skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's true!
However, another quote that I thought was relevant to this same way of thinking: (this was just posted today on HN, and I thought, exactly!)

“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.

“You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same, but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.”

~ http://blog.garrytan.com/

When I read this, it exactly encapsulated what I was trying to say. You are allowed to fear everything, but if you let fear control you or decide what you will or will not do you will not become great. You may even regret bitterly not taking the jump off the cliff.
Apple denies any knowledge of NSA's hacking its iPhones
You Say Goodbye and We Say Hello
It has a lot more in common with gold than it does with currency. Its ultimate role may be to act as a basis for more usable cryptocurrencies.
Guess South Korean submarines of the future will get even quieter and covered with tiny holes.
That is an incredibly biased way of handling related work. Doing it right means being blind wrt the PC, if the conference isn't run by dysfunctional egoists and you cover related work in good faith, the reviewer won't dock too many points for missing something and they'll fill in your missing information in the review.
I just copied the profile code from bsdnt. I guess the reason it uses it is that it simpler and/or more portable. In this case, it does not matter much. I use the functions from sys/time.h when I do more serious profiling.
Private currencies were local to small areas and national currencies were created to consolidate control and distribution to citizens -- making transactions easier between states, controlling inflation, etc. Why not look at bitcoin as the next step: a means to globalize currency and facilitate international economic growth.
I really liked using your app and am sorry to see it go. :(
I don't see where the issue of whether it is economically a good idea is brought up?

The article focuses on the history of money, specifically how governments have increasingly monopolized it. And the conclusion is summarized here:

> Anyone who thinks that Bitcoin will triumph has to believe that it will succeed where earlier generations of private currencies failed -- that Bitcoin will, improbably, manage to overthrow more than century’s worth of accumulated state power, jealously guarded and ruthlessly enforced.

In other words, the argument here is that governments will kill bitcoin (if it becomes big enough).

The basis for the argument is that, while bitcoin is new and unique and in no way similar to those old types of money that existed in the past, it is still money, and it is still being used by people within the reach of national governments. And the argument is that those national governments will keep their monopolies on currency by fighting bitcoin.

That leaves open the question of whether they will succeed. Certainly governments have not succeeded at killing another bit* thing, bittorrent.

However, the story is not quite a parallel, as bitcoin will be used in different ways, and likely require far more of a connection to "normal" monetary markets - people will want to exchange bitcoin for standard currency. Governments might be capable of fighting that very effectively, even though they have proven mostly powerless against bittorrent.
This guy's argument just boils down to "they failed in the past, so these guys will fail now, any other outcome is preposterous." This is not an argument which can sand without consideration of factors of new technology, virtuality, and globalism, never mind any social and political factors which are different now from then.

Weak opinion article, with no actual coherent reasons to believe him. "It happened before, it must happen again" is not an argument.

BTW I am not entirely bullish on Bitcoin, but it's not because of this guy's (non-)argument.
In 1964, Isaac Asimov Imagined the World in 2014
Wireless is not a panacea even with spread spectrum. You still have a finite amount of radio spectrum you have to share with everybody within range. The amount of bandwidth you can serve to each customer with a fiber-terminating central office every square mile is limited in practice by the cost of installing fiber. The amount of bandwidth you can serve to each customer with a WISP every square mile is limited in practice by the laws of physics -- the only way to get more is to build a higher density of wireless base stations, and in higher population density areas the cost of that is on the same order as installing fiber to the customer premises. Moreover, the cost effectiveness of using wireless for the last mile goes down as the demand for bandwidth per customer increases over time, because you have to increase the density of wireless base stations and run new cable to each of them in order to expand capacity rather than only replacing the terminating equipment at both ends of an existing cable.

Wireless is a great solution to providing high bandwidth services in rural areas where the cost of laying new cable is prohibitive. It's not a solution for cities.
Website defacement: provisional details
Bitcoin, Krugman and the Mere Agreement of Value
Agree with this sentiment, but I think the effort would be better spent taking steps to switch to trusted DNS providers, as well as building layperson tools to monitor them.
You might be surprised at how many people show up to a developer interview and are unable to have an intelligent conversation about the problem, let alone solve it. This is a weedout question, that's all.

Bear in mind that the objective isn't to weed out people who can't solve it. There are plenty of people who are fine coders who wouldn't quickly hit the solution for any number of reasons, including nervousness. The objective is to weed out the charlatans and amateurs who managed to get past the HR resume filter, so that as little time as possible is wasted.
NSA's Propagandist For CBS Officially Takes Counterterrorism Job
Yes, but the point of view of the article is that from the perspective of national governments, it is similar. Hence they will try to kill it as they killed previous currencies that competed with the government monopoly-issued money.

