skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A loaded question is when you try to misrepresent someone's point of view. Am I missing something, or did you not agree with the basic premise (Racial discrimination isn't inherently bad)?

I would argue your doctor analogy is flawed in that doctors don't racially discriminate, but biologically discriminate. I guess I can see why you would think that.

> So whether discrimination is bad depends on the context and whats being accomplished.

I agree, but I still haven't seen a good argument for racial discrimination. Can you cite examples of where racism was good for society? I'm willing to keep an open mind about it, but I think in the long run, segregating ourselves is not the right way forward. Maybe this is too disney, but I'd like to live in a world where we can disregard race and reach out to whoever needs it.
Because it's not about Mickey.

It's about suppressing the ideas that copyright is a granted right, a temporary right, that everything starts out free (as in freedom) and is only temporarily monopolized for the betterment of society, that the public domain exists.

And to reinforce that idea that culture, art, entertainment are products owned by corporations which must be paid for.
>Hyperinflation would make it impossible for the Federal Reserve to buy up enough dollars to stabilize the value of the currency

Even if this is true, where is the evidence that we're in imminent danger of hyperinflation? Despite mounting public debt, U.S. inflation has remained incredibly low since the start of the financial crisis four years ago, as has the interest rate that must be paid by the government to issue new debt.

From what I can tell, we have on the one side a dollar that has endured as a value store and medium of exchange for hundreds of years, and which has proven remarkably resilient (valuable) by any objective measure throughout the worst economic implosion since the Great Depression (which the dollar also survived). On the other hand we have Bitcoin which is intriguing in many ways but which has demonstrable volatility even just in the short span of its existence. And which, as a feature, is not backed (in the hard economic sense) by any nation or bank. I mean it's cool and all but I see where Krugman is coming from.
I am certainly not implying that Rust is the only language that supports this kind of thing. Haskell is where I first saw some of this. I'm just happy that Rust is doing it well.

C# is a great language, but I don't use Microsoft technology, and it's effectively Windows only.
Seconded. I listened to the audiobook about a year ago and am ready to listen to it again - and I never do that.
Sometimes I wonder if Bitcoin really is a weapon made by a nation state. Like Stuxnet. Or alternatively could a nation like North Korea co-opt it in an attempt to dislodge the dollar?
Actually, for your first point, you have to compare the carbon footprint of bitcoin to the carbon footprint of the alternative. What is the carbon footprint of all the different transaction processing systems run by Mastercard, Visa, Amex, etc? What about if you add in the cost of the massive mainframes that handle ACH transfers? The cost of printing millions of archaic paper checks?

I'm not saying bitcoin replaces all those things (it certainly doesn't), but it aims to.
For the record, Charles didn't post it to the home page. I promoted it there, since I thought (correctly, it turns out) that it might be of wide interest. So all the blame for that goes to me.
In a crisis significant and widespread enough to crash the dollar or any other government-backed currency you'd like to pick on, it seems likely that there would also be significant disruption to electrical and communication networks, which does not suggest BitCoin is a great thing to hold for that situation.

(a similar point is often raised against gold, in that a post-economic-apocalypse world would not immediately have the infrastructure to verify claims like "this is one ounce of pure gold", meaning gold's utility as a medium of exchange would not be as high as suspected by people who buy it to hedge against such apocalypses)
Cannot upvote enough!

Rubyists try too hard to emulate natural language syntax, but in the process forget that natural languages are not particularly clean - in fact, more often than not they are highly dependent on contextual information, not just semantically, but even syntactically.

Ultimately, natural languages and programming languages serve very different purposes: communication in natural languages is highly dependent on context for resolving ambiguity (e.g., if we took this discussion to a non-programming forum, everybody else would be like "WTF is going on?"), while programming languages are all about making it possible to be pedantically precise without reducing convenience.
Right. I don't see why we're having this discussion. You use C++ if you want to deal with higher-level objects. The argument of, "memory management is easier," is a total fallacy, just like has been pointed out in that list message.
Gen_server in Ocaml
You may be right, and I'm no expert in this, but that is not a large part of the reason.

I think it was a well designed piece of software by itself - and the node based programming model lended itself well to interface design.

Right now, it is more a case of adoption. For example, Facebook is investing a lot of resources in creating stuff like Origami for Quartz Composer. I'd be willing to bet that if Facebook puts even a small part of that resources into supporting something like Blender, then the fundamental differences at the OS level should'nt matter.
Also because surgeons were manual laborers, and therefore not accorded the same respect as gentleman physicians.
Not true. In the UK the "NUS Black Students’ campaign represents the largest constituency of Black students in Europe and students of African, Asian, Arab and Caribbean descent, at a local and national level on all issues affecting Black students."

http://www.nus.org.uk/en/who-we-are/how-we-work/black-studen...
Actually the NSA's overreach is more a problem with the executive branch.

