skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's like nobody read the second half of my post. Yeah, we're better off for it if they effect change, and they're one of the few opportunities for it. I'd like if it happened, but I don't take their position seriously.
PayPal Acquires StackMob: Some Thoughts About What The Media Got Wrong
distraction free mode on gnome without menu bar!
Agreed. I'd be much more accepting of this approach if he mentioned his book at the beginning. I would've still read the whole thing.
I'm not convinced. Like gold, Bitcoin isn't an investment. Warren Buffet will tell you that investing is putting your money into something which creates real value, like a business. He would also tell you that you should stick to what you know, otherwise its just gambling. For me, that's investing my time and money into building my own income streams.

I don't really care that I could possibly get a return of 10x or more on my money in Bitcoin (or I could lose that much.) I could do the same with my businesses if I do them right, and having everything in Bitcoin would keep me from being able to allocate those resources elsewhere. While the rise in Bitcoin could be a one time thing before it stabilizes (or tanks,) my efforts elsewhere will provide me an income for a lifetime.

I'm more interested in using Bitcoin as a currency. A temporary hold for my most liquid assets which I can use to pay bills and other expenses. If I really believe in Bitcoin and want it to succeed, then I know I should try to run some of that activity on what's possible with Bitcoin now. The more mainstream and the larger the Bitcoin market, the more stable it should become. But I'm not interested in risking a large amount of assets to be a revolutionary or financial martyr.

ETA: To me, a currency is a place I can park my cash and know that it will hold approximately the same purchasing power as when I put it in there in the first place. I don't care to see it go up (as I said, I have other schemes for making it grow) and I really don't want it to go down. I just want it to be relatively stable. Living in the Philippines for a number of years and working with people around the world, there is 6 different currencies that regularly affect me or the people paying me. Since I have been here, the Peso has gained as much as 20% on the dollar. This sucks and it's not something I want to deal with. Bitcoin would drive me crazy.
And also for the n-th time these are people who's sole professional purpose is to be be fair judges and protect us from abuse, and they are apparently worse at it than J random hacker off the street.

Thats the core of what makes it shocking.

Lets say we had a business division of people focused intensely and solely on the job of applying computer science principles to practical net positive business applications. Shockingly there might exist a regional dysfunctional group where no one knows how to plug in a mouse or fizzbuzz. You can't rationalize away the incompetence of that particular IT department by making comparisons to the proverbial grandma can't be expected to run Ubuntu and pro football players shouldn't be expected to hack Clojure because that misses the point of why those specific societal positions exist in the first place.

Maybe even more on topic for HN, say someone wrote a garbage collector that actually stuffed the heap more full of garbage than when it started, and then when bugs are filed, rather than fixing the bugs, we get spin and rationalization that 99% of non-garbage collection code also put trash in the heap so its not really a bug that the garbage collector generates more garbage than it removes, etc.
Yes, if a plane explodes with a nuclear bomb, the centre of the explosion would be quite distinctive. We might not be able to tell for sure which plane it was, but we would know which planes were in the airport, perhaps which were around the centre, and thus which was likely to carry the bomb.
I can think of a few reasons... A new approach some merchants have taken is to accept only Bitcoin and thus eliminate payment processing fees. This leads to prices lower than their competitors can reach (stores such as Bitcoinstore.com and Bitcoinin.com). While the 2-3% may not matter much on small purchases, larger orders certainly will.

Another aspect is the peer to peer nature of Bitcoin. With Bitcoin you have the ability to send money to any other Bitcoiner, anywhere, instantly. That simply isn't present with traditional currencies. Now there are some inherent difficulties there. For instance, if I need to send money to my family on the other side of the country I can do it instantly, but they still need to be able to translate Bitcoin to whatever good/service they need. Currently that may require translating it into their local currency by some means, as not all that many local/physical merchants accept Bitcoin yet.
The story of tech is a wheel not a line. If you think the idea of a JVM is innovative, I've got a pascal P-system to sell you. Or tokenized basic.
The kernel debate is a different one.

Software can easily consist of loosely coupled pieces as source code and be compiled and run as a single monolith with hardly any performance loss at runtime (versus coupled source code).
Nope, it is just that I still have some hope in my abilities to guess the right password. I'm quite the optimist by nature ;)
This is great for hand editing SVG's, unless sublime is only handling bitmaps. I use SVG previews all the time in emacs for making little fixes.
Trojan.Skimer.18 infects ATMs
Maybe you're right, but in this case I do think it is somewhat transitive. Based on what I know about Jeremy, I'm inclined to think he is successful enough work somewhere that he considers 'worthy'. But I'm not certain enough to strongly argue this point :-).
Senator says House patent bill is ‘treating the symptoms instead of the disease’
One of the greatest investors of all-time, George Soros, made billions betting against the British Pound. A pretty old currency.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2773265/Billionaire-who-b...
Bitcoin fanboys have classic tunnel vision - they're so enamoured of the libertarian ideal of an anonymous crypto-currency that's not controlled by any government, that they ignored all the practical, economic and legal challenges it would need to overcome before it could become a real currency.

