skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suppose that even with this, bitcoin banks still appear to be far more reputable establishments at the moment than say, either RBS or the Co-op, unless Rob Ford has founded one recently.
Plus on MacBooks there is a second microphone to gather surrounding noise to improve sound quality. I don't think there is any non intrusive way to stop it from activating either.
What do you propose for those people who work these non-livable jobs (including security jobs, janitors, restaurant service workers, and whatever else) to allow them to, well, live? Because you can't just ignore it and say they should get better jobs: someone has to do these things.
Having an inline LED is still a bit over-engineered in my opinion.

The earliest standalone webcams, for instance Logitech models and the IndyCam that came with the Silicon Graphics 'Indy' workstation, had a 'door' that you could slide over the lens when not in use. Lenovo had this on their all in one PC's a few years ago but I don't think they kept that feature.

What was wrong with the slide-across lens cover?

You would think it would be an essential feature for some.
Yeah, fair point that he could have sold his coin the day he received it.

As I mentioned in a few other comments, just seems to me that frustration over the Coinbase's error and frustration over the price swing are both being heaped only on Coinbase.

I've had great experiences with the product and company, I would hate for this particular screw-up to be seen as representative of their overall service.
Great idea. Must be a physical switch that just cuts all physical links between the camera/microphone and the rest of the system, so that no reprogramming is possible. Unfortunately, little chance to see it in Apple products, as such switch would probably not look "slick" and would probably be considered "confusing for the user" and as such not suitable for implementing.
Patreon: Let fans become patrons of their favorite artists and content creators
Actually, false. There are no primes between n! + 1 and n! + n + 1 for all n, so arbitrarily large gaps between consecutive primes do exist.
Yes. Basically he has wasted his own time and mine reading it.
> "My understanding is, the mods catch people using the flag button to downvote, the mods make your flag stop counting"

The "flag" link disappears entirely, it doesn't just stick around but become a noop.
It would be nice if there was a US only odesk clone that popped up and became popular. I'd give it a shot...
I'd pay someone $10 if I could figure out a way to make sure that my macbook never plays the "I AM NOW TURNING ON" sound.
If only we could just make these people work for free and not provide any benefits, and just let them die in the street or go bankrupt because they got sick, the market would fix everything and the world would be perfect.
Task Force Blasts NSA's Collection and Storage of Personal Data
> if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like"

I'm not even sure whether that's a meaningful distinction. Searle's Chinese Room et cetera.

I'm with you in the wing analogy, I fully agree. I just don't think Watson or Deep Blue is a significant approach even in that direction.

Human-like or not, we have certain expectations from our hypothetical AGI in terms of the kind of new problems it can solve without too much help. I guess what it mean is: I think it needs to be able to solve a problem it wasn't designed upfront to solve. No serious system I've ever seen attempts to do that.
Agree with you - they don't give a st about people. But a major difference is that with Amazon (or any company) you have a choice - don't shop with them, don't work for them, convince others to do the same, document their bad-behavior etc.

With a government, there is no alternative choice. And typically socialist governments tend to swing towards totalitarianism as well, depriving their citizens of many other rights and freedoms.
Ask HN: Let's open-source our unused pitch decks
Lots of posts on HN about sharing ideas, sharing unused domains, etc, so why not share our unused decks as well? The idea is one thing, the approach you took is entirely different.

I'll start...

https://speakerdeck.com/chadokruse/10speak-pitch-deck-the-mobile-calendar-public-domain

Idea: The mobile calendar isn't about what's on your calendar, it's about what's NOT on your calendar.

Reason for not continuing: I woke up one day and realized the app I was creating wasn't really making the world a better place. I'm now working on something I'm truly passionate about (fixing philanthropy). Also, ran out of money before validating the right go-to-market strategy.

Background: We never got enough traction to fundraise, but the VC's I talked to really loved the notion of breaking the old Microsoft Outlook time paradigm (which we still use, even in mobile form). I also had a few celebrity-level VCs as users, so there's definitely a pain point there.