Congress tried to establish checks and balances over the intelligence community by establishing FISA after Watergate, but it wasn't enough. Judge Leon's ruling [1] actually discusses the shortcomings of the FISA court.

[1] http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/obamansa.pdf
If r/bitcoin could speak, it would collectively say: "All tax is theft. It is our job to stop being stolen from. All money belongs to me for the benefit of myself. I am all that matters in society."
A really quick introduction to his ideas:

http://chronicle.com/article/Jonathan-Haidt-Decodes-the/1304...
This is an easy one to understand.

Krugman was a proponent of mass inflation, aka. helicopters of money, as a solution to the credit crisis. Bitcoin makes it basically impossible to manipulate the money supply the way the Fed has done to navigate the 2008 crisis.

Krugman sees Bitcoin as a threat to the central banks ability to stabilize the economy.
The answer I've heard is that Bitcoin has utility as a payment network somewhat independent of its usefulness as a value store. This is most of how Bitcoin is used currently (save speculation)
A softmodded Wii will easily do this, and you can get them secondhand for cheap these days.
>> If a Nobel-winning physicist was writing about physics, you wouldn't dismiss it because the physicist's politics don't agree with yours.

First of all, Physics and Economics are two different things.

Physics tends to be about facts, Economics is more about opinions, views and theories. It's not because we're not Nobel Prize winners that we shouldn't disagree with the author, and I'm sure there are many well-known economists out there who won't agree with him.

>> Also, his point about BitCoin enthusiasts being unable to distinguish between what makes a good currency and what pushes their ideological buttons may apply to you.

Bitcoin enthusiasts are not the only users of Bitcoin. I use Bitcoin and it's for no ideological reason. It's helping me better than any other payment system right now and that's all I care about.
Effective Django [video]
you cannot [..] use named and anonymous functions interchangeably.

That seems like a odd restriction/asymmetry. What's the rationale?
No reason on the divide. Just because. That is probably a reasonable guess on the big O value. Clearly O(rand) is cheeky but in accurate. And the PRNG will walk the number space so it will eventually succeed, but computing how long it will take for 'n' numbers eludes my math reasoning skills.
Kerlnel is a project trying to move the erlang runtime closer to bare metal
The state monitors financial transactions primarily for tax purposes. I'm guessing a very substantial amount of data they collect is around payroll and sales.
Not about the expired copyrights. But rather how any story using those same characters are derivative works of the later still copyrighted stores (and thus protected by copyright) even if they use no elements from those later copyrighted stories.
I realize that it's difficult to understand another culture, especially one so very different and - honestly - so much more complex and sophisticated than one's own, as the United States is in comparison with Belgium. I realize that this is hard.

Nevertheless let's try.

We can do better, HN. We can do better than "this wouldn't fly in Belgium" as the top-rated comment.

BTW: Belgium? Not historically a model for even-handed tolerance with respect to black people: https://www.google.com/search?q=king+leopold&safe=off&rlz=1C...
Well if it is tied in most and beats it in some categories, for half the price tag that seems like a clearly superior phone to me.
And yet, Krugman is probably right to suggest that, as a currency, BitCoin will need to also be a store of value. Which it currently does not seem to be, and I don't see how it will become one.
From where is that?

This is how it works in C# (and .NET in general)

DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2)

Not wanting to overload integers with calendar functionality doesn't mean you have to make it so cumbersome.

Edit: typo
One problem with extension methods is that you cannot statically express the idea that multiple classes implement the same extension methods. In particular, you cannot make a generic whose type parameter is guaranteed to implement a given set of extension methods. This, in my opinion, reduces the usefulness of extension methods from "potential game changer" to "mere syntactic sugar".
You are demonstrating unfamiliarity with the difference between de jure and de facto. When people of other demographics feel uncomfortable being there because the audience is predominantly white and predominantly male, it is effectively exclusionary even if there isn't a single word to the contrary.

That doesn't make it your fault. It does mean it's something you have to make a real effort to understand and accept in light of the privilege you have.
> but money laundering and large-scale scamming are actual threats.

Yes, banks launder drug money for cartels. Without the state, who would slap their wrists?
You seem pretty accustomed to economics. Can you explain how exactly or why would anyone buy any items (that's what currencies are for after all) using a deflationary currency?

Then again, it's not a design a flaw - as I once thought - it's a clear choice: Why would anyone would want to own a non-deflationary asset? :-)

So actually, in my view, BTC as a currency is already failed. No one will be eager to buy online (perform an actual exchange) when he can buy the same items using USD, because BTC will possibly have a higher value tomorrow. While the USD almost certainly will not.

Best Regards,

ps. FIAT currency is regulated by the FED and you know who runs the FED. BTC market is run by those who have huge amounts of BTC and you don't have a clue about who they are. Not sure which one is more secure for a society.
> To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value. And it remains completely unclear why BitCoin should be a stable store of value.

