skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Bitcoin network doesn't require CEOs to burn jet fuel to visit their associates for catered meals; it doesn't require metal to be pressed into little discs, or trees to be pressed into little rectangles, and then distributed via combustion engine; it doesn't require receipts to be printed, duplicated, stored, and finally destroyed; it doesn't require millions of humans to commute to HVAC supported cubes to keep the system running.
You can hand me dollar bills, but how many dollar bills do you have? I just counted. I have $36 in bills in my possession. I should to go to the ATM today to get more in case I run out. Eventually, Bitcoin will be similar in that most of our wealth won't be stored in the actual currency, but in bank deposits. I could withdraw actual currency from a Bitcoin bank with the tap of a button and have it on my phone in 10 minutes. Getting dollars requires going to a physical place to get physical bills.

Transferring large amounts of dollars takes days. Transferring Bitcoin takes 10 minutes or so.
But how much of that is bundled assets vs actual code bloat ?
Well you can speak for me because I was going to write basically this same post. I often felt this way growing up.
Despite what your teachers and your parents may have told you, your opinion is not inherently valid. You have shown yourself to be ignorant of too many things to provide a meaningful contribution to this discussion.
This paraphrased quote was quite ambiguous to me, but the conclusion of having preferred Ruby in the end without further commentary makes it seem like the nice syntax is worth the complications, while I would say those "intuitions" of initial liking/disliking a language because of syntax are completely misleading and should not be trusted.

Also, it's not only about ugly internals, I wrote several RSpec tests that looked like a perfectly reasonable "natural-languigish" expression of what I wanted to, but did not work at all, because of the tricky mechanics underneath happened not to support this particular combination of incantations. In the end you have to understand all the ugly internals to know which of the "nice" calls will work and which not, and I all the time see people shooting themselves in the foot because of not having this understanding, e.g. not wrapping some bit in a lambda in Ruby and having something evaluated at the wrong time etc.
And aside from wishful thinking, what evidence do you have to back your hypothesis?
I love rule-based central banking. It injects predictability and stability into a monetary system and has had fantastic results in the developing world. Cryptocurrencies allow for rule-based monetary systems without the risk of a central bank failing to adhere to its rules prescription. A world of competing crypto currencies would be fascinating - various rule systems being adopted and phased out as (a) critical flaws are discovered, (b) more competitive rules are introduced, or (c) the global economy's needs and hence optimal rules system change.

The downside of discretionless rules-based central banking is it makes learning, and thus evolving, very expensive, requiring a rerooting of the currency and thus monetary system. This is why developed countries do better with discretionary central banks - their economies are too complicated for any known rules systems to work reliably and their central banks trusted enough not to be stupid.

I love the future Bitcoin portends - a world of competing and overlapping rules-based and discretionary monetary systems. I am fairly confident, however, that Bitcoin is not competitive for that world. Still, it's a great introduction and has its social value as a stepping stone.
The retina iPads are higher resolution, color-calibrated and likely higher quality panels then the big screen you're talking about. And you can easily use high-quality headphones to get quality sound out of them as well. Maybe not surround-sound... yet.
Who told you these things? Obviously, that's where the problem starts, and though I've never experienced that (nor has anyone I know), I can't deny that it exists.
Definitely a steep learning curve, but like vim/emacs, it quickly becomes second nature.

I shouldn't have left all my Blender books on the bottom shelf of the bookcase where my old cat could pee on them. I need to pick it back up again. Good thing there are so many more resources these days.
> This entire thread is about "discrimination" for the purposes of introducing black girls to programming. Is that not a positive for society?

Are you justifying racism via economic output? I've seen this line of reasoning go horribly wrong before..

Obviously teaching people how to be productive is good. But what about teaching people to discriminate against others? If we were to argue from principle, I would agree that racism is not a virtue. That said, I don't adhere to principled reasoning 100% of the time and would be happy to help "black girls" code.
HSBC knowingly laundered billions for violent drug cartels, and were fined a mere 5 weeks of revenue. None of the executives involved in this went to jail.

Meanwhile, people's lives are ruined for selling or even possessing small amounts of harmless drugs.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge-approves...
Can you explain how exactly or why would anyone buy any items (that's what currencies are for after all) using a deflationary currency?

Why would anyone ever cash out of any position with a positive rate of return?

By this logic everyone should stop consuming and put all their money into SPY, or similar market tracking indices. Yet they don't.
fair enough, my point still stands though. I don't see people clammoring over the gender disparity in janitorial positions for example. I simply think events like this are odd. I don't think they should be gendered or racially restricted. When I was in high-school I had to teach myself programming. There were no resources for me to take advantage of like this I would have loved to attend something like it. There were also huge negative stigmas associated with (nerds) who played computer games at the time which is how most of us got into games.

