skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Money/labour input does not equal value. I could spend 10 years pulling all the grass from my backyard and sorting it from longest to shortest in length. A lot of effort went into it. Doesn't make it valuable.

Doesn't make it valuable to 'you', but if you found someone willing to pay you with another object of value, that's another story.

Better answered by another user here "money is backed by the willingness of other people to price their goods and services in it.Vendors aren't required to sell for dollars, they can sell for whatever medium of exchange they want. It's just convenient to do so."
Because transportation accounts for about 1/3 of all energy use, and oil accounts for 95%+ of all transportation energy.

Because good transportation fuels are hard to find. If you're on a fixed track (rail, trolly), you can electrify. If you're not going too far and can keep your vehicle weight low, batteries become an option. If you've got a big enough structure, you can consider solid fuels (ships). For overland untracked transport (trucks), you might be able to use steam power (allowing solid fuels) at considerable losses of convenience and increase in mechanical complexity.

For heavier-than air craft you're pretty much SOL.

Transportation isn't just moving people around, but everything: food, raw materials, finished goods, and more.

And liquid fuels are also convenient for powering other equipment, especially for mobile, temporary, or remote locations.

Finding a replacement for liquid fossil-fuel based hydrocarbons is the holy grail.

Coal and oil fundamentally changed human existence in ways that are very, very difficult to convey. They've made possible not only all of modern technology, but even the world of 1850, primitive as we would consider it, would be impossible without fossil fuels. Take them away and you're going back before that time, but with 14x the population. Trust me, that's the sort of thing that keeps me up nights.

Though he's rather much the cornucopian, Daniel Yergin's The Prize, both a book and TV series, really impress how much the world changed with the discovery of petroleum in 1859. I highly recommend it:

http://fixyt.com/watch?v=Qspu35JG59Q

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781439110126-2
Didn't this service just launch too?
Thanks for taking the time to research and respond! So:

1) Dan's comments on Bitcoin in that BI article are a bit subtler than that. The very last section suggests (to me) that despite what value the BTC protocol has, it doesn't "square the triangle."

2) Dan is mainly talking about Sybil attacks in his 2011 post. The difference between a 51% attack and a Sybil attack is somewhat blurry, but here's my understanding:

A Sybil attack can't be prevented if an attacker controls >33% of the nodes. This is a mathematical truth of distributed systems (cf. Byzantine Generals), but Bitcoin's proof-of-work is often cited as the first practical system to demonstrate a workaround.

The >50% problem becomes the new lower bound for attackers, because with proof-of-work, you can't just fake 33% of the nodes. They have to be participating in the number crunching.

However, recent research blew this entirely out of the water, at least as far as Bitcoin goes[0]. They propose a change to the protocol that makes it a >25% percent problem, but currently it is a >0% problem. That is kind of a big deal. There are some good ideas in the "proof of stake" discussions, but none of the answers appear to lend support to the "triangle is squared" hypothesis.

Now then: I think you misunderstood my remark about the political aspects. I'm not saying anyone agrees on who/what/when/why/how of privacy issues. If the goal is to describe a system that is resilient to eavesdropping, you shouldn't distract from that system in the same paper with so much argument about why you want a system resilient to eavesdropping. Spill your ink to convince people if your system meets the requirements you lay out. Finally:

- "meta-domain" is a very strange term to use. It makes you sound ignorant of the realities of DNS, whether you are or not.

- My statement was that a proxy to namecoin doesn't add much to the system. The first and fourth of your bullet points might be paraphrased as "but it adds a proxy to namecoin!"

- What would be the purpose of adding DNSCrypt to DNSNMC? What do you mean by "secure queries" there? Anonymous queries? Validated responses? It's okay if you haven't finished specifying DNSNMC yet, but I wasn't asking for guesses about what you might do in the future.

Meanwhile, don't let counter arguments discourage you, but remember that the problem space is large. Failure to solve a gigantic problem may still be success when solving a normal sized problem.