So maybe BitCoin isn't money? We already have something that is a reasonably stable store of value but is not a medium of exchange (gold), so why can't we have something that is a medium of exchange but not a reasonably stable store of value?
I'm not totally sure what the intention of this article is.

Is it to deter people away from using node as an application platform? Is it to deter people away from web programming in general? Is it to deter people away from using Macs?

In each case no hard evidence is given. Just a lot of baseless opinions.

I don't think this article is appropriate for HN. I didn't learn anything useful from this. If it was meant to be an opinion piece to influence how programmers think, it wasn't done very tastefully. What this article does best is reflect the immaturity of its author.

As far as the node project being over, I don't think that's true. There are surely IO scheduler optimizations that could be made ala http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/hask03.... The speed of JS code could always be improved. The HTTP standard is currently evolving and those changes will need to be made. There are probably other examples I'm failing to list.
The other systems aren't based around grinding CPUs at 100% power utilization for days/weeks/months doing worthless busy work. Unless your power comes from a zero-carbon-footprint renewable resource, it's pretty ugly.
Beat This Level, Get A Programming Job
I think I agree with the thrust of what you are saying here. Just as English has rules with what you do with nouns and verbs etc, code has rules too that are different to English.

2.days().from_now()

says that we are performing the action 'days' on the object '2'. What could that possibly do? Well there're a bunch of options and none of them are obvious. It's weird and counter-intuitive. And then we go and perform the action 'from_now' on whatever the result of that was.

I don't mind 'fluent' style interfaces as long as they don't mess up the normal meanings of what objects and methods are, but sadly they usually do. Another classic sign of a bad interface is that with many of these fluent interfaces it's not obvious whether a particular thing should be a chained method call or argument, and if it's an argument, whether it should be got by calling a method, using a field or what.

Code should read like clear code. English should read like clear English. These are not the same things, and efforts to make them the same usually make a mess of both.
Thanks, great reply.
But does Bitcoin really have a floor related to the energy put into the mining? Since the energy cost is paid for by the miners, do other players in Bitcoin "respect" that floor? I don't see that - there's nothing keeping a Bitcoin from going all the way to zero - regardless of the energy consumed in it's production, and Krugman argues that gold (and the feds) have a bottom that is greater than zero.

My understanding could be wrong, as my understanding of Bitcoin would definitely be at the "noob" level :)
Looks like you have a roughly ten percent success rate. Sounds reasonable.
Also see: the euro crisis.

It isn't a "threat" so much as just foolish.
Can you put the source on Github please?
One capability of bitcoin not often addressed is the ability for the majority of its users to change the rules.

If you can get the majority of users to agree to a change in the rules, then they will fork off the block chain in a direction that follows those new rules. Of course, you will have some percentage of users who like the old rules, and could theoretically continue on the old block chain.

One rule change, for example, is to have miners vote on the reward for new blocks found. Then, every so often take the medium or a random vote and award that amount for new blocks mined. This would allow miners to regulate the amount of new coin being mined, which could level off the exchange rates between bitcoin and the world currencies.
It seems like you're confusing a judge's interpretation of a law with extensive lobbying to get a law changed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
We weren't in imminent danger of hyperinflation. I think mass adoption of Bitcoin will cause hyperinflation.

If every merchant you patronize today accepted Bitcoin, would you rather have Bitcoin in your bank account or dollars? I'd rather have Bitcoin. They're easier to transfer, they can't be counterfeited, and their supply can't be manipulated.

If every merchant accepts Bitcoin and every consumer agrees with my logic, hyperinflation of the dollar would occur. Coinbase and its 0% transaction fees will lead to rapid adoption of Bitcoin on the merchant side. I'm less confident about the consumer side, but I see that happening as well.
Maybe some day Bitcoin will be a cheaper way to transfer money than EBT, credit cards, etc. (a few percent). If/when that happens, people will hold Bitcoins for just long enough to complete a transaction -- microseconds -- rather than for however long it takes them to cash out their speculative bets.
Here's an entertaining Blender podcast.

http://www.blenderguru.com/introducing-the-new-blender-guru-...

In early episodes he tried to rally people to fix the UI and make it more intuitive. He got so much crap (why should we change!?) that I think he's given up on that for the moment.
I have a serious question: What if title would be "White Girls Code"? Is there going be an outrage in the society?

I'm just trying to understand the racial words connotation in USA, just to not make faux pas in the future.
I think I understand the thing about word size, thank you I'll fix it
Bitcoin is evil like book pressing machines are evil to hand written books economy (like few centuries ago)
Gold is no longer widely used as money, but in the past it was, and was quite successful as a medium of exchange.

