skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you check https://blockchain.info/pools Ghash.io is back down to 39% of blocks created, which is still big, but not as scary.

A good explanation is due to the random variation in the who the block is a awarded to.
For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)
@rasmus
Can you explain what the threat is please?
A bit of an aside but half relevant now that they could be moving overseas.

I tried to apply for an internship at Atlassian but was rejected because they only take interns from UNSW. I was not pleased.

EDIT: I suppose it makes sense since the founders attended UNSW.
Singapore figured out how to tax bitcoin—treat it like a product, not money
Ranking The 35 Best APIs of 2013
Could someone with knowledge of Bitcoin explain what happens when a share of the pool hits 51%? Is this dangerous in some way?

Edit: Thanks to those who took the time to explain. Very interesting.
This situation is similar to any other technology I would say.

My employer still gets requests for projects in Java 1.4! Just to cite one example from many.
It seems reasonable to me that courts should be able to issue temporary restraining orders without requiring much evidence, as long as it's generally understood that that's what happened.

The problem here seems to be that the man was held accountable for a breach of such an order that was both minimal and unintentional. I would guess that the law takes this possibility into account, and the police involved probably should have rejected the woman's complaint as vexatious, if that was the entire basis of her complaint.
I don't know if the bar is too low, since crimes have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Jailing someone here seems rather excessive though.

Keep in mind I find this no contact thing rather weird. Of course I spent most of my adult life in small towns in the US, where such a broad order would be met with "no contact? In a town of 3000 people? Are you saying he has to move out of town?"

I have also known people who were heavily threatened by exes and opted to just disappear for a while. The reason is that if you are really in danger, then the last thing you want is to tell the target of the order where to avoid (because that's where you will be). Due notice (a Constitutional requirement) makes restraining orders useless against someone dangerous enough.
IBM to invest $1 billion to create new business unit for Watson
I don't understand anything. What's going on?
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/01/09/warning-ghash-io-n...

---The attacker can----:

Reverse transactions that he sends while he’s in control

Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations

Prevent some or all other generators from getting any generations

Double spend Bitcoins

---The attacker cannot---:

Reverse other people’s transactions

Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they’ll show as 0/unconfirmed)

Change the number of coins generated per block

Create coins out of thin air

Send coins that never belonged to him
Wish I could filter out the bitcoin news.
German co-operative Fairnopoly as a model for tech startups
The Campus cafe has a great vibe, but it does get very full quickly in the morning. Space is at a premium.
It should never be a crime to report something to the police.

It should be the police's responsibility to make a decision about whether reports should be followed up or not. We should hold the police, prosecutors and the courts culpable for making reasonable judgements here, not random uninformed members of the public.
Here's why custom fonts and big type usually only work in theory
Make some app and put a video of it on YouTube. You can definitely parlay that into a Harvard or Stanford admit
I don't use PHP, but I think the "Fractal of Bad Design" essay is well known about.

That's why I choose Django and Python when I wanted to do a web based app properly (as opposed to hacking something together quickly in Perl / CGI which is what I did know).

I have not regretted my choice so far. (No idea if I would have regretted using PHP, but Python does seem to do stuff well / properly most of the time).
I don't understand why the first Tweet is offensive or disrespectful? Same goes for the PG comments last week.

People are very quick to escalate stuff like this when there are enough real injustices around where they could be targeting their time and efforts.
> "so basically you are saying that when something in the law is not clear, it's the job of the lawyers to make it sure they give proper advice to the next person coming into that situation, while the unlucky first person just has to face consequences?"

That is a lawyer's job, yes.

On the other hand, it is also our Constitutional tradition to give the defendant generally the benefit of the doubt on the law (rule of lenity, reasonable doubt, and so forth).

You can't hold someone in violation of a law he or she could not have reasonably foreseen.
Well, she and the cops, since she "went down to the local police station with a print-out of the invitation".
Essentially, Ghash.io would be in control of the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing double spending of BTC and other nefarious deeds.

See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Attacker_has_a_lot_of_...

Edit: According to the Wiki linked, these attacks are also possible with <50% mining rate, although with lower probability of success. So this is a problem even if Ghash.io does not crack the 51%.
Are iPads and tablets bad for young children?
It depends on what you mean by "do math". Both a proof and a program are just syntactic manipulations following a particular set of rules. The exact rules differ, but the underlying system doesn't.

Proving something in a low-level way--just following inference rules--and executing a program are basically the same things. This is abundantly clear if you formally study operational semantics, but even people who haven't still think operationally. Of course, nobody thinks purely operationally, but then again, practising mathematicians also rely on some poorly defined "intuition".