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243
If you missed it, 16 year old David Thibault is Elvis 2.0 (2 VIDEO’S)
Heh. The attempted spinning of the DVD business plus the fee increases were a PR fiasco and cost Netflix huge amount of subscribers. Surely the CEO was off his "A game" and was fired accordingly.
Ya dawgs go lawnch another virtuale coin'n get h4ck3d dat easy and komplain.
I guess it’s user generated content. But at least it has to have a few (or many) correct acronyms to be initially useful, for example:

http://udoaa.com/a/USA

http://udoaa.com/a/HTTP

Also is it possible to flag an explanation?
Who needs google? Why don't you just go directly to rap genius and bypass search altogether?
I'm interested to read about the rating system they use to differentiate A players from others.
I'm going to guess that Windows Activation saw a different hardware config under the VM, so it thought it was running on a completely different machine.
Holy cow. With that mentioned, my re-reading of the GP and your prior comments make me wonder how I missed it at all. I remember replying to you before, then editing my reply after realizing that we seemed to be in disagreement, while my original apply had assumed agreement, then editing again to just reiterate my point, with no idea whether we agreed or disagreed.

That clears things up completely. Thank you for the clarification, and apologies for the confusion.
> This is a problem with functional programming in general, it is fundamentally anti-human

I would argue that the "anything goes" dynamic procedural languages ( like Ruby, Python ) are far more anti-human, in that human ability to reason about large masses of code scales orders of magnitude worse than in languages that provide a strong theoretic framework for reasoning about code.
Children ingesting magnets is growing problem that can be fatal. For use in a household setting, it is irresponsible to sell smooth, shiny magnets that are of a size that can be swallowed.

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Pediatrics/GeneralPediatrics/408...
It's flippin (using their terminology) annoying that they disable pinchzoom for mobile devices. I wanted to zoom in on the tiny video. They feel they want to limit my browsing experience. Why would I buy or invest in their product?
I'm giving away http://dontgobreakingmyart.com and getting http://kickr.in. No idea what I'm gonna do with this thing. DGBMA was for a friend who made blown glass things. I was giddy when I thought up that name for him :)
I thought that this was a joke digital currency. Literally the only other place I've ever seen it mentioned was on 4chan.org, where the threads about it made very clear that the point of dogecoin was to try to get speculators to drive up the price so that the coins could be dumped for a profit. This story is hardly newsworthy.
Here's the explanation from Dogewallet http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1toz92/dogewallet_...

"the attack originated from the hacker gaining access to our filesystem and modifying the send/receive page to send to a static address."
I personally don't feel that I've struggled with monads that much. Perhaps that was because I was okay with "I know how to use monads or wrestle them into getting something to work" (took 20 minutes) until I got to "I understand what monads are for, I understand how to compose them, and I can see how they aren't a hindrance and in many cases are useful." (has taken 4-5 months on/off learning).

I haven't ran into memory issues yet, but I have heard others have a very hard time reasoning about memory/space leaks. However, something I hear less often is that the memory problems people have also happen in other languages.
I think this is the issue people should focus on more. We are at the point where one external entity that you have no contract with and is under no obligation to continue looking on your business favorably can if it chooses send you out of business.
I'm giving away http://notmedia.com and picking up http://nouncd.com/. I'm really not sure what to do with it, but hey, what a neat exchange!
So lets save the expensive oil for transportation and stop burning it in fixed installations.

The are plenty of electrical plants that burn oil.
> Have you ever heard the expression "it pains me to say this"?

Yes. It's an idiom. It means, "I feel uncomfortable or ambiguous about saying this, but I'm going to say it nonetheless."

But you didn't use the word "pain" in this idiomatic sense. You said:

"Defending freedom of speech feels - and should feel - very painful."

No. Having a tooth filled without anesthetic feels painful. Deciding to put a pet to sleep feels painful. Going through a divorce feels painful. (I speak from personal experience in all three cases.) But defending freedom of speech does not feel painful. It can be quite frustrating at times, but never painful. Most of the time it make me feel proud.