Caveat: Since we never got to fundraising, we didn't finish the deck, so prepare for some glaring holes.

NOTE: Let's all assume anything posted here is open for public domain unless otherwise stated
Unfortunately he doesn't seem to understand it.
On the other hand, think of how much power a program like PowerPoint gives the average user without forcing them to learn the underlying technologies. Or the iPhone. I think that user interface design solves most of the leakiness problems, and the illusion of seamlessness is critical to good interface design. Remove as many features as you have to so that the abstraction doesn't leak.

PowerPoint came out in 1990 - what's the PowerPoint of 2020?
“Your shitty website is not a startup.” - Reflecting on negative attacks
Do you actually have to wire up a bank account in order to create a coinbase account? How many coinbase accounts actually have any money in them?
Unsurprisingly there are good emacs scripts that perform all of the revolutionary features in this product [0].

However there's something about emacs that keeps it from being sold as a viable consumer product...

[0] https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode

Update: added example link
Uber is not a "gypsy" taxi fleet. They may not be sanctioned, but they're far from unregulated.

Your idea that they have a social obligation is incredulous. Would you prohibit me from ride sharing with someone privately? Of course not! Why does an app and the exchange of money make that different?
Closure allows you to capture references to variables, not objects.

The function may reference the variable `card` but by the time the first one is triggered the for-loop had already decremented the variable to 0.
Fair point. And agreed, hopefully they will address it further.

Again, not saying that this is not a major screw up.

I just think Brian and crew deserve more support than they are getting.
Agreed, this is a failed trade.

They should simply wire back the money to end this matter and blame a back-end gremlin.

As a gesture of goodwill, maybe comp the guy $100 credit, cash, starbucks gift cards, whatever.

They've actually made it worse now by executing the trade but only after a public outcry.
Play poker with investors, not roulette
Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses
I agree that good speech recognition will be one of the biggest advances of the next five years, and that many people will want to use voice as their primary input. But most people do not want to have to overhear other people talk to their devices. Look at how resistant people have been to permit cell access on subways and planes. Think of a public place where many people use mobile devices. Now imagine that place with all those people talking to their phones
Can we say coinbase is basically shorting bitcoin with its customer's money ? (it's a question.)
>What was wrong with the slide-across lens cover?

The fact that you can forget it open, duh!
Britain to Join Ranks of Nations Using Plastic Currency
I wonder if Zillow and Trulia would ever consider hiring brokers to grow their revenue...
Unless you're dying or giving birth, I don't see how a limo ride is an essential service.

Even at 8x surge pricing (maybe $500 for a ride across Manhattan), Uber is much cheaper than an ambulance. Why are people mad at Uber and not the ambulance companies that charge insane prices for an essential service where they enjoy a monopoly?
You say that like solar power is free. To calculate the EROEI, you have to include the energy from solar.
Clickable link: https://speakerdeck.com/chadokruse/10speak-pitch-deck-the-mo...
How does a YC CTO think? Ask the CTO of HealthSherpa & RentMetrics (YC S12).
It's another poorly-written blog post.

"The use of centralized exchanges remain a frustrating point-of-failure" should be remains.

"Chinese leaders have little issue exploiting as they look to crackdown on the once high-flying bitcoin" should be crack down (2 words).

"The flurry of companies to hop aboard the bandwagon and inflate this most recent bubble, including Baidu and China, were quick to fall in line" should be China Telecom.

That's where I stopped reading. Please have enough respect for your readers' time to do some proofreading before posting.
Network events aren't networking like television ads aren't marketing
It's all about risk. The roulette table will give you a 100% return in 10 seconds. It's very risky though...
I put a piece of paper over the camera, then tape over that. That doesn't leave glue on the lens.
There's also a similar project for Python [1].