His argument seems to be that if you want something to be genuinely useful as money, it has to do both reliably, and BitCoin only seems able to do one.
From near-death to Silicon Valley CEO
I think the core problem with bitcoin acceptance is that understanding the way it functions spans many domains of expertise. There are cryptography, cryptocurrency, decentralized networks, economic concepts (inflation/deflation), centralized banking, government controlled currencies, computing ability, mathematics, human psychology, and ... so much more! It's really something that has a little bit of everything in there.

As such, to an expert in any one of those fields, it's very hard to digest because looking at it from the perspective of one field might suggest it is doomed for failure. But experts tend to look at things from the perspective of their own expertise.

For laymen who might know a little bit about each of those domains, it feels like "Yeah.. this could work..". A simple analogy might be about how hardcore web developers always feel about PHP. They always say it's a pile of garbage and it's bound to self destruct and swallow the earth in the process. However, PHP trudges on with some very large projects and sites under it's belt.. and novice developers will almost never notice a problem with it. Experts can be wrong.

So yes, bitcoin has it's issues if you analyze each aspect of it. But maybe if you zoom out and take an overview it might start to make sense how all the parts get together and even with flaws with each sub-aspect it just might work.
like the kind HSBC did in plain sight for over a decade with essentially zero repercussions (the fine was barely enough to break out of 'cost of doing business' territory, so please don't bother with the largest settlement in history uselessness)?

but yeah...bitcoin is bad! cuz...bad people!
What's the point of a store of value if ultimately it cannot be exchanged for something else?

One can also turn this point around: what requires the store of value to be the same thing as the medium of exchange? The store of value must be convertible into the medium of exchange, but that doesn't mean they have to be the same thing. Yet Krugman blithely assumes that they must be: "To be successful, money must be both a medium of exchange and a reasonably stable store of value." He doesn't even consider the possibility of, for example, an economy based on Bitcoin as a medium of exchange and, say, gold as a store of value. For that matter, he doesn't even bother to mention that very few people actually use dollars as a store of value: people don't keep their retirement funds in cash under the mattress.
I don't have references on hand, but I've seen a study that showed girls are much more vocal and active in a classroom (specifically science/technology related) when its an all-girls setting. That in itself is a good reason to create introductory environments where girls can engage in the material without whatever social pressures keep them from doing so otherwise. As far as "black" goes, that's probably a function of the fact that its in brooklyn and to ensure that black girls realize this is for them.
Finessing Typewriters for Nearly 40 Years, and Now Turning Over the Keys
Will keep pushing. The 4hr workweek article is pretty robust. Some good PR practices, and sharing tools that I'm definitely going to keep in the toolchest for next time. Thanks!
> Placing a ceiling on the value of bitcoins is computer technology and the form of the hash function… until the limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached. Placing a floor on the value of bitcoins is… what, exactly?

Doesn't he get that point wrong (like many others)? The mining rate, and eventually the limit of 21 million bitcons places a limit on the supply of bitcoins, not on their value. If bitcoin is successful, it will only keep getting more and more valuable. Its hard to estimate how much, but the total market capitalization will probably that of a commodity like silver, or that of a nation state's currency.

Also, I think bitcoin is not really supposed to be a store of value. Its main purpose is to pseudonymously buy and sell stuff (drugs, cough, cough). It's good enough if it can hold its value for a few hours - if someone builds a nice way to deposit dollars or euros, convert them, and immediately pay with the bitcoins, milliseconds would even suffice. In a market with such a high turnaround, of course, the value represented in bitcoin at a given time will be lower than for e.g. silver or gold, which are supposed to store value for a longer time (and also have applications as a material).

Finally, I don't think bitcoin can replace "real" money. It might have worked a few decades ago when there was a kind of self-carrying growing economy. The only way todays econonmy is still running is because of massive state intervention, which is impossible if bitcoin in the main currency. I mean, we gave up the Bretton Woods system and the gold dollar for a reason...
Try MediaCrush. It's been on HN a couple times, and it also does the GIF->HTML5 thing, but it's open-source and has a lot of other benefits, like browser extensions and a nice API.

https://mediacru.sh

Prior discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6773039 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6189397

Open source: https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush

Browser extensions: https://mediacru.sh/apps

API: https://mediacru.sh/docs
"Monitors" is a bit strong, unless you're talking about actual states. NY/NYC will go after you fiercely if you are wealthy and try to get out of city taxes.

All federal tax information for employees is self-reported by employers. There isn't a huge monitoring infrastructure in place—just required-by-law reporting of what people get paid. Getting paid with not-dollars doesn't change the system.
I guess you're trying to be snarky or clever here, but I don't get your point. Maybe you can walk over to your local BofA branch, slap someone's wrist, and feel good about yourself?
Wow, this is soooo helpful. Seriously, thanks a bunch for making this. Works just as I envisioned it.