skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key here is the promise to deliver bitcoins at a certain price at a certain date. If they indeed promised to deliver on a certain date then clearly they are in violation... not sure if they really did make that promise though
Like pretty much anything, the answer is "it depends".

CDs, index funds, an IRA, individual stocks, etc., are all options. Your decision will largely depend on how much risk you're willing to assume.
>If companies don't act appropriately, people can post stories and complaints online. The companies reputation will then suffer. This is exactly what's happening here.

Except for the missing piece of the puzzle: worthy competitors. Very few people who would otherwise run great businesses to compete with Coinbase don't want to operate in this sector because of the ridiculously onerous criminal laws that now surround money transmitters and exchanges.

As just one example of these laws, to operate in this sector, you have to agree to be a government informant against your own customers, even if you think they're not doing anything wrong.
YCombinator: http://nmap.org/favicon/?search=ycombinator.com
That't why when it comes to money, you should trust Wall Street over Startups...
While I don't think Bitcoin is a "weapon intended to damage central banking", I'm not sure why the author has such an affinity towards central banks.

He claims Bitcoin might destroy social safety nets — but how are central banks protecting those institutions? The cash that quantitative easing produces goes right into the hands of banks / investors. Rich people get richer when QE inflates the stock market to new highs. Working class people get poorer, and will feel the subsequent crash harder.

If anything, Bitcoin is better for working class people. It means the money they earn retains value, regardless of whether they invest it in the market.
Let's say these people are envious. So they get their own bus! Buy it outright, and use it for their own travels. Well as soon as that bus pulls into a city bus stop, they get fined $300. Google's buses don't get fined, only poor peoples' buses get fined.
Most of your points are valid, and I also found the article to be rather weak. With that said...

The serpentine bank transfer system that skims transaction fees on a huge number of transactions can be avoided.

... and is replaced by a different transfer system that skims transaction fees.

Actually, this is the main reason for why I believe Bitcoin will not "conquer the world": It has the potential to put downwards pressure on transaction fees, but it is inherently inefficient (the "carbon footprint" mentioned in the article), which means that it can be undercut by a competing system.

Government does not have to issue it. The jury is still out on whether this is a net positive or not.

This really depends on your reading of history. It seems Bitcoin is well on the way to reinvent the gold-backed free-banking system of ca. the 18th and 19th century.

It's true that there are people who believe such a system to be superior to what we have today, in the same way that it's true that there are people who believe humans play no role in global warming (that is, the vast majority of scientists studying the issue are on one side of it, but there's a loud, politically motivated minority of the population who disagrees).
I've been inspired by this article to write a post titled "How to Analyze Big Data in Python" that walks you through how to make pivot tables in excel.
Money is about Impact
Don't be silly.

He suffered a $12k loss because of price fluctuations most likely tied to People's Bank of China news, not because of Coinbase's error. There are no grounds for a lawsuit here.
"HACKED BY SyR!4N M43STR0"
We didn't sell Know Your Company.

No one sold anything and no one bought anything. The piece of the company that Claire owns was a gift from us - and she can earn more as the company does better.

We moved it out into its own company, which Claire now runs.

Nothing at all like Sortfolio.
Yeah, only if he can make the case that he would have sold or used the bitcoins prior to the new valuation, and only if you don't treat it as a currency.
... which he could have minimized if he had access to the coin when promised.
Taiwan government fund offers NT$1 billion to subsidize start-ups
I'm assuming this is a dig at Apple. Care to show that any other laptop manufacturer's webcams are impervious to having their firmware overwritten?
The coming 'instant planetary emergency'
There's a complete lack of any attempt to empathize, just a quick rush to (anecdotally) show how everything is okay, it's just this one thing, she's overreacting, etc. Which is exactly the kind of thing that causes the most problems for women, because the result of these actions is an effective sweeping under the rug of the very real problems facing women in tech. I mean, most of the comments very obviously didn't even read the whole article before rushing in a froth to make a post attacking a single isolated statement.
I haven't done any programming in Clojure for years but that looks really useful. It almost makes me want to start up Emacs and install Leiningen.
What is scarce?
Not everyone can get a full time job in this economy. A friend of mine is struggling to pay rent with her part time job at minimum wage. She can't afford to eat every day. Sure, you could tell her "go get a full time job", but no one is hiring. Believe me, she's tried.
Yea I was wondering where the cool promised effects were. I'm a light user of the phone and iOS7 was a noticeable improvement. UI is better, idle battery life doubled. But that's my particular use case. Could be the experience of non nerd users as well.
It's somewhere between Amazon delivering your book the day after Christmas and TicketMaster delivering your ticket the day after the concert.
His linkedin page sends us to this awesome article too: http://sfctoday.com/news/1025-sfc-senior-already-a-financial...

