skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have had and am continuing to have a dialogue with smart technologists who are very high on BitCoin — but when I try to get them to explain to me why BitCoin is a reliable store of value, they always seem to come back with explanations about how it’s a terrific medium of exchange.

My friend, you fall under this critique. While the middle-class can make transactions if it chooses using Bitcoin, it has to deal with its huge volatility - a 'store of value' problem. You cannot have just a 'medium of exchange', like the song "You can't have one, without the other".
Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience
>And none of this looks likely to change. Windows has been a second rate development platform for some time now, and Microsoft don't mind.

Says who?

Those of us that use GUI environments not stuck in 70's terminals workflow think otherwise.
100-Year-Old Box of Negatives Discovered by Conservators in Antarctica
Can someone familiar with how the site actually works explain what has happened here? The story isn't marked with "[DEAD]" or whatever but it doesn't appear to be indexed on the main site at all anymore - I looked on the first half dozen pages. Has it just somehow been censored into oblivion?
Not every nonsense 'rule' that someone comes up with is 'valid'. Rules need to be consistent.

And yes, I was talking OOP since we were talking about ruby. Functional or logic programs also have their own rules that tell you how to understand them. If you want to create good programs you shouldn't mess with those basic rules in order to make the code look more like something it actually isn't.
While reading the book, sometimes you feel like it's reading your own mind. Very chilling.
Hawaii. Rent a condo/house on VRBO, that way you are not stuck at a resort with tourists. Typically can find these near resorts, so you are close enough to enjoy them when you want to close the laptop. I've had some good weeks of hacking between snorkeling and sunning on Maui, renting a condo on a golf course near the resorts north of Lahaina. Kauai and the Big Island have similarly nice places with reasonable housing and food, with the ocean nearby. Avoid the resorty areas of Oahu.

As for outdoor wifi, often just making sure I'm in a spot with LTE connectivity is sufficient to live with tethering to a phone or my ipad to do basic net things like access repos, web pages, and occasionally download packages.
I wonder how it looks.

A non-black girl/boy comes along and says that they want to participate, too. The black girls/their instructors tell them to piss off because they are not black and a girl to boot? If this is not racist, I don't know what is.

How about a program for any children under a certain age - be they black or not? If they wanted to include more of the under-represented minorities in the program, they could promote it more heavily in the areas where the minorities tend to live/congregate. Such approach would achieve a similar goal without being racist.
You also want to implement foreign keys in the database since you do not want to have to remember to lock referenced rows when inserting new referring rows. The database helps you out with concurrency issues.
If you find yourself having dull conversations, stop socializing with dull people.

My entire quality of life improved dramatically when I stopped going to the same, old wells for my friendships.

First, I stopped trying to be friends with everyone I met. Not everyone is going to fit in your life. I don't mean that there will be arguments, just that things you find interesting won't be interesting to some other people as it would be to some other-other people. So, the pursuit of making everyone like me required that I focus on their interests and be deferential to them. Well, turns out, most people don't like a carpet as a friend. It's far better to be interesting yourself, in some specific way, forgo the potential friendships that don't "get you", and cultivate the ones that do. In other words, I was trying to make quality out of everything, which is impossible. It's better to winnow quality out of quantity.

Second, I stopped prioritizing friendship based on length-of-time. Most of the kids I grew up with grew apart in college, as people do, but afterwards we clung to this idea that we were once friends, thus should always be friends. It became a serious issue of clashing ideologies, and I realized that, if we had met today, we would have been much more polite to each other than we had come to be, and we would not be trying to spend a lot of time with each other. This notion of eternal friendship was exactly the reason why we were arguing so much all the time. It made us refuse to see the differences between us.

I just stopped spending effort on relationships that weren't going anywhere. The interesting people who were interested in me were out there. I just had to find them. Once found, the conversation was, of course, interesting.
Mindstorms by Seymour Papert

How Children Fail by John Holt

These books literally changed what I was doing with my life. Both are about how children (and thus people) learn.
You can write 2.days().from_now() in almost any OO language which allows extending primitive types, so it isn't really very impressive. There are lots of example of languages with very powerful means of abstraction / composition and not syntax people commonly consider pretty or natural: Lisp, Erlang, Prolog. There are also programming languages which imitate natural languages to some degree and aren't very expressive, like COBOL.
So it is a demo that you can use Rust metaprogramming to make Rust look like Ruby. I hope this would not become idiomatic Rust.
Say Hello to the Apple of Linux OSes - Wired article on Elementary OS
It cant be "worthless" and simultaneously have the whole system based around it. If you want to use bitcoin and the "worthless" work is what allows bitcoin to exist, then it has worth.
Who changed the title from the original's "Bitcoin is evil"? I thought Hacker News was opposed to editorial titles.
You're right, you really don't know what racism is.
I would prefer to see these types of programming camps open to anyone interested.