> I don't want to see Neo-Nazis protesting in a public area of my city

Neither do I. But I absolutely want neo-nazis to be able to protest in a public area of my city. There is not an iota of moral ambiguity here (at least not in my mind) and hence no pain. It does not "pain me to say" this: I will defend the right of neo-nazis to spew their bile every bit as vigorously as I will oppose nearly all of what they say.
Man, that's a crazily passive-aggressive article... the author dances around it, couching his dislike (and fear) in slippery and vague language, but the clear impression one is left with is that he feels Google is "the enemy"... ><
Here generally is not a timeframe involved in this. Is google penalized them then they received a manual penalty for unnatural links. They will have to identify all the links that are unnatural, contact all those site owners and try to take get the links taken down. Or disavow them and show a huge effort was made... And tell google that they won't do it again through a reconsideration request. Unless google makes an exception, it is taking at least five days or more for google to respond to RRs. And even then, once a penalty is lifted, the site won't necessarily come back quickly.
I wonder if blockchain.info was hacked, how many bitcoins would be stolen, and if that would be enough to undermine the currency, or if bitcoin would move forward with the ownership even more centralized among early adopters, thieves, and speculators.

(Yes, I know it's a javascript wallet - that doesn't mean it can't be hacked.)
I read through the submitted article here to find the link to the scientific journal article[1] that has just come out from this research group. The abstract tells the basic story:

"Performing genetic studies in multiple human populations can identify disease risk alleles that are common in one population but rare in others1, with the potential to illuminate pathophysiology, health disparities, and the population genetic origins of disease alleles. Here we analysed 9.2 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in each of 8,214 Mexicans and other Latin Americans: 3,848 with type 2 diabetes and 4,366 non-diabetic controls. In addition to replicating previous findings2, 3, 4, we identified a novel locus associated with type 2 diabetes at genome-wide significance spanning the solute carriers SLC16A11 and SLC16A13 (P = 3.9 × 10−13; odds ratio (OR) = 1.29). The association was stronger in younger, leaner people with type 2 diabetes, and replicated in independent samples (P = 1.1 × 10−4; OR = 1.20). The risk haplotype carries four amino acid substitutions, all in SLC16A11; it is present at ~50% frequency in Native American samples and ~10% in east Asian, but is rare in European and African samples. Analysis of an archaic genome sequence indicated that the risk haplotype introgressed into modern humans via admixture with Neanderthals. The SLC16A11 messenger RNA is expressed in liver, and V5-tagged SLC16A11 protein localizes to the endoplasmic reticulum. Expression of SLC16A11 in heterologous cells alters lipid metabolism, most notably causing an increase in intracellular triacylglycerol levels. Despite type 2 diabetes having been well studied by genome-wide association studies in other populations, analysis in Mexican and Latin American individuals identified SLC16A11 as a novel candidate gene for type 2 diabetes with a possible role in triacylglycerol metabolism."

The most novel and startling part of the factual claims in the abstract, and definitely the part that I am most dubious about, is "the risk haplotype introgressed into modern humans via admixture with Neanderthals." Well, maybe, but maybe not. There have been very few samples of ancient hominid DNA so far, so we are still not sure what range of variation was found among ancestors of today's Homo sapiens species to which we all belong.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Supports Linux and Windows on both Python2 and Python3. Here is a screenshot:

http://i.imgur.com/vJgKK0r.png
Has anyone been able to install it with rbenv/ruby-build?
Ruboto 1.0.0 Released
I don't understand how stat counter gets away with what they do. They offer stats similar to google analytics. They seem to get most of their ranking from including a link back to them with a random anchor text from a set of terms they want to rank for in the JavaScript block to install stats.
To put things into perspective it's ~USD 13000 (1dc= 0.00062$), combined. Not saying that it's not a serious matter. OP on the forum lost $600 which is sizable. But Dogewallet have stated on reddit that they will return all the investment and close down the site, which might arguably be better customer service then we have seen by Coinbase lately with much more money from individual investors at stake.

