skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that the difficult rate increases based on the hashing power put into the network, and the reward for mining is cut in half as more coins are mined until there are none left.

http://www.bitcoindifficulty.com/

You'd need a LOT of regular PCs to match even one simple asic. A butterfly lab's jalapeno does ~5 gigahash/sec. You'd have to infest 500 decent PCs to achieve that, and then wait about a month for about a tenth of a bitcoin.

So to get 1 btc in a month, you'd need to infect 5k PCs without them noticing that "damn, my machine is really pegged" and "golly, this laptop is awfully hot and my battery dies really fast...".

It has happened, but realistically you could just buy a miner and be done with it. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/botcoin-bitcoin-mining-b...

They were able to get ~240 machines, at a time when CPU mining was making them ~$350/day. Decent, but worth all the time to write the software and distribute it? Eh, probably not.
I dunno, I doubt the users will care much about how it looks and more about how it performs. Besides, the trash can look goes well with where you can put it, i.e. on the floor, next to the trash can, ;D.
Nice way as a contractor to knock down your taxable income for 2013...
> Poor people take cabs?

During a public emergency? Yes.

Other than that, I think your arguments are valid and are a better point than "but they can't make egregious amounts of money off of others' pain and suffering, so it's them getting screwed".
> The problem is that today's supposedly heavily regulated markets just aren't

Yes, and Mr Stross is pointing out that Bitcoin may be different, but that doesn't make it better. In fact he lays out good reasons to believe that it is worse.
Re: BTC carbon footprint

From your link: "Spending energy on creating and securing a free monetary system is hardly a waste."

This doesn't address any of the arguments brought up in the article Charles linked to: http://pando.com/2013/12/16/bitcoin-has-a-dark-side-its-carb...
That's what it did, it messed with my EFI partition, so, that's why Im askin if someone has succeded with the latest reléase.
The front page of HN is like many other venues for what becomes popular: there is an enormous amount of randomness.
doesn't apple sell a cinema display? or is the 27" not retina?
Academics should not remain silent on hacking
Alpha Geeks vs. Beta Geeks
Please complain. Complain loudly. Flip tables and announce "I CAN'T WORK WITH THIS SHIT". Or just shell out $60 (or whatever) for an 8 or 16 GB memory kit yourself.
Meh, I have never owned a bitcoin. Never mined one. Don't intend to do so soon.

I'm pretty ambivalent about bitcoins. I view them as something people want to trade with each other. They're an interesting experiment in new ways to break free of some problems of fiat currencies and precious metal currencies. If they survive it's because people find some value in them. Good for them.

I read Stross's article because I was curious about arguments against bitcoin. All I read was a bunch of knee-jerk emotional dribble about carbon footprints, lack of taxability, and the dreaded "some people own too many".

So I called it like I saw it.
Wasn't Git conceived as an api instead of a straight up all-in-one VCS?
I love full screen mode in OSX. With a trackpad to hand (pun intended) I can swipe back to my browser, check the output and continue. It's beautiful.
>> So we're talking about people doing it with _actually_ stolen electricity, and you'd hope that the electricity companies were good at spotting that nowadays

Unless you simply use a ton of machines, that alone will generate some extra electricity, but nothing noticeable, versus using a huge botnet to do it for you:

"The ZeroAccess botnet is one of the largest known botnets in existence today with a population upwards of 1.9 million computers, on any given day, as observed by Symantec in August 2013."

and

"These figures give some indications of the additional power requirements of bitcoin mining on a single computer infected by ZeroAccess. We can now extrapolate these figures out to 1.9 million bots and see what the total cost/impact is likely to be for the whole botnet.