What got you into coding by the way?
As far as tax monitoring goes, I'm not sure that account and transaction monitoring is helpful. If you have a stated income near the median, yet own a palace, a Porsche and a Lamborghini for the wife, a yacht &c something just has to be off. Apparently you can see the phenomenon in at work in Greece. If you have undeclared income, at some point the funds have to enter the regular economy, and from then on it's just old-fashioned police work.

Just how you do the actual enforcement, that's a different issue, especially if corruption is entrenched already.
This is a tough question... so many possibilities.

First thing that comes to mind is the Cadillac Hotel in Venice Beach, CA. Fun, sunny, laid-back area, easy to get to, lots to do. Close to the Getty. Not too expensive. Biking/rollerblading at sunset is wonderful.

http://www.thecadillachotel.com/

The Santa Monica library is also a great resource and alternate place to work if you are tired of coffee shops and hotel wifi.
Interesting list. Will check out later.
Please don't share your business idea with everyone, they may spoil it.
The quick, short example is VMS and Windows NT, two systems which were quite successful and not so simple.
I love this.

I would be great if you could a) download your mix as an MP3 and/or b) open your mix in a popup window.

Love the sound of rain and thunder. Makes me want to stay indoors and do stuff. I understand that this is at the moment not a problem for North Americans and Europeans but in Australia it's getting pretty hot/sticky at the moment..
> He's entirely correct in saying Bitcoin has zero inherent value, as opposed to gold and USD.

No, no, he is NOT correct on that. Bitcoin's inherent value is in the Bitcoin technology. Inherent value of USD is that government declared it has value (by fiat). You can actually create "pretty things" with bitcoin technology, the same way you can create pretty things with gold - those are just other things.
There's an assumption here which may or may not be true: technologies are ethically neutral.

Some reasonable people disagree with this assumption.
Dont give crappy titles!
It's so true. It would be much to risky to do that. Reddit could risk a Digg-like exodus if people got too pissed off. I think a more viable strategy would be to somehow expand the reach of reddit so that it isn't merely a replaceable social media/news site.
Why Dataflow is not Popular
There are several cryptoanarchist responses to that:

1. Some government-like mechanisms should definitely exist on the level of the physical world (this could be anywhere from Rothbardian private law to a concept of private cities to a more moderate vision of a Georgist government that taxes exclusively resources and perhaps even pays out a basic income). What matters is that these governmental mechanisms should/will stay out of trying to restrict human interaction.

2. We are already moving into a less materialistic society, and the trend will continue in the future. For myself personally, all of my physical possessions combined have a resale value under $1k and a replacement cost under $2k. If you mug me, you will get a moderately good cell phone, some cash in my wallet and maybe an old laptop, but not anything nearly worth the tiny risk that I or a bystander will be able to overpower you. When all wealth is stored in data or the mind, locked behind passphrases and encryption, physical crime simply becomes not all that interesting.

3. Contrary to Oleg's post, people's online identities should be cleanly separated from their physical identities, and it should be cryptographically difficult to make the mapping from the guy who wrote a bad review of you to the physical person living in a certain city.

You can feel free to choose which of these you find more and less convincing; I have my own opinions on the issue and certainly do not represent "the movement" as a whole to any significant extent. But you are correct that the high offense/defense asymmetry characterized by the (cryptoanarchists' vision of the) internet does heavily rely on existing infrastructure; if this were not true, then we would have been living in a society organized largely along cryptoanarchist lines for the past ten thousand years.
The organization itself was founded a female african-american EE. I agree that that stuff should probably be on the donation page... but the flip side is they clearly picked Alexis because a) he's internet famous and b) he lives in Brooklyn,

For the second, if the goal is to try to get black girls into programming, then there's very little reason for them to spend the resources on other people. Why limit to black? Because the founder felt culturally isolated while going through EE, and wanted to minimize that from happening in the future. Why limit to girls? Because the founder felt culturally isolated while going through EE, and wanted to minimize that from happening in the future.

But seriously, the donation page should link to the charity's website: http://www.blackgirlscode.com/
Since you seem to be very connected to the a generic literal meaning of things, try taking one more step and imagine how this "racism" would manifest itself, what the negative repercussions could be. Would whites and males be kicked out or jailed for trying to attend?

You're ignoring the cultural context in favor of whatever correct perspective you have. Unfortunately, natural language doesn't respond well to simple analysis like yours.
How was the BingoBo idea created? (Part III)
What's funny it that this same Dan Brown without any shame is still pushing for this algorithm [1, 2]. I'm not for a witch hunt but I really think there really are some people / organizations that are toxic and do not seek our best interests in these standards.

