skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How you think about the cost of Bitcoin mining strongly depends on what you think the point of Bitcoin is. If you believe that Bitcoin will "take over the world" (metaphorically speaking) purely based on its merit as an electronic payment system, then consider the following:

The difference between the cost of printing paper money and the cost of Bitcoin mining is that, to the best of our knowledge, paper money cannot be made significantly cheaper. However, electronic payment systems can be made significantly cheaper than the cost of Bitcoin mining. We already know how to do that from a technical point of view. The hurdles tend to be of a regulatory nature.

Those regulations have good reasons to exist, but if Bitcoin becomes sufficiently successful and practical simply as an electronic payment system, one of two things will happen: either, regulation will expand to cover Bitcoin to such an extent that Bitcoin loses advantage, or regulation will be reduced. In any case, there will be a market opportunity for non-Bitcoin systems to provide the same functionality, but cheaper.

This would then lead to Bitcoin's decline.

So if you want to argue that such a decline based on market forces will not happen, you have to have an argument that is not based on Bitcoin simply being an electronic payment system.

It seems very popular to argue that the decentralized nature of Bitcoin is what gives it a sufficient edge, and that the properties arising from its decentralized nature are impossible to replicate at a lower cost.

I'm not sure that I buy the line of argument that the decentralized nature causes a sufficient appeal. The public at large doesn't seem to care too much about that kind of thing.

Obviously, it was sufficient to spark the initial uptake of Bitcoin, which seems to have been driven by a mixture of cypherpunks, Libertarian and Austrian ideologues, and drug traders -- all three are groups that care much more about the properties that come with decentralization than the general public. And that initial spark was enough to attract broader interest, which may even be sufficient to carry Bitcoin over into long-term viability in a number of niches (similar to what happened to gold). So, if you personally have skin in the game, your investment may be safe.
It goes the other direction too. Canada, like many countries, has a point system. Its been a long time since I considered an offer in Canada but its a simple game theory optimization puzzle, to get the same number of points I could either get a degree, or become fluent in French, or work X years in some field or another. Programmer types tend to be pretty good at numerical optimization, think of it like a RPG game with various tradeoffs to level up.

One interesting thing to research for either immigration or jobs in general is do you get a CS degree or any STEM degree or any degree at all in any topic?

You're probably more employable if you're better rounded, so even if you are going IT instead of bench work, a Chemistry degree might help you get a job in IT at a pharm company more than an actual CS degree. Ditto finance if you want to work at a bank, etc. Employers love already trained subject matter experts.

WRT immigration this is a gross generalization but you get more points for "any" STEM degree... so if you're not going to learn anything in an IT type degree, why not get the physics degree you always wanted, immigration isn't going to care.
I'm not saying is a good thing, but that's a policy decision on what the NSA's mission should be. "whistleblowing" that it's happening doesn't really change anything.
Different companies do get it right to varying degrees. Can you link to any specific incident where one of these companies resolved an issue with the open source aspect of their product that left a disgruntled user more 'gruntled'?
Startup shows its first Brahma3 Anvil 3D printer.
Very easy to do. No degree here, building web apps on and off for twenty years almost. I've met tons of other developers who had no degree also, some of them very successful open source "stars."

However, it's not possible to get a tech job without learning a lot, so if you go in without a degree, you probably have to be the type of person who reads a lot and does a lot of research as a matter of habit. (Quite possibly has to be true even if you do go in with a degree.)

Also an enormous caveat, I had an incredible pre-college education, at least compared to most Americans. Programming classes when I was 11 years old, two years each of Latin and Ancient Greek while I was still in high school. I think I might technically have been doing college-level math in high school, too, but I'm not 100% sure.
Python, not Ruby.. but Beautiful Soup is a lenient parser and a really awesome library: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
Best comment in the entire thread.
We (speaking as a US citizen) are not the good guys any more than we're the bad guys, we're just guys doing our best to protect the interests of the country as a whole. Just as one day the Japanese were the bad guys and are now one of our closest ally's, morality and the high ground change as time and circumstances change.
>>You can't conceive nature as an engineer and talk about how sloppy and random its designs are.

Why not? We can talk about how sloppy something is from a given perspective; we do it all the time, and then try to improve things (there will be no progress otherwise), and if we succeed/fail, learn more ...

>>as if you can read its mind

Nature/evolution is not a sentient being, thus has no mind. Do you have evidence to the contrary ?
I spent enough time looking at Detroit. :-) The US is by no means perfect, but I think encouraging entrepreneurship is a better solution than organized labor.