I agree that bitcoin might be harder to kill due to those technological aspects, that does feel like it was not sufficiently addressed in the article.
Not necessarily kill, but co-opt or take over entirely. Or even beat it into the ground competitively with a similar digital currency that they control and can promote more vigorously.
I can think of so many things that can go wrong from sexual harassment lawsuits to a samsung-or-other-made battery exploding in the face of the user.
Some data points. Took a poll around our office (it was kind of thin because of the holiday) and of the 4 devs that responded and said they use SO, all 4 said they don't actually care about or pay attention to the points, they just use it as a source of information.
Your post was unclear and I asked what you meant. I didn't debate anything. i was extremely clear and explicit about this. i asked a question, said i didn't know, said i was curious, didn't dispute anything you said.

Only a domain expert could be expected to automatically know whether double GPUs is effectively the same thing as double CPUs or not. Apple has put a lot of effort into making their GPU structure effective (in general, not just for a few special cases), and I didn't know if you were saying they'd failed or not. i know parallel processing is hard, but i also know apple has smart people who've worked on it. i don't know things like whether "lack of unified memory" is a problem for apple's design too, or not. it seems completely plausible to me, not knowing the domain that well, that apple could have had something that works well in general, or not – i don't really know and you didn't say, just assumed your reader would somehow know what you meant (which will basically only work for people who already know your point and have no need to read your comment at all).
I don't think that that is the right way to look at it. Yes those people employed by startups would be able to find work elsewhere, but if they did would they take a job that would otherwise go to someone else? Also the startups that succeed employ more people. If we have a shortage of jobs, more jobs sounds like a good thing.
Only if that foreign currency is absolutely never inflated by that government, and allowed to thus increase in relative value to all the other fiat currencies.

And also that bank account does not flow through the existing US controlled international financial system.

And that bank account does not require an ID, residency address, or even your name to open.

Oh, and that bank never lends your money out. They keep a 100% reserve on all deposits.

I suppose this bank also has no bank fees, no wire transfer fees, no wire department transfer latencies, no bank holidays etc.

I should also point out that if you are a US citizen, it's nearly impossible to open a foreign bank account without either 1) foreign citizenship 2) connections 3) a very large minimum balance.

Then, you are correct, it's like a foreign bank account.
Etiquette to contact a tech journalist about your startup
Hey, Philip - thanks for posting this and also the previous write-up of your experiences as a helper in the 'boot camp' (http://pgbovine.net/teaching-librarians-programming.htm). It is very valuable, including the photos. Very nice, multi-generational group - must have been quite a challenge!

But I agree with calhoun137 when he says there is no fundamental user/programmer culture divide. Programmers are users with a deeper understanding and wider toolset. We all want to get stuff done quickly and move on with our lives rather than drown in computer-driven drudge work. So it seems like a course for beginners should start from that common point, and really be focused on (a) uncovering the problems they're already solving by hacking together the tools they know (e.g. getting data into Excel charts, or whatever) and (b) using the inefficiencies in their solutions to motivate learning or building tools with more leverage, etc.

I can't help but think from your description, the student "regular users" are the ones with a pragmatic/hacker approach, using the limited tools they know -- while the instructor "programmers" are the users stuck in religious attachment to their arcane tools. Maybe the course would go better adopting some of that "regular user culture", AKA hacking ;)

I'm sure it was more complicated than that and for one thing I can really empathize with having to deal with massive variety of platforms etc. Might be worth setting up a common VirtualBox image that everyone (students and instructors) use from day 1, to avoid some of that headache?

Anyway, thanks again for the write-up.

Eric
We were aware of this in 2005 when the Pentium 4 could not transform into another Pentium 5.
"Placebo only works when the people don't know they are being duped."

It's my understanding that this is (surprisingly!) not the case.
Couldn't identify with this more, the worst part is when you spend so much time circling that you start to forget the things you originally learned, or at least think you do.
However I have noticed the same effect, especially when you have circled once or twice back to the same well your brain has learned more than you know, and thinking in that way is much easier now that you have had time to work through it and let your brain rest a bit.

I think on some level you cant make yourself feel bad for being a jack of all trades, and you can setup methods to reinforce going back to the well of whatever you were working on.

One of my compatriots who does this has a dedicated but somewhat more closed off friend who doesn't look around for new things. They challenge each other to see who can accomplish the most in some specific language, style, whatever . The flighty but open one now is challenged by someone who is more dedicated to the task, and as they keep it light hearted. Together they make some interesting stuff and are a pretty good team.
Yep, that would be perfect, I think.
If card companies are paying it all back to consumers, then what are their shareholders ending up with?