If each KWh of electricity costs $0.162 then it would cost $0.29 to mine on a single bot for 24 hours. But multiply this figure by 1.9 million for the whole botnet and we are now looking at energy usage of 3,458,000 KWh (3,458 MWh, enough to power over 111,000 homes each day.) This amount of energy is considerably greater than the output of the largest power station in Moss Landing, California, which could produce 2,484 MW and would come with a corresponding electricity bill of $560,887 a day. Despite the costs, all this energy will create just $2165 worth of bitcoins a day! With these sorts of sums it would not be economic to undertake bitcoin mining with this setup if you had to pay for it yourself. But if the bitcoins are being mined at someone else’s expense, then that changes the picture completely and it becomes a highly attractive proposition."

source: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/grappling-zeroaccess-b...

Once you make it attractive for someone to do this, they're going to do it, point blank. Add in no oversight or regulation and you have a recipe for criminals to come in and take over.
5 predictions on the future of databases (from a guy who knows databases)
In the video, the clumpier it is, the better. I would say the more powdery snow looked like wet oatmeal when it hit the floor.
His point is he's sick of the inherent drum-beating that BitCoin is the salve to the financial issues present in the gold backed/regulated traditional economy because it's just as broken, if not potentially more so.
Coffee With Dessert: Java And The Raspberry Pi
ALL 4,726 headlines that Upworthy has published to date
THe thing is, it doesn't matter how much exists, because I could buy a happy meal at mcDs for .001 bitcoins (pulled out of my arse) -- Bitcoins deal in fragments so even when all are mined, they will still be valuable, still be traded, and still be used as currency. Plus, I believe it'll be awhile before all are mined due to rising difficulty. I think it took 4 years to get to 11 Million, and might take another 4-6 to get all the coins - but don't quote me on that.
What is it about driving, paying taxes or joining the army, and having children (easy if you've hit puberty) that necessarily determines that you have a sufficient grasp of the issues required to make a supportable case for voting for one candidate as against another? A bizarre decision? I don't think so though I would ensure a delay for the option of joining the army until say twenty one.
I think his correct points highlight why BtC is good, not bad. Untraceability is incorrect though.

His points expressing worry over stable governance as being totally desirable is interesting. Why is the current system in play necessarily a good thing?

Deflation seems like a problem until one recognizes alternative currencies provide the same options and will grow over time. Hence the deflation isn't a problem unless one only accepts BtC.
Don't forget office printers! Some have hard drives or other nonvolatile storage. You know, in case you want to run off a second copy of that fax from 2009.
Feel free to produce a competitively priced, comparatively specced workstation in a similar form factor.

[/obligatory reply]
I'm typing this on a windows PC with 192GB ram.
64GB RAM LIMIT? WHY OH WHY?
it is 2013. 64GB is not enough for many serious tasks.

(repost from a similar thread earlier today)

The RAM limits on laptops are nearly understandable. But on a machine like this, it seems like obvious greed on the part of Apple to give this machine a maximum life span of 3-4 years.

edit: spelling
You can activate Vintage mode (vi mode). Isn't 100% the same as vi but for me it does the job :-)
It's not a paid beta, since ST2 licenses are compatible with the ST3 beta and dev builds.
Starting Feb 1, new apps and app updates must be optimized for iOS 7
But does it really? It looks like rampant speculation to me. I've seen that many times in markets.
The business equivalent of Christmas gifts is "we have to use up the whole budget by the end of the year or we'll get a smaller one next year."
Well, being able to purchase it in Dec 2013 vs Jan 2014 may be very significant for budget or tax reasons, regardless of when you take delivery.
I don't disagree that it is a skill that can be learned. Quite the contrary. I just feel that likely the best way to learn this skill is to first build a few systems that aren't loosely coupled first. Consider the analogy for building cars. Before you try and build a continuous transmission system, first get a direct drive one working. Then, determine what would need to be messed with to put basic gearing in place....

Now the major trick here is that this breaks down in categories that are effectively already solved. Which is why many of the examples are obnoxious to the point of unhelpful. If you know how to break something down to where it is loosely coupled parts already, I feel you should definitely do so.
EdX Drops Plans to Connect MOOC Students With Employers
No, his main point is that the ratio of good to bad uses is even worse in Bitcoin compared to the nasty banking system that we already have.
I like a good challenge. Would you send me a dump of the phone's harddrive? The command to dump the harddrive is `dd if=/dev/hda1 of=./phone.image`

Then I'll examine the bitcoinj wallet format and write a tool to search for the private key within the phone.image file.

