianism, which seems only to have waned relatively recently. We didn't have a revolution because we already had Magna Carta.
> Would you consider working in a clunkier programming language if you knew that it offered 10X more "refactorability" than the other languages you were considering?

I'd have a hard time believing that a more clunky language would be a more refactorable language.
Zeppelins Seen Hauling Caterpillars to Mine Siberia
In healthcare experiment, patients pay more for 'bad' medicine
Clearly the sane route would be write T in C then once complete run T through T to emit a C to go translator in go.
0s: "next generation web framework for node.js" (oh god, not another)

5s: "designed by the team behind Express" (wait what?)

6s: "Through leveraging generators Koa allows you to ditch callbacks" (wow, ok. oh hey, that makes "next generation" not just marketing fluff)

18s:

app.use(function *(next){
var start = new Date;
yield next;
var ms = new Date - start;
this.set('X-Response-Time', ms + 'ms');
});

(oh sweeet)
awesome. totally brilliant. it's rare that something
absolutely knocks my socks off, but i'm sitting here
in my bare feet, wondering what the heck happened...

this is gonna take some time to digest, but thank you,
thank you so much, for doing something so outrageous...

-bowerbird
In Finland when they launched the "child porn filters" a few years back, they also filtered out the website criticizing the way the filtering was implemented.

And to my knowledge this has never been lifted.
As I remember the F/A-18 was always considered a front runner for political reasons (pressure). It caused a lot of commotion among those who really understand about aeronautics.

And it's clear that the last choice was a political one also.
There is a patch for that in GnuPG, available in both Debian and Ubuntu. Update your machines :)

FLOSS is amazing. One day since research paper and your machines are already patched. This means that probably no one had enough time to actually use this attack vector in the wild.
Can anyone say... Publicity stunt?
That's too simplistic. If Gates had not done what he did at Microsoft, hundreds of billions in revenue could have been distributed differently, and we don't know, or have a realistic way of knowing, how much of that would have ended up channeled into equally positive endeavours down the line.

We also don't know how it would have altered the technology landscape - whether positively or negatively. Thing could be far better, or far worse or anything in between.

I think it is a meaningless thing to try to evaluate, and can be debated endlessly. What we can do is judge the up against the standards we hold/held others too. By that standard, Microsoft was judged to have unfairly and illegally engaged in anti-competitive practices, almost putting them at risk of being broken up; and multiple competitors got substantial amounts out of Microsoft in separate cases, based on damages incurred.

That he is redeeming himself personally through charity now is great, but I've also seen little indication that he accepts that the way he illegally stomped on a number of competitors in the 80's and 90's was wrong, which tempers my excitement somewhat.
This underestimates the preposterous volume of porn - and the agility of site owners. 1% is still "enough porn" by any definition.

That's what makes this such a failure: not only does it stop legit material like sex-education and rape counselling sites, it also doesn't prevent access to porn. The only box that is successfully ticked is "something must be done".
They didn't bypassed it either. They just found a sidechannel that was leaking the key.
Only if enter is pressed!
> These are mostly O(1) things and shouldn't matter.

I often hear this from programmers coming from a higher-level background. O(1) only means constant time. It doesn't mean quickly. This function:

int foo(int x) {
sleep(3600);
return x;
}

is O(1), just as this:

int bar(int x) {
return x;
}

Foo takes an hour to commplete, but it's just as O(1) as bar :-).
Lowering standards and allowing a larger number of competitors could bring in a better alternative to Coinbase, thus benefitting users and allowing them to get better service.

However, it would also bring in a bunch of far worse companies, including purposely illegal ones. I'm fairly sure that the average 'quality' would go down even more. There could be a benefit to the more careful users, but consumers in general would simply get defrauded on scale.

If the current quality level is unacceptable, then IMHO it is appropriate to say "guarantee X or get out of the business". Even if it results in 100% everyone getting out of the business - then it simply means that the potentially profitable niche will be waiting until someone is ready to do it properly.
Really unbelievable...! But I can not understand how it gets its power. In a "normal" car there are pistons who makes ignition.Here what?:P ... The only it says about it is "runs on air".
Anyway still beautiful...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarrow_March

I was thinking the other day, how convenient it is that the various near-revolutions of our history are taught exclusively in primary school, before you're old enough to understand them.
So, does node support generators out of the box?
What else can you name as "unfair business practices"? I'm genuinely interested in the answer.
Reading this comment makes me sad. Does this mean you would have immediately closed the tab, irregardless of technology, if they didn't namedrop?
Why Big Data Will Power The World - Video
They're playing the "motherhood and apple pie" card, and playing it hard. If in doubt, invoke Paedogeddon and push your legislation through.

Agitating in favour of porn isn't a popular public opinion and the UK doesn't have the hardon for free speech that the USA does.