I am always amazed by the condescending tone of know it all speculators who think they've got it all figured it out. Labeling bitcoin enthusiasts as fanboys is a trite rhetorical tactic to marginalize their opinions, but what's really hilarious is that your tense (they ignored all challenges, an obvious falsehood btw) seems to imply that you've somehow definitively demonstrated that bitcoin is destined for failure. Guess what? Bitcoin was chugging along just fine before the Chinese hit the scene, in fact, black market merchants had no problem accepting bitcoin as their primary source of payment long before the financial world had even heard of bitcoin. I applaud your risky predictions though (bitcoin will fail, the price will drop if a government clamps down on bitcoin, bitcoin technology will be used in future financial systems), truly marked insight, you should recommend a reading list.

Anyway, I expect you to headline the inevitable "Bitcoin Once Again Breaks 1k" thread with a post linking to your comment here, explaining why you were full of shit... Though, I won't hold my breath since intelligent individuals like yourself will always find a reason to consider bitcoin a failure until its adopted as legal tender (something that the "fanboys" realize is completely unnecessary for the success of bitcoin).
You make a good point. If China shuts off entirely then the potential size of Bitcoin's network could decrease significantly. That's not to say however that Bitcoin doesn't still have a significant and increasing network of users. There have been significant gains outside of China as well recently. A large contributor to the high was resultant from the US Senate Hearings which seemed to somewhat validate Bitcoin's legality in the U.S., the world's largest economy.
Your reply makes me think: You should buy more. Invest as much as you can!
"Talk is a set of protocols that allow two people to have an interactive dialogue via a computer."

I remember the first time I used talk. I think it is what got me hooked on UNIX.
Neither North Korea (nor Cuba, nor Muslim Arab countries) are under any risk. South Korea (and the US, and Israel) are only convenient strawmen to prop tyrannies.
'The wave of stuff that's happening' is not some crazy new paradigm shift. It's remote network services. Why you would use a remote network service when all your files are available locally, I have no idea. People are weird.

The easiest way to think of this is in terms of network architecture. A Client-Server model of network architecture is by definition centralized; you have one or more clients, and only one server. The client connects to the server to do whatever it wants. In a decentralized model, the server is any node with the ability to serve the requests of the clients - which often includes other clients.

It would take too much time to explain how all of that stuff works, but suffice to say that just because there's more than one computer involved or more than one process involved does not make it a decentralized service. If the client is still just talking to one thing (on the frontend), it's basically centralized.

To explain how centralized architecture is faster, consider a simple example where there is one client, and three nodes distributing a file. The client has to first find and identify the nodes, which usually takes more time than just resolving a single server, because it has to "search" for its peer nodes. Then it has to request a file, which is probably split up into pieces and little requests are sent to each node. Each node then sends the client the pieces. The client then reassembles them on its end to create the finished file. Compare this to a server, where from lookup to file transfer, there is one continuous operation; there is no need to communicate with multiple nodes or track multiple connections or piece together files. Also with the distributed model, you are at the mercy of all the nodes in the network, not just one, and all of the different networks those nodes might be on. You also may end up doing 3x the network operations, depending on protocols, chunk sizes, etc. Because you can't bet on the source of the file coming from one reliable place, network latency may go up, and bandwidth may also go down - in practice over the internet this is virtually guaranteed vs a central server's large pipe.
Gasoline has tremendous energy density compared to other forms of storage. If you need that energy to be portable (like in a car or truck), you may still want to use petroleum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
One of my favourite frameworks! I abandoned Rails for Camping when I saw how easily I could grok the entire framework. One thing I liked doing when building web apps was to rip out the View infrastructure so that I could more easily render alternative formats. I've written a couple of articles on Camping here [1], [2] that people might be interested in (be gentle, my writing wasn't as good 6 years ago)

[1] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/23/three-methods-for-s... 3 methods for simulating render_component in Camping
[2] http://roberthahn.ca/articles/2007/07/22/camping-without-the... Camping without the View
There's a pretty neat Sublime plugin[0] which shows the base64 string of any image you open in the editor. This has saved me time on a lot of occasions.

[0] https://github.com/tm-minty/sublime-text-2-image2base64
Do you have a blog, or do you intend to put it on Github?