The best way to get any kid interested in tech is video games. They will be interested in a career there if they look up to role models in that industry. Kids need to respect and look up to scientists and engineers rather than pop culture and sports stars. I myself was guilty of this when I was younger, Then I played quake and it blew me away. Afterward I looked up to John Carmack and started learning about computers.
Agreed, but I think both the computational attacks and miner collusion are on a similar level of difficulty as printing passable counterfeit dollars.
"(save speculation)"? That's a huge save.
Chomsky certainly never left academic work for politics. He has divided his time evenly between the two for many decades.
I think some people look at it as form of nonviolent protest, and I'm glad they've found a peaceful option. In fact, I also appreciate that more of society is becoming engaged in a discussion that used to be strictly the purview of economists. Ever try starting a conversation at a pub about how to imbue a new reserve currency with value? Unless you happen upon someone from the IMF, you'd probably be out of luck.
As far as making it illegal, I wonder if the blockchain gets to a certain size where it's easy to detect and delete, if that's not already the case. At that point I think the blockchain morphs into something harder to detect--maybe that technology already exists? I think the coin with the best developers will survive--maybe that's Bitcoin, maybe not.
You're saying `code` but what you really mean is "Java" or your favorite OOP paradigm. If someone comes up with different rules for what `2.days()` means then they are valid rules (and we can discuss whether they provide benefits to the other ones).
Wow, this is the most unnecessary and untimely comment I've ever seen. This has absolutely no relevance. This does not even address the question being posed and goes off on a wild tangent that can only be meant to incite others and detract from the conversation at hand. This doesn't belong here, and I'm questioning whether the kind of person who would post such a thing does either.
The basic idea is that objects should know how to represent themselves. In Smalltalk every Object implments writeOn: method, which gets a stream and prints self on this stream.

By extension, if an object knows how to convert itself into another object, it implements a method for doing do. In Smalltalk there is a convention of putting all such methods inside "converting" protocol. For great example of how is this useful you can look at the Collection and it's subclasses in Smalltalk - all collections have many "asOtherKindOfCollection" methds, which are either inherited or implemented, depending on a collection. It's great to be able to send "asSet" to any collection that comes your way and the way Smalltalk does it is natural in purely object oriented languages.

That and the fact that creating IntsToRange or StringToDayOfWeek "static" classes is actually even worse leads to the design where Integers have `to:` and `days` methods.

Actually, there is one more probable cause: in Smalltalk and some other languages extending already defined types is easy, really easy, easier even than creating a new, empty class. The methods are grouped into "protocols", which are grouped into packages and it's - not quite - largely orthogonal to the classes. Combine that with powerful IDE, VC support (Monticello, Metacello) etc. and you have no reason whatsoever not to extend even the most basic classes.
That was on my top three for last year.
Looking through my list, none jumps out as a 'life changer':

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/

Although there are several good ones there:

* Nathan Barry's Authority: http://blog.liberwriter.com/2013/11/21/nathan-barrys-authori...

* Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/09/worthless-imp... - not one for the ages, but I thought his take on entrepreneurship was interesting.

* http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/08/pathfinder-jo... - biography of John Fremont. Interesting guy in an interesting period of American history.

* http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/02/innovation-an... - Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Drucker. Still a very relevant book in a lot of ways.
Well, partly it's that sanitation work like that is very much a blue-collar job, and very few feminists really care about the working class women who are most affected by gender discrimination in it. It's a known problem with feminism, basically.
It's probably more economical for hosting companies to use lots of cheap drives in a RAID configuration. For my own desktop PC, I'd rather use a single SSD with a good reputation for reliability, together with frequent backups.

Of course, a RAID is only useful when the failure is drastic enough for the controller to notice it, which some of these power-down failures may not be.
I wrote the original implementation.

One thing worth noting is that the implementation isn't globally extending `uint` with `.days()`. In order to write `2.days()`, you need to first import the trait that provides the implementation.

From that perspective, it's not much different from importing a function like `days_from_now` that you call as `days_from_now(2)`.
I agree with this. For a Docker container to be valuable to companies (i.e. willing to pay money for it, I assume that's the goal), it should support both.

How are you planning to integrate the Docker container with the business authentication/authorization? LDAP?
I use it too, and sometimes http://raining.fm as well.
None, but it's important to remember that currency is wishful thinking. The value of a non-commodity currency is what people believe it's worth. Trends in the public's beliefs about currency are incredibly significant.
At https://vline.com we provide a free WebRTC-based video chat service. It doesn't require any registration or installs and is built on top of our developer platform: https://vline.com/developer/.
Nice try CIA, nice try.
Feed Ads would cause a user revolt overnight.