Any ways, if cryptocurrencies are to be taken seriously and formally, these entities have to up their customer services, at least to a BOfA level, which isn't much to expect ;)
If you want a bash script that does similar things: https://gist.github.com/sontek/1505483
Is it my predisposition against all things Microsoft or there is someone else who doesn't find him that hilarious?

Mind you, the title only states he's the funniest man in Microsoft Research, not that he would be considered funny in the general population, and, therefore, a lot is left open to interpretation.,
b... but how do they work?
Sure if it was easy for people to think functionally then functional programming is without a doubt more elegant. But elegance doesn't negate the fact that the reasoning model demanded by functional programming isn't friendly to the way we think. The elegance argument is something proponents always bring up, but it misses the point.

While dynamic procedural languages have their problems, I think they work for the most part, hence their success Vis-à-vis functional languages. As far as the issue of scale, that's why modular constructs as added to manage large code bases.
Yeah, dogecoin, the less serious coin.
Calibre is the best ebook manager. It's the iTunes for ebooks.

On Android, the FBReader.app is quite good, however you probably will want to tweak the options to get it to look as nice as the Kindle.app looks "out of the box."

On iOS, the Bluefire.app is the best of the unaffiliated apps, but I preferred to open .mobi files in the Kindle.app.
Kind of like the story about Bliss and his iconography. I have never understood the idea of destroying something you love because someone else might benefit from it.
Looks like your apps are so much more useful than a lot of the multi-million dollar apps that get sold.
Hmm. Most "super-high-performance" projects I've seen find they can get more bang for the buck by switching to a different microarchitecture (FPGA etc) or exploiting parallelism (buy ten computers), not so much optimizing the machine code.
Then clarify because so far all you've done is said "People don't deserve this! Copying isn't stealing. They shouldn't get paid for this" then when anyone challenges you they get the reply "Thats not what I meant" or some snarky comment about their comprehension.
"In some way that I don’t yet understand, I’m glad that theorists are investigating the equivalence between five-dimensional Turing machines and Edward Scissorhands"
He seems like a major dick. No offense to the talented engineers at RG.
Was going to say the same thing, basically I do a variant of this when camping, adding to the list of things I missed or forgot, so that by the time I've done the first few camping trips of the season I've refreshed my memory of all the things I need. I built a list in Trello which I've been adding too but it would be handy to have a non-online way to note something which got added back to the routine once I was in connection range again.
The are plenty of electrical plants that burn oil.

Relatively few. On a cost basis, oil's been more expensive than coal or gas. The former is still widely used (and serves as the bulk of electrical generation in much of the world). Solar and wind are approaching parity with coal, but are not dispatchable. They're available when they're available, and you can shed excess, but there's no accelerator pedal: you can't turn on the sun (or the wind) when you need them.

Solar thermal gives the option of banking energy for a few hours (about 6 presently, proposals for several days' capacity exist). This would address load balancing to a significant extent, but solar thermal plants must be specifically constructed, they're not suitable for opportunistic deployment as solar PV is.
Interesting how this post fell to 20th place in its first hour, whilst receiving over 50 up votes... Something tells me the way this is getting voted could be sketchy. Unless, of course, people aren't clicking the link through and just commenting/voting.
It's oil.

The differentiation is in the length of the hydrocarbons. Most biofuel oil is equivalent to diesel fuel (heavier grade than gasoline), but that's largely tuneable in refinement.
I'm glad you brought that line in the 2011 piece up, because it caught my eye too. I am not sure it's clear whether Kaminsky was talking about peer introduction or content discovery, though.

Regardless, this gets down to the crux of the "squared triangle" issue. Getting introduced to the network isn't the only place where centralization helps, and it's probably not even an important one, as you say. A human that wants to get on the BitTorrent network just finds a client binary. There isn't a need at any point to type bit torrent dot com into a browser.

