skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. They are not guaranteed to increase in value

2. Spending bitcoin helps the ecosystem, thereby increasing the value of your other coins in the long run.

3. Having things now is often more desirable than slightly more later.

(You can't eat bitcoin. If bitcoin is all you have to spend, you will spend it on food, because food now is worth more than more valuable bitcoin later. If you also have dollars, then you'd just spend the dollars. If you have dollars and bitcoin, you can spend the bitcoin to help support the system, and replenish it immediately with your dollars.)
but but but growth hacking
We should invent a huge space water boiler; this way we can warm up nothern coasts of Canada and Russia and get nearly unlimited beach front.

In Stanislaw Lem's book the main character lived on Greenland warmed up from space to allow subtropical climate. I guess this idea will cause any environmentally-aware hipster from California to have a heart attack.
This is Bad News, seeing as Target is also tracking every thing you've ever purchased[0] and using it for marketing purposes. I wonder if they also got ahold of not just credit cards and PII, but also purchase history.

I wonder why they're not using this information to contact their "guests" directly? Why should I need to read about this revelation on HN, when they know everything about me.

[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/target-knows-you-re-pregnan...
not all banks... just ask HSBC ;-)
"Matt Taibbi: After Laundering $800 Million in Drug Money, How Did HSBC Executives Avoid Jail?"

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/13/matt_taibbi_after_lau...
You can't delete old comments and submissions
To preempt some of the usual thought on this topic: no solution to the Fermi Paradox can rely on every civilization taking a certain direction. It doesn't matter how strong the incentives are for any particular course of action, the numbers (of stars, planets, etc) even in just our galaxy are so very large that even under rare life assumptions there are still going to be an enormous number of civilizations at any given time, never mind over all history.

Some of those will have (or will have had) subcultures that generate self-replicating colonies, probes, or whatever. Those visit every stellar system in the galaxy in a very short time frame.

Possibly viable solutions include:

- We are simulated.

- Stochastic colonization leaves long-lasting uncolonized voids at all scales.

- Wolves. (Ecological wolves intent on making everything look natural, but since they get to be unitary, they can be as odd as they want to be).

But non-wolf Great Filter arguments have the same issues as arguing that all civilizations sublime, or leave, or whatever. There is always going to be someone who doesn't.
That's my feeling t0o. I had been using it for a few months before it shut down and was amazed at the amount I could host for free. I recommended the service to a number of people and would have been willing to pay for it if I needed to.

Also I don't get why it disappeared from one day to the next... Couldn't they massively restrict free usage? Or have some form of donation/fund raising à la Reddit Gold? people were attached to the product and it was disappointing to see it just go away /rant
What possible good would that do? You can't make them un-xenon. If I flash my lights or not, you'll still just keep toodling along blinding everybody in the oncoming lane.
Banks aren't the only place to safely store money and transmit money. Is there any reason an armored car service can't pick up marijuana industry cash and sell these businesses cash equivalent securities that are not at risk of being stolen (like short term federal or Colorado bonds)?

It could be that insurance companies would not cover armored car services for marijuana industry clients, but presumably it would be possible to raise rates to cover expected losses (FBI data shoes that only 7 armored cars were robbed in 2010).

edit: This sounds vaguely like a valid business plan. One could start a Colorado-only Colorado-regulated bond broker-dealer. This broker dealer could cooperate with armored car services to move cash from marijuana industry clients to the broker's bank (or to the State of Colorado as payment for bonds). Marijuana industry clients would be unburdened from carrying large physical cash positions and free from a great deal of counter party risk because the marijuana industry clients would own liquid bonds.
>While they are active, however, these accounts may have informal restrictions placed on them — some self-imposed — so they do not draw the scrutiny of bankers who may file suspicious-activity reports or would be required to report deposits over $10,000 in cash. The account holders may make only small deposits, and only at night and at certain branches. Mr. Kunkel of Seattle has such an account.

