skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If everyone is doing it then it becomes much easier to run a mixing service, and to the extent that a mixing service polices its own membership, the more unsavory characters could be weeded out...

But as for traceability, if you're not mixing your coins with other peoples' coins, there's not much you can do at the point of sale to obfuscate the origin of those coins.

Everything is absolutely traceable. You can identify every transaction that a bitcoin (or fragment) was involved in since it was minted. With a "taint analyzer" (not kidding, this is what it's called) you can see what percent of the bitcoins stored at an address were ever stored at another given address, to see how many of these coins are "tainted" by those coins' history.

That being said, simple mixing services likely do still exist, and if you are willing to pay a small trade fee at most any online exchange, you can (probably) be rid of your existing bitcoins and quickly having new bitcoins with the stroke of a keyboard. If those exchanges are following KYC and AML, you still haven't broken the trail.
> I'd regard an ideal economy as one in which robust competition drives prices down and wages up, at the expense of profits.

I think that's fairly reasonable, although at what point do you say "profits are too high" or "wages are too low"? If the market can fail (which it obviously can), then what mechanism can we use to determine what is "optimal"? I do not think that monopoly regulation of the economy (i.e. government regulation and fiscal policy) should be expected to do better than the market.
Let us get you straight.

"This guy" has a "sense of entitlement" in your little world....because he's taking care of his daughter, worked at a menial job to make ends meets and while he kept studyting and just got his college degree, programs on the side, just got a new job, and took the time and energy to try to improve conditions for his fellow employees....and then geniuses like you whine about "free condoms" and "entitlement"?

Please. Just delete your comment.
Realistically, I don't need to do that.

In an investigation, they'd eventually get a warrant for your electronics. They'd comb through them, and probably find your bitcoin wallet. In the event where it's relevant to the case that they see the contents of your bitcoin wallet, you'd be compelled to decrypt it.

So they wouldn't ever have to tie your IP address to a transaction - the feds or local police would just get your wallet and trace backwards from there.
"I felt like there were a thousand challenges I had to face alone, that no one else could see. I was usually the only woman where I worked, and I felt so isolated. More than anything else, what I found myself really wanting was for someone to say “I see how difficult it is, and you’re doing a great job. Just keep going.”

Sorry, but it looks like the poster would be unhappy in a number of professions, not just tech. As a manager you're happy when team members come to you to talk about results, not like "I want you to know how difficult and complex this is. It's not done yet, but I'm breaking my balls and I want you to notice how difficult I'm finding it".
This is a very weak dismissal. Have you read the actual details they claim?

Side-channel attacks (like power analysis) in the presence of other activity are well established.

Electrical signals causing audible frequency output are also well established. Look up the piezoelectric effect[1], or magneto/electrostiction[2][3]. The demand for miniaturisation of everything means even at low voltages, there are quite substantial electric fields across small distances, which are enough to flex the material audibly.

On the magnetostriction side, the flyback transformer in old CRT televisions is a perfect example. Myself and many people have been able to tell whether the TV was powered up (even if totally muted) from outside the room (and yes, double-blind tested repeatedly).

What does wire gauge have to do with anything?

On the practicality/data rate issue, a nice quote from the very intro of their paper states:

> In a nutshell, the key extraction attack relies on crafting chosen ciphertexts that cause numerical
cancellations deep inside GnuPG’s modular exponentiation algorithm. This causes the special value
zero to appear frequently in the innermost loop of the algorithm, where it affects control flow. A single
iteration of that loop is much too fast for direct acoustic observation, but the effect is repeated and
amplified over many thousands of iterations, resulting in a gross leakage effect that is discernible in the
acoustic spectrum over hundreds of milliseconds.

(emphasis mine)

It seems that the main focus of their work is to fingerprint the crypto and identify that a particular key was used (but not necessarily what the key is), which is a much easier problem than the one they talk about here, which requires specially crafted input over a substantial period of time.

Your solution might work, or it might just lower the SnR of the signal and require filtering larger quantities of data to extract the desired signal again.

The road to crypto-hell is paved with people who thought that they could use their "common sense" to reason intuitively about their problem. But to paraphrase Feynman, Mother Nature is not swayed by persuasive arguments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetostriction

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrostriction
Just little deflation nearly destroyed the world economy

I don't think you can interpret the causation as going that direction.
We currently live in a world where banks try to foreclose on homes that aren't even mortgaged. Bitcoin and the like will end that.