I never claimed this makes programmers mathematicians. It doesn't. Both fiddle around with formal systems, but the goals and the actual practice differ enough to make the two fairly distinct. But they're still related and we still use the same tools to analyze both: automated theorem provers, type theory, Curry-Howard...

The fact that I can bring advancements from formal logic to bear on analyzing programming languages and the fact that I can bring advancements from programming languages to analyze proofs means this is no mere "philosophical mumbo-jumbo". This includes all sorts of things you probably think completely removed from mathematics, like verifying properties of drivers or automated debugging.

Not only is it a deep relationship to think about, it's one we regularly exploit. Even if most programmers do not acknowledge it, it exists. Really, you're saying more about the state of programmers' education than anything else.

Besides, you never really made much of a point. You made a statement and a poor analogy in its support and accused me of "abuse of language", but never said anything substantial.
My understanding is that if one entity controls 51% of the network, they can push arbitrary modifications into the block chain. In effect, they can do whatever they want.
Assume that a restraining order represents someone's strongly held desire to get a restraining order. That's the limiting factor. It's much closer to "X was sued" (Y filed some paperwork) than "X was found guilty of a criminal offense."
I'm aware of that thanks, as noted in the last line:

Efforts are being made to clean it up, but for a language to ever end up in a place with that sort of library functions is a pretty big red flag.
You can: http://hn-filter.appspot.com/#preset=bitcoin
Huh? Python 2.8 discussions recently? Last I checked there was never going to be a 2.8.
I'm having trouble understanding from the paragraph intro on the site, why I would need this in the growing market of python-in-my-browser tools. I've used the language mostly as scripts to process piles of data -- if I were to get into generating web content, why this over one of the "inspirations" or other packages?
How to Apply Gamification in Education
i can attest to this. if you dont need to, please dont go down the path of building node-webkit.

Actually, its not so much node-webkit as chrome/webkit inside it. that took a few days to download correctly and then a few nights to build.

i did it when i was still on snow leopard and needed nw.
The pool operators could launch 'double spend' attacks. Essentially with > 50% of the hashing power, a bad operator is able to generate a chain faster than the rest of the network. They can hold back this longer chain in secret, execute some transactions on the honest chain, then broadcast their chain (which doesn't have those transactions included) to the network. The network will use the evil chain since it is the longest, and since those transactions are not included, whoever accepted them beforehand has been ripped off.

It worries me that it's this hard to convince miners to leave a pool. If I wanted to kill Bitcoin and had a few million to spare, I'd open a pool with no fees PLUS a bonus of 1 or 2% from my own pocket. Good luck getting people to leave that pool.
http://www.westegg.com/unmaintained/carnegie/win-friends.htm...

http://sameffect.com/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people...
Http://kulswaminilandmarks.com/
All hail to our coding god.
On a serious note: I prefer to trust the typesystem and concentrate on the remaining "real" bugs.
I would think it would be either "intentionally" or "knowingly." In other words if you sent the email intending to contact the other person that's pretty clearly there. I would suspect at least some states would draw the line at "knew or should have known" when you hit send.

But "couldn't reasonably have known" is different. If Google is, for example, looking at your past email contacts and sending invites out on your behalf then that is so far beyond "knew or should have known" that I can't imagine it applying.
> Look at the screenshot I posted on the original content.

Seems to be a new (or inactive) G+ account that is following few (if any) active users.

What are you honestly expecting to see in your newsfeed?
The chart you link is over the past 4 days.

In the past 24 hours, they are still at 41%.

Although I agree there's bound to be a bit of random fluctuation.
Ghash.io is "just" a pool. For them to do anything scary, all the members would need to collude, right? Or can the pool "direct" the mining in such a way that eg. double-spending can happen without the consent of individual miners?

Obviously, the second there's evidence of double spending or similar, any value of Bitcoin will disappear as dew on a summer morning and the value of all the ASIC gear with it - so there is a very strong incentive for each individual miner to refuse to participate.
Not just any keynote either, it was more or less pro-government propaganda, complete with pre-vetted questions from the audience.
Steve Gibson of the _Security Now!_ podcast recommends ProXpn. They do sponsor the show, but Steve has vetted them, and in the absence of vetting services myself I'd go with his recommendation.
When I took a maths GCSE, (UK qual,) most of the work was memorising equations and using them. You didn't prove them or understand how they worked or anything. Like teaching someone to program by memorising the functions in the standard library.
He did say "wonderful" ;-)
Ice age is coming...
Thanks. Links to substantiate trustworthiness and plummeting number claims would be appreciated if you have them.
I have no idea which industry is not competitive if it is programming related.
It is a computer that is personal. If you mean desktop, or workstation, or x86-based desktop, then use those terms.
The Pre-History of Software as a Service
Why I want to make interstellar travel possible
I would word it differently: "for women to use this in order to regain some sort of advantage" considering the fact that women generally are at a strong disadvantage in society (especially when it comes to personal safety and income)
TypeMatrix 2030. It's switchable at the keyboard between QWERTY and Dvorak, so you have your choice without having to configure anything on your computer. Not having the rows of keys offset is comfortable enough that I'm wimping out on the Dvorak switch, I'm ashamed to say. :)
There's no safety even if GHash.io is below 50%. How can we tell that GHash.io and BTCGuild aren't already colluding? They have 61% between them.
How to write a popular blog post
What Happens When a Major Blog Links to Your Site?
Sculpt: a free lightweight, responsive HTML, CSS (and SASS) framework
> if someone's really bent on doing harm, they can be grossly ineffective.

