skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
According to this article,

> Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion.

This assumes that the government needs to know how much money you have / make in order to tax you. There is an alternative -- to instead tax physical property (in particular real estate) and/or physical goods moving across borders.

This alternative has been used for most of human history; the income tax is a fairly recent thing. (In the US, it is theoretically a "temporary" measure to pay for World War I.)
In simpler English it wasn't the deflation that nearly destroyed the world economy, it was the near-destruction of the world economy that triggered the deflation.
From the blog post:

"This is a one-time investment, not an ongoing expense."

I like the idea and it makes sense.

But I think it has to be restated in a way to not
sound as if there is a hidden cost that pops
out when getting to the fine print. That creates a negative
in a buyers mind [1]. Needs to be restated in more of a "ok I understand makes sense" or might backfire.

[1] Example: I had a building security system quote (cameras). Company said "we take care of the installation and everything". Quote states more or less "oh yeah but you have to supply 110vac outlets where we will put cameras". Oh great what is that going to cost me? Surprise. To me "everything" means turn key. Doesn't mean I am right but that is what I (not dealing with this every day) thought. My reaction. Had the salesperson said "Installation includes everything but electrical and that's normally $100 per outlet" prior to the quote I would have felt much better about the process.
Amazing! thanks for share.
Something else caused the deflation (basically the collapse of CDOs). But the deflation caused the damage.

It's like the difference between "his car slammed into that other car" and "he was drunk". Drunk caused the accident. Accident caused the damage.
"They could make Visual studio better than XCode for iOS apps. They could make a really nice Android toolchain too."

Wouldn't this just lead to more and better iOS and Android apps?
> In the following paragraph she dissects her reaction and tries to reason about it--seems to come to the conclusion that she was being emotional, which isn't an unreasonable response in that situation.

And follows up with:

> I’ve struggled with this for over a decade now, coming to terms with the humanity of those I believe oppress me.

And the title is: "Sexism and Tech and Love"

> Wow, you must be a riot to work with.

I'm not a diplomat, nor a politician, nor a kindergarden teacher, I'm a programmer, I don't get paid to talk nice to people, I get paid to get stuff done to best of my abilities, and forgive me if I dare use harsh words towards people who deserve it.
> if the number of people using Bitcoin continues to grow, our institutions and infrastructure will have to evolve to address the problems mentioned by the author

So basically Bitcoin will be successful if Bitcoin will be successful.

>society will need [...] substantially better authentication mechanisms, [...] more secure financial institutions, and more technologically-savvy regulatory and policing institutions.

This is describing how to improve online banking. Isn't Bitcoin supposed to present an alternative to that?
Actually, you don't use IP addresses at all when tracing Bitcoins. You subpoena the exchanges for customer information and trace from there.
I imagine oDesk is fine as long as you don't have any problems. They don't see blackmail as breaking their rules though, e.g. a contractor blackmailing you for a good rating. That contractor gets to stay on the platform. I have had this experience.
Aaaaand the predictable gaggle of defensive men in tech swoop in to dismiss and belittle the author's concerns about feeling dismissed and belittled. I long for the day when this industry acquires the maturity and self-awareness to understand just how unwelcome it makes itself for women.
>it's not trolling, he raises many valid points and he's not the first to do it.

Though he has done much fine writing before, I was really disappointed by this post by Charlie Stross. The arguments are weak and poorly supported.

* The whole power consumption debate is based on a single out-of-date estimation at a bitcoin site.

* The Gini Coefficient argument is based on a small survey from 2011 when Bitcoin was new and practially unknown with a tiny userbase of early adopters.

* The point about malware mining is also outdated, and it refers to a problem that is going away fast. 99% of Bitcoin mining is now done with custom ASIC chips, which are vastly better at it than PC CPU/GPU hardware. Using a botnet for mining is becoming more and more pointless every week.

[Botnets can still make a little money mining scrypt-based Litecoin, but that is also become less and less profitable, and ASIC chips are now on their way to that market, too.]

* Many of his opinions about the "evil" of the Bitcoin network are just laughable. The world is evil. Nations go to war and millions die for no good reason. Millions of lives and entire nations are destroyed by the drug trade and the 'war' on drugs. International banks, like HSBC, launder hundreds of billions in drug funds. That is the status quo. In that context, Bitcoin is a tiny drop in a big and toxic ocean.
Points of view - essays written to celebrate Alan Kay's 70th birthday
JFDI[1] is also the name of and Incubator out of Singapore, run by Meng Weng Wong[2]. Meng is the founder of Pobox.com

1. http://jfdi.asia/

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Weng_Wong
Sterling to go plastic, Bank of England decides
This is correct, but this stuff is particularly hard. I would even say it's the hardest part of our profession. Some people try to invent reusable abstractions, small (map, fold, zip) and big (AbstractFactory, Command, Composite), but to attack this problem really efficiently you need to be able to come up with your own ones, preferably those that are less leaky and have limited and well-defined surface area.