That said, do I understand correctly that the way you assume the users will share their OpenSCAD models is to share the generated OpenSCAD scripts?

[1] https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython
Thanks!

I think that I will stick with this:
"You should stick with the simple stuff from now on. Capisce?"
Final table no longer makes sense. Might make more sense to extract your update to a new article and link to it from the top?
As a rule of thumb, I only buy apps if they have an accented, tousled hair developer doing his best Jony Ivy impression to create an artificial need.
You would just chain multiple exploits. For the right price you can buy a zero-day exploit for anything you want -- for the browser, OS & root access. If you have the money, installing the camera exploit in place is trivial.
There is no central controlling authority you need to trust to not seize your digital currency.
There is a freely-available kernel extension[1] to make this firmware hack accessible to root only. The exploit depends on modding the camera firmware from userspace.

The kext is created by the same authors of the paper[2] this article is talking about. Search the paper for "iSightDefender".

[1] https://github.com/stevecheckoway/iSightDefender

[2] https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...
I've been keeping my mouth shut here about Coinbase after starting that thread 9 months ago.

I feel bad for someone that can't put a finger on his 30K, but I can't feel that bad if he didn't do a little research here first.

Hopefully on the next bubble people will be a little more enlightened.
Yes. The question is why did they refuse to act until this public outcry.

My theory? Proprietary trading. The CoinBase guys were probably trading on behalf of the company and screwed up royally, taking a big hit, so they decided to try and pass that loss onto customers or until they balanced the books
The LED is wired up directly to light up in the opposite state of the standby signal (i.e. off control) to the camera module.
However, the camera module has a programmable setting to ignore its standby pin, and the microcontroller can be programmed to do whatever it wants with the (now ignored) standby pin.

The fact the camera controller could be reprogrammed from user space and then used to emulate a keyboard or mouse and bypass security / a virtual machine particularly devious, and shows how hard it is to trust even known hardware.
What should happen is that people should notice that they do not have a reliable process for either delivering the coins or canceling the transaction (if the coins cannot be delivered within some reasonable period of time).

This sort of settlement process is a scary thing to throw very much money at.
I understand the difference, but I still think some of the anger at the change in price is being misdirected.
Doubt it, why would they when they have made a killing on data alone?
Kudos for a stunningly misleading graph. The manipulation of numbers is impressive.

Whats wrong with it? Bitcoin to USD has dropped by 50% in the last few days. By taking a "monthly average" and graphing that they've been able to hide this discrepancy.

However there is no legitimate reason to graph the "monthly average" instead of just the price. It's a line graph so it can deal with a range of numbers quite well. In fact the graph has a total of 6 data points for the BTC to USD line, the whiff of BS is strong on this one.
I really like the workflow concept and I hope it works well. But what professional writer on earth would find any value in this feature that they're so proud of, SYNTAX CONTROL™? This isn't a knock on iA Writer specifically. Writing and word processing apps have been touting this kind of thing for a long time—15 years ago it was Flesch-Kincaid scoring. This feature stuck around for ages (it's still there, I presume) despite the niggling persistent truth that for any given text written for and by fluent English speakers, increasing its 'readability' only made it more stilted, patronizing, and sort of... lobotomized.

So now there's a tool that highlights parts of speech. The problem is the same as the readability scores: the level of insight that an ordinary, untrained, consumer-level word processor can bring to bear on written English is completely trivial compared to the needs of any writer. The ability to load in vocabulary lists for what you think are parts of speech, like the ability to count word and sentence length (less so, frankly), is like the ability to detail a car with a sledgehammer.