No, it won't. The problem was never proof of payment. The problem in almost all cases was proving ownership (by the foreclosing bank) of the ownership of the mortgage/loan, which Bitcoin can't and won't solve because it's not something that can be put into the Bitcoin protocol or software. (The bank you take out a mortgage from is rarely the bank that you end up making payments to; the original bank usually sells your mortgage to another financial institution willing to accept the credit risk.)

But even more importantly, Bitcoin is about wealth protection. The average Joe will have very little of the deflationary income. But large banking institutions will.

Why is this a good thing? You've basically just said that the rich will just get richer and the average Joe will, in relative terms, will become even poorer (as prices increase to keep pace with the increasing wealth of the rich).
clickable https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1szAw3ewku3o0AuvK3c4r3zydllv...
By that reasoning, people who either can't afford cars or can't be trusted with them (DUI convicts) have no ability to travel freely. There are lots of infrastructure changes that should be made to fix that problem, so enshrining the right to drive cars around is neither a complete solution nor an especially efficient or safe one.
Sen. Coburn's Government Wastebook 2013 [pdf]
Risqué Holiday Video - Christmas surprise in Bathroom
Well firstly the gotchas very rarely get me. I found the same with Javascript. The inconsistent and odd data conversions make fun slides to denigrate the language, but in practise they seem to be easily avoided.

I realize posting a 40 minute video to support my point is a bit lazy and unfair but you seem aware of some of the key points fortunately.

First let me admit that we have a php legacy codebase, so porting that to another language, even if we had a strong desire too would probably be prohibitive.

I definitely feel super productive in PHP. I've been able to knock out a new app feature in 1 day, which to build the equivalent in Java would have been at least 5. It's very easy to write code fast, and then come back and refactor it later. Using PHP Storm as an IDE with a very good debugger and PHPUnit to build a suite of tests for everything we do means that gotchas are always eliminated before production, and with PHP I find things are either working or completely broken with not much in-between.

I guess having a strong unit test suite, or really it's more of an acceptance test suite, is something you can do in most languages, but the assurance it gives us enables us to share large code bases between teams, doing frequent merges of features. You can have large numbers of programmers with varying abilities and even programming styles hitting the code without too much headache.

The talk also mentions state. Not sharing state between requests except explicitly. You don't have to worry about complicated background threads, resource leaks, memory leaks. Even crashes are less of a big deal since you just lose one request to it, not the whole server like with Java et al.

PHP's array is a swiss army knife with lot's of useful functions for transforming data, which is a lot of what we do on the server. I can map, reduce and filter data. I can dynamically handle arrays or single objects in the same function, or handle arrays of different kinds of data without any fuss. In short going from what I want to happen to having it happen is very fast.

Background tasks are queued and run on other systems including some written as bash scripts or in Python, Go and node.js. These languages are a better fit for these jobs and so we ditch PHP for those.

What Facebook is doing with HHVM (run faster) and Hack (add type safety as needed) is pretty interested and we've adopted the first but not yet the latter.

Hopefully that's flavour of what I like about using PHP. I have not written more than a few lines of Ruby so I cannot comment on that. I have done some maintenance work on a Python server but not with a modern framework. I'm not sure Python with a modern web framework offers all of the advantages I've mentioned above but I am open to being enlightened on that.
I had not heard of Joe Londsale before now, but just as an FYI in case you weren't aware... the term "man-computer symbiosis" (which means, as far as I can ascertain, the same thing as "human-computer symbiosis") predates Lonsdale by decades[1], and was being used by J.C.R. Licklider[2] back in the 1960's.

[1]: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._R._Licklider
There are benefits to be had by BOTH. Pairing 100% of the time works well for Pivotal and their clients. At AirPair we mix and match for appropriate tasks internally. Externally for our customers, we use it as the ultimate format of knowledge share and training.

Benefits of solo:
- Creative
- Code faster (in terms of lines, no necessarily quality)
- Get to do things they way you like

Benefits of pairing
- Instant code review and double vetted architecture decisions
- Avoid distractions (like email/social media) as you can't be rude to your pair
- Getting accelerated knowledge infusion on both software tricks and domain of the application
This olympic event should be cancelled. The whole methodology is flawed and assumes way too many things.

For us, logback+gelf was the right solution. Get the logs off the box and keep them intact. https://github.com/mp911de/logstash-gelf
Furthermore, move out of the bay area, man! That's one of the most expensive places to live in the country!

Whenever I see these articles, I think about what makes the Bay Area expensive. The key factor is housing prices.

There's a limited amount of land available near the centers of SV because of mountains and natural areas. Supply is strictly constrained and demand is very strong because of industry growth. The result is spiraling prices far above what would seem reasonable elsewhere.