[1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03651.h...

[2] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/threads.ht...
he doesn't even bother to mention that very few people actually use dollars as a store of value: people don't keep their retirement funds in cash under the mattress.

Individual people, perhaps not. But the US dollar is the most widely-held reserve currency in the world, followed by the Euro. Wikipedia states that approximately 2/3 of reserve currency holdings are dollars.
>1) Bitcoin mining has a pretty horrible carbon footprint. ("but so does ..." doesn't eradicate this argument)

From a logical standpoint, "so does X" (e.g gold mining) very much does eradicate this as an argument against BitCoin, unless there is some Y which has less carbon footprint than either. If there is not, then the carbon footprint it's an necessary evil, and a constant through all similar systems.
I should note that a pool of audio tags allows you to play multiple sounds at once. I've tested my lib with up to 200 simultaneous samples playing at once on a lark, since I don't need anywhere near that sort of coverage.
I'm a white male too and yes, you're right, "perception does not indicate reality."
Weird. I've been online since the mid 90's, mostly on IRC and newsgroups, and have never seen it. TIL.
The Times publishes articles about the dwindling numbers of typewriter repairmen in New York from time to time, so this isn't really news. The repairman in question mostly runs an office supplies store in the Village. That's not remarkable either. What is remarkable is that he's retiring at the age of 60 because he's "too tired." What's up with that? This is why the Social Security program in the US is in trouble, run for the exits at age 62 when you are still physically capable of working. Strange.
2 years and no progress? I think you are doing something wrong. I have been using Blender for a long while now and there are parts of it that I see every day and don't use or even know what it does. It's a generalist's package, it can be overwhelming but just focus on what you want and don't try to grasp every bit of it. A beginner's series I would recommend is http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-courses/blender-basics-intro... and some useful resources can be found here http://meta.blender.stackexchange.com/a/43/12. I have a friend on fb that makes amazing 3d prints using Blender and a couple years ago he was fairly new to it, here's his blog, http://generativemodelingproject.blogspot.com/
Logic is not what's important. Equality of results is paramount.
They could think about allowing geo-targetting of adverts. I'd love to advertise on certain subreddits, but only if I could specify the adverts only show in the UK. There must be people who feel the same in other countries. Pretty much every comparable platform - e.g. StumbleUpon - allows geotargetting of adverts. I'm sure they're missing out on loads of advertisers.
I'm going with the blockchain that has the most transactions is the most valuable because of the meta data you can glean from it. That's currently Bitcoin.
It's still a totally inaccurate bait and switch title, which annoys me and makes me like his column a little less.

If I click through to an article called "Bitcoin is Evil", maybe I actually want to read about how a Bitcoin-dominated world is going to making exploiting the poor trivially easy. I'm not convinced yet, but it's a plausible (if normative) argument someone could make, so there's no sense in making a joke out of it. Especially if - like Krugman - you already support redistributionist taxation and the welfare state.
Yes. If you're willing to use cglib or some other code generation (or reflection) you can already achieve the same thing, and there are projects like QueryDSL that do it.
>I disagree.

I think it's both. Your turnip site instantly becomes the hippest turnip site due to it's location on Reddit.
Many good candidates seem to anchor on those two properties (correctness and maintainability) as a starting point. More generally, they tend to identify that some of the properties are directly desirable right now, while others have no immediate value in themselves but are necessary to ensure that you can still have the directly desirable properties later. Which ones take priority under which conditions can be an enlightening conversation, often leading to related ideas like technical debt, up-front vs. evolutionary design, and so on.
The “maybe” marketing mentality
Quit trying to intellectualize your racist approach to moral righteousness. It's coming across as desperate. If you have a principled argument to make, now would be a good time. If all you have is more false analogies then I think I've had enough.
Highlights of this article:

>In fact, a complete history of Dual_EC_DRBG would begin with the ANSI X9.82 DRBG standardization process, which kicked off in the early 2000s.

>You'll also find Dual_EC_DRBG in the international standard ISO 18031.

>Dual_EC_DRBG is not the only asymmetric random number generator in the ANSI and ISO standards.

>Since MS-DRBG comes from the same people who brought you Dual_EC, if you are using it you might want to think twice.

These are some interesting points that I haven't heard anybody mention when talking about the recent Dual_EC_DRBG fiasco.
> Modern goes out of date. You don't call things modern, other people call your things modern.

Agreed, but MS already call the Windows 8 UI 'modern'.
Why does he write it as BitCoin? I'm sure he is aware that it is normally written as Bitcoin.
What I think is important about cryptographic assets isn't exactly in the economic properties they have now, but in the potential for reforming governance.

