skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's wimpy warmongering as in "police action" and far away. Psuedo-colonialism.

Real USA warmongering would sound like, "We're gonna invade Canada and take all the maple syrup as our manifest destiny or we'll die trying".

Even the attitude of the Italian-Ethiopian war would be more hard core than the USA now.

Depressingly, our war mongering looks more like serving an arrest warrant in Detroit than being in a world war. Militarization of cops is the depressing part.
What's the goal? A 50% gender ratio in all fields?

Just trying to understand the mindset of a SJW.
Eh, sorta missing the point there, brah. He's not changing his position that Bitcoin is a farcical experiment. He trivializes every argument that favors bitcoin, therefore allowing him to save face.

AKA he's justifying his dumb thoughts...
I don't think there is much they can do.

A similar review of Human Resources professionals, also courtesy LinkedIn, shows about 70% are women.

In another report, in 2013, 41% of college seniors that elected majors in Physical Science were women. Yet, only 18% of those who chose computer science or engineering were women. It seems they'd be equally capable in chemistry and physics as in computer science and engineer. But their major choices indicate it is not about ability and something else is going on:

http://www.directemployers.org/2012/08/16/the-college-class-...

I believe that the whole dust up is a matter of gender-based difference in interests. Nothing more, and not a real problem. Which is why YC is scratching their heads about how to solve it.
> huge stigma against men who wanted to become nurses because it was a job "for women" and what kind of man would want to do that kind of thing.

...and that's exactly the kind of label that women slaps on tech jobs. "What kind of woman would want to {drive race cars,work 60 hour weeks coding,debug java threads,maintain virtual server farms}"

And there you have it. It's clearly the oppressive white males' fault.
The problem with keeping mining rewards high is that Bitcoin is supposed to be deflationary.

Right now the mining rewards being minted increase the Bitcoin supply at a rate of 11% per year. If demand for Bitcoin were constant, this would amount to 11% inflation. Demand for Bitcoin is currently increasing, so it is net deflationary, but this only lasts as long as the demand for Bitcoin is growing constantly. If you kept mining rewards high after the demand for Bitcoins had stabilized, you'd have five times the inflation of the dreaded US dollar, as you paid for your infrastructure costs through inflationary taxation.

(Which Benjamin Franklin and I actually like, but that's another issue entirely.)
paywall!

"Once you've registered, you can read up to three articles each week."

pretty sure I've not been to economist.com in a while. :/
And now Amazon also loses some customers.
Impressive what one company can do to you if they decide you're not playing by their rules. (Not defending RG, I just think this is a good example of how much power Google has..)
The copy I had was 16 bit. So it's worth noting that it won't run in 64-bit Windows. (Did they have a 32-bit version? Or maybe a DOS port that would run in dosbox or freedos? I seem to recall it also ran on Mac System 7.)
Also highly recommended to read the TechCrunch article titled "Why Tech’s Hottest Companies Want To Hire More Female Engineers" at: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/06/why-tech-companies-hiring-f...
Gold has base value derived from its industrial, ornamental uses. But its trading value is much larger.

Similarly Bitcoin has a base value in the cost of mining 1 BTC. Right now it is around $800 or so.

Because of the competition in mining, asic chips development, and More's law. The cost of mining 1 BTC is going up exponentially.
In a literal sense we have gold coins. I guess it's interesting that governments mint and sell them for a thin premium on bullion prices. And then, yeah, I'm sure there are things you could buy with a pocket full of Krugerrands. Really though, governments are giving you this opportunity to go off their currency standard. If you want to keep part of your wealth, near-cash, in gold coins, you don't have to use American Eagles to do it.
British government porn filters block EFF, Linux, Amnesty and more
If technology startups were founded more on business principles and less on hot air, tech hand-waving, and "the Facebook of X", then this probably wouldn't be so much of an issue.

