skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right. The black market gives Bitcoin a "floor" value, just like Gold or Silver. It is a very efficient means of currency for the black market, as proven by the Silk Road and others.
10 Web design trends you can expect to see in 2014
Not quite. The court is saying that the statute does not itself create that avenue of recourse.
The problem with that is banks sometimes ask what your last transaction was to prove you are the account holder. Anyone who has access to these email messages will know that information.
As for your 2): why did the Silk Road explode in popularity? I think, done correctly, Bitcoin offers people on-the-couch access to anything they could want, with the level of risk largely depending on their technical expertise.
Go look at US action movies, video games, etc. There's plenty of warmongering going on. Heck, just within the last year we had a mass media frenzy over the prospect of bombing Syria.

Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now, and on the whole doing quite poorly. If any country ought to not be warmongering...
Well, in the future we will replace human pilots with automated flying drones. Sure we still have drones require human flying.
Thanks. I didn't know them. Pretty impressive.
"it would be a very short war. Blood and a mess but still very short."

You may wish to read up on attitudes immediately prior to WWI. And there were three dominate military powers at the start of WWI, Germany the land empire able to call up 5M men in days, Russia with infinite manpower but so logistically messed up they never get to use them, and the British Navy dominated the waves, which was a pretty big deal as this was toward the end of the colonial era (although Germany didn't get to play colonialism which was arguably part of the problem)

Seriously, the franco prussian war was only a couple months adn the protoGermans won decisively. They really did expect to be done, one way or another, by winter time.

WW3 will probably be something like NK implodes and tries to blow up SK and .jp along with it (australia?), and China and "the west" argue very forcibly about who will dominate the area in a post-NK, perhaps post-SK and post-.jp world. At least if I was writing an Alt Hist type novel thats where I'd generally go.
A great article. I suspect the shortest route to atomically-precise manufacturing will be by engineering biology since biology already knows how to do it. And there is even already a high-school competition as Feynman suggested at the end of that article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Genetically_Engin...
"Exist" developer on creating an existential horror game
Letter to St. James Church
Another good read is the Forbes latest article "Here's Why Microsoft Is Worried About Google Chromebooks" at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2013/12/29/heres-...

Also, another important thing to note that many Chromebook apps now work just fine off-line, so Chromebooks are increasingly less dependent on an Internet connection.
Krugman has spent the past few months qualifying, trivializing and disclaiming his previous asinine and uninformed remarks about bitcoin. Does he have a single shred of dignity left? Insufferable.

Moreover, Krugman is blissfully unaware of the hundreds of millions of people that don't have access to stable or reliable banking. How does opening the markets to untold millions, via peer-to-peer transactions, not solve an economic problem?
> On the other hand, Tim Cook is weak. Instead of pumping money into R&D he is courting Wall Street. Dividends. Stock buy-back.

Tim Cook has both pumped money into R&D and into dividends/repurchase... According to their filings, R&D spending (in fiscal years):

2013 - $4.48B
2012 - $3.38B
2011 - $2.43B
2010 - $1.78B

He has also put a ton of money into operations (paying for factories, locking in huge volumes of components, all available air freight capacity, etc etc). And a ton of money into Apple Stores. At the end of the day $40B is a lot of cash to put to work.

Apple could hire 1,000 engineers at a cost of $250,000 per year and it would only be 0.625% of $40B (and it's actually more like $50B because that would be pre-tax). 10,000 engineers is still not far off from a rounding error.

Apple is waiting around until Democrats will let them bring back cash without a tax hit and then they'll make a special dividend. No financing magic needed.
Outmatching someone militarily doesn't necessarily forecast a short war. This is especially true if you do not have the resources or interest in total annihilation of your opposition. There are many recent examples of this to choose from. Iraq comes to mind.
R&D spending is up 32% from last year.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/30/5045894/apple-research-an...
It started out as rap genius and now its extending its tentacles to all types of music and even non-music related subjects Eventually, it would become just another annoying agitator website that clutters the search results with less than helpful results, so this was a good move on google's part.
Lisp macros receive as input valid s-expressions, that don't need necessarily to be valid common lisp code, such as

(my-macro (2 + 2))

and output valid lisp code during macro expansion time. The macro my-macro could expand the code to something like:

(+ 2 2)

Some Lisp compilers such as CMUCL will issue a warning if you try to use wrong type (it has type inference), such as in this simple example:

(defmacro foo ()
`(+ 1 "foo"))

(defun bar ()
(foo))

You can see the compiler notes here: http://imgur.com/3vlQm6G
Google had to do that specifically, iirc, since Apple doesn't like other browsers.

It's also worth pointing out that Chrome on your iPad is just Mobile Safari (the slower version for 3rd party apps) with a Chrome skin/UI on top of it. It's not the real Chrome/Blink engine used on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, etc, which would be faster.
And that is relevant … why, exactly?