A PHP parser written in PHP that generates bytecode for LuaJIT or HHVM's JIT-runtime would be cool. I was thinking about this too. And it would be fun to hack around :)

FB's HHVM JIT and its bytecode format "hhir" is explained is the following recent blog post: http://www.hhvm.com/blog/2027/faster-and-cheaper-the-evoluti...

LuaJIT2 and DynASM: http://luajit.org/

[edit:] I found your repo: https://github.com/cretz/meh ...interesting, I am reading the code atm
You can't have 20-40% weekly swings in an asset and still expect to use it as currency. Neither merchants, nor consumer can trust it, and speculators just sit on it and distort the entire market. I hate that Bitcoin as a currency is almost worthless.
I think another vital part of describing the Haskelly abstraction type is the existence of laws. It's not just that an object fits an interface but further that some non-trivial amount of its behavior is specified by the laws that constrain it.

That might seem to not be a huge deal, but mathematicians are aware and programmers should become increasingly aware that good choices of constraining laws allow for both massive expressivity while also having enormous capability for anticipation and introspection. My favorite example is the preponderance of groups showing their large variety coupled with the intense, sophisticated structure unveiled during the Moonshine project which attempted to categorize all the kinds of groups that can be derived just from their core, law-fixed properties.

That's why the monad laws are so important. They extend the tiny, simple interface into a robust method of reasoning that cannot leak in so far as the precise promises it makes... The promises derivable from its laws.

(Unless you don't have a "real" monad)
And a feedstock for herbicides, pesticides, (some) fertilizers, or on a meta level above those, its a feedtock for "human food".

Of course you could eat the algae straight, or feed it to hogs and then eat hogs, but variety being the spice of life its a perfectly valid alternative tech to turn sunlight into food.
>> Personally, I believe currencies are better when they're regulated by governments.

Stop believing that. The exact opposite is true. If we could all use a currency that no one could manipulate at the press of a button somewhere behind the scenes, we would. But as long as governments control money, we're shit out of luck there - they're printing and borrowing money as they please, debasing their currencies and causing all kinds of grief to the little folks, ie. us.

You're right to be skeptical about Bitcoin though. It's basically a "speculative investment vehicle", as someone mentioned. Until that changes, you should be cautious about buying them. The gold rush is probably over.

( Or not. But no one knows. )
I'm exactly the same. And it annoys me greatly that being hypersocial and actually wanting to sit around in noisy environments is considered a prerequisite for many jobs. Not everyone wants to work that way.
I continually find this particular point useful and enlightening. (Joel's whole corpus of stuff is worth a read. At the risk of causing a hacker news "joel storm" of submissions, check out the pricing/segmentation piece: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...)

For example, after discussing the subject of promises (in the sense of the tool to manage and abstract asynchronous program flow) with a colleague, it occurred to me that the reason we care about async behaviour is that a "function call" is a leaky abstraction, in that it takes a variable amount of time.

We think of a function call as "doing X, Y and Z". The fact that it takes time to do it, blocking our 'thread of execution' causes us the problem that we can solve with the overhead of async programming (or threading, or...)

(By 'function call' I'm glossing over system call, library call, embedded cpu-eating loop.)

From this perspective, you can see that an alternative to working around the leak is plugging (some of) the leaks - which is the approach golang takes, by shuffling around threads of execution to avoid them being stalled by blocking system calls.

That perspective is useful to me and helps me understand why I think I prefer the golang approach, "more robust abstraction".
The worst I ever saw was at a govt site, where you could not see a single inch of floor space, for the tangled mass of cables that ran across it. They had laid scaffolding planks across the top of the sea of cables, to walk on.
Under Amazon’s CIA Cloud: The Washington Post
>A new approach some merchants have taken is to accept only Bitcoin and thus eliminate payment processing fees.

Don't count on it. Processing services will rise up to automate various aspects of bitcoin transactions, and you'll still pay those fees.
* Windows: SSE support is no longer required for 32 bit builds

I wonder how long we're going to be held back by (very) legacy machines. Valve also recently dropped SSE2 support because 0.0004% of their users complained about it.
It's for Siggraph, so there's a time limit.
Goes to show how much a catchy title matters. :-/
If it's technically possible at all then it's 100% true.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_...

"According to former NSA officials interviewed for this article, TAO's mission is simple. It collects intelligence information on foreign targets by surreptitiously hacking into their computers and telecommunications systems, cracking passwords, compromising the computer security systems protecting the targeted computer, stealing the data stored on computer hard drives, and then copying all the messages and data traffic passing within the targeted email and text-messaging systems. The technical term of art used by NSA to describe these operations is computer network exploitation (CNE).
TAO is also responsible for developing the information that would allow the United States to destroy or damage foreign computer and telecommunications systems with a cyberattack if so directed by the president. The organization responsible for conducting such a cyberattack is U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), whose headquarters is located at Fort Meade and whose chief is the director of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander."