My email's in my profile.
Well, that's not completely true, I also share other people's content. By the way, I hear you. Thanks for feedback.
I'm testing http://Runbox.com right now, and I'm impressed. Worth considering.

EDIT: I know you said without money but I've never been good at following instructions.
incredibly surprised ?
Apple thinks their 27 inch Thunderbolt Displays are still good enough, and they aren't really that bad.
The Mac Pro wasn't really cutting edge for years and the new one, while being very capable, isn't the best workstation you can buy either.
I don't see the point of the inflation "criticism". We can always add more zeroes to the bills, and if inflation raged long and hard enough we can simply issue a devaluation where 1 new unit corresponds to 1 gazillion old units.

------------

It is not about lack of precision. It is about the change of purchasing power of a unit of money you currently posses.
They need a full stack OS with TCP/IP, crypto, UI, etc... Plus with Windows they can reuse a lot of their libs which are written in C# or Java.
24h Bitcoin Chart
It will likely never replace fiat

Bitcoin is a fiat currency, in several senses of the term. A Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it is unbacked and its value is not defined in reference to any other asset or quantity.

(though arguably it is not a currency at all)
SolarCity And Tesla Team Up To Offer A Solar And Storage One-Two Punch
If Linus gets a hold of any of you guys, for just a second..
BTC is inherently deflationary.

The idea that deflation is necessarily harmful to an economy is a fallacy. See the Fed itself:

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr331.pdf

"Our main ﬁnding is that the only episode in which we ﬁnd evidence of a link between deﬂation and depression is the Great Depression (1929—34). We ﬁnd virtually no evidence of such a link in any other period."

From the post:

The current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for gas gangrene.

Not proven.

A bitcoin economy would be worse than unlimited bailouts and money printing? Not even close to proven, or, at this point, particularly plausible.
IPS: It sucks less than you think
Blaming statements are pretty easy to spot if you know the signposts for them. Indicating a current outcome is 'predictable' because you said it was going to happen is a form of confirmation bias. Making a self referential comment to bolster his opinion sets the tone for the rest of the blaming argument that follows. Also, there the fact he didn't actually publicly call it first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818680.

As you point out, the terms 'fanboy', 'tunnel vision' and 'libertarian' can be tactics to market a particular opinion. Ad hominem arguments are always a good indication someone is making blaming statements. I'm personally enamored with the fact that cryptocurrencies instantiate trust at their core because trust is important to me. That's not necessarily a libertarian viewpoint, so clumping me in with a group of libertarians effectively blames me for something that I'm not guilty of. FWIW, I don't have a beef with Libertarians, and may be one for all I know.

BTW, making a coy remark about his 'intelligence' and speaking for his future actions are blaming statements in themselves. It isn't helping the conversation much by doing that.
It's not exactly my area of expertise. In the UK, infra-red cameras on helicopters are used to identify houses with 'hot' roofs. It would seem nonsensical to do this if electricity companies could easily identify theft.

As part of reading a meter I'm guessing an inspection of the meter box can be made. I'm guessing the modern digital electricity meters are able to report usage stats back to the company.

I'm using the word 'guessing' quite a lot here.
Yes, you can do that in Maven
My recommendation on pair programming is that it is a good idea, you should try it, you should do it 5%, 10%, 20% of the time, whatever you want, I don't think is a good idea to do it 100%. I see two main benefits on pair programming.

- Knowledge transfer. Learn new and better ways of working. IDE usage, short cuts, etc.

- On a complex piece of software is better to have two sets of eyes checking everything.