Speaking as someone who got a home computer at eight, back when it was still extremely uncommon, and who never stopped programming, I actually think we vastly overvalue this whole "you have to have been hacking since age 13" angle. There are so many other elements that go into actually delivering solid product that I just don't think we can point to that as the issue to focus on.

This is a symptom of a problem, not a qualification of proficiency.
It's 32bit now
Strange that at this level of hardware the HN zeitgeist views firmware replacement as a flaw†. At a higher level, say the cell phone or desktop computer, there is a sentiment for "if you can't replace its software, it isn't yours".

There seems to be a threshold under which a device ought to just do what you expect, what the manufacturer decreed it would do and no more, even if you own it and it could do more. I propose that this level varies widely across individuals.

␄

† Granted, this capability is undocumented. But if it were documented on that scrap of paper that fell out of the packing materials, in 4pt type, using gray ink on not terribly white paper, would it be that different?
Ahh.. cool, thanks for the clarification
This new information puts American companies at even more risk of lost sales since given two companies, American Company and Foreign Company, the NSA is always going to have a massive advantage in penetrating the American company to get as much information they want to produce these backdoors. Whenever they fail to remotely access the company networks containing the IP for all the equipment they want to target, they have many more options available to physically access the network of these companies, possibly going as far as having a mole working at the companies, exfiltrating the IP they need to produce the tools in the catalog or even deliberately putting in backdoors.

This is probably the most damning information I've seen of NSA activities. This is anti-American activity since it clearly harms US economic interests. This coupled with the policy that spying on foreigners is fair-game is enough reason to give any foreign government or company enough reason never to purchase equipment from US tech companies.

As an engineer in the US, this makes my blood boil. I really hope that this new information generates more interest in open-source network software and hardware.
Not worked too well how? No revenue loss. No government penalties. Allowed to freak out at government spying with righteous anger on behalf of the customer.

I dunno, looks like as a business everyone has made it through a-ok.
Yep, and a series of uncomfortable truths about how things work against men (specially Asian men) who are trying to learn to code:

1. At school and such, no one tries to encourage you to code. People naturally think, "Oh, male and Asian, screw him, the world doesn't need another Asian dude coding. Let's try and teach Rails to that cute girl -- we need more of her kind."

2. People assume you are better at coding, math, and suchlike, and are more strident in their criticism of you when you fail to live up to their standards. I have had people tell me "yeah, if you can't understand this, you might not be smart enough". Think of the brouhaha that would result (gasp!) if someone said that to a girl.

3. You are naturally left out of all of the outreach events. Everyone is trying to get more women into coding, for some yet-as-undefined goal (getting exactly 51% women, maybe?). But you -- you are just another male nerd, and you have apparently had a red carpet laid out for you to the world of coding, so you must be privileged.

There are tons of jobs that are female dominated. Nursing? Teaching? Fashion? Yet no one's complaining that there aren't enough men on the editorial staff of Cosmopolitan magazine, or starting movements for "Men Who Are Interested In Fashion". Draw your own conclusions from this.
Only if you define dictatorship as someone the US doesn't like and democracy as someone the US likes.

There's no evidence that the government of north vietnam was worse than the organized crime cartel the US backed in the south (that had monks immolating themselves in the streets in protest against them). The US also backed Saddam Hussein against Iran, overthrew a left-wing but democratically elected government in Chile and replaced it with a brutal dictatorship. Castro, for that matter, was no worse than they guys he overthrew. The US repeatedly helped quash popular uprisings in aouth america to help out corporate interests. The US was vetoing sanctions against South Africa as late as 1988.

Oh, and check out our awesome middle eastern ally Saudi Arabia.