Reddit is caught between a rock and a hard place since users like Reddit because of the nonintrusive ads.
great find :)
Stop conflating discrimination based on race and racism. They are not the same. Go study some history if you don't believe me.

And just because I know this is coming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6976062
I have no problems with an AVM router with (proper) dual stack - Dual Stack Lite sounds like something from a nightmare.

Did you try installing freetz?
I think most commentators here missed the point of the article. Bitcoin is evil not because it fails at x, because the interest in it propagates bad (Krugman POV) economics. Krugman/Stross assume this type of economics is the 'Austrian school'/Goldbug economics.
There are "girls code" events which are dominated by white females. There's no need to have one specifically for white females, except to exclude other races, There is a need for Black Girls Code as an effort to bring them into the fold. Once they are overrepresented as coders, I'd expect to see these events disappear.

Is this really so complicated for hackers to understand?
Pretty much League of Legends all the way, all of the adrenaline of an FPS, with the progression of an MMORPG but none of the grind. I'm not surprised it's the most played game in the world. Recently Hearthstone has been fun...
Why is being categorized as Black an inherently negative thing? You should really read up on how we historically used to be classified and categorized.

> Are southern Italians black? What about Turks?

No. Black typically refers to people who are indigenous members of the African diaspora. As it's been used in the west, it's not typically resting solely on complexion (e.g they had another set of nasty names for darker people from Europe and Asia).

I understand this is highly contextual, and that there may be native categorizations that are similar to specific regions, but I hope this clarifies how it applies.

> Just to put this into context: here, in Belgium, it's actually illegal to register someone's "race" (except for medical reasons).

I'm still curious why this is considered progress. As I've seen it in other countries, it doesn't do much to address racial issues in a society. The elimination of a box on state forms doesn't mean that it's somehow removed or diminished in that society.
In a word, clarity.

I realize it would be redundant, that's not the point. I'm hoping for 3d modeling software that is free, and easy to start with. Maybe blender isn't the solution to that problem, but i've spent well over two years using blender, and i honestly have no idea what half of it does.

There are some helpful "blender for beginners" video tutorials, but not many, and i've looked.

In trying to advance open 3d printing, this is a huge barrier. Modeling software is the future, and if we want any independence from stratasys we'll need a powerful, easy to learn, modeling program. Otherwise we'll be overwelmed by proprietary software that only works with proprietary printers, e.g. makerware slicing program.
Yes. This is already happening to a small extent, and the use of bitcoin as a money transfer mechanism is where the value comes from. People who wish to transfer money using bitcoin do not care about the market price; if they have $1000 USD to send, they buy $1000 USD worth of bitcoins at market price, send them over the network in seconds, and then that value is converted into cash locally. They don't care about the market price, as long as it isn't volatile over the short time it takes to move the value.

The market price of bitcoin is determined by the number of bitcoin holders who think they will go down in value; as coins gradually transfer to the hands of people who believe they hold long term promise, the market price of 'loose change' available for transfer will rise; that rise in price will actually _increase_ the use of btc as a transfer mechanism because it will attract more people seeing BTC as a store of value, which increases the store of bitcoins held for long term positions and thus the market price of BTC, etc. The increase of its usage as a medium of transfer ALSO increases the market price of BTC; that interplay between new value-minded long term investors and new users of btc as a transfer mechanism is what has been pushing the price up continually. the entrance and exit of speculators in the market is a short term distraction that has the benefit of spreading awareness but the drawback of adding to conception as a bubble.

after about the 6th or 7th one of these 'boom and bust' cycles that triples/quadruples the market price, people will stop seeing this as a 'maybe' thing, and my guess is that will drive a massive one-time spike in the value.
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.

There are plenty of economists who don't agree with Krugman. But they would disagree for actual reasons instead of "OH NOES THE WORD LIBERAL APPEARS IN THIS COLUMN".
or how Microsoft trademarked a common GUI element
So you need to write that up in a format that Krugman can understand and get it in front of his eyes. But I think his main criticism is that all of that infrastructure falls under the medium of exchange function and doesn't serve as a store of value.

What I think you're saying is that the block chain and it's supporting infrastructure and the functions it enables ( decentralized notary, unrepudiable statements, etc. ) are creating value in the same way that making jewelry from gold creates value. And that's an interesting argument. Much more interesting than a bunch of people ranting incoherently about "fiat".