I remember doing one of the Project Euler's problems, something in the vein of "you are given a 20x20 matrix, find an element for which the sum of the elements around it is maximum". Nothing complicated, right? You just iterate over rows, then over columns, then throw in a check for zero index and the max boundary index, then do this for both x and y, etc. When I was done with the problem (nested for loops, five if checks inside), I found someone else's solution in Haskell on Project Euler's forums. A point-free one-liner with bunch of smart folds.

That's the power of abstraction.
$30/month is insanity. You can get high quality creams for much less.
As a CS major this fascinates me to no end, but reading the paper the physics are a bit much for my brain to handle. Can any physics-inclined people here recommend me some good books/papers so I can learn more and hopefully make more sense of this?
The problem is most business guys aren't business guys. By splitting the world into "technical" and "non-technical", the title "business guy" just means "a guy who can't code but wants to do a startup". Most self proclaimed "business guys" aren't business guys, they're nothing guys.

I contend that it's easier than ever for true business guys to find a technical co-founder. But for that to happen, they actually have to do their job, which is to drum up business.

Here's what non-technical people should be doing BEFORE they even start hunting for technical co-founders if they want to be introduced to a tech co-founder actually worth having:

* Conduct 100 customer interviews within the target demographic, record them on video and edit it down to a 2 - 5 minute reel that provides some unique insight or perspective on the market that others have not realized. Ask for a verbal intent to buy at the end of the interview and achieve at least a 10% success rate. Prove that your idea is within striking distance of product/market fit.

* Start a blog within the target demographic, achieve a steady readership of at least 100 pageviews/day within the target demo and build up a mailing list to at least 1000 qualified subscribers. Prove that you can own an effective marketing channel that is unavailable to competitors.

* Build out whatever parts of the business are possible using human labor in replacement for code and demonstrate actual customer demand, validated by at least $100/month of revenue. Use spreadsheets in place of a database, text messages from your phone in place of notifications etc. and demonstrate where automation can lead to easy efficiency gains. Prove that there even is room for technology as a core competency of this startup.

* List out at least 3 major learnings, lay out what your original assumption was, what data prompted you to change your mind and what implications this learning has on all aspects of the business. Prove that you can remain open minded and pivot the startup as appropriate.

Achieve at least 3 of these 4 things and engineers will actually be interested in talking to you.
An Open Letter to Coinbase
You don't really have a choice in some cases. Coinbase creates new wallets for referrals and maybe other transactions rather than use the existing wallet
Nice catch about the title, fixed!

In the release notes: http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/4_1_release_notes.html#csr...

In the upgrading rails guide:
http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/upgrading_ruby_on_rails.ht...

In the docs: http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController/Requ...
That's surprising. I feel bad for talented freelancers =/.
It's been around a few times, but always a good watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
Silicon Valley to White House, NSA: “What the hell are you doing?”
It isn't that you said something possibly sexist, the point was she didn't have anything to talk to or reach out to in this regard from a female perspective and that solitude was the issue after the matter. Small incidents like these add up.
Very well written.

Excerpt: Microsoft could ship a hamster wrapped in duct tape, label it Windows, and a lot of OEMs would bundle it.
Why not just keep the product in 37Signals if it's a profitable product?

"not to get dragged into the day to day of each and every business or product"; 37S has a successful history of getting into the day to day of every business and product, that's what they do exceptionally well. Why change that?
If you're worried about the association of your wallet with your identity, then almost all of Coinbase's services are off limits to you. There would be little reason to create a Coinbase account.
Sorry, I didn't know this was a scam. Stop with the downvotes.
I am totally on board with you on that one.

I remember checking out this book on graph drawing, and realizing how hard a problem drawing arbitrary data structures is. And what about functional code? How do we visualize stateless algorithms?

I deeply want this to exist though. I feel like, much in the same way excel secretely represents the core of what we want to do with computers, data structure visualizations is the core of how we want to read code, especially in "tight" code involving heavily coupled structures.
>Wow, you must be a riot to work with.

And you must be a cry-baby nobody would want in his team. See how ad-hominen cuts both ways?

Now, if we are to discuss seriously as adults, what he says sounds correct to my experience to. In teams I've worked with (in over 5 companies), people have said way harsher words than "you're being too emotionally attached to my code".

Not only the project lead -- you can hear such things between team members, even from team member to project lead. And 99% of the time it's not even taken personally -- a little later the crisis is resolved, a decision is made, and people are working together just fine, including having fun together with Nerf guns or what have you, again.
I thought this might be interesting and relevant to HN as the first product of a new startup with the goal of expanding into a full fledged CPG company out of SV.