Editing prose is a matter of taste and thus a very, very difficult problem to solve programmatically. I don't blame software developers for continuing to try. I laud them. But to bring this feature to market—indeed, to make it the centerpiece of your pitch? You have to ask what segment of the target audience would benefit. What dedicated writer is actually so adrift in the English language that they need a simple, boneheaded machine to hold their hand through the most delicate and important part of their workflow?
Love all of this. I'm always looking for well tuned sites like yours to showcase. Can you share a URL?
Why do Germans shun Twitter?
Your original claim was that fiat currencies had intrinsic value. I don't see how 1) or 2) support the fact a fiat currency has intrinsic value. On the contrary, history shows that fiat currencies always significantly lose value over time. The USD for example has lost 85% of its value over the last 50 years. How is this observation compatible with any sort of intrinsic value? "Guns" and "taxes" did nothing to prevent this loss of value...

What you are trying to say, I believe, is that fiat currencies will likely have some value in the future because they are in demand (notably from taxes). That is true, but this is no different from Bitcoin: it has value because it is in demand. I would argue that the potential demand for Bitcoin is higher than the potential demand for USD, if only because there are billion of people across the world from countries with terrible fiscal policies for whom Bitcoin is clearly superior to their local inflation-ridden currencies. Compare this number to the merely 200 million tax payers in the USA.
He should just get a refund in USD for the original amount. This would be classified as a failed trade in any other market.
Openlaunchd
My work is heavily inspired by SolidPython. SolidPython, unfortunately has some shortcomings at the syntax (resulting in too many braces to read properly).

I do hope that the people will share the ruby code and not the generated openscad code, as that would be hardly readable.
Countermeasure: plastic http://eyebloc.com/ or just a small piece of paper on a tape, which looks better.
Malware that spontaneously lights the LED without activating the camera so the user becomes accustomed to a false indicator. Or have the LED turn anytime the machine is left idle (but still on) in order to burn out the LED.
No, it can run in user space by an unprivileged (non-root) application:

https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/36569
Some of the "Top Losers" items don't make sense:

* YahooJapan: (down arrow) 1.5 to 3.5%

* Microsoft: (down arrow) 1.2 to 3.4%

* LiveJasmin: (down arrow) 1.2 to 2.0%
That's true for traditional financial institutions that consider this the costs of doing business and can easily absorb such losses. Something like the $25mn Coinbase got in venture capital is lunch money for a JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs. BTC on the other hand has insane amount of volatility and the players are comparatively small. You may simply find yourself in a situation were they are simply unable to refund your losses and instead declare bankruptcy.
One problem with weed and mexico and percentages, is are you talking about dollar figures, which doesn't mean much, or land area indirectly under cartel control, which given news reports is more like 95% than 5%, which has indirect economic effects (every beheading results in $X lower tourism revenue, etc).

In comparison, 5% of the american economy would be bigger than waste services but smaller than non-durable manufacturing aka toilet paper and the like. Needless to say those guys in the USA don't control significant territory or intentionally behead people other than crazy industrial accidents. If the drug biz is 5% in MX it certainly has more impact than most other 5%-sized biz sectors.
It could be difficult for them to sustain revenue growth once they've sold to a critical mass of brokers...

https://ycharts.com/companies/Z/revenue_growth
Show HN: NSA developer recruiting video
actually...

IE7: 0.5% worldwide

IE8: 8.65% worldwide

IE9: 5.29% worldwide

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...
Yeah, it may well. But it won't need 10 billion of us around, that's for sure.

And humans can be useful to, as expendable biological robots that are cheap to manufacture and run while also being intelligent and versatile. Although most of us probably wouldn't call that living.
more parts, more cost, more to break, more dissatisfied customers, more customer service calls, more returns...
Same thing happened to me except for the bitcoin magically reappearing. Since this is now Coinbase's unofficial support forum - issue 52050 - 4 weeks and counting....
I'd like to point out that, as an early adopter, it really pains me when I see people using situations like this to argue for the viability of Bitcoin as a currency.

Bitcoin is going to succeed because anecdotally you risked far more than was responsible on a winning gamble?