But the reality is, if Amazon is so bad, folks should just go work somewhere else.
Unpublished images also live on the server for a short period of time.
>in a dispute over pay and conditions that has raged for months

Amazon could have dealt with this way in advance of christmas. What did they honestly expect would happen?
The stuff about tapping major ISPs, the ubiquitous metadata collection, etc. That's the true whistleblower material, the stuff that will get people angry and clamoring for change, and I think releasing the rest of it actually hurts that goal.
It's also a strategic decision by Costco to treat their employees better. Why not allow them this type of strategic advantage? If Amazon doesn't want to follow suit, let them lag.
I can't vouch for AWS, since I've never used it, but if the same principles carry across from their online store then one thing I've always found with Amazon is that they have the most amazing customer service.

I had an issue with a 9 month on SD card splitting, not expecting much I emailed them and they immediately sent out a replacement and told me to return the old one. I've had a couple of things go wrong with orders (sometimes just delayed in post) and they've always been very quick and helpful. Not all companies, online ot brick & mortar, understand this well enough.
Nice derailing, as this is clearly not the topic of the argument here.

The replacing will happen in due time - be it with amazon, be it with every other big warehouse. But that does not allow amazon till then to pay his warehouse-workers way under the trade-agreement, that is binding for this kind of industry in Germany.

Amazon says it does not have to pay the trade-agreement-wages from the mail order business, as it is just a logistics company. And that is the whole reason of the strikes. So the union is pushing for strike, to bring amazon in line with the other mail-order-businesses in Germany. So that its workers might one day earn the same amount of money, that every other worker in this industry earns already.
This is a reaction to Arielle Schlesinger: "In the scope of my research, a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems such that we can code using a feminist ideology." And she wasn't joking. http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ari-schlesinger/2013/11/26/femin...
It depends.

I dropped out of Uni after one year (this was about 10 years ago). The thing was, in the hobby/amateur game development circles I was well known. Had written a bunch of tutorials, a book (when they still used dead trees) and knew folks in various companies. This made getting job easier. Now, after 10 years of work history, no one gives a damn about my lack of degree. I've working in more industries than most, form junior to Technical Lead positions.

But if I was 18/19 today, no side projects, not very well known, it would be different. When I was more involved in recruiting, I never cared about the degree, but without one, and without a work history, what can you really show me that proves you can do the job?
Yes, I see that difference. I also know there are laws protecting computer systems and such. But was wondering if it could be applied to an online service.
American Psychosis
Management bargains collectively? I don't think so. That would be considered anti-competitive, like when Apple and Google had a no-poaching agreement.
tptacek should write up a block like http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt for everytime somebody rolls up their own crypto solution.
Gosh, good point! You can't fix everything, so why not just embrace all the moral failings of our culture? No point in making marginal progress! Fuck self-examination! Don't question it!
The HN thread is also illuminating with another knowledgeable person commenting in the thread directly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6782839
Do you assume most posters are from the States? I work in Spain. I would say I am paid comfortably for living, without enough to save comfortably for the future.
"start building things from papers."

Really liked what you wrote and found this particularly interesting. Can you elaborate on why you think this is important and how you generally go about it (finding papers, choosing what to code, etc)
Seems possible. When you type in your address, it sends a request to https://mail.google.com/mail?gxlu=YOUREMAIL&zx=TIMESTAMP

The response is empty, at least in my browser, so unless that is only true sometimes, the only plausible explanation is for it to be causing something to occur server side.
Why not send a drone plane together with the Curiosity? It sounds more efficient doing exploration from sky than land. I get that the weather could be a problem. Anyway, just food for thought.
Give `debugger` a shot, it'll make your life so much better.
I love this kind of stuff. It's the kind of article that today makes me very interested in embedded linux and systems that supposedly don't have enough resources to do things that we've been doing for decades.

Brilliant blog post!
It's not conclusive that e-cigs are not hazardous to your health. And I'm not talking about the nicotine in them. Search around there are studies showing there are other chemicals in these, but its hard to know for sure still.

