skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
libpurple saving passwords in plain text is the correct decision. If it did encrypt them, it would also have to hold the key, so it would only add a false sense of security.

The only improvement would be a hardware-backed secret storage mechanism, but those aren't exactly ubiquitous.
"Why the Internet Will Never be Newspaper"

It doesn't have to fit the role of traditional currency because it isn't.
What does bitcoin aim to achieve?

I've heard so many different things, and as soon as one gets challenged someone will pop up and say "well it was never meant for that, it does these other five things".

Frankly if it was to be a currency, yes, a central bank would be a feature. But it's not a currency, its economic presets would make it a really bad one and its lack of central control makes it very prone to instability.

It's not really a very good payment method either, because it takes time to confirm and there's no chargeback facility, something that has given consumers the confidence to shop online and really helped along the boom in internet retail.
Bitcoin is already used a currency right now but I believe what the author is trying to say is it has not lasting power. Which i believe it to be true.

In its current form, its too complex for non-tech savvy people and what makes bitcoin bitcoin will not last more then 10 years as processing power increases over time.
Does a lack of inflation equal deflation? I've not heard that one before.
Depends what you include in "code"; your program might be a one-liner, but its language environment and operating system are the product of huge teams. It's a kind of modularisation that's so effective we don't think of it as a division of labour.

One person writing all the code for a system from the bare metal up is pretty much limited to embedded systems now.
And the actual evidence behind the author's claim that deflationary currencies aren't successful?

crickets

Gold has been deflationary for all of recorded history, insofar as I'm aware (ie: rate of gold discovery was slower than economic expansion), yet it seemed to work pretty well for a little while.
This! Bitcoin is an investment and good one at that for short term gains. Its the tulip craze with bytes.
Homelessness is scary, especially in this society. But there is not some number of startup failures after which I'm at risk of spending every day yelling gibberish and spitting on passers-by. And that stuff doesn't seem to happen in the valley, possibly because they were all drawn to the city where not so many people drive everywhere.
People saying Bitcoin won't work because of the instable price are just dumb.

Can anyone bring up some charts from when the first 'normal' (non-crypto) currencies were invented? Let's see if those were so stable from the first year onward.

Earlier today I just happened to look up inflation rates from european countries before the Euro: one was nearly 30% in 1980. "Omg 30% price change in just a year," yeah and even that seems to have worked out fine. They were even allowed to join the Eurozone.
This article's thesis is way off. I'm pretty sure, when someone complains about "crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash", their concern is not about the possibility of themselves becoming like that.

Ben Stroud, you live in London, why are you writing about San Francisco anyway?
Oh! I watched it muted. Derp.
According to the poorly thought out theory that deflationary currencies are by necessity bad currencies?
The author obviously understands that Bitcoin has no central bank - his point is that if it ever were to be used as a currency it would need one. Would you like your salary paid in bitcoins? You wouldn't know from one month to the next what you could afford to buy since prices would be so volatile. Bitcoin might have other uses like easy electronic payments - but the author points out that if you want to buy something legally it is quite convenient already today with the currencies we have.
>> Gold has been deflationary for all of recorded history, insofar as I'm aware (ie: rate of gold discovery was slower than economic expansion), yet it seemed to work pretty well for a little while.

Gold has been a terrible choice of currency in the past. Read about it. There are a variety of very good reasons (and probably one or two bad ones, sure) why most modern countries have decoupled currency from precious metals.
Creating the school we would want to have attended
What fascinates me is how the principle of warranted search and seizure can be so completely ignored in the presence of an easy, painless way to seize and search information. It's really that simple: you either believe it's right, or it's wrong, and the possibility of doing it at a large scale is truly orthogonal to the question of what is right.

What is not in doubt is that the data from a panopticon used by a benevolent organization would be a powerful protection. But that same argument could have been used to subvert the 4th Amendment. Indeed, that argument could be used to subvert every amendment in the Bill of Rights, since a benevolent actor, by construction, would only subvert those rights with good reason.

The lack of thoughtfulness about what the Constitution means, and how it applies in a world where government wishes to piggy back on ubiquitous corporate surveillance (and extend it), is fascinating. One can imagine the creation of a new police robot that knows when you are not in your home, and which lets itself in, reads all your documents and catalogues all of your belongings, disturbing nothing. Would that be okay?
I thought it's part of established economic theory that monopolies have an incentive to invest in infrastructure, as they are best positioned to reap the results.

Explains Google's Internet balloons, and many other investments.
Bend over and shut up we are good peeps and the others that will rape you if we "pull-out" would be much worse.

Sad to see a programmer be so lost. Kudos for the post but if the NSA was squashing terrorist attacks daily with evidence of their efficacy they would be screaming it from the roof tops.