There often is simply no need at all for separate user accounts on a family computer.
This analysis is true to a point, but overlooks that the 'decentralized cloud bank' innovation now allows a whole bunch of other technologies to be applied into an important economic domain without the old gatekeepers and limitations. Those other technologies are a bit more familiar to people:

• global always-on connectivity

• encryption constructs

• easy discovery/formation of communities-of-interest

• open source collaboration

• instant rich search and giant archives of past behavior

• delegation of policy to ever-improving software/automation

• cheap powerful handheld computer-phones

• ...etc

These may not seem to be similarly novel breakthroughs; we're getting used to them, over the last 5-20 years. But now they're being applied to a monetary domain, via Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), where progress was formerly bottlenecked.

So while I'm wouldn't generally put a lot of weight on the cheap, shallow shot against Krugman – "he thought the net wouldn't have more impact than the fax machine" – there is a somewhat similar failing here. By looking at one aspect of Bitcoin in reductionist isolation, he (and his tech friend) are missing the combinatorial effect of all these new possibilities together.
I think this only really happens if you have a large existing audience that you funnel into the product, or you're selling it on a platform that delivers either launch traffic, or "Trending" traffic (eg. Google Play, iOS App Store).

What's your process for launching your products?
I just want to say that it is very refreshing to see your comments on these types of issues. You're one of the apparently very few people on HN that actually understands what sexism/racism is in the tech-world.
Yesterday in a talk at 30C3, a historian discussed article 10 of the German 'Grundgesetz' (our constitution) whose logic is similar and which reads as follows:

> (1) The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable.

> (2) Restrictions may be ordered only pursuant to a law. If the restriction serves to protect the free democratic basic order or the existence or security of the Federation or of a Land, the law may provide that the person affected shall not be informed of the restriction and that recourse to the courts shall be replaced by a review of the case by agencies and auxiliary agencies appointed by the legislature.[1]

The logic sounds alike to me: Victims cannot know that they are being surveilled, and should they, under some circumstances obtain knowledge of the fact, take any real legal recourse against it.
Fun fact: That article was imposed by the US.[2]

[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.ht...

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Notstandsgesetze (sorry, the English article doesn't cite any sources)
Here's a way of triple-booting Android, Firefox OS and Ubuntu on a Nexus 4: http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on-andr...

It relies on a piece of kernel infrastructure called kexec-hardboot which to me sounds like black magic - it's like normal kexec but also resets all the peripherals so that they can be reinit by the new kernel. Magic.
I haven't that read much about cartels in a long time but Google's behaviour here doesn't seem to fit that of a cartel based on a quick reading of the wikipedia page you provided.
Bill Gates might have been a very good scholar if he chose to be.
Social Justice Warriors are shrinking the bounds of possible thought and tarnishing people's reputations. If you're not self-employed, they can get you fired. I'm an old-fashioned liberal: I believe that thoughtful, free discussion leads to improving our knowledge of the world. So first of all, SJWs are the enemy of free thought and they have turned their eyes towards tech. I hate to see the enemy wielding power or gaining in it.

Secondly, I agree it is useful to introspect into tech culture and hiring practices to make sure we are not turning away good candidates. But we cannot judge the fairness of a hiring process solely by results because the hiring process doesn't control the larger culture that a person grows up in. If the cartoons kids watch at age 8 only have pimply male geeks in tech roles and as a result your startup has a skewed gender ratio 14 years later, that doesn't make the startup founders a witch, oops I mean sexist.

Changing the culture is a monumental task, but the startup community is not shying away from it. They are investing in early childhood education and other initiatives to give all people the opportunity to code. But the fruits of these projects will be long-term.

In the meantime, I want people to be able to discuss the issue openly and honestly without being attacked/fired, because I believe that makes us most effective and I believe that is what is right. The SJWs looking to burn witches aren't adding anything and they can go to hell.
Firefox has become too slow with too many updates and internet explorer merits no further comment
That explains why there will be noise and some degree of inaccuracy, and that the process is not trivial.

It doesn't at all explain why in a large sample there would be powerful unexplained systematic error about ChromeOS usage in particular.
I've launched many products, but most recently I've been doing web games. Our most recent game is Cloudstone - http://armorgames.com/cloudstone-game/15364

We launched it on Facebook, Kongregate, and Armor Games.

Only one in a million products can truly spread on their own (minecraft, reddit, google...). The rest are often really good products, that can make money, but require unique ways to get users. For us, this meant giving up a percentage of revenue in order to get promoted on various platforms.