I agree with you that not all the $500Bn is going directly into the pockets of shareholders, but the reality is that there is a huge transaction cost in taking a clip and then passing part of it back to a consumer. However much is lost in the process, it might not be $500Bn but it is definitely a lot of money, and it is unnecessary.

There are a lot of arguments as to why merchants won't adopt Bitcoin for payments, the main one being that they actually need most of the features of modern finance that these companies charge for. The fees though are definitely an argument for Bitcoin, and not against.
It doesn't actually talk much about why Bitcoin and other currencies like it were/are a "bad idea" for the economy. It mainly talks about how governments wanted to kill them, and how they succeed in the past (something that may prove much harder with Bitcoin, even if they do want to do that, which so far at least, most don't want to do).
It did have to do with cost as well. From the original paper: "That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer."

In other words, it was the number of transistors that could economically be included in a single unit.
Engelbart and Kay
There are a few holdouts in certain areas. E.G. there's a pretty active and good Haskell community on SO currently.
I think that all evidence points to states having far far more power to respond to technologies than anyone here can imagine. Frankly, in light of all the public disclosures this year I can't help but wonder where all the bitcoin optimism comes from.
I would ignore him. He clearly has no idea what he's saying. No one I've talked to has called Mavericks "buggy as hell".
> Cash4Trafik

It may be the cynic in me after seeing abuses for companies like Cash4Gold, but "Cash4" anything does not instill any amount of trust in a brand, at least to me.
My Blogging Resolution for 2014
I understand what are you trying to say. But this is a not a reasonable comparison.
>I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.

Which, instantly, should be reason enough to understand that said criticism is BS.

Apple products are among the best in the industry, period. Not just from the industrial design part of it, but overall: coherence of product vision, attention to important characteristics for the target market (battery time, portability, weight), quality machining and materials, attention to small details (from multitouch touchpad to magsafe adaptor and from backlit keyboard to magnetic, non protruding, lid hinge).

These people think that because they are not speced and designed like gaming PCs they are not worthy ("I can have a better GPU for less money in my custom box, and with xeon lights on the sides too).

And they attribute their popularity to some BS "reality distortion" effect, ignoring the fact that hardcore hackers, prominent programmers and old school neckerbeards, from Rob Pike, DHH, and Duncan Davidson to Jamie Jawinsky and Miguel De Icaza (the frigging founder of the Gnome desktop) down to Linus Torvalds, who waxes poetically about his MacBook Air as the best in the market.

So, "fawning over Apple" justs translates to "did some favorable reviews of products, instead of making up BS reasons to dislike them".
I thought the sentence was clear. For example, if you strip away the mobile, network-connected, and technological aspects of a mobile phone away, you are left with nothing: there's no centuries-old parallel for such a communications device. With bitcoin, apparently there is.
Maybe. Much of the history of computer science is the layering of abstractions. Indeed, the transition to multi-core hasn't been the disaster that many feared because various abstractions (game engines, rendering engines, Hadoop, etc.) abstract parallelism in important ways where that parallelism is actually needed.
What is the context from that photo? What are you trying to imply from it? It strikes me as simply a funny photo. I don't see how it warrants name calling.
more OSes to ship with python3 as default would help.
I guess another thing that would help is to change the narrative, even just a year ago python3 was said to be bleeding edge and if you wanted to make something production ready you should go with python2, so I did. Basically, sell python3 better to both existing and new users.
If you search little bit more, you would be be able to find that work somewhere else for free download. Some application paper published by Springer etc are difficult to get.
He proclaimed it the next big thing just 8 months ago. https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/ZLV9GdmkRzS

Then, he is wrong often. http://odonnellweb.com/pelican/posts/2013/Apr/google-glass-i...
Your credentialism and elitism doesn't impress me.
If someone buys content from russia they are dealing with russian entitiy not with US one. Given that he can probably shore up some sort of company and do business through that via appointed trustee.
I'd really love to hear pg's comments of wether there is a piece of software, a tool, that could help him write the essays. Is there something that constantly comes to his mind when he writes, in form of "if only there was X so that I could Y".

Or anyone else's
Very interesting. I'm compelled to investigate further; are there any websites/books you could recommend for further reading? I have no meditation experience.
Messages by carrier pigeon? Sounds pretty "mobile" to me.

I think the point is Bitcoin is revolutionary in many ways than just being a digital currency. It's also P2P, and these type of technologies seem very hard to shut down by governments, after reaching critical mass. There are probably a lot of things governments could do to slow it down, but I'm not sure they could kill it.
I'm very excited for the second and third generation oculus rift, or whatever succeeds it. If I can get something with a sunglasses form factor and a front facing camera with "pass through" mode, I'd just wear it all day (while working). For me, the killer app is a virtual desktop where I can arrange a wall of windows around my laptop. I don't own any furniture and tend to bounce around furnished apartments, so being able to have a replacement for multiple 27" monitors that I can fit in my laptop case would be a godsend.