Edit: Oh gawd, at the end he actually says "you only live once."

Edit2: "Money drives me completely ... I've gotten so used just being able to go anywhere without looking at any price tags ..."

Let's go ahead and [dead] this thread. Forget it ever happened. (or make a movie out of it)
Do you work for coinbase? You seem to be defending them pretty hard.
IF we take it as given that an AGI must think exactly like a human, then I might say I agree with you. We aren't necessarily close to emulating a human being in software, and I'm actually doubtful we will for a VERY long time.

BUT... if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" then I think that Watson (and Deep Blue, etc.) do represent steps on that road.

You can probably guess that I lean towards the latter viewpoint. I fall back on the oldchestnut that "We didn't build airplanes that fly by flapping their wings like birds, but they fly nonetheless" as an analogy. We may not build machines that think like humans, but they will still be intelligent, nonetheless.
Certainly in the UK this is the case - people are smuggled into the UK, and have to repay the cost of being smuggled by growing cannabis (or sex work, or similar). Passports are removed, fear is created about going to police, people are locked into houses, etc.
Does tape actually provide enough impedance to prevent surveillance through your microphones? Seems like all an attacker would have to do is amplify (and possibly filter) the audio a bit.
Because you know what happens when you try to pass immense torque through a transmission? Bad things. Its why Elon fought for so long for a 2-speed transmission on the Roadster before giving up and opting for a lower top speed. Electric motors have a ridiculous amount of force they can put out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster#Timeline

"Subsequent to completion of production car number one at Hethel, the company announced problems with transmission reliability. The development transmission, with first gear enabled to accelerate 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) in 4 seconds, was reported to have a life expectancy of as low as only a few thousand miles. Tesla Motors' first two transmission suppliers were unable to produce transmissions, in quantity, that could withstand the gear-shift requirements of the high torque, high rpm electric motor. In December 2007, Tesla Motors announced plans to ship the initial Roadsters with the transmissions locked into second gear to provide 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) acceleration in 5.7 seconds. The first production car was not delivered with this interim solution; P1 has both transmission gears enabled. According to the plan, the initial transmissions were to be swapped out under warranty when the finalized transmission, power electronics module (PEM), and cooling system became available. The EPA range of the car was also restated downward from 245 to 221 miles (394 to 356 km). The downward revision was attributed to an error in equipment calibration at the laboratory that conducted the original test"

DISCLAIMER: Tesla's final solution was a single-speed gearbox, combined with software and energy management upgrades. The electric motor will now run as high as 14K RPMs to achieve it's 125mph top speed while retaining it's 4 second 0-60 time.
The guy who bought these coins is a douche. The fact is bitcoins are highly unstable and he bought them when the price was high(for this week). It is doubtful he would have had the sense to sell them before todays drop. If he really believes that bitcoins are a good investment, which I do, then he should have faith that they will rise in value over time(months, years). It's speculators like this that buy in when the price is high then immediately complain about the volatility that give bitcoins a bad name.
Which then nearly ruins the use case of theft recovery software. Sometimes you want to turn on the camera in software.
$35,000 is a huge sum of money. I'm suggesting he sell the 40 or so bitcoin he purchased immediately at market price (~$550), cut his loses and move on. By doing so he would limit the damage and would only lose ~$12,700. Bitcoin will continue to fall and he will continue to lose money.

He won't get his money back from CoinBase and he is losing money every second he holds his bitcoin.

Losing money sucks. It happens to everyone who invests, gambles or takes a risk. Take your medicine, learn for your mistakes and be better tomorrow.
Which could have been mitigated -had Coinbase fulfilled their delivery, as negotiated-. Ergo, material losses.
Not sure if that make sense since Bay Area is quite integrated. Great you move to Santa Clara but your kid needs to go to San Francisco since there is a good catholic school there - then what? Or your wife works in San Francisco?
What about internal microphones on MB's?

osascript -e 'set volume input volume 0' doesn't really produce the expected result…
Pivotal DataDispatch Got Payback in 3 Months w/ 377% Annual ROI  NYSEEuronext
At any time between then and now, the OP could have realized his mistake and sold the bitcoins for a lesser loss had they been in possession of the bitcoins.
Forget Bulky Smart Watches, Slip On a Smart Ring
Yikes! Please tell me you consulted with a lawyer before posting this publicly? Even if you gave the OP the BTC at current rates SEC/Courts can make a case against this sequence of events.

It does not even have to be reported.

I have nothing against you or Coinbase and I do sincerely hope I am wrong. This can have dire consequences on your current and future business(es).

It would have been best to refund the withdrawal in its entirety or just credited it, to be used for a future transaction as that would have saved you guys from a world of pain.