You've seen Stuxnet and Flame which proves that they have zero-days and the code to access even networks not connected to the internet.

At least 3 submarines (including the USS Jimmy Carter) have the capability to tap into communications cables in the ocean which we've been doing it for at least 40 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Underwater_Reconnaissa...

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb305/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

Also more relating to the original article:

http://www.nti.org/

http://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/NPIHP

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/index.htm
Enough already with 'minimum wage increase' demands
Sentry is great, but I currently need something that will log timeseries (i.e. more like an actual syslog, so I can see how debug messages progressed in time). I tried Logstash, but it was a bit hard to set up.
I honestly can't say if you guys haven't read Douglas Hofstadter or if you have read it and love it a bit too much.
NGOs or foundations are perfect for this. They have funded many similar for-profit start ups in this space. Scroll through http://www.impact4change were you may find some information.
Strictly speaking, you would only lose 1x your money on Bitcoin ;) Otherwise, I agree with what you said.

I would prefer to invest in something where their assets will be used to make the world a better place. Not only do I (hopefully) gain long-term value, but also moral satisfaction. If you happen to believe that there will be human value in Bitcoin-as-a-currency, consider investing in the infrastructure rather than the coins.
These look really cool, but what is the target market for $3000+ desktop machines? I don't doubt that there are some people who could take advantage of that much power on a desktop, but it seems like kind of a niche product. I work with machines that do use their 256GB of RAM, but they're all servers. I'm a Linux user, so maybe the thin workstation model feels more natural to me. My MBP has 8GB of RAM and I rarely even come close to using that much, even running two or three VMs at a time.
sorry: www.impact4change.com...;-)
Most of the VFX industry releases the majority of their techniques as papers, etc. Some of it's kept a secret, but that's happening less and less.

There's a lot of competition, but still there's a lot of open stuff like OSL, OIIO, OCIO, OpenSubDiv that multiple facilities contribute to.
A tasty looking chocolate bar for the Internet of Things
is there some description of how this differs from sublime text 2, e.g. what new features and/or improvements it brings?
The idea is to use an instance of logger to store messages related to some event, like serving a particular request or running a background job. If nothing happends, you discard everything and don't pollute logs. If you're not so lucky, it will flush all the messages, so you get a better picture of what was happening before the error. Compared to having just an info level logs that usually omit many relevant details.
Yeah, the paper talks about how to vary the parameters to simulate powder, wet snow, slush, etc. These techniques were developed for the movie Frozen, and to my eye (I grew up with snow too) they did a great job of simulating all manner of snow and ice.
See http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/10/06/tedx-prank-philadel...
You looking over someone's shoulder or them looking over yours is definitely not pair programming though. It is exhausting though, I agree with that part.
The point Elon Musk makes is about information equality. It seems you were lucky enough to be at a place in time where a good amount of information was readily available. Not me. I had to depend on very old encyclopedias. No libraries available and no one to ask. Now days, thanks to the web, I have the same general access as you. Which is his point about equality.

When he mentions the president, the point seems to be that the person holding that position could simply ask and get the information he desired. That option was not available to the masses until web search came to be. And think about it. You do have access to a lot of sensitive information. Such as updated maps of every country. Direct and instant communication with people from other nationalities. And so on.
Give it some time. A child crawls before it starts walking.
All New Mac Pro Available Starting Tomorrow
There are already several such services, the most major being Bitpay. However, with their software as a service model they don't charge a percentage of every transaction, but rather a small recurring fee for using the service. Thus as transaction volume increases costs per transaction decrease.

The major cost for current payment processors (i.e. mastercard, paypal, etc) is that they end up third party mediators in disputes regarding chargebacks. The Bitcoin protocol, which inherently disallows chargebacks, eliminates much of that need, thus the fees decrease. What you're paying for with Bitpay or Coinbase is a piece of software that interacts with the Bitcoin protocol for you, not a traditional payment processor that ends up mediating disputes.
> but it seems like kind of a niche product

It has always been a niche product.
Why do you think that TDD prohibits you from using a whiteboard to design your algorithms and data structures beforehand? As far as I can tell, doing that work, then writing your first test is just TDD done well.
It's easier to transfer online than dollars. You can send your bitcoins directly to another person for free or close to free. IF the use becomes widespread, I think the utility of this is obvious... it replaces Dwolla entirely and most of the function of online payment systems.

The problem is the volatility. I'm not sure how that could be fixed.