TDD. I enjoy doing it, I am not strict on doing test first, most of the time I don't. I usually shoot for 70% coverage. Indeed, the tests take a significant part of the effort, often they are brittle and you need to refactor them, but I really think they improve your overall design, your confidence on the robustness of the system.
I am not going to lie, when i started reading the headline I was hoping for some interesting story about the timber/logging industry...
I have been tempted to switch the Django ORM for SQL alchemy, but I would loose the Django Amdin interface.
It's not retina. 2560 x 1440 is the highest resolution.
Depends. Before Operation WebTryp, the online market for grey-market research chemicals was, well, huge. Things are still huge, and that entire market has nothing to do with Bitcoin. There's more to online drugs than the SilkRoad (and indeed, there was more stuff going on in the dark-web prior to BTC as well, but yes, not at the same volumes).

And more to the point: who cares -- the real-world market absolutely dwarfs (by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two) the "online drug trade", so his fear-mongering there seems short-sighted to me. There are plenty of legit issues with Bitcoin (some of which the OP even brought up), this one is just playing to people's fear of drugs.

In my opinion, anyway :)
My traditional witty summary is to say that Bitcoin is the currency of people who've read John Locke but not Thomas Hobbes.
Creep mode >>Activate<<!

That guy should get his own movie.
i don't have access to a lot of information that the president of the USA had 30 years ago. Most public information on the internet today was also available pre-internet. The main difference is the time needed to access information.

But time restriction is information restriction. Who in the 1980s had the time to sit in a library for hours on end every day researching esoteric issues? I'd argue that the information wasn't meaningfully available to everyone - only people in academic careers that had time to conduct research.
It depends on what "Retina" means. It's resolution is close to the MacBook Pro, arguably it'll look just as good since it's further from your face. Or not.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC914LL/B/apple-thunderbol...
The 27" Thunderbolt Display (Cinema Display was discontinued in '11) has a smaller resolution than a 13" Retina Macbook Pro.
I lost all respect for this guy.
Bitcoin in traceable. Much more traceable than something like cash or gold.

It can be taxed. In fact, it lends itself very well to taxation since each transaction is indelibly recorded. Just because no one's implemented taxation doesn't mean it can't be done.

If it can be taxed it can be regulated.

It does cut out the banks. That is a strength. The serpentine bank transfer system that skims transaction fees on a huge number of transactions can be avoided. This has some obvious benefits (as most things that reduce transactional friction do -- I mean, most of us on HN are probably in the friction reducing business in one form or another).

Government does not have to issue it. The jury is still out on whether this is a net positive or not. I think it is a worthy experiment since government control of the money supply seems like more of an accident of history than anything. It /could/ be a fundamental strut in the framework of effective government but I think that might be overselling it. Bitcoin gives us a vehicle to test that theory.

In short, Charles Stross is confusing the way things are with the way things must be and that is a mistake. Most of these problems, if they are truly problems, are solvable. And, at the very least, their impact will not be catastrophic so it is worth the risk to see where this experiment leads.
I lost some Bitcoins on an old phone that used Bitcoin Wallet (https://github.com/schildbach/bitcoin-wallet) by doing "Settings > Reset".

That sounds like remarkably horrible UI design.

Being purely digital and having no institutional overhead, Bitcoin seems to "uncover" a lot of security and design problem in modern apps.
I wish the page described what the goal actually is - and what gitless is.

This is very hard to parse: "We are exploring what conceptual integrity means with the goal of building a rigorous foundation for concept design."

Huh?
It is not a question of precision. It is a question of market dynamics.

For the sake of explanation, imagine a world where Bitcoin is the only currency. Let's also assume that in this world, Bitcoin gains value at 10% per year.

Now, you are an entrepreneur setting up your company. You are going for the grocery retail market, which presents a free cash flow return rate of 8%.

In this scenario, you can't get any investors. Investors are faced with two options: a) Stuff bitcoins under the mattress and get a return of 10% with zero risk; or b) Lend bitcoins to you, get a return of at most 8% (or you'll go broke) and face a non-zero risk that you'll go broke and they lose their beloved bitcoins.