For any other service I would have given you Kudos for acting, albeit slowly, and applauded honesty(though not so much due to blaming it on the servers, which in a financial context is unacceptable).

But for a business that a court can deem/classify as a financial institution (regardless if you consider yourself one), this could be considered as a admittance of wrong doing.

edit: grammar
>that's really shocking for a company that is trying to play a role as a financial institution.

That is probably the scariest part about the current Bitcoin community. Many of the big names are simply "playing a role". We have no idea of their technical expertise, the viability of their software, their USD/Bitcoin reserves, how they plan to address disputes like this, or even whether they are skimming of the top.
Wanna buy some bitcoin? ;-)
It's highly suspicious that Coinbase has the capacity to selectively delay or cancel transactions when the prices rise, but no ability to do so when prices drop. If their system isn't capable of that, it's definitely a deliberate design choice since the necessary code is essentially identical.
Walking Dead: The Game – Season 2 is Now Available on the App Store
I thought the same as well. An LED in series with the circuit powering the CMOS sensor is all that would be needed. No amount of reprogramming is going to bypass a physical circuit.

This is disappointing, and I expect Apple will redesign the cameras because of it.
Have you ever seen an actual economist say this? I have a feeling Stross got his economy degree from a cereal box. Bitcoin is not the first asset in history to appreciate. Why haven't the wild swings we've seen in gold, oil, pork bellies, etc. had the horrible results you predict?

"Deflation" doesn't even relate to assets people aren't forced by law or other circumstances to use for regular commerce. For normal, non-currency assets like that, we say "appreciation" instead of "deflation". If 6 billion people decided to "hoard" BTC tomorrow, I guarantee there would be plenty of dollars/rubles/whatever available for investment, lending, and spending.

Honestly the hoarding argument is dumber than the precision argument, so I tried to give Stross the benefit of the doubt.
Analyzing the 1000 Most Common Wi-Fi Network Names
Congratulations on your launch, and your approach looks unique enough to have place in face of the many online coding shops.

Just don't get complacent with your revenue, it really isn't much.
Makes sense. St. Louis has a lot of low cost places to escape to whereas in the bay area everything's somewhat prime real estate.
I would venture to guess that the Google bus, with all of its amenities, costs less per passenger mile than a MUNI bus. Paying for better city buses would be a waste of money.
If I write shit code (and I do, because at some point we all do) and for whatever reason I can't fix it (usually time crunch) I call it out even if it's just a comment in the code to say "this is a terrible hack, don't do this". It's important to recognize when code is less than ideal or when you write something that you know you could do better if you had more time to research and think about the solution. Part of becoming a good developer is learning to accept criticism of code not as an attack on the developer but as recognition that there's always room to improve on things and that no one is perfect. It's also about recognizing that sometimes you just have to accept "good enough" and move on even if you'd really like to go for "perfect". At the same time you don't want to throw away your standards and just settle for anything that gets the job done if you don't absolutely need to, which is why calling out kludges and shit code when you (or someone else) writes it is important. Now don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to call my shit code shit, but I'd at least try to be more tactful of someone else's code.
No US tech company can be trusted anymore. I expect Cisco to be banned worldwide in particular.
You seem quite the apologist:

"To not expect some errors from a startup with an emerging technology is just silly. Users should expect some errors, and expect fixes to those errors by Coinbase as properly happened in this case."

Huh?

A startup dealing in financial instruments doesn't just get to say "Startup!" "1.0!" "Beta!" or "MVP!" and wash its hands of responsibility.

If I do $10,000 worth of damage to your car due to my (in-)action, and throw $50 at you "by way of apologizing", your losses are somehow mitigated?
And a majority of the (previous) big players have been compromised on more than one occasion. It's a big kindergarden.
If you can name a single specific claim that you don't think is defensible, I might be inclined to take your argument more seriously. But so far, everything you've said is a vague generality that continues to support my theory that you haven't read the paper and don't understand the method being described.
"if we were to challenge the very core concepts in version control systems, what would version control look like?"

I looked at the documentation and I see nothing that challenges the very core concepts in version control systems. Did I miss something?
I love the idea of Coinpunk.

And I wish I could contribute, but I'm so jaded and scarred by Javascript at this point it's not even funny. (For context, I spent a lot of time debugging JS on Internet Exploiter in the early 2000's long before anything cool and JS-related existed, and I do Ruby now.)

Can you do me a huge favor, though (and I'd be happy to toss you an entire bitcoin if you simply promise to do this): You NEED a better test suite. You're writing software that deals with money (or "a money," whatever), it absolutely needs a robust test suite. Primarily unit tests, but also a few functional tests. For both the server-side AND client-side code. Bitcoin itself has a reasonably good test suite, yours should too. I REALLY doubt Blockchain.info has a good one. You could distinguish yourself this way while also covering your own ass in the event you need to refactor things without breaking things :)

I didn't think tests were fun to write until I realized how much time they were saving me in debugging and headaches after the fact. Do it now, before your code size gets much bigger.