Learn some freaking history.
Restaurants learned this ages ago: start with a soft launch, and learn your weaknesses. Iterate. Then "launch."
Krugman has said over and over again that bitcoin is bubble. He is right. But Krugman has failed to understand a crucial aspect about bitcoin - it is truly an international currency. Here is why this is so important. Krugman argues that someday news about bitcoin will come out that is so bad it will scare people away from bitcoin. This will certainly happen, as it has happened already. But bad news is localized. Just because China may ban bitcoins does not mean that people will stop using it elsewhere. The "bad news" would have to be truly world-wide for everyone to abandon bitcoin altogether. Anything short of that, and the bubble will continue onward.
It is completely factual. Look at life and human history from an information theoretic point of view.

DNA for long term storage, cell to cell communication culminating in multicellular organisms, nervous systems and memory, symbolic communication and information transmission through conversations. Writing, printing, telegraphs; computers, networked.

Technology is a self-amplifying meme, and, now that there are technological means to transmit, persist and process complex information outside of human brains, we are no longer necessary to perpetuate it.
Bitcoin to money is what app store is for mobile software, or the web is to newspapers etc. It's decentralization of power. There's no gatekeepers to prevent new innovative payment services. You need $100 to create a new payment service, not millions. You don't need to ask anyone permission to do what you want.

In practise, individuals will now have the power that only large corporations used to.
Thanks for the candid reply! What I am working now at the moment is using LinkedIn as the authentication mechanism and adds a lot of value to LinkedIn users.

I am thinking that getting the word on LinkedIn via posts and "likes" from my own extended network may be the way to go with this app.
Taxi pricing in NYC vs Mumbai
This is spot on, and I've seen many a startup fold early on because they bet the farm on launch day.

Each time someone new stumbles upon your marketing site - you've "launched". And if they don't convert, figure out why and you'll get to launch again with the next visitor.
Here's the (vain) hope that their continued failures won't be used to justify even more spending.

To be fair, however, it often seems that USA military failures are more often due to terrible strategy than poor tactical capacity. I.e., many tactical units can achieve operational objectives that would be impressive in any military. It is the bloated, inept layer of general staff that weighs down the whole structure. But that's really just a reflection of the culture: look at any USA corporation.
If you watch the presentation, it's pretty funny why they used the Appotech chipset:

They managed to read out the embedded raw-flash on one device, and when they searched for the vendor/device, the third link that popped up on Baidu brought them directly to a download for the windows based firmware-update-tool (in chinese, of course)... so much for a headstart in analyzing the firmware :-).
Then how could he have been so wrong in his prediction?
Yeah, I'm familiar with it; my point is that the ad-hoc procedures companies use in place of work-sample testing are much more perilous. I've been a witness to more than one legal action that resulted from them.
How long would it take to re-create a computer running C from scratch materials?
Everyone's predictions are wrong because no-one can see into the future. I know that, stated like this, it's a tautological statement. But hopefully you know what I mean.

AND! the existence of different interpretations of history suggest, oddly, that this also applies to the past.
>When the official ideology is against reality, you have to choose between being a "good person" and a good scientist. It's best for your career to choose the first.

Unless your career is in something like insurance, medicine, or any field where those differences actually matter.
The scenario with people cashing out because of regulation also assumes that most bitcoin users live under a single regulatory area, which is untrue. Banning bitcoin in the United States, for example, might decrease it's value, but not destroy it, as there's the rest of the world.
Can anyone in the UK verify this?
>Who ever owns the islands ... has the rights to exploit the oil/gas fields in the ocean beds around them.

that is the current post-colonial (post-WWI) framework of "independent sovereign nations". This framework starts to show its limitations in dealing with a host of transnational/transcontinental/global issues. Global warming in particular comes to mind. As usually, either framework will get adapted or it will rupture into a new WW, and the new framework will result after it, like it happened after previous WWs.

With regard of mutually assured destruction - this would assure that the war will be fought outside of populated areas, i.e. nobody is going to nuke each others cities (Walmart will still be importing and selling Chinese manufactured goods as sinking the container ships isn't a necessary part of fighting of the modern war for either side :). WWI was new kind of war - trenches. WWII - motorized. WWIII - precision and automated weapons, drones fighting drones.
I'd disagree that Bitcoin is to money what the app store is for mobile software. If you are talking about the Apple App Store, they are the gatekeepers to what software you can load.
No, its reasonably implied.