Snowden proved the implicit insecurity of information aggregation on such a massive scale and if he had access so will nation states... the one that I fear most is my own county.

I am a patriot too, just sad.
Add an online photo editor to your web site
Look up the Euro. That was relatively recent.

And no, it didn't have fluctuations anything like BTC.
For some reason, the entire page has a random rotation and skew applied to it with CSS.
> When the demand for Bitcoin goes up, they need to print more to keep it from skyrocketing.

To some degree, this already works. If the price of bitcoin gets high enough relative to the price of electricity and ASICs, then more bitcoins are mined, right?
It isn't. The correct decision would be to save the password in the operating system keychain, like Empathy does (or Messages on Mac, or name any others). Browsers also use keychains. On Windows, you can use the Crypto API to obtain an intermediate level of security.
Disrupt all the nimby's who lobby against building additional housing. Landowners hate new housing because it drives down the value of their assets. If anyone's truly despicable in this culture it's the landowners who refuse to let more housing come into the market.
Einstein had all kinds of struggles in his personal life. Maybe he could have been happier and even more productive. Don't be selfish and cruel to Einstein. He's not your physics monkey. He deserved happiness as well.
This armchair psychology fails any basic sanity check. If the SV rich worry they'll become poor, why wouldn't they support more public safety nets? And why anyone fear a day when they are "not white"? A startup failure does not change skin color.
Discipline is not something a person is born with it is learned. You my friend are in the learning phase (which i'm not sure ever stops).
I'd never given much thought to how corporate the tech world must seem to the uninitiated. I really like the author's observation that this misunderstanding could be behind a lot of anti-tech sentiment.

It makes sense that without any insight into how code works or what it makes possible it could be hard to differentiate popular tech from (in the author's words) its embedded corporate agendas.
There are many bitcoin competitors now and I find it interesting that many of them are the creations of a specific political and economic line of thought.

While bitcoin supporters tend to hate the idea of inflation, there are others coins that have inflation built in to encourage spending -- a kind of progressive version of bitcoin.

Here's a random example of a coin designed around a specific economic philosophy:

>Unlike Bitcoin, Freicoin has a demurrage fee that ensures its circulation and bearers of the currency pay this fee automatically. This demurrage fee was proposed by Silvio Gesell to eliminate the privileged position held by money compared with capital goods, which is the underlying cause of the boom/bust business cycle and the entrenchment of the financial elite, and has been tested several times with positive results.

http://freico.in/

(no idea if that has merit but it was the one that stuck in my head because it was so clearly articulated on their homepage)

Whether bitcoin itself last who knows, but probably some descendant will be around at the very least at the protocol level.
This almost reads like a parody. It's as if the author completely disregards the fact that the Austrian school exists at all.

I particularly like the reference to the 'deflationary' nature of the Great Depression while glossing over the fact that the prescribed solution (the establishment of a central bank) occurred less than two decades before it.
Why Instagram Direct May Fail
MINARET was used in the 60's and 70's. It led to the passing of FISA, which made it illegal to look at or pass on US citizen data unless a judge suspected them of being a foreign agent.
It really depends on how widely it is reported. Government employees even those with clearance are prohibited from looking at the wikileaks cables. If it makes it into the NYT and they see it, then it is ok. But they can't actively dig for it. Direct from the mouths of government employees.
> Thanks for letting me know about parallel construction - I hadn't heard of it.

Seriously? Have you - as far as the NSA's activities goes - been living under a rock?

... oh.
I remember a time when ThinkGeek sold a lot of cool truly nerdy products like Linux mugs and Tux mascots. I'm not a big fan of Star Wars, so the licenced Star Wars products don't appeal to me. I respect ThinkGeek as a company, but I think they need to go back to their roots a little bit if they want to move forward.
The fact that most credit card entry fields don't accept spaces gives me hope that most spambots can't turn " at " into "@".
Agreed on both counts: someone had to write those library functions, and this was just an example.

However, the author starts by talking about a "holy war between C and Fortran" and then proceeds to write... well, assembly language using the C compiler. So the summary could be "assembly language can be made more efficient than Fortran, and C lets you coax the compiler into writing the assembly language you want". I guess this could be seen as a win for C, but I'm not so sure...
Many, but maybe (probably) not most.
Gold didn't work very well as a currency. There is plenty of proof, but just look at the first graph in this article. http://fabiusmaximus.com/2010/09/13/21514/ Industrial production and when a country left the gold standard. Obviously clinging to the gold standard for so long was a huge mistake.

(my point is purely related to that one graph, not the rest of the article (that I have not read))
You have

(Integral a, Num b) => a -> b

It's just the function fromIntegral. You don't have the opposite, if, by which, you mean

(Num a, Integral b) => a -> b

I was talking about giving the same expression multiple types. So you can have:

n :: Num a => a
n = 1

and then do

n :: Integral a => a

But again, we're talking about subtyping, and this isn't it. Consider the original problem, where we want a vector of objects of different concrete type. Haskell 98 doesn't help us here. The type

Num a => [a]

is inhabited by heterogeneous lists.