That's not a good thing to admit to a newspaper. Even if the federal rules allow legal marijuana sales, he could still be in trouble for structuring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
Maybe this is because I come from an HTML + CSS background, but if I'm adding code to a file that may need to be moved around within that file or transplanted to another file I often use comments to mark the start and finish of Sachs ection or 'block' of code.

It has little to do with how clean the code is, I can't imagine not having my way finding markers around!
Are Asians underrepresented in technology?
The irony that banks take a stand against these small time shop owners is ridiculous, they are all guilty of laundering billions of dollars.

I can see smaller credit unions being genuinely concerned, but big banks? Really?

It allows them to claim they follow the rules without actually hurting their bottom lines.
(Broken record) Swartz's own lawyer believed that had he opted to go to trial and lost, he still mightn't have received a custodial sentence.
This is a critical distinction, and one that applies to virtually every kind of rule and policy that affects our lives. Does anyone seriously think that bankers have a moral objection to taking in money from legal pot growers? That the banking profession is in the pocket of the tobacco industry? They are reluctant because of the strange legal situation that the federal government has allowed to exist...and yet it's so tempting to yell at the banks for being unfair. Cathartic, yes, but if the situation is to be remedied, they aren't the ones who have the most leverage to effect change.
I'm intrigued that reports on the event still fail to mention any technical details, where and how it happened. I remember reading speculation that the breach was actually in a third-party transaction processor within the financial system, which would be even worse...
What you're doing is stupid. All you're doing is placing software engineering behind all of the classes of engineering. Why not mention companies like BP, Pfizer or Toyota ?

In terms of software engineering Twitter is absolutely one of the best around.
I really recommend watching this video of the author, Clayton Christensen, talking about the same thing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQSG_d0mmf0

> ""...by competing against non-consumption, all they had to do was make a product that was better than nothing. And so when you have a new product, it's actually really important that the kind of customers you target, are people whose other option is nothing at all, and that way they'll be thrilled with a limited product."
Your implied assumption that Overstock is the only thing influencing the price isn't right.
Presumably, from Target’s use of the words “guest information,” this additional data wasn’t related only to customers who actually purchased something from one of the company’s stores during the November-December 2013 timeframe, but also potentially to anyone who has ever interacted with Target in any way.

... well no. 'Guest' is just how Target refers to customers, its just corporate speak.
i live in vancouver BC canada.

nearly every medical marijuana dispensary i have been to have been accepting DEBIT/INTERAC/MASTERCARD/VISA etc without any issue for about 2 years now
I wonder if anyone will ever write an article about Bitcoin that doesn't quote some crackpot who thinks the Federal Reserve is destroying our money.
It's not as small as you think. This is what Overstock's CEO had to say about it on Twitter: "#Bitcoin's first full day on @overstock.com was a huge success: 840 orders, $130,000 in sales. Almost all new customers. #stunned". https://twitter.com/OverstockCEO/statuses/421754592427139072

130 BTC is 0.001% (130/12.5M) of all Bitcoin spent in one day at Overstock. Does Overstock typically receive 0.001% of all the USD money supply in one day (~30M$)? My math is probably a bit off but my point is that before calling 130 BTC ridiculous, you have to put it in perspective with regards to other currencies.
> One might also argue that incidents like the deliberate infection of native Americans with smallpox were evil, but they localized incidents, and not something that was endorsed at the highest levels of government.

This is more myth than fact, and also predated the US by decades:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-eve...
Personally I think civilizations tend to undergo a singularity or destroy themselves eventually and the exceptions to those two cases are rare enough that communication becomes exceptionally rare.
It makes sense to divide Hispanic and non-Hispanic White if we are performing this categorization for the purpose of analysing discrimination. This is because traditionally Hispanics have been discriminated against by non-Hispanic Whites. The same could be said for the Irish, or Catholics... but Protestant/Catholic discrimination seems to have simmered down in the US.