If the NSA has the information its claimed to have, then its reasonable to suggest that anyone in power has every little thing they ever did wrong in the past in the back of their minds, knowing the NSA might know about it. Recent revelations can only make that feeling stronger. So, while it is unlikely that every judge, politician, whatever, has been literally visited by a NSA goon, it is quite reasonable to suggest that such people rationally decide not to oppose the NSA, and act accordingly.

That is the whole reason why industrialised, comprehensive data slurping is a direct threat to any notion of freedom.
A discussion on SD card security, reliability and hackability
Bitcoin is far more than "just" a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem.

Inside every Bitcoin transaction is a small program that contains no loops. If that program when executed returns true, the transaction is valid.

The simplest, most boring kind of transaction--but the one that most people assume "is Bitcoin"--is a transfer from address P to address Q. Where things get more interesting is in using those little programs in more creative ways; e.g., k-of-n escrow, attestation of ownership, etc.

A whole generation of kids is going to grow up soon routinely using small Bitcoin escrows to hedge everyday scenarios. They won't quite able to believe that their parents operated in a world based on centralized authority subject to rent-seeking corruption.
Unfortunately, you may have had a point, but the abusive and offensive way about which you've made it makes it nearly impossible to discern it. Your comment is exactly why I stopped reading comments on news papers, it is full of ad hominem attacks with a serious vileness that makes it clear you are neither interested in discussion of the subject nor capable of providing meaningful insight.

I agree with the other poster, political posts bring out the partisans and assholes.
I think you'd be hard pressed to run Win8 on a 32Gb drive with 4Gb Ram (although, admittedly, my Surface Pro runs Win8 adequately on 4Gb so it's the tiny drive that will get you).

If you compare the base 1299(wifi) Pixel to a 1299MBA(13") they look about equal as far as I can see.

The Pixel gives you a higher resolution display (2560x1700 vs 1440x900) and a slight bump in processor speed (i5/1.8Ghz vs i5/1.3GHz). The MBA also has an intel HD Graphics 5000 vs the Pixel's HD 4000.

The drawback to the Pixel imo is that there is no 8GB ram option and it's stuck with a 32 GB drive (even if it is an SSD). Also, the MBA has a longer battery life (8h vs 5h) and USB3 ports instead of USB2.

It's actually the battery life that pushes me towards the MBA. I picked up an XPS13 "Sputnik" in an effort to move away from Apple hardware and was immediately disappointed with the battery life. The Pixel doesn't appear to be any stronger on this front.
A Look Back on Crowdfunding in 2013: The Data Explained in Infographics
Just curious - do you think that outlets like Valleywag are a positive or negative for our industry?

If something is a positive for everybody who believes the "right" way and negative for everybody else, I tend to believe that's a net negative because it makes us dumber in the aggregate.
Yeah, I completely agree - I absolutely hate interviews, to the point where I would prefer to do a large amount of work on alternative methods over a full day of interviews.
> I wonder if it is just something about startups - higher risk, lower guaranteed reward, worse training programs, higher pressure.

This is explained equally well by inexperienced managers hiring people similar to themselves culturally, racially, and socioeconomically. Likewise, if I were a woman, I wouldn't want to work on a team with five dudes oblivious to their dude-dom.
Majority of Africans own a cell phone, and they already use it for payments.
You're REALLY going to try and get that jib about Microsoft in there? Christ, HN really has turned to shit. Get a clue, EVERY company does this. Stop fan-boying and learn to think for yourself.
'War' is a very specific term of the trade. Using any and all tools available when you are at War can be easily defended by a whole lot of people (not everyone0. US is not officially at war in Yemen or Pakistan or for that matter Afghanistan. Hence, I think, use of drones introduces another dimension to the arguments. Ultimately, there is and always has been one principle used by humanity - 'Might is right'. Of-course smart ones can always hide this core principle in layers of arguments of convenience.
You make some good points. The evaluation of drones should be reasoned and open. How about suspending their use until then?
Colonialism was mostly war as business as usual too. WWI was the exception.
I think the point is that Iraq was essentially positioned as a police action against the government - not a war against the whole country, so it has been relatively restrained, especially since Iraq couldn't hit back.