The problem can be circumvented as described in the OP, or by using existential types. However, we still have hetergeneous lists, but the concrete type has been abstracted.
"...what Bitcoin really needs is a central bank to stabilize its value."

Seriously?
Xerox PARC may never have produced the modern computer if there had been an explicit profit goal.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

The "spectacular failure" here was not in the goal of the lab -- the problem was how Xerox management dealt with its results.

Yes, I agree 100%.
Bitcoin aside just reading the first few sentences really shows what a sad state our economics education is in. People literally, dogmatically believe something that is so blatantly false you'd think you would have to be mentally handicapped to believe it. Yet they do.
I'm happy with sharelatex (i'm not involved with the company, just a happy user)

They have a few glitches here and there but convenient enough to draft some papers in the browser
That proves itself: A deflationary currency can't replace the dollar, because the dollar isn't deflationary.

However, the present system is perhaps not the only possible system. Some alternative schools of thought in economics see possibilities beyond systematic inflation.
Yes, I think HTML is superior to LaTeX for modern documents. The reason LaTeX is still popular is mostly inertia.
Some time ago I saw someone post this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6816649

It left me questioning the authors motives. On one hand, if the author intended the event to be about business networking (as he, being a ceo of a startup, are wont to do) then the choice of having it done on thanksgiving to be an odd one, but ultimately harmless.

If the offer was more of making meaningful social connections then I would have found that to be troubling. I was particularly convinced of this when I saw in a bold faced declaration, the author stated that "No one should be alone for thanksgiving". No one should be alone for thanksgiving but it seemed targeted at the members of the tech community and not the community at large. You know, the people without a home, people with fractured families.

I could be wrong. Perhaps he advertised on the street. But if he pointed people to upvote it on HN, then it just reinforces my opinion.
Ever used Pandoc? http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

You can embed LaTeX into your Markdown, and still have it render to many targets (HTML, PDF, etc.) with full linking and fidelity.
Yes, but you don't copy all communications to try and find the astonishingly small number from the most closed-off country in the world. This is how the NSA gets smart people to build something they would never set out to build--an all powerful global snapshot of data.

They tell you about North Korea and your radioactive future. You like big problems and give it your best effort, perhaps thinking that you had a small part in saving the world. Then one day you read in the New York Times that your well intended project doesn't just scoop up communications from North Korean thugs, but what you helped make is collecting communications on everyone. It's helping the DEA illegally bust people. It's helping diplomats illegally snoop on our allies. It's helping keep US companies aware of what non-US companies are doing. Etc etc.

tl;dr Anyone could be a terrorist, everyone must be monitored.
Let T be the total amount of money in circulation in a given currency C. When you see a value X in units of C, convert it to C' by X in C' = X / T. There you have it, every currency is already trivially equivalent to Bitcoin in that the supply of C' is fixed at 1.

How they're _not_ equivalent is that the creation of money in existing currencies is centrally controlled. You can get a clearer view of what happens when money is printed by looking at C' rather than C.

For simplicity, pretend there's only the Mint (can create money) and the Public (can't). Initially, Mint has X C and Public has Y C. In C', this is X/(X+Y) C' and Y/(X+Y) C'. Then Mint decides to create Z C. Mint now has (X+Z) / (X+Y+Z) C' and Public has X / (X+Y+Z). The Mint has effectively transferred money away from Public. All arguments against deflation are, basically, Mint will now redistribute the money in such a way as to stimulate the economy.
Right, but which balls make it through and which don't isn't random -- that's decided by the holes. It is tricky though. I guess it depends on what you consider to be within the system and outside of it. In this example you have randomly generated the holes, whereas I don't think there's anything random about what it means for something to be dead or alive.

For example, we might say that children born with fatal/harmful defects are "unlucky," which is true, but this is a short-term perspective. Over larger timescales, we can say (poetically) that the rarity of these particular kinds of DNA configurations is a "design choice" rendered by the laws of nature. The larger the time scale, the less meaningful individual "chance" things are and the more "systemic" factors come into play. This is probably an instance of "the law of large numbers".

--

Another important thing to point out is that the environment is dynamic and species interact with eachother in all sorts of ways. The concept of a single species evolving in vacuo is very dry, but the reality is different. Throw a few different species into the mix and suddenly you have an explosion in the kinds of behavior and phenomena you will find. I think intelligence is one of those phenomena.