Agitating against stupid broken censorship is a bit of a wonk issue - privacy people, law people, tech people.
It's behind a flag (--harmony-generators) in 0.11 (current stable is 0.10, hence my "next generation" comment).
I had the exact same thought when i was like 10 y-o :)
I was already giving it the benefit of the doubt by reading any further than "next generation web framework for node.js".
Not all ISPs. Andrews & Arnold are aggressively anti-censorship, for example, and if you sign up asking for a censored feed they tell you to move to North Korea. :)

They're getting my money as soon as the holidays are over. I'm done with BT since they added anonymizers and proxies to the block list: that's massive overreach, and I'm voting with my wallet.
Why not point out concrete problems with the implementation? We can't stop at the "smells" level of discussion! So, for example, is it hard to understand? Does it perform poorly? Is it difficult to extend?
Sweden fines pirate $650,000 for illegally sharing a single film
Could Coinbase be arbitraged this way? Just running ACH chargebacks every time the Bitcoin price falls before fulfillment?
I think the NSA would know if that was the case and be able to pass that information along.
It looks almost like if they rewrote express for generator functions

I can't wait to drop this in to one of my projects!
Correct. The same method would not work against a one-time pad. The processor would do exactly the same operation for each and every byte of message and key. The power consumed would not change in any significant way.
3 points

by the way, if you read the rfc, you will see that many references are before 1993.
Not if your logmsg() function prepends a timestamp to each message. Then its just a matter of glomming the output FD's, piping through sort, and .. problem solved.
And the list is secret. Don't forget that bit: it's "commercial confidential" to the private companies contracted to do the filtering.

I don't like to use the f-word, but private companies acting as sanctioned departments of censorship stinketh strongly of that corporatism bordering on fascism.
I believe it means that it "runs on compressed air".
Design App Creates Beautiful Photo Collages on Your Phone
Optimizing your startup for profits, growth and happiness
I assume it runs on compressed air, is slow and can't go far. It was funny to me that they article explains that the owner raised money to pay Romanians to build it for him and then later takes a tone of complaining about auto manufacturers closing local operations.
Command Line Interface for Your Personal Cloud
Everything ended up resulting in my favor. Brian from CoinBase issued the BTC earlier today at today's market price. Considering I have been holding about $18k in BTC from prior transactions as well, as of this moment I am down 1.83% on my total investment.
When it takes a public outcry on HN for a company to do their job, I no longer deal with such a company. Simple as that. I don't care if you raised $25 million - if you can't treat your users fairly, you deserve neither.
The system only provides leads for further inspection, not evidence. When a metal detector has a positive, false or not, you inspect the bag, you don't arrest the person.
The point is that you don't need an app specific for that data repository.

There was a time when you needed a different application to connect to each publisher, or each content type. You may be too young to remember that.
Surely there are repercussions for issuing chargebacks for non-legitimate reasons?

I imagine Coinbase would just cancel your account pretty quickly.
Actually encrypted does mean that. What you're thinking about is hashing. Hash functions are a one-way trip, and what is most commonly used for password storing.
True, but don't forget people can also act egoistically or produce harm to others completely on purpose too, just to say that this gift doesn't automatically makes Bill a good person in average, nor his bad actions from the past make this gift dishonest.
I never created a shell account on here. The only thing I did earlier today was post a link of this thread at a local community forum that I am part of. Some of them came here and supported me. That is all.
>or you need to use a “sufficiently strong wide-band noise
>source.” Something like a swooping, large-orchestra
>classical concerto would probably do it.

Unless you're standing next to a live orchestra that's playing the concerto on specially designed dog-whistles, you're going to have a pretty hard time masking anything near the 150 kHz range.
I admit, that is a very poor article and I mainly blame the editor. He spoke with me for two hours with a running tape recorder and after the interview this was the best story he could come up with apparently. Obviously when you take a few lines here and there from a two hour conversation you can make anyone sound like a douchebag. Maybe that was his motive? I'll never know.
The D community chose the same route. Currently [0] it seems to work in Win32 already.

Meanwhile, development on the C++ implementation continued. This is probably the biggest advantage, as the porting does not slow down language evolution.

[0] http://forum.dlang.org/post/l8uccc$1qkr$1@digitalmars.com
This is exactly the field that I'm working on, so I'm quite interrested by this.

In my opinion, the problem is more of a tools problem than a language problem : One language that has one of the most interresting support for this kind of things is C, with coccinelle [1] [2].

Google has been working on absolutely amazing tools for C++ that applies programmatic refactorings in a distributed manner on absolutely enormous codebases [3].

This IMHO shows that this is a tools issue rather than a language issue. Coccinelle had to develop a swat of parsers for its project, and the Google project is using Clang as a basis for structural and semantic capabilities. C and C++, with their fragile type systems, preprocessor, horribly hard to parse syntax, might be the worse languages amongst typed languages to develop such projects on. And in spite of that, they are the ones for which such project exist, because they are the one with enough need for such tools.

Of course some languages are more amenable to such tools than others. Very strong static typing and a solid package system helps a lot. No metaprogramming helps too (because you don't have to handle the transformation).

I'm working on such tools for Ada, that is pretty much the perfect language for this as far as imperative languages go. The essential need for such tools is to have a compiler that exposes some services as an API, most notably the ability to explore the AST and query cross references for language entities. This was the fantastic insight of Clang/LLVM in my opinion.

[1] Coccinelle semantic patch language : http://lwn.net/Articles/315686/

[2] Presentation on refactoring with coccinelle
http://video.rmll.info/videos/coccinelle-automated-refactori...

[3] Clang MapReduce -- Automatic C++ Refactoring at Google Scale http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVbDzTM21BQ
Previous discussion on HN (275 points | 90 comments)

(Notably about why playing music does not mitigate the threat.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905