Supply constraint isn't really a natural limit, though. Bay Area housing is spread out, low density, even sprawling. Even San Francisco is only half the density of Brooklyn. San Jose and San Mateo county mostly look like a suburb of Omaha.

Market demand would indicate big profit opportunities for anyone who can buy up a subdivision and build a neighborhood of three story flats on wide sidewalks and two lane streets. That would be over double the density of San Francisco and ten times the density of a typical San Mateo subdivision. You could easily afford to buy up property, knock down current buildings and carry away a huge profit. But you can't get permission from planning boards.

Or you could build like Tokyo, which is a little less dense than Brooklyn. You'd make free standing two or three story single family homes with very little yard on 15' single lane streets and small blocks. That's the same density as Brooklyn, 2.5 times San Francisco.

Or you could even build like San Francisco, but in San Jose. That's efficient enough in land per housing unit to make big money.

But it's all prohibited.

The Bay Area has chosen to be unlivable and unpleasant by its choice of public officials. Those city officials have prohibited the practices that make city living affordable. The result of bad public officials is an unhappy public.
I like the juxtaposition of

> Anybody who uses the word "denier" to denigrate their political opponents is employing dishonest tactics that only a fool would find convincing.

and

> fake environmentalists
No matter what you invest in you always worry about the rebound or lack thereof. This is not exclusive only to Bitcoin.

If you're not keen on assessing a general idea of the risk involved then hedging on magical internet money futures is not for you.
I agree, but I can't wait until organs on a chip are cheaper than rats!
If that's the typical daily fluctuation, it is still not "about the same level", it just means that the commodity has an extremely unstable value.
1000?! Where did you get that number from? Coinbase has 650.000 users alone...
In other news the United States Dollar has almost doubled in value in a single day: http://www.coinion.com/2013/12/07/united-states-dollar-almos...
To add to your counterpoints:

6. While it is about sure that in the future they will be technology that is for indistinguishable from magic, this does not imply that every magical thing we can think of will be true at some point in the future.

7. The whole premise rests on recursively improving AI. The human race has been making tool to help make them better tools for at least 50,000 years (lower bound to be uncontroversial). We do have amazing tools now, and tools that automatically do other tools, but we have not witnessed an accelerated auto-recursive thingamagig.
Since there seems to be no free version, or free trial, I think the site needs some more information before sign up.

How are the backups performed? What does the interface look like on phone, desktop?

Looks great though.
No, it isn't sarcasm. Online communities need moderation to thrive. If you allow people to insult each other at will, eventually you drive all the thoughtful folks away: We have better things to do than constantly point out Discussion 101 things like fallacies and abusive behaviour.

Unmoderated forums end up full of people who have a great deal of time on their hands and a large emotional attachment to arguing online. If that's your bag, you should hang out in such places. If it isn't you should try to avoid comments that come out swinging with insults.

I favour moderated forums, and I favour moderating away comments that are blatant examples of abuse. Your tastes may vary.

p.s. Normally I just downvote and move on, but since this discussion is actually about moderation, I thought that explaining myself was appropriate. But normally, I don;t engage in much of this kind of discussion, because it "feeds the trolls:" People with an emotional axe to grind thrive on arguing angrily about why they should be allowed to argue, angrily.
Yeah that's generally the downside of cert pinning / hardcoding. The upside is people can't install extra certs.
And the person featured in this article is not living?
I just found this in the latest El Goonish Shive webcomic update http://i.imgur.com/tkZsaNd.png This character has been summing up my views on dating pretty well lately.
oDesk to merge with Elance
She says, later in the article, that this may not have been a sexist remark, but at the time it was hard to see that. I think that's someone who's quite good at introspection, in fact, since she anticipated your comment, or the first part of it.

On the second half, I've never been managed by someone who I wasn't supposed to learn something from - have you, really?
Bitcoin is undergoing a difficult price discovery process, and no one (even die hard bitcoiners like myself) will deny that the valuation is heavily driven by speculators.

Sticking with index funds is very, very smart... I doubt I'd even own any btc myself if I didn't buy some at a buck a piece back in 2011 (well, I also make some from my bitcoin business, but that isn't a speculative decision)
That has nothing to do with AI or anything we're working on.
For Microsoft, it doesn't matter how many people are using PCs, it's how many are buying them. If usage is down, replacement time is up and OS price is down, how is that anything but bad for Microsoft? There are still a lot of XP users that have given Microsoft no money since at least 2006 and have still costed them money in support.
This is off the top of my head and with no knowledge of the progress of the work done already on the topic... so please take this with a grain of salt!