Arguably, the human-oriented / memorable leg of the triangle can't be solved globally. Here's some really good thinking on the subject: http://stpeter.im/journal/1035.html
Official NORAD Santa Tracker
Isn’t it possible to trace the stolen coins? Wouldn’t it be a risk for the thief to spend or exchange any of it?
I have your unicorn job. They exist. I'm on the development team in a small startup, and since I'm the only one with proficient design skills, I have a ton of creative freedom.
Let's ignore technical progress for a while. You can order every Joule of oil by how much effort the extraction is. There's basically no limit on the effort here. But, if you add all energy from other sources into your line-up, you will see that we won't touch the crazy difficult oil until we have exhausted the easier alternative sources.

So, if oil ever gets expensive enough, nobody will use it until we have used up eg more coal. While we use the coal and _not_ the oil, oil won't become scarcer, and thus won't increase in price.

Of course, it doesn't really make sense to go for oil that has less energy output than what its extraction costs. At any price. [0] Technologic progress will take care of some of that.

[0] Unless you use the oil as a kind of battery. Ie use 100J of solar power that's only available during the day, to extract 50J of oil usable anytime---that might be worthwhile, but it would compete with battery technology not with energy sources.
Show HN: Perfect 2.0 - Send a postcard with ease
Google Is Aware Of SEOs Bribing Bloggers says Matt Cutts
Keyboards, UX, and “Fuck”
I don't know how you're coming to this result, but it /is/ easy for people to think functionally. You can teach intro-CS classes in both functional and imperative styles and generally they pick up both styles at the same rate. I've seen it year after year of teaching these courses. The myth that functional programming doesn't match human thought is just flat out FUD, there's no evidence to support it.

The adoption of programming languages is more influenced by economic factors than informed by solid engineering.
This looks interesting:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061202010422/http://www.weidai...
There's plenty of coal, and natural gas. And solar is already viable at high prices, with costs falling fast. Wind energy is also well understood. Methane hydrate might work, too, but I don't know enough about it.

And more boringly, energy conservation and increased efficiency can have the same effect as new sources. A `smart grid' becomes a more and more lucrative investment as energy prices go up.
yo you're a dick
Show HN: Better product management software
I am a big proponent of this method for programming languages but this is also how French was basically taught to me in school and it just did not work. The difference? You can practice coding alone... A Hunan language is much more difficult to do that with.
Here is what Matt Cutts tweet says:
We're taking action on hundreds of buyers, dozens of sites, & dozens of spammy writers.
I love low-level learning projects like this, but I wish more of them would centralize around something like Nand2Tetris[1] to create an expanded, and interconnected, learning ecosystem.

[1] http://www.nand2tetris.org/
The scale at which algae would have to be produced to provide even a small fraction of existing petroleum consumption would mean you'd be growing it on rather more area than you've got affixed to building facades.

For the US alone, sever tens of millions of acres, at 15,625 square miles (40,468 km^2) per 10 million acres.

If you were, say, build your 10 million acres of algae grow tanks along the length of US Interstate 80 (2,899 miles), they'd extend 2.6 miles to either side of the highway, for its full length. And that's about 25% of what would be required to replace present oil consumption, so figure on extending your tanks out another 7.8 miles on either side, or string tanks along Interstates 10, 40, and 70 as well (mind the routing around the Great Lakes). Oh, and algae don't freeze well, that's going to cut into your growing season.

Plus you've got to provide water, nutrients, stirring, and keep pathogens and scavengers off the crop.

It's ... a pretty significant undertaking.
i guess everything depends on what you expect from the system. For me xp was the last windows that had both reasonable features and resource usage. The only reason I'm going to use windows is because I need that one specific application for 15 min. If they provide me a terminal with something that's windows-compatible enough for me, I'll happily pay for it (saves me 2h of installing the system and hunting for drivers / downloading updates).
Download Facebook videos
They probably eat babies, too.