If I were in search of a dissertation topic as an economist/anthropologist; I would be looking at the current wave of cryptocurrencies as a fascinating natural experiment in the social construction of value.
I stand corrected. Indeed, this program worked just fine:

fn foo() {
println("hai")
}

fn main() {
let xs = ~[1,2,3];
for _ in xs.iter() {
std::task::spawn(foo)
}
}
I don't see why it is a bad thing. There are multiple types of emulators out there, which is awesome!!! This way if someone has a low powered computer, he/she can use one of the "less accurate but speedy emulators", but if someone has the compute power OR wants to play a rare game the others can't handle, bsnes to the rescue
I'm European too, and I also wondered what was he going on about. I mean, McDonalds fries "great"? "Everything a fry should be"?

I've had lots of wonderful french fries in the US -- and none was in a McDonalds (or Burger King, or Jack in The Box, or Arbies, or ...).
It's long been standard practice with tantalum filter capacitors to feed them through an inductor or at least a resistor to prevent inrush current failures. That, and/or you derate the crap out of them when you design the board. Newer drives are probably using multilayer ceramics that can put up with just about any abuse including inrush.

Executive summary: powerup stress is not an issue unless the drive was designed by a moron.
I am afraid this is a lost cause already. Too many are already trained to stop thinking and react in knee-jerky-white-knighty way to any mention of race or gender.
This is sad, bet the worst is that it stops people from rally digging into problems and solving them.
Indeed. JOOQ is nice. However, it does rely on code generation to do some of the nicer things http://www.jooq.org/doc/3.2/manual/code-generation/

Now that there are new language features it may not be required.
There's Wings3D
Very very valid points, in my experience.
And I don't think you're disagreeing with him. I think you're trying to say "well, this other thing that doesn't get used as money anymore also doesn't fit his definition of money" and then implying that this somehow disproves his argument.

When, in fact, it lends support to his argument.
Bitcoins can only be as evil as cars, guns, LEDs, pin-and-tumbler locks, trusted computers, square-rigged ships, Jacquard looms, and enriched uranium. The point is that these are technologies, not people.
Actually one of the premier packages for 3D does exactly this, Lightwave 3D. It has a separate exe for modeling. At least it did back in the day.
I'll look into this, thank you.
There is another way actually, use an HTML5 Audio tag and Base64 encode the audio files, then load that data via JavaScript into the Audio tag.

I really should probably write this up on my blog... I will - and post it on HN but here's a quick overview. I'm doing this for a JavaScript library I'm working on for form-validation for the visually-impaired (coming soon!)

I dynamically create a pool of audio tags via

var audioTag = document.createElement("audio")

then

audioTag.setAttribute("autoplay","autoplay");

then

audioTag.src = strSound;

You don't even have to attach them to the DOM either from my experience so far (cross-browser!), just maintain the reference in memory.

Then I do some eventing magic for forms and validation stuff, loading the audio from strings of Base64 encoded mp3s or wavs. This way I can package the audio I use inside the JavaScript that hooks up all the form events. And make it easy for others to override my audio samples with their own just by over-writing the strings in memory via their own .js file include.
Depends on the age, I grew up with lots of poor kids that thought they'd be able to live their dreams, then had reality harshly shoved in their faces.

My family was temporarily poor, we had resources that few of my friends had. Both of my parents had advanced educations and my parents received inheritances that helped them start a small business.

My childhood friends had nothing to fall back on, of the ones that survived into adulthood, most of them ended up poorer than their parents.
Krugman is smart and a bit condescending, with a sarcastic bent. "Is evil" was not prima facie humorous, but the way certain people in this thread have responded to the title without reading the article may have been part of the joke.
Perhaps he doesn't see a need for a cryptocurrency, and so does not feel obligated to propose one.
To be fair, there's also a strong contingent within the U.S. political right that believes paying taxes should be made as explicit (and, potentially, annoying) as possible, lest the citizenry fail to appreciate how much of their income is being extracted to fund the government. This kind of thinking has popped up on the left from time to time as well, around things like military spending.
> Sorry to disagree with you, but I think that Iceland is a good place to host if you want data protection

You've missed the point: they are not incorporated in Iceland. They are incorporated in Italy. Move their servers does them no good, and doesn't do anything to reduce their exposure.

An analogy: a company can move all its money offshore to reduce its tax liability, but only if at the same time it sets up a offshore limited liability subsidiary to handle that. Just moving all your money one day to the Cayman Islands without any of the legal and corporate work associated with it doesn't reduce your tax bill.

Similarly, it doesn't matter if Clipperz servers are hosted in Iceland unless said servers are owned and managed by a Clipperz subsidiary based in Iceland and not subject to Italian law. It sounds like they think they've figured out a clever wheeze, but they haven't at all:

> Clipperz was born as an Italian company subject to Italian laws and so it will remain. We are not planning to move people or assets out of Italy, we just moved the tech infrastructure to a place where our fundamental rights enjoy better protection.

Moving the tech whilst keeping the entire company in Italy and subject to Italian laws doesn't give their fundamental rights any better protection.