I also thought the launch, marketing and focus on men and women of color were interesting. Maybe I should have posted this link instead which provides some extra context

http://allthingsd.com/20131218/tristan-walkers-next-act-buil...
Are we supposed to conclude that men never feel isolated, alone, or struggle to mentor others? She describes very common feelings and struggles related to working in a corporate environment, and then blames them on her gender.

This made leaving tech her only option, since she can't change who she is. Had she been a little less quick to assign sexism to fairly common struggles, perhaps she could have explored ways to effectively address those feelings.
WordPress is known for being "easy" but that depends on what you want to do with it. It's definitely easy to get a simple blog up and running since it's mostly done for you. But WP can quickly get complicated since it isn't designed well and the documentation is pretty bad surprisingly. There's a ton of resources online but the quality of it is hit and miss.
"But they are at the end of the day a business"

I sometimes wish that some of the "newly hatched" were around back in the day when I started in business. The idea of "download netscape now" buttons and links outside your website would be as likely as a mall store putting in a door to let you escape from the maze of aisles meant to focus you on their product. Not to mention allowing your customers to share their opinions with your other customers.[1]

[1] In other words, unthinkable.
Positing extremely radical, society destabilizing measures like "unplugging the internet" does not lend much credence to the idea that Bitcoin can be controlled.

There may be other less drastic ways, of course, like leaning on ISPs to choke off blockchain traffic or something. I'm sure the bigger, scummier ones like Verizon and Comcast would even jump at the opportunity to curry more favor with the government in exchange for rent-seeking opportunities down the road. But it seems to me that these half-measures would just accelerate the rush to develop alternatives and detours around such roadblocks.

"Shut down the internet" is not a serious idea.
Explains the timing of the blog post, the graph would look very different next month.
You're right. I'm being incredibly impatient. I'm being very disrespectful to the people on this forum who aren't Bitcoin zealots. I'm sorry for that and I owe you guys an apology.

I've lost almost all respect for the industry and the members of this forum, but even that doesn't warrant my actions.

But this Bitcoin madness is driving me fucking insane... and I'm letting fears of sedition and anarchistic revolution get to me.

I should heed my own real life advice and just channel all of this energy in to storytelling... I'll get you bastards with a song and a smile!

I really need to take a break from this forum...
Thank you. That's the study.
This line would certainly work for anyone. But "we" is referring to those prone to getting razor bumps and irritation in general from other shaving tools & products. This issue disproportionately plagues folks with coarse/curly hair and consequently 80% of black men.
Hell, if you're going that way, let's go the whole nine yards and grow mindless clone bodies for testing and transplants. It'd still probably be more expensive and time-consuming than animal experimentation, but it would allow for "human-like" testing faster than we can do today.

I'm pretty sure "the future" is going to be based on time, money and technology. The organ-on-a-chip thing is just one of many possibilities. But until it's cheaper and more efficient than the cost of feeding and keeping rats, keep on dreaming.
Umm...I would expect the price to be jacked up big time now that they own the market.
It would seem that the two main incumbents in this market (founded in 2005 and 1998, respectively) are getting nervous about Freelancer.com's (founded in 2009) rapid growth (predicting ~73% in 2013) and recent IPO [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/au/freelancer-more-than-triples-first-d...
So a scenario would be what, when two people bring their laptops to do a deal via Bitcoin?
How can I tell if an ATM I'm about to use is vulnerable to this?
It's actually a fork of a fork of a fork, it's a fork of Luckycoin, which is a fork of Litecoin, which is a fork of Bitcoin.
>>Is why we won't run out of 'oil' at any time. Even at $500/barrel equivalent there is a point where if you must have 'crude oil' you can make it for a price. Of course at that point its a 'renewable resource' which is kind of funny.

Well, yes. We won't run out of oil in the ground either. The Earth actually has enough reserves to last us for thousands of years.

When people say we will "run out of oil" what they actually mean is that we will run out of cheap, easily affordable oil (i.e. oil that can be extracted and transported to refineries easily). I mean, do you know what would happen to gas prices if we had to pay $500/barrel?

So yeah, we will probably always use petroleum, since it has a lot of byproducts used in other industries. But using oil as a fuel? That is going to have to stop soon because of price pressure alone.
Sorry, but I think you misread that. She isn't saying that about her work. She's saying that about the challenge of being the only woman around, and not only of putting up with sexism but in this case the challenge of worrying about sexism. She didn't say that her manager should be the one she can talk to. In fact, this is a pretty textbook case of why it's helpful to have groups for women in programming, so you can reality check each other with things like 'nah, that guy is actually a giant asshole to everyone, not just you/women'.
Capitalism depends on the flow of capital. Incentivizing not moving the money (so money increases in value simply by stuffing it in a mattress) wrecks the risk/reward curve. Deflation is a terrible, terrible thing. Every investment has to be weighed against the increasing value of doing nothing, rather than the decreasing value of doing nothing.