Prices don't just increase inexhaustibly. Bitcoin isn't going to 'win' if the only value it has is that people can wake up to find their investment multiplied overnight. These are the elements of a ponzi scheme, and you shouldn't argue for its success because of your kitschy miracle story.
so ... oLance then?
It might not be a computer system problem.

Perhaps CoinBase (or a rogue employee) were doing some proprietary trading and screwed up badly?

Maybe they were trying to quietly recover their losses and weren't expecting a customer to cause a public outcry and force their hand?
>Seems I will have to re-evaluate what the internet is used for.

Enjoy your "evaluating."
No, they are not - only if you prove fraud. I tried to get an ACH back with BofA and I couldn't. The other party can reverse it, you can't yourself.
Can you calculate the average of those icons? I wonder if there is a pattern.
Somebody could make money from me by offering an accredited, for-credit course that mostly tests my understanding of a subject gained from reading I have already done. What I dislike intensely about MOOCs is that I still have to watch lectures (they are often mandatory, and are especially likely to be mandatory if you are taking the course for actual accredited credit). I can read much faster than anyone can talk. Prerecorded video lectures on MOOCs can be played back at double speed, but they are still linear-access rather than random-access that the way a well indexed book is. So I think there is still a market for online courses, but with the testing being more online and more decoupled from the instruction as such.
Sure, but the question is: if Coinbase placed the order today, that suggests they kept the ~12k loss for themselves. Is that rightful profit?
Can you give an example of a place where $2 peer hour is a lot? I often hear this type of assertion being made. I can believe that $2 per hour is enough to live off in some places, but I don't know of anywhere it would be considered "a lot."
As highlighted in the thread and in PG's reply, the default response to criticism of Coinbase is to nuke the conversation.

As PG wrote:

> Strictly speaking I should have killed the post entirely

Now, it's possible that other complaints on HN were nuked by PG or some other moderator, making it difficult for someone to find it.
>The world wasn't ready for computers, the internet and cryptographically secure communication either, but we still managed. For a forum that supposedly loves "disruption" everybody seems to be really frightened when it actually happens.*

Amen, brother. I've also been preaching cold fusion and perpetual motion machines like forever, and nobody's listening to me either. They are not ready for it.
> ... and no automated procedure for fighting deflation by printing money.

Depending on how you measure it, the share of credit which comprises the USD money supply dwarfs the amount of actual cash by something like 100:1. The cause of the deflation in the 2008 crisis was a sharp contraction in the amount of that credit, and the crisis only ended when that contraction stopped, not because of the Fed's relatively much less significant cash injections.

The sorts of sharp, catastrophic deflations that took hold in 2008 (or 1929 for that matter) are always caused by the bursting of a preceding credit bubble, usually created by central bank policy. I don't see how that kind of bubble can happen in Bitcoin. So the argument that "Bitcoin is deflationary" is true as far as it goes, but that doesn't mean that a Bitcoin-based economy would necessarily look exactly like, say, the Depression-era U.S. They're two very different kinds of deflation.

In the absence of major inflows & outflows of credit, the addition of liquidity to a market usually reduces the severity and frequency of big price swings. The very difficulty of issuing credit in BTC may very well prevent it from becoming a viable currency, but I think it's also an important brake on speculation.
We are the one percent? (sorry)
I suppose it depends heavily on application, but I don't think external transaction control is necessarily tied to performance. However, that being said, it's usually up to the user to come up with some sort of managed transaction on the application/middleware side which usually needs to be coupled with some sort of database locking mechanism. In reality, that's really hard to get right, even if you "get" multithreading.

Again, I think VoltDB is going places. I haven't been able to actually dig into it personally due to time constraints, and when I realized Command Logging was only available in the Enterprise Edition that effectively killed a few use cases for me.

One of the uses I hope to investigate is to use it as a nice materialized-view playground for bridging data on-demand from various databases, in coordination with Presto:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...

In any case, it's a shame it's rarely discussed on HN.
Good old Signal Intelligence.