Indeed. Among other things you have to tell the target where to stay away from (namely where you live, work, etc).

if someone really wants to hurt you, the restraining order contains all the information they need to carry out an attack.
Aussies resent business, they don't seem to realize that the money that pays their high wages has to come from somewhere.
Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks--The Forth Shall Be First
As a fellow Ausssie, I'm also sad about this. By the sounds of it, they've given this move a lot of careful consideration.

But, rather than just be sad about it...

Might be a good opportunity to discuss what can be done to improve on the situation for future Australian companies? In what ways can navigating through the red tape be made simpler?

I know there's a lot of small startups springing up across at least Melbourne and Sydney. So it's natural to assume Atlassian aren't the only ones faced with this dilemma of moving overseas to further their business.
[HELP] Validate the idea plz
Hi All. I am here to validate my idea.

[Opportunity] - There are lots of brand images uploaded by people knowingly/ unknowingly. There are quite a few tools to get this at one place but are the brands capitalizing it from there?

What if brands can incentivize people for doing it? What if they can contact these people and send them vouchers/ coupons? What if they can get the emotions/ sentiments of people?
But if the person is threatening your life, it makes no sense to get a restraining order.

"Yes, I know you want to kill me, so don't contact me, don't come near my home at such and such address, or my work at such and such address, or you will be guilty of a minor misdemeanor!" Right.... that's a good idea...
Does anyone know what parts of the game client are using Python? Are they using it for scripting?
Right, and the problem is two-fold:

1) they execute their business model without ethical restraint

2) it is difficult to avoid being affected by said business model because they can legally collect the data that other entities produce about you.
I imagine a big part would the higher trading multiples and thus potentially higher valuation.
Maybe the hacker recommended them because they are actually insecure and now he has access to all your data because you blindly followed his suggestion. :O

Or maybe you are actually the hacker and getting more people to subscribe.
European Civil Liberties Committee Votes To Ask Snowden To Contribute To Its NSA
"""More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and it’s really easy to make things talk HTTP."""

And here I am naively assuming that Snowden et al. at least taught us that nothing should talk HTTP anymore and everything should talk at least HTTPS.

Maybe 2015 then.
Homogenization of scientific computing – Python is eating other languages’ lunch
There might be a Stackless [Python] 2.8:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.stackless/5749
I doubt those instructions (especially stos* and movs*, respectively matching memset and memcpy) are going anywhere. Intel has even changed their semantics in recent chips to work on 16-byte or larger chunks, and to have out-of-order memory accesses. Current MOVSB, for instance, should be nearly as fast as SSE/AVX optimized memory transfers.
Finding the right Node.JS Web Socket implementation
> Browsers are fine as long as you use them for what they are meant to be used

A lot of people now want to use their browser for far more than that and browser technologies are evolving accordingly. I'd suggest it's been quite a while since browsers were meant to be used for nothing more than browsing html files.
Samsung opens up about Galaxy S5, new Gear & Galaxy Note with “3-sided display”
I think it is less cargo-cult and more nobody wants to be sued over something they don't really understand so they choose the (dumbest) option with the least risk that still lets them do what they want.
IBM commits $1bn to new Watson supercomputer division
that looks pretty horrible if you ask me
And those are the ones I know (or, well, knew) who still remember college times. Some still likened back to their high school years.

In other words, that whole anecdotes not necessarily being data thing. This study seems to show by and large there is something significant around the 7 year mark. Are there similar studies on other years?
> ...they can push arbitrary modifications into the block chain. In effect, they can do whatever they want.

No, since who holds what coin is defined by consensus, which has to stretch out of the mining pool. If they arbitrarily gave themselves coin, for example, then no other client would accept that they hold that.

See smtddr's reply for details of what they can and cannot do.
None of their miners have to collude in any way; scary stuff is entirely up to the pool operator to execute and the miners won't even know that they're helping until it has happened.