In other words, the natural world has all the depth and richness necessary to account for the "enlightened" properties that you attribute to life. In fact, if I had to pick one gripe I have with religion, it would be that it blinds people as to the raw amazingness and beauty that can be found in the natural world.
Rumor: Modern UI May be Optional in Future Windows Phone
If people are capable of more profound thinking, I'm all for it. But most people don't think in a vacuum; they think when forced by circumstances. And then what they think about are the obvious sources of pain and the obvious actors.

From what I've seen, using scary stories to encourage people to think harder before experimenting just increases fear and inertia. That lengthens feedback loops that are usually too long already. I'd much rather people just try something thoughtfully now and learn from it.
There's a fixed quantity of it like gold and gold worked as a currency for a very long time. If Bitcoin fails its certainly not because of its "deflationary nature." What you think it a basic understanding of economics is obvious nonsense. How could people have it so twisted?
What I get from this article is "hey, what if we use HTML instead of LaTeX?" Unfortunately the answer to this is, "HTML is insufficient to specify all the things you need to make a paper publishable." LaTeX is a full-strength gnarly language because it had to be. If you were targeting digital distribution only, HTML (and the author really means "HTML plus CSS plus probably a small subset of JavaScript") would be maybe-kinda-sorta-plausible, but you can already go from LaTeX to HTML --- so why not write your original in the more powerful language and simplify it down to HTML when you need that? HTML+CSS+JS is actually not an improvement on PDFs, because you've got executable code in there and you'll go right down the same security-problems rabbit hole that PDF did.

To oversimplify: LaTeX is not perfect but is much smarter than the author is giving it credit for. This is that stereotypical Unix learning experience ("feature X is enormously frustrating, why can't we do something simpler" -> time passes -> "oh, feature X is actually spectacularly useful when viewed through the right lens") going on.
"homeless people deserve our sympathy and help"

San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people. Yet also seems to have more of them than any city I have ever been too. I wonder why?

Actually I don't. "Sympathy" and "help" exacerbate the problem instead of resolving it.
The bile, it burns, it burns!
"But I digress – the rare cases of unauthorized data retrieval were not polygraph-trained foreign spies trying to infiltrate the Agency, but rather regular employees illicitly viewing communications for personal gain."

There are articles suggesting this is happening many thousands of times per year - shouldn't each of these 'regular employees' be put on trial? They have committed serious crimes.
I grew up in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. and saw it both ways. Butter on sandwiches just sort of seems like just another way to make one, like some people like Mayonnaise (I don't) or not. I'd probably put it on a jam sandwich, or a ham and cheese, but not a PB&J (the Peanut Butter takes on the same role).

Of course I also grew up in very immigrant heavy areas so that may have been part of it.
I am horrified by this essay. It's overwhelming how much disturbing information is in here. I am deeply saddened that someone so young has had their beliefs so strongly influenced.

Some of the most disturbing passages:

> it would seriously impair our ability to spy if we couldn't gather everything.

It is saddening to hear someone so young say this.

> I am an American patriot. Patriotism to me simply means that I care about the US and its future.

How often is the word "patriot" used internally in the NSA? Who is building up this false hero, blind to his own oppression? A synonym might be a "justifier" or "oppressor" or even more simply "someone who has not yet been oppressed."

The rest speak for themselves:

> The NSA copy of my emails will only be viewed if the Agency can convince a judge that I might be a foreign agent.

> The vast majority of unauthorized retrievals of US-person data are unintentional.

> ...the rare cases of unauthorized data retrieval were ... regular employees illicitly viewing communications for personal gain

> XKeyscore ... was an analyst tool that I had access to.

> NSA employees are the law-abiding type.

I am scared to respond to this article. How easily could I be labeled a "foreign agent"? Does criticizing the system mean I'm working for another country? Did the NSA try to demonize Snowden as working for the Russians? Everything you have written has only increased my fears. To hear the blind loyalty to the system that comes from the NSA's own employees means that nothing is safe.

I hope that later in your life, as you grow as a person and a citizen, you see the evil in the system you colluded with, and experience a deep regret about your actions. The same regret that lay citizens feel when we learn our tax dollars have built a criminal entity. The regret that we did not try harder to stop it, to read up on laws like the Patriot Act and protest more. The regret of our collective ignorance that has built the tool to intrude on everything we do.
If we commit suicide by destroying the constitution and the freedoms it embodies then the terrorist goal of destroying America is achieved. I see your point though, they would not deserve credit for our failure to stand up to an internal threat, so consider it poetic license to dramatize my point.
Deflation is when prices drop due to currency scarcity, and inflation is when prices rise due to currency abundance. The only perfect zero is when the amount of currency in circulation perfectly matches the amount of economic activity. A cryptocurrency might be able to make that happen, but central banks usually err on the side of 1-2% inflation since deflation is so much worse than inflation.
In my defense, the actually aggressive page was not as useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duh
Hey, I backed that guy's Kickstarter! And now that I read his post I just cancelled my pledge.