Or to put it simply: Does a Hispanic in California currently experience White privilege? If no, then they should be counted separately.
I never mentioned Businesses. I said Bitcoin as in the protocol/blockchain.

edit: To further clarify, if you use your CC, you have to give the merchant or processor all the data required to make a purchase. The protocol/idea itself is broken, just like automated ACH by an external third party.

edit 2: To go further, think about when the social network sites used to ask for thr username and password you used in order to login to third part services to 'invite your friends'. That was clearly a security mistake at the idea level. Now most services hardened up a little and offer revokable API access so that your account credentials are not required by a third party and usually even access limits can be set on a per API key level basis.
I would describe #3 more generally by saying that holding BTC creates an opportunity cost, unique to each person's circumstances.

Some more reasons:

4. Lower transaction cost (especially for international transactions)

5. If you want to help out the merchant, he may get a lower transaction cost out of it too (if the alternative is credit card, for instance).

Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the spend-and-replenish BTC strategy to keep your BTC holdings fixed.
As a minority, I would not be comfortable around a sjw. I've been told way too many times by sjws what it's really like to be [minority category X], when I am very clearly minority category X and they are not.

I don't know anything about this Django contributor aside from the tweets I've just read, but the phrasing and verbiage are very similar to the sjws I've had experiences with similar to what I wrote above. It makes me wary. SJWs do not have my best interests in mind--99% of it's a show to demonstrate how pious and dedicated they are to being a morally superior person, and it seems that a lot of times that demands you ignore and steamroll over the very disadvantaged people you somehow have self-appointed yourself the designated speaker for. SJWs complain about marginalizing, othering, and silencing voices of minorities, but they're quickly becoming some of the biggest offenders.
Careful. People that did this are certainly better informed than I am, but here's a way to break Google's services and annoy the hell out of you.

- I was a G+ user, registered with my 'real name'™

- The nymwars discussion came up, real name policies were enforced. I have strong sympathies for one faction, changed my name to 'Ben .'

- Profile suspended

- Deleted my account and deleted my Google Profile (or whatever that precursor thing was called)

If you somehow end up doing what I did, you

- will regularly end up on 'Your profile is suspended' sites. Reloading Gmail (I'm glad that I'm using it less and less) gives me a login screen, logging in shows the 'profile is suspended' bullshit. Only way out? Manually going to mail.google.com. Why a reload on a GMail site would lead to a G+ login/redirect .. I don't know.

- will be out forever. Luckily, I consider G+ as MySpace, just worse. But I DID click on the 'Your profile is suspended, please click here' link in the past. It .. leads to the very same site. In other words: You're now enjoying a suspended profile, that shows up a lot and annoys the hell out of it. You cannot make it go away, you cannot follow any links that this site offers and Google shoves it in your face again and again.

I seriously doubt that any testing was done that includes 'Your name is not agreeable' suspensions. Ever.

Of course: The link of this story here leads to a site that says:

"Your profile is currently suspended
Until your profile is unsuspended, you will be unable to use this feature.

Visit your profile to learn more."

Where 'Visit your profile to learn more.' is a link that .. shows that very same thing. Suspended people cannot delete their profile. Makes sense..
sssh... you'll interrupt the narrative.
Thomas Kristensen recently released a Propagator implementation for Clojure (https://github.com/tgk/propaganda) -- Propagators as in Sussman's paper "Art of the Propagator" and his StrangeLoop talk "We Really Don't Know How to Compute" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...).