For comparison, with the current economy, currency loses 2-3% per year, so investing in your business has an effective return of 10% to 11%, so if the risk is below this threshold, investment is possible.
> FINCEN would like a word with you.

i.e. you're saying that money laundering is already difficult to trace. If I understand bitcoin correctly, it will make that almost impossible. I'm not clear why this is an argument in favour of the currency.
... and in the end you still have talk over TCP and deal with that leaky abstraction, or you accidentally write O(N^2) code that could be expressed easily in O(N) (compare https://github.com/nominolo/HTTP/commit/b9bd0a08fa09c6403f91... for a recent HN submission) because the "taking away" approach at abstraction also abstracts out some important performance considerations.
But why they use outdated consumer oriented versions of Windows? Why they all are XP Home Edition?
So just get rid of the internal combustion engine...Surely that energy could be used in a more efficient way - such as filling up batteries for electric cars, and then power 10x more electric cars than oil-based cars.
Just because it worked out well in the end doesn't mean it was a good idea to begin with
Never crashed IIRC.
Phonons. Phonon pipelines, phonon tanks... Investors please form an orderly line for me to fleece you go millions.

Srsly though. Liquids are extremely good at this kind of density storage trade off, it's the reason petroleum won over electric cars in 1900 ( look it up, electric cars aren't new, we just decided about a. Hundred years ago we liked oil more.)
For the same reason that Airports and subways use Windows. Developers.
Its not a very good caret though...
What is the point of having a specification, if everyone decides not to follow it ?
10 Insights On Enterprise Data
It is based on something more restricted (or, some were, anyway) -- Windows CE. It's a "Build-your-own OS" style thing, you pick the parts of the OS stack you want and build up your ROM. It's kinda cool, though I only ever played with it somewhat illegitimately.

Then there are some ATMs running Windows XP. Which, yes, is really dumb.
Except that, if it was what they wanted, then it's hard to explain the walking character at 3:30 that gets his legs almost trapped in the soft heavy melting snow.

There's just no way that you'd get that kind of effect with that kind of snow. It looks more like the kind of thing that you'd get from non-uniform snow that has a crust on top (and that kind of snow is not sticky and not melting).
That little 'flag' link is for articles that get posted that you think are poor content, badly written, ill informed or troll bait... right?
The screenshot shows APTRA which means this is an NCR machine. I've commented on threads here before about how freaking vulnerable and buggy many of the NCR machines are, since they are essentially running Windows XP and are infrequently manually patched with the monthly fixes. There's only three major lock types for the older machines and the internal cage has several PS/2 and USB drives open. There's a manufacturer admin password (one for APTRA Advance and one for APTRA Edge) that lets you get into XP and then you can do whatever you want.
git add -p could just be replaced with git commit -p without adding a stage. Although it doesn't seem like this is what Gitless does at the moment.
Beautiful, and makes me feel like a complete fraud.
On the other hand, they are one of a very small number of workstation-class machines that might fit in a stocking.
Medium-style blur on scroll + Simple Parallax
I created a simple page to demonstrate a Medium.com style blur image on scroll with a simple parallax effect. Also scroll position is retrieved using requestAnimationFrame.
It is not a fiat currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

It is not backed by any government, it is not legal tender, and it is not state issued.

It has no intrinsic value, you're right about that part.
There are full TCP/IP and crypto stacks for pretty much any chip that can support enough IO ports to communicate with a network card. UI is not that difficult to implement if the only thing you need to display is a full screen background with one row of changing text. Even if you want to play movies, this can be offloaded to a GPU and done almost entirely in hardware.

Look at it the other way - the only functional difference between a payment terminal and an ATM is the cash dispenser. Payment terminals implement modems, networking, bluetooth, crypto (actually that's done in hardware anyway, you just talk to a chip), UI on an almost completely custom system - it's being done right now.
I highly recommend enabling the two factor authentication feature. I got my account targeted by some botnet and was breached several times regardless of how ridiculous my password was. Of course, this all stopped the moment I started using two factor auth.