I would be inclined to try to develop a model of the system and see if I could reproduce the measured viscosity and elastic properties from a simulation. From there you can do things like free energy calculations and figure out which ant-phase is the most stable under which conditions.

You're right that in reality each ant is much much more complex than a molecule. But since we're scientists we get to approximate (hooray for spherical cows).

To build the model you just treat each ant as an elastic ellipsoid with directional bonding properties. You start off by ignoring the legs and ignoring or greatly simplifying the motion of each individual ant. The first hurdle would be to figure out an ant's bonding properties as this is crucial to the stability of the total structure's properties. Play around with that until your simulation starts reproducing reality; add complexity as necessary; iterate and repeat.

As far as experimental measurements, I couldn't even guess what to do next without reading some of their publications.
> Because it's fun, and kids think it's cool.

Well, that's a good way to drive fast adoption -- and equally fast abandonment.
From what I can tell, he used to do pretty awesome work ... and then went a little crazy.

Much of this, for example, looks like depak chopra level pseudoscience drivel: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Rupert+Sheldrake+&hl=en&...
it's Theo's basement. How much power could there be?
A conversation I had the other day:

"Ha! I'm glad you like my idea. You should send me five Dogecoin."

"Okay, so, we just have to install this wallet on your computer..."

"Uhhh nevermind."
Then it has "Rebounded to within its normal trading range."
I think this is a very honest account on a difficult topic. Thank you for writing it.
Yup. Both the beta and stable versions work with 2.4.
Isn't this just a continuation of Microsoft's recent-years strategy of waiting until other peoples' innovations created a market, and then trying to drop their entry into it? Zune, Xbox, Windows Phone, Windows Tablet, etc.. hell, didn't Ballmer explicitly state that was his strategy?
I don't know guys, I just picked up dell venue 8 pro. this thing is nice. the whole Metro things works really well and it is fast and smooth. The quality of games/apps I am seeing is already better than my kid's Nexus 7 (long way from ipad tho). If they market this thing right, I can see it(windows tablets in general) gain some hold in pure tablet world.
The Flash Crash of 2010 was nondissimilar: stocks were available at a ridiculously good price, and as people realized this, they created buy orders driving back up the price.

Bitcoin may be more vulnerable to these crashes than other currencies, commodities, stocks, or similar instruments. It's got a smaller size, lower volume, generally high volatility, and no sophisticated market instruments or automated high-frequency trading algorithms operate to make the market more efficient.

(oblig. disclaimer. this post is not a bitcoin advocacy post or a bitcoin hate post, but rather is meant to explore interesting properties of markets.)
Why?

1. Federal poverty level isn't a term [1]...
>The poverty guidelines are sometimes loosely referred to as the “federal poverty level” (FPL), but that phrase is ambiguous and should be avoided, especially in situations (e.g., legislative or administrative) where precision is important.

2. Government instructing market isn't in the constitution, nor is it in Free Market Capitalism, nor the concept of a Democratic Republic...

[1] http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/13poverty.cfm
Putting ethical and philosophical issues front-and-center, absolutely. Why is this a difficult argument to make? It's our disease. It affects our bodies. If we want a cure then we should put our own skin in the game.
netbooks, by the looks of it
Yowza. I guess it's true that the majority of people investing in Bitcoin saw it as more of an quick-flip play than a long-term value investment.
But that's true of a good portion of currency. The USD became a fiat currency in 1971.
The Bitcoin Swan Dive Was Utterly Predictable
You'd be surprised how many people take on risky investments then contemplate suicide when they inevitably lose a lot of money...
> I really can't think of any investment as risky as bitcoin.

Oh, that's easy. Short-sell some overpriced darling stock like Tesla Motors or Amazon or something and watch the market remain irrational longer than you remain solvent. :)
I'm one of the creators of this (we're the same people behind http://roots.io) so I'm happy to answer any questions. We're just trying to make developing WordPress sites a little more bearable :)
SensioLabs, Makers of PHP Framework Symfony, Raises $6.9 Million
"I don't know about this particular man's case..." followed by "He irresponsibly had a child...." [emphasis added]

Do you even read your own writing from one paragraph to the next?

How in the fuck do you have any clue whatsoever about what happened to "this guy" before and at the time he had his child?

The only "entitlement" here is you making really amazing, shitty assumptions. Over and over.
That was your takeaway from the article? Really?
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That sub is about as volatile as the currency itself. Though some people mentioned buying bitcoin on credit and that could put you in a pretty bad situation.
Thank you! This is a unique program that really makes a difference. This would,indeed, be a great way to abate that negative backlash. Lets all work together on this one.