I highly recommend this book
http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...

Again, happy to order it for you (it's not cheap) or just toss in some more BTC if you promise to order it and read it.

I don't know what cred I can give you other than to tell you I'm "GSpotAssassin", a well-known big tipper on /r/bitcoin. (I got into bitcoin very early, and I'm an open-source developer.)

Anyway, congrats on your self-funded expedition, that is pretty fucking rad and I expect big things. :)
I'm not crazy, yes. When I first purchased a laptop with a camera (MBP 2008) I put tape on it. I did some research and found that the NSA had published a report that stated they could not confidently secure the iSight camera from external access. trying to find it now.
Nuclear fusion isn't an option because it's not technologically feasible at positive EROEI (that may change someday, but it's basically science fiction now).

Positive EROEI on numerous forms of solar is already there and in production. It just can't beat fossil fuel on a cost/power basis. That's an economics problem, not a technical problem.
Can you explain more on why normalizing is better? I get it for OLTP systems, but for data analysis performance it just seems like doing the denormalization can remove a step every time you want to pull the data.
How is the bonding from the pads on the die to the pads on the PCB accomplished? Sounds easier to do with packaging compared to PCB for me.
Show HN: Amazon + Svpply = my new project
That's not Google's problem, that's the loopholes' problem.

I'm an entrepreneur. I get that. And you can keep repeating it until we turn into India or Brazil or Nigeria or someplace else where the rich ride around in bulletproof cars while the poor beg by the dozen at each intersection.

Or you can work toward a better solution.
$549...
Here's the thing about financial institutions: when they make a mistake, they pay for it. They should really be crediting him 62.9 BTC, which is approximately what he would have gotten by selling on December 13 and buying again today.
This is definitely ridiculous. The loss of value was not on the fault of Coinbase, but the result of market swings.
I doubt this (Furbys are kiddy toys, after all); but this article proves that audio is indeed a viable data communication channel for bypassing air-gaps.
I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.
awesome demo. very informative and useful for any level of dev
> The premise of the third party doctrine is that it's not objectively reasonable to consider information private when you've given up control of that information to a third party. How can something be private when it's at the total discretion of someone else to disseminate that information?

In that case, why doesn't it cut both ways? The Gov't gave access to Snowden, so does that suddenly make it reasonable that he should be able to share that data with the world?

The fact that most people expect their telephone, email, etc records to be private should say that the 3rd party doctrine is fundamentally flawed.
No. The joke is that people are demanding a product so badly that theyre doing business with kiddies who dont know how to run a financial institution.

This is literally an economy of "shut up and take my money," but no one wants to play ball.
It's worrisome that you have to basically complain on a public forum in order to get a reaction from them.
OMG! The porn!

Just a few icons away from news.ycombinator.com is incest-dream.com - don't go there! There are plenty of other porn sites surrounding the Hacker News favicon, call me naive, but I didn't think there was that much porn out there on the interwebs these days. Someone told me it was hard to monetize because you cannot compete with free. Plus you don't get a screen full of pop-ups of porn, 1998 style. Seems I will have to re-evaluate what the internet is used for.
> You'd have to get the user to download and run a package installer that prompts for an admin password RIGHT?

In theory; but a motivated party with sufficient resources could simply ("simply") author a fake OS update and deliver it to you over a compromised ISP and you'd never know the difference.
And if we just got rid of half the people on the planet, the rest of us could be twice as rich!

A sense of entitlement means you think someone owes you something you didn't work for. This guy is working hard and looking for ways to earn more which means he's not feeling entitled.
It's a TOS. Feel free to write whatever you want in there, because much of it will go straight to the trash if its ever tested in front of a court.
Define 'long term' Government's crumble making the long term value of any currency 0.
Kraken is just an exchange. You can deposit/withdraw USD if you live in the States. The only two other options are CampBX and LocalBitcoins.com, but neither has the ease of Coinbase.
90% smaller and 40% faster than Mustache
Pop culture history in the making, indeed.

ಠ_ರೃ
What are you talking about? He could have sold them on December 13 if he had gotten them at that time.
If Economists Wrote Christmas Cards
To do this you need code execution privileges on the target machine, but there are many ways to do this (social engineering, browser exploit, etc). The research is specifically about disabling the camera light.
No, there doesn't have to be. CoinJoin is a technique for mixing on the block chain that can also be used for payments. If widely deployed, mixes look like regular bitcoin activity.
You know some days I actually wonder why hellbanning exists. Not today.