One thing is certain - it is nearly impossible to launch an effective web game by itself on a stand-alone site. Our game makes money, but there's no way we can get any decent return on marketing investment if we tried to roll our own. The traffic we received from posting the game on reddit was totally insignificant compared to the traffic we received from partnering with websites that already have users.

I haven't launched any "applications" recently. But I don't think it's much different. Most engineers severely underestimate the importance of proper marketing and user acquisition. If your entire plan is to launch a product website, post it on reddit and hacker news, and see where it goes from there, it's not going to work. This doesn't necessarily mean your product is not viable!

I would recommend not just launching a website and hoping it gets traction. Consider porting whatever you're building to multiple platforms, and consider all of the app stores that you can put your product on. They will promote your product for a percentage of the revenue. And don't feel bad about giving up that percentage - they're providing a valuable service. They're doing the marketing for you.
Why not?

https://solari.com/blog/control-files

The entire point of gathering information is to use it.

Why rule out blackmail?
Racket is a scheme, but this infix notation is unique to racket, i.e. it's not in the scheme specification. In fact, there are other proposals for infix notation for scheme, such as http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-105/srfi-105.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/336

Having a dash and a HUD have absolutely NOTHING to do with being able to place a dock where you need it. Maybe you don't have good spacial memory, or maybe I don't have adequate keyboard-app-launching-magical-fingers, but I seriously doubt that people are getting any more work done than I do with a dock on the bottom of the screen.
Um, Germany had overseas colonies, including one where they committed genocide (foreshadowing later bad acts). And do you think today's globalization isn't colonialism? Explain the real differences, including a discussion of multinationals investing in third world nations and gaining defacto control of their governments and Chinese treaties sewing up the national resources of African countries and acquiring long term leases for agricultural land all around the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonial_empire

http://www.rferl.org/content/ukraine-china-leases-farmland/2...
A great idea and a great offer. One thing that always worries me though: my first welcome email included my account password (that is, the one I used when signing up as opposed to the one needed for VPN use) in plain text. Isn't that a big no-no for security?
Manufacturing plants. 30 seconds after the Chinese can no longer supply Walmart for political reasons, we'll be buying Japanese electronics again.

Aside from the obvious diplomatic ally stuff. Our other diplomatic allies would make sure we don't leave Japan hang.

One minor problem is that stretch of water between Japan and China, of course. At this point in their military development, an invasion of Taiwan would be ridiculous much less the Japanese home islands. In a couple decades Taiwan might be toast, but its still another order or two of magnitude to invade Japan.
You'd have no idea what 2 chainz was saying, or the meaning of what he is saying?

Which begs the question: if you don't know what 2 chainz is going on about half the time why do you listen to him?
I'm assuming this is akin to the http://www.openttd.org/en/ or Doom clones where the "engine" is open source and you have to provide your own graphics/sounds/etc.

As a stop gap until they completely replace the art assets with OSS version, you can extract the originals and use them for development. That requires an original installation to coexist with the clone (read https://github.com/fabianschuiki/OpenSkyscraper#how-to-try-s... which mentions you need the SIMTOWER.EXE locally, mainly to acquire art assets).

So, you need a legit copy of SimTower to play the SimTower clone (at least until they rebuild all art assets).
Microsoft should jump on this. Run ads promoting Rap Genius as the best lyrics site on the web, and noting that you can find it easily with Bing, but not with Google. Kind of like those Visa ads that highlighted some cool place and then said don't bother of you use American Express, because the cool place doesn't take AmEx, it takes Visa.
Didn't you ever see 'The African Queen'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_East_Africa
Or you want to work with the underlying forms rather than the "wizard" mode (essential when seeking advice from sources other than TurboTax online help), file/amend prior-year or late (after October 15) returns, file a business return, or prepare multiple returns without paying multiple e-filing fees.

Like most other Web versions of existing desktop apps, TurboTax Online is not a complete replacement for the desktop version.
Not exactly but your point does raises the BIG question i.e. "Apple doesn't have any major new (iPod or iPhone level) thing in its pipeline". Yes, I agree with you on this front. Apple seriously needs a new game changing product for long-term investors faith in it. For the past 2 years they haven't launched anything radical except the iterations of their product line. Also, the upcoming iWatch (according to online reports) doesn't excite me at all as too much saturation already in market. The next product gotta be something that consumers will love it and will it use on daily basis.
Fabulous! Best of breed for creating ambiance that I've heard and the suggestions here are bound to improve it.

It works from Firefox browser on a phone (sliders don't function with Chrome and it fades out immediately on Dolphin and Android browsers.) An equalizer (even Baxendahl 2 knob tone control) would be cool but would probably be a drag on the server.

FWIW regarding sleeping to ambient sound, I have an extensive collection of 'phones and 'buds of all types for R&D purposes and the hands down winner for 'buds to sleep with is the Sennheiser CX200.