"Use it or lose it" is a powerful motivator.
If we're talking about stable long-term energy sources that aren't yet ready/cost effective, then nuclear fusion is another option.
NSA review panel to release findings on US surveillance practices – live
> Many dot com failures were due to inadequacy of the internet's infrastructure.

My understanding was that the dot com failures were largely due to incompetence in business knowhow. Can you substantiate your claim at all?
Yes, but the language of the ad pretty clearly targets black people. Maybe the razor itself isn't particularly innovative, but perhaps the rest of the "system" offers some benefits. There already exist many "black" shaving products that claim to help reduce razor bumps and ingrown hairs.
Calm down, where was I treating it like a magical currency?

People mentioned buying BTC with, specifically, credit cards. Maybe I'm not too up on my commodity trading but how many individuals are over-leveraging themselves on their personal AMEX?
Try Steve Keen and his work. He modeled both fixed money and flexible money supply in his dynamical models of finance. You can even download a computer program "Minsky" and try the models yourself.

Edit: He is also a proponent of "endogenous theory of money", which basically says that money can be easily created within the system through debt. In essence, "fiat money" is a fundamental property of monetary systems, and not something imposed by governments.
Ah, except I'm not trading for cash. I'm trading for something that means more to me than cash (which I would have used cash to purchase anyway) :) What the merchant does with it afterwards, on the other hand.

And I'm not in it to make a fast buck. I'm just using it for occasional vanity purchases. I don't like treating a volatile commodity as a forex investment.. just doesn't seem wise. If it crashes to <$1/btc, I'll be out like, a hundred bucks. So what?
The weakest link is always the end-user.
Yeah, I normally do two swipes then rinse to get rid of my manly beard deposits.
There's a startling lack of empathy here. Overcoming feelings of isolation and trying to get more involved is easier said than done for some, and the whole concept of taking something by the horns and just fucking dealing with it, or offering advice by 'telling it like it is' is astonishingly unhelpful to anyone who feels upset or down because of something. Not just sexism, or isolation, but depression, anxiety, loneliness, and all manner of things which will cause a person to feel like they're on the outside looking in, or beyond reproach.

The entire post cries out for such an empathetic response and I'm not surprised in the slightest that none is forthcoming in this thread.

I've had experiences myself relating to this attitude to things, and know that posts like this are incredibly difficult to write, and the emotions are difficult to discuss. I'm glad the author found the courage to publish it.
> That’s why I was so moved to see men being willing to learn from their female teachers when I took massage. I realized this is not something about men and women, this is not something about human nature, this is something about tech.

The first thought that came to my mind was, maybe it's not something about tech, it's something about her not being as good of a teacher than her massage teacher was.
I noticed some moments in that video where a flashing controller button appeared in the corner. Does that mean the player has to mash the button to continue? I hate games that do that. Why do game makers do that?
Could someone visit coinbase's career page and confirm that the Apply buttons are not working. https://coinbase.com/careers

Coinbase has one of the more interesting legal positions I have come across in a long time (registration/licensing/compliance work) and I know I will be kicking myself a year from now if I did not make every effort.
yep, the same logic of vivisection, concentration camp hypothermia experiments, Tuskegee syphilis experiment, etc... - "it advances science"

>Also, a lot of research is basically infinite trial-and-error until you find something that works; doing this on a scale large enough for humans would kill lots of people, versus lots of mice.

Doing research on humans vs. mice would [these days, though not even 40-60 years ago] force to do the research differently, mindfully and efficiently, instead of meat chopping factory it is now.
I don't think this is a gender thing, or at least mostly isn't. Software is really a pretty emotionally rough field in the sense that it's got this hot-dog show-off mentality, people are really blunt with their criticisms, lots of stop energy that you have to ignore, etc.

Personally I've found it hard as a male just because it can be so alienating, antisocial, and generally irritating. One of the toughest things is to put a ton of work into a new product, open source code, etc. and have people just attack you for it... often cluelessly too or just for the sake of bashing something.
Overtime laws definitely affect the cliff at 40 hours. That said, there's something to be said for reliable and consistent employees. I know that a lot of small business owners I know would rather have a few trusted employees than many not-as-trustworthy ones. There's a trust cost to adding each additional employee that may or may not offset the overtime costs.
I think they are trying to illustrate a move towards more mass-market appeal and reach. Depending on which data source you look at, females account for anywhere from 70 to 90+% of consumer purchase decisions in the US. If Coinbase wants to move from being the cryptocurrency enthusiast and tech speculator's toy to actually seeing significant product/service spend in Bitcoins with merchants, increasing their female userbase could definitely help.