An all out war against a powerful nation that could hit back would be far less restrained.
The article you link to is about loan sharks. You can loan money out to people using Kiva at 0% interest.
I've never seen this with any of the banks with which I've done business. They will tell me what the transactions were and ask me to confirm that they were indeed by me in the case that they're suspicious of fraudulent activity.
I agree with your point about an "ageist" culture in the valley. An interesting idea I think would be a funding group organized around older entrepreneurs. With so many trying to emulate the success of the valley, maybe the opportunity is in targeting what the valley is missing?
It's more like " The principal says you confessed and agreed to serve detention, because your friend told him you said you'd serve detention if you had to."

The specific statute does not provide victims an avenue of relief, so the victims cannot seek relief from the courts under that statute.

The real problem is either (a) the law is unconstitutional, or (b) the Cnstitution is not strong (well-written) enough to give justice in cases where the government is concealing its actions.
"Germany had overseas colonies"

Yeah like 3 small states in Africa almost by accident.

To compare to a "real" colonial empire take a look at the Spanish empire at peak, or the British empire around WWI, or the French colonial empire, or the Russian empire, the Dutch empire...

Needs a sense of scale. The Russian Empire around 1900 was the 3rd largest empire in history, something like 1/8th of a billion people. German colonial population from the linked wiki article before WWI, 23 thousand.
I don't believe bitcoin has a floor value in the same sense as gold or silver. A currency doesn't need to have a floor value just because currencies traditionally had. Besides, modern currencies are fiat money without a true "floor" value.
HEXEN 2.0 (tarot cards about Internet and mkultra etc.)
I worked with him at UW. Dickweed then, dickweed now. Talks out of his ass more than anyone I've ever met.
I bought a new laptop about six months ago and I made sure to buy an SED SSD but I'm still using dm-crypt/LUKS encryption on top of it.
It was over five years between the iPod and the iPhone's introduction, then another three between the iPhone and the iPad. Apple's R&D spending has been ramping up sharply over the last few years (see figures posted in another comment). Hang tight.
Startups try to keep a "high bar", only hiring people with sterling academic credentials or proven work in the field.

So I would expect the gender ratio to be less equal at startups that draw from the far right-hand side of the graph, and more equal at big firms that are willing to hire from the middle.
I agree that it's not a perfect analogy. App stores (I'm talking in general, not referring to Apple's store) are still centralized and act as gatekeepers, but the "gatekeeping level" is in another level to what it used to be. Before app stores it was practically impossible to for a lone developer to create an application and release it.
The success of bitcoin, in large part, relies on faith that people will support it as a currency. If its market cap and/or trade volume isn't high enough, then a secure mining network cannot be supported, and the entire system, including all of its extra features touted by techies, will collapse.

Bitcoin will succeed if enough people believe that it will succeed, and bitcoin will fail if enough people believe it will fail.

Krugman is attempting to damage the future prospects of the system by spreading asinine notions about how it's not "economically viable". This really hits a nerve, because it serves no purpose other than to gain readership and to make him feel better for not investing in it. There is a risk that he, and others, could destroy bitcoin's future by convincing enough people that it shouldn't be trusted.

No economic arguments (especially Krugman's) about it are valid. Bitcoin's success or failure is entirely a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Two factions will form (or have already formed) - supporters and haters. The system needs enough supporters (and their investments) for it to be viable. The hope is that the supporters will grow in number or at least remain unchanged. Krugman is trying to turn supporters into haters, reducing the viability of the system.