That is, if people are successfully using a crypto asset for their business, AND they are able to use a power and network infrastructure for this that is difficult enough(not perfect) that government authorities aren't successfully applying their "monopoly on force," then government is now pushed into competition with the crypto-anarchic principles and must find a way to become a "better product," enough so that people will prefer government money over crypto.

How will government come up with a product that is better - in a positive way - than a crypto asset? Government has the authority to issue new centralized currencies. This means that if it truly embraced computing - which it never has to date, having never faced a challenge of that nature - it could program a form of currency that is "smart" and bakes in the policy decisions and taxation currently executed by bureaucracy. It would be made attractive to citizens by building in basic income, as well as the service provisions. The result would be more powerful and more efficient than anything we currently know as government. Cash would still exist as a backup, but the government could discourage its use except in emergency situations.
Bitcoin is able to facilitate transactions because of the power put into the computers running the Bitcoin network. Mining Bitcoin provides the functionality for validating the block chain. So, power into the network provides the value of security.
I run C# in production on Mac OSX, IOS and Android phones. What do you mean by Windows only?
Inflation is a function of money supply and velocity.

If everyone adopted bitcoin, the velocity of the dollar would approach zero. Which means that inflation would go down, not up.

And yes, I would rather have my [savings] account in a hard, non-inflationary currency. On the other hand, I can only earn interest when someone is willing to take a loan in the currency and pay interest on it. And I am not about to take out a loan in a hard currency when perfectly good inflationary currencies are easily at hand. So, you're going to have a hard time finding a bank that pays interest on bitcoins. This is why "bad money drives out good", aka Gresham's law.
But can technology be immoral? I'm a bit rusty on all that stuff but it sounds like we're talking about two (subtly) different questions. I would argue that technology can be used for evil, but technology just sitting there by itself is no more evil than rocks or sand.

If you can prove that a certain technology can not or will not be used for good, then that raises different questions.
> After reading this I dramatically increased the amount of money that I donate and began supporting several new charities.

I've been in a dilemma for years about this. I look at the world and how systemically fucked up it is for so many people, and feeding the charity machine seems so indirect and ineffective. Although I do acknowledge that charities probably do improve peoples' lives in a band-aid sense.

As old as I am, I'm still emotionally a teenager and would like to figure out a way to wipe out war and poverty and intolerance. I wish I knew ...
I see an assertion, but no actual argument.
I flagged this because of the link-bait title.
Older members of my family. They simply related to me their experiences living in the United States. Unfortunately the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not that long ago and the world didn't change overnight with its passage. And they received similar teachings from their parents who dealt with even greater injustices before that.
Software development related reads with a strong focus on proven practices that enhance software quality in terms of readability and maintainability (and other software ~ilities) to ease the process of changing the software later on.

The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell & Trevor Foucher

Don't Make Me Think 2ed by Steve Krug

Remote: Office not Required by Jason Fried & DHH

The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove

Code Complete 2 by Steve McConnell

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler

The Practice of Programming by Brian Kernighan & Rob Pike

JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander

An Introduction to Programming in Go by Caleb Doxsey at http://www.golang-book.com/

Also read: How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston
The one fact we can all agree on is that Black people, and women, are both underrepresented among programmers, and Black people in general economically disadvantaged.

My understanding is that this program should be seen in the context of a political movement that sees this under-representation as an example of systematic oppression by a society that privileges White males. This oppression comes in the form of discrimination in employment, unequal access to education, and stereotypes that guide White males towards higher paid careers. The movement sees eliminating this oppression as a very high priority.

There are two points where I disagree with this movement. First, there may be explanations of this underrepresentation that are unrelated to oppression. These include lack of interest in programming (due to cultural differences in values), cultural differences in how education is valued, and genetic differences in personality and intelligence.

Second, I think that it is natural and inevitable that the majority culture be dominant, and this has social and economic implications. For example, Israel is fundamentally a Jewish nation, and this implies that Jewish values, culture etc. are dominant in that society. While many Israelis explain economic and social inequality in Israel as a result of the backwardness of Muslims, I think the truth is that really this is just another instance of the inevitable trend in societies. So I would like to curb the worst excesses of inequality that result from different races/cultures living together but I do not see inequality as a something terrible that must be eliminated entirely.
San Jose, PR. It's a common wealth, so travel there and back is easy. They use the US Dollar. I was there earlier this month, and the connectivity was really good compared to most places I visited in Costa Rica. Also, no roaming charges for most US cell carriers.

Weather was great, nice beaches, fairly nice people (Costa Ricans are nicer).
This would create a floor on price ... which would then make it useful as a store of value (since there is a high probability that you'd be able to sell them in the future).