Edit: as long as it has vim bindings. :)
I love the Haskell version of this because non-deterministic computation via (depth-first) search is embodied by the list monad!

The preliminaries are that we represent a board position containing N queens on an NxN board by a list of row positions in each of N columns.

newtype Board = Board [Int] deriving ( Eq, Show )
emptySolution = Board []

Then, given any particular NxN board with M queens in first M columns that is a solution to M-queens, we can generate the list of possible new boards with (M+1) queens. We try all possible row positions for the new column excepting the rows where queens already exist.

attempts :: Int -> Board -> [Board]
attempts n (Board queens) =
map (\r -> Board (r : queens)) ([0 .. n - 1] \\ queens)

And we prune out the ones where the new queen has a diagonal conflict.

valid :: Board -> Bool
valid (Board []) = True
valid (Board (q:cols)) =
and $ map (\(n, c) -> abs (q - c) /= n) (zip [1..] cols)

-- this is a bit clever, as we walk back through
-- the previous columns, if the absolute difference
-- between the row position of the new queen and
-- an old queen is ever the count of the column
-- we're in, then it must be in a diagonal line
-- from the new queen

All of the above is pretty standard, but the fun part is using the list monad to structure a search. Each bind (<-) in do-notation can be thought of as non-deterministically setting a particular choice from the right side to the name on the left

queens :: Int -> [Board]
queens n = search n [emptySolution] where
search 0 boards = boards -- no more queens to add
search k boards = do
board <- search (k - 1) boards -- find a smaller solution
filter valid (attempts board) -- try all possible extensions,
-- remove the bad ones

>>> length (queens 8)
92

Finally, the pattern of `search` is really common, it's just iterating the generation of attempted solutions. We can write it with the built-in function `Control.Monad.foldM` or another common utility combinator, `iterateM`

iterateM :: Monad m => (a -> m a) -> a -> [m a]
iterateM f x = iterate (f =<<) (return x)

queens n = iterateM (filter valid . attempts n) emptySolution !! n

Finally, it's worth noting that there's nothing special about the list monad's implementation. It's easy to rewrite it without using the typeclass.

-- this is the list monad definition
instance Monad [] where
return a = [a]
xs >>= f = concat (map f xs)

iterateList :: (a -> [a]) -> a -> [[a]]
iterateList f x = iterate (concat . map f) [x]
There are definitely a lot of risks involved in accepting Bitcoins as a salary. Anyone doing it should fully research the currency and be aware of the risks before ever accepting such an option.
In the time you spent writing that comment, you could have registered and logged into Quora.
Ask HN: How do you focus?
In the midst of distractions-how do you focus if you need to get something done? Is there anything you do particularly?
I had an extension that did that as well. I reported it to Amazon and left a 1 star review warning other users.
Show HN : a site to create vintage computer terminal messages
You don't trust your ISP, so you go for the one company whose entire profit model is build around ads and profiling their users, and who is known to cooperate (willingly and/or unwillingly) with the NSA in their logging programs? I'm not sure that's the right response...
Yes, and conditioning your users to click on popups. Glad you chose not to!
Job is a job, business is a business. I hand it to you that you did this the way you did, perhaps you could've found a way to stay under the radar, grow the business and maybe find an investor that could stock most popular offerings and let you sell them yourself - ie putting your matches first. Gradually cutting amazon and others out of the loop. That is why they sent you sent cease and decease letters, becaue they do not care for people to be becoming their competitiors.

again very nice, I applaud.
I'm considering it only from a currency regulation standpoint, as per the article. But it's easy enough to make sure that you may deposit or withdraw money only from a local bank account, in the local currency, which you must have opened using valid non-anonymous credentials. Existing banks are highly regulated, as you point out.

BTW, EverBank offers foreign currency denominated money market accounts in the US.
Knuth's saying goes "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Which is just another way of expressing the Unix ethic of first make it work, then make it fast.
Interesting point. Seems like a single currency would make transactions more efficient. That's why the EU did it, right? The problem becomes who controls it. You'll have some nations who want to inflate it. Others who won't. Eventually the system breaks down. That's where I see bitcoin as having an advantage. Everyone knows from the beginning the currency's inflation trajectory.
Theoretically, you're right.

In practice, we can just look at existing single payer systems and see how they're doing. Would you rather be a poor parent of a disabled child in the US or the UK?