"Art of the Propagator": http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/art.pdf

"Revised Report on the Propagator Model":
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/

Original Scheme implementation: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/propagators/propag... [tar file]

Thomas' 2013 Clojure Conj talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXOOO9MLvhs
If FDIC insurance is the issue, then simply offer uninsured accounts. I don't see why this is an issue.
Never mind the testimonials from the victims themselves. Never mind the fact that Japanese politicians go out of their way to deny what went down.

doesn't make it any less illegitimate and immoral. Oh, and it wasn't just Asian women, they enslaved European women too which made some part of the "Comfort Brigade". Surely, Dutch women weren't being pimped out by their own mothers? So this, "but everyone was doing it" from the mouths of the perpetrating nation themselves is claim which is dodgy in itself and and a lame excuse to cover up a war crime and crime against humanity and women. Your argument would be like saying it's somehow joie de vivre of the times, no, no other army conscripted armies of sex slaves to keep the morale of their troops in a losing battle against Allied forces.

Do you want to deny the holocaust too because "people just didn't know better back then", "scapegoating and suppressing and massacring minority population cuz thats what dictators do" so the fact that it happened is now questionable? Never mind the victims of holocaust themselves voicing their horrible experiences?

I can't believe I'm hearing garbage like this, out of all places, on hacker news.
Exactly right but these buyers & sellers don't care about anonymity too much. It is the banks who are worried.

If governments were really devious they would replace their cash with a non-anonymous cryptocurrency like BitCoins. That would make it hate for the underground economy to avoid the police or taxation.
Mutable state is an optimization. Sometimes a powerful optimization with little loss of clarity, sometimes utterly ruinous to any hope of understanding the code. Usually it's between the two extremes. But I think the default should be the functional style. To reach for imperative tools immediately is usually a premature optimization.
Those are good points for most rules. Perhaps not when it comes to rules that you will let employees go for breaking, though.

It seems to me that this lady was merely following the rule that you cited. In some countries, if she now files for unfair dismissal, I think Wikimedia might lose.
How is adoption of bitcoin as a payment technology a bullish indicator for bitcoin as an investment? The prices on Overstock are still in dollars and bitcoin as a payment technology works equally well whether bitcoin is priced at $1,000,000 or $0.01.
Thanks for the hint. I moved the files to another host, check the site again.
I don't get it. The ecosystem is not a constant system. It is summary randomness, guided by evolution. Whatever you are trying to preserve, be assured new randomness will happily take its place.
Well, in this case the crackpot in question is the CEO of Overstock, so it's kind of relevant.

I think the real issue is that in a disproportionate number of the big cases of Bitcoin being used in actual transactions, one or the other of the participants is a crackpot who thinks the Federal Reserve is destroying our money, despite the dollar's impressive record of price stability.
Why does everyone assume that if life has existed on another planet for a billion or two years, it must necessarily be similar to life on our planet and be intelligent with some sort of civilization? Why could it not be a planet filled with brainless jellyfish and green algae?

People forget that our planet has been through several catastrophic events that happened at certain times in our planetary evolution, and on other planets those events did not happen, or happened at different points in their evolution, or those events had a more severe impact. Things like the snowball earth phase, and the comet that triggered the die off of most dinosaurs. Maybe most planets are inhabited by symbiotic colonies of advanced trilobites 20 meters long crawling the ocean floor eating the abundant sponges. Have a look at the wierd and wonderful pre-cambrian life forms that somehow combined to create the kind of animalia that we know today. What triggered that? And earlier, what triggered the abundant bacterial mats to start forming mobile colonies?

Sure, life is everywhere in the universe but the trajectory that life took on earth will be exceedingly rare and we may never encounter another such planet even if we develop advanced star travel.
I'm certainly not saying that anybody's accomplishments are hollow, and I'm not saying anybody should feel guilty. Neither I nor Scalzi feels guilty about having privilege. The question for us is what we do with it.
More seriously, they don't have the kind of capital that warrants that level of service. Unsavory characters with billions of dollars are almost always able to find willing banking partners. The same isn't true of those with thousands of dollars.
No. But declining populations destroys quality of life.

With an ageing population you need someone to "work" in order to cover state-subsidised health care, housing, unemployment, pensions and other living costs for those that are still alive but not working.

And technology can absolutely solve a lot of problems. Being able to grow commercial quantities of meat in