*Note, I'm using an e-cig right now as a quitting aid. So this isn't some anti e-cig post.
Armored Trucks are a waste of resources- They don't do anything useful, they just need to exist because of a flaw in the dollar bill (it can be physically stolen)

/sarcasm
Consumers in the first world wouldn't care if they're paying 5 cents or 6 cents for a pound of wheat. But consumers don't buy wheat. They buy sandwhiches from companies who buy bread who buy from companies that make flour from wheat they buy from grain companies who buy wheat from flours. All those companies in the chain care greatly about the cost of product they buy.
Look, I don't have a position in this discussion, but your argument is prototypical for much of the others in this thread and it just seems so flimsy. Here is another totally made up argument just the other way around: for a UAV pilot, and their commanders, the 'kill order' is much more rational. Soldiers get to make decisions that are not influenced by the hate against the person who 2 minutes ago shot their buddy next to them in the head. Nanking massacre? Would never happen with drone pilots.

See? I'm not saying that argument is right. It is only just as neat, simple and (probably) wrong as the 'killing through a joystick causes more casualties because it dehumanzes the process' argument.
I don't recall which of the Atari cart game did this (might've been Combat) rather than using space for storing sound effects the game would refer to its own code in memory for a random noise sound effect.

So true that back in the day much of a game programmers mental effort was spent on how to make big ideas fit inside small memory, anemic color palettes, and slow processors.
Argh, paywall.
Comment of the year. Hah!
Previous (very active) discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6293463
I've never found anything to dislike about the actual NSA whistleblowers (Binney, Drake, Wiebe). I guess the only problem I have with Drake is that he hasn't prioritized personal and family income/wealth enough -- he lost his pension, and is now working at an Apple Store; he could have gotten a much more lucrative job.
Bitcoin Inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is Anonymous-style Cell from Europe
That's what happened the last time we found him (we tried airstrikes before) and it wasn't because we were worried about killing civilians, it's because we needed the job done, verified, more-so than your average middle-ranking terrorist.

Also, not an easy task to fly a Navy SEAL team around the world constantly to do operations like this. Not only does it risk their lives, but sometimes it's not even possible to get there physically or in enough time.

Also, somehow the terrorist were able to recruit before the US and it's allies "retaliated" with drone strikes. Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem but it would be crazy to blame terrorism on the killing of civilians that only took place.. because of actions of the terrorists.
In countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights there are laws in place to ensure workers' rights don't regress. Amazon isn't breaking any laws. The working conditions are safe, the employees are paid above minimum wage, and the employees are not working 80 hour weeks. The worst possible (legal) working conditions in these countries are far better than working conditions in third world countries. No matter what shopping choices you make, workers' rights in these countries will never regress to those of a third world country.
No, the point here is that there will be no slowdown, because the browser doesn't need to reparse the entire CSS document every time it needs to refer to that variable value, or anything like that.

It reads over the definitions ONCE (with all the CSS hierarchy and such), and then establishes it's own internal constant value for that variable. Referring to that value will be no more expensive than referring to a value that is set by the CSS sheets like "FF55FF".
Thanks for this insight! I never would have seen it had you not told me. (I'm an engineering guy and switching between time-per-unit and units-per-time is so automatic for me that I didn't realize it wasn't automatic for everybody.)

I've updated the story to explain the calculation the first time it happens.

Thanks again!
First of all let me say that I have no problem with paying for software, even closed source or otherwise. I already pay a chunk of personal money for JetBrains tools and stuff from RedGate to let me get on and do my job more efficiently, and my company does the same.

However your license condition:

"If you want to run Helium on another machine then you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously."

I work across a few different machines - work PC, other work PC and PC in lounge at home, VM's etc. This license condition just isn't practical or financially viable for solo developers or small dev shops who work like this. Do you actively check for multiple installs under the same license i.e. with a registration server? Altova XML Spy used to do this and it quickly got binned after the first year's license came up for renewal because they messed up the licensing records (PC crashed, couldn't de-register in-use licenses etc, hassle, hassle hassle) and we had developers working in VM's for a bunch of different projects all at once. Yes we could defeat the LAN sniffing it did to find out if two copies of the XML Spy were running with the same license, but it was too much effort and we resented having to do this - despite each dev being properly licensed.

Vendors such as JetBrains and RedGate license the software to me/company for use by a single developer/user, I don't have restrictions such as "you must first remove it from the computer you were using it on previously".

I/we are happy to buy licenses for each developer on our team "using" the software, but not for each and every VM or dev env a single developer is working in. As such I haven't bothered to let my colleagues know about this tool which sounds pretty cool, nor have I tried to download it (forcing me to part with contact details to try something really puts me off).

I understand that you have to eat and pay the rent, but even for a company like ours, that has a fairly generous budget for development tools, this type of "per-installed machine" license is considered hostile for the type of tool being sold.