At this point it's tempting to consider just mining for this pool as collusion, however. GHash.io have been known to abuse their mining power to double-spend already. Miners are not showing much will to leave for other pools, however. It's a dire situation.
> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved?

Those CPU don't have as much cache memory (which is vital for a CPU to be fast), are very low powered, and not cooled by any fan. Even my $50 nokia can do 3D, 3D acceleration doesn't mean it's a fast device. CPU frequency doesn't mean it's a muscly device either. You'll always need power for fast computing, and multithreading without adapted programming paradigm lead you nowhere. Those chips are very much different than your desktop's.

Many things are already preoptimized on the kernel level, but it doesn't change the fact that even html and javascript parsers, which parse text, will be slower on those devices. If you make an app for a smartphone, you can't really have even one third of the expectations you have on a desktop or laptop computer. Optimizing will be mandatory, and that's a huge disadvantage because most developers are not trained for that.

Not to mention the bogus "optimizing is evil" knuth quote. Performance will bite you on mobile software.
Perhaps there's a need for a White Hat market, through which exploits can only be sold to the affected party.

The market would list the existence of the vulnerability (but not the details) until it was fixed.
Lessons learned from a year as a self-published author
Should I be impressed? Mess on top of existing mess. :(
So true. Browser were meant to display page, the day javascript was introduced, nobody would have really imagined to see 3D webgl games running on the monster that is v8.
I use/abuse my T-Mobile plan at times and at others barely use it at all. It all averages out to a pretty light to moderate usage, I figure. One of the reasons I really like T-Mobile is that they have never really bothered me about it.

The worst instance of abuse was once, for a couple months, I used tethering as my only home Internet access as my land lady was dragging her feet on getting Internet access installed. During one of those months I decided to watch the first few seasons of The Mentalist and that uses data plenty quick. An hour of video is still several hundred MB even with these fancy new encodings.
>Since when FP is high performance and better concurrency support?

FP is a huge step forward for concurrent development. The availability of immutable and (especially) persistent data structures is a key point in getting a concurrent application to work well. One of the core points behind FP is to reduce (or even remove) side effects in software development. Those side effects are what make concurrent development hell and unmaintainable. By logic, using FP makes concurrent development easier to handle.

As for performance, it's not that obvious whether or not FP is better or worse than other paradigms. Had you asked me ten years ago then the answer would've been obvious (it'd be worse) but interpreters, compiler development, type systems and all that jazz has improved a lot in the recent years.
It is no doubt a joke, and in my eyes a funny one at that. I wouldn't get too offended by it :) I know the local homeless around this area and there are very few that fit that stereotype
> Browsers are fine as long as you use them for what they are meant to be used: browsing HTML files

Fully agree. I do web development since 1999, besides many other types of projects.

On those days, it was a new world to discover.

Nowadays, I jump of joy every time I am asked to work in native UIs, instead of fighting against the Frankenstein that is the HTML/CSS/JavaScript mess.
In 2011, Jed McCaleb pointed out that bitcoin mining pools can collude. So in fact, Bitcoin is based on trust... it is based on trust that mining pools are not colluding against you.

His idea was to make this trust explicit. And that's the birth of Ripple. Ripple's consensus process is predicated on trust that other entities are not colluding against you.

The Ripple protocol is not subject to the 51% attack that Bitcoin is subject to. Making entries in the ledger has nothing to do with computational power.

-----

Link to the 2011 discussion that spawned Ripple: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10193.msg146250#msg1...

EDIT: Adding a link explaining Ripple's consensus process for making changes to a shared ledger: https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus
> They have every incentive to keep the browser dumb in order to keep devs using java/objc and staying on their platform.

It's IE6 all over again :(
Who would want to kill bitcoin apart from governments? (They can just outlaw it.)

It's not possible to short it yet, is it?
As a EU citizen it truly pisses me off that American corporations lobby against our civil rights protections.

I consider this a much better reason to boycot American online services than the NSA crap. The NSA "only" infringed on our rights, Google e.a. are actively trying to destroy them entirely.
I agree, but that can't really work on the long term...
lucky php has very clever people doing clever things with it - see hhvm for a recent great thing for PHP.
Cory Doctorow: 2014 is the year we lose the Web
I guess you didn't read my post higher up. You cannot redistribute software that uses both GPL libraries and proprietary libraries. This is not an academic concern: we cannot distribute Julia with Intel's MKL even though we have developer licenses because we also use some GPL libraries (readline, FFTW) – the result would have to be GPL but we cannot provide the source for MKL because we don't have it. Lots of people would be very happy if they could download Julia and just flip a switch to choose between OpenBLAS and MKL; we can technically do that but we can't legally do it because of the GPL.
I just can't believe, not one thread on HN starts with an "i agree totally" reply.
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