(Irrelevant aside: For $19 at Amazon they are also by far the best bargain I've encountered for pristine sound.)
Your comment would have been just as effective without its first and last graf; had you refrained from trying to caricature everyone who feels like gender imbalance is a problem, I would merely disagree with most of it.

It is simply not true that cartoon representations of computer programmers are a necessary component of an effective startup hacker.

Changing the culture is indeed a monumental task, but the startup community seems to be embracing the current culture and back-rationalizing its attributes. You see this when you see people describe how getting started at age 13 is somehow important to building CRUD websites.
Paul Krugman is a great economic thinker. These blog posts are no doubt just him eliciting feedback so that he, as a nontechnical person, can better understand a new technical phenomenon that has direct bearing on his work.
Paul Graham isn't keeping women out of tech
He came around on the Internet (and admitted his mistake), and now believes there will be large productivity gains from Big Data.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/the-dynamo-and-b...

Edit: I realize I'm not addressing your larger point. He still may not be the guy to go to. But that being said I think his opinions are more nuanced.

Edit 2: Another post by him on the value of ICT: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/the-ict-revoluti...
I don't know how you justify your statement about the 'good' Paul Graham has done. If it's just about job and wealth creation then so have the Koch brothers.

However, I agree to an extent with everything after that.
>> Bear in mind that the US has been fighting wars against far weaker opponents for over sixty years now

That is only natural.

The democratic peace theory (see Wikipedia) seems to work, not even USA have wars with democracies but with really unpleasant dictatorships.

With the dictators that have nuclear weapons, you had (have) MAD as in "Mutually Assured Destruction". Not even USA starts a war. Which is why every torturing, murdering and stealing junta wants nukes...

The dictators without nukes come in two flavors. With oil -- or really poor, which implies weak military. (The juntas with oil tend to be corrupt, so no good military either. Iran might be partly an exception.)

The open question here is what happens with China and democracy when the GNP/capita goes up a bit more.
I think transaction-fee-free money transfer is a pretty radical economic problem Bitcoin solves.

Unless we think banks taking 3% of all Internet transactions is a good thing.
> is indicative that the visitor has children or siblings

... or parents.
How dare a guy change his opinions when he gets to know the facts better. Travesty I tell you.

We want that will think on Wednesday the same they thought on Monday, no matter what happens in the world on Tuesday. (Shamelessly stolen from colbert)
Sometimes the ridiculousness of the opposition's argument is more compelling to the majority of people than saying "You've committed fallacy A, B, C, D, & F." Especially when the 'argument' in question actually isn't even an argument.

"Opinion piece is misleading because it isn't a factual non-biased piece of journalism" seems like one of these times.
> where you would expect your best engineers to come from.

I frequently see this assertion but I never see it sourced. Most programming use nothing more than simple math or just re-implementation of known algorithms (and we know how it turned out for Telegram to invent their own), why would you need hardcore math skills then?

If you said "above average", that would have been understandable, but then there isn't much data to support that point of view since as point out, the effect is especially important in the higher percentiles.
If you think this is still true, then clearly you haven't used Firefox as of recent.
Microsoft still support the Surface RT in exactly the same way that Apple support their year-old devices - they're still providing software updates for them, but some newer features aren't available. On iOS stuff like Siri and the new motion tracking features wasn't available without upgrading from hardware only introduced a year or so earlier.
Personally I consider a stack of (non-counterfeit) twenty dollar bills to be 'useful.'
Well, standing is usually a matter of law. But yes, I was oversimplifying, and anyhow IANAL.
It's hard to recognize the importance of technological breakthroughs and impossible to predict the future. With Bitcoin the problem is doubly difficult because the technology is new but the economics may be old. Unlike, say, digital publishing that democratized a process that was once in the hands of gatekeepers because of high costs, crypto-currencies try to do away with gatekeepers that were put in place because decentralized currencies didn't work so well. This discussion bears resemblance to others about economic regulation, which, just like Bitcoin fans, ignore the fact that regulation was put in place, at least in America, to save Americans from the horrors of the Gilded Age.
He's quoting a friend of his who happens to agree with him. Shocking.
What's the overlap between people with access to stable or reliable banking and stable or reliable power and stable or reliable internet access?
The point of Griggs vs Duke Power is that a work sample test would probably need to be "reasonably related" to the job at issue, if it has a disparate impact on minorities (meaning minorities pass at a lower rate). I have no idea how one proves in court that a test is "reasonably related", because I'm not a lawyer :-)
Ain't no schaden in this here freude, pal.
If you have some links to the studies you have read, I would be really interested to read them.

Thank you
Colorado will become the first state in the nation to open pot stores
NSA does surveillance on Santa letters
First came DonorsChoose, then came Kiva, and now here comes COTAP...