I'm generally not a negative person when it comes to "Show HN" and I truly appreciate the efforts people put into their projects whether it be for a paid-for product or showing off some hacks or tricks, but your license....it frustrates me.
Robot dragonfly "DelFly Explorer" flies autonomously
Amazing photo of severed hand surgically attached to an ankle
Arstechnica figured out that Snowden had been a commenter there (or maybe on their chat system) and had published the threads, but nothing very scandalous besides writing some swears and defending the NSA.
Exactly. High value target uses high value assets.
The End of Bad Meds (Testing medication in the developing world)
Groupon's Friday Night Dump blooper
...or just use NoScript...? I really don't understand the incredulity, though; does the average user think that Google has the entire Internet stored on its homepage to get Auto Suggestions to work?
A very interesting exploit.

This phrase "internally php strings are byte arrays. As a result accessing or modifying a string using array brackets will trick the parser into evaluating arbitrary php code in the scope of the variable if the prior mentioned requirements are met." doesn't seem to be present in the linked documentation (http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php), however. Does anyone know what these "prior mentioned requirements" might be?
MTProto still uses RSA, AES + DH. So I would disagree that what we have here means 'compromising security for speed and stability'. It is rather optimizing for speed and stability, while staying secure.
Clientcide sounds similar to suicide, homicide, infanticide, genocide etc.
I have friends who have worked at the Amazon UK packing werehouse Peterborough. They tell me it was a truly horrid, literally back breaking experience.

First note of caution was the hiring test. For them english is a second language but they found the test alarmingly easy, something you would give a 2nd grader in social skills test. I suppose the test weeds out those who have no ability to follow any direction.

After that the repetitive work started, within months both had developed repetitive stress injuries in the back and arms. The man lasted 6 months, the woman 7 months.

It seems there was little or no thought left for ergonomics of any kind.

They both were already pretty skinny, but both lost a substantial amount of weight while on the job.
Well, the simple fact is, empirical studies of minimum wages just don't show their having a macroeconomic effect on employment that overwhelms other effects. Neither do empirical studies on basic income experiments show them overwhelming other economic effects when it comes to "efficiency" (if you don't want your statement to be tautological, you need to define efficiency as something other than "that which the market does", by the way), employment, or anything else.

So basically, you're preaching from a pulpit of pure theory and ideology, while I'm down here saying that you need to provide empirical proof and can't, and I'm not the one making a claim of global optimality.
Dart compiles to Javascript that runs very well on IE9 and up, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.

Chrome does not run Dart natively.
So after they say "yes" how would you go about asking them if they stopped in a non-loaded manner?
The details are important. That's why intelligence agencies are so secretive to begin with - unveiling an asset, be it an actual agent or an electronic access point usually has the effect of denying future access to that asset, thereby damaging the US's capability.

Again, you could legitimately argue that that's a good thing in the global scheme of things. You could also argue that sabotaging the US air force is a good thing, on pacifist grounds. Unfortunately, this is where Snowden looks most like a traitor and least like a patriot, because US military officials tend to view the two situations as pretty much the same.
I really enjoyed Telerik's "30 Days of TDD" series which just wrapped up. http://blogs.telerik.com/james-bender/posts/13-09-09/30-days...
One thing I would add to that, before walking away talk to the hiring manager about it. HR is just following some set of guidelines, and in many cases a good manager can work with them to make the problem go away. Think of it as a test for your prospective manager as much as anything else.
I've worked for a company that did those types of things and I found it awful. On top of the work, you had to negotiate strained, forced, Corporate Fun. After 10 hours working, the last thing I wanted was to be told by the company that was exploiting me that I should smile and be grateful and give it my all in the Company Nintendo Wii Bowling Tournament.

> The work may be mndane and shitty, but slogging through with friends makes it a million times better.

You make it sound like school and as though the workers are children. People don't want to be infantilized at work. They want to feel as though they are valuable -- that the work they are doing has some impact in the world -- and they want to be compensated fairly for it.
What are Google's boundaries?
Why bother reviewing the code? It's almost certainly a waste of time to do so.

We know that writing crypto is hard and experienced crypto programmers make mistakes.

The possibility of a naive programmer creating a sturdy piece of crypto software with no previous experience is vanishingly small.
Dang, that sucks. So neither eBay OR Paypal helped? Did you send the macbook to the "Paypal verified address", because I thought that was one of the protection requirements?
Ooh, I'll happily build the spaceship's "earth communication unit" so it has realistic delay:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/614795/simulate-delayed-a...
Or breakpoints. With Chrome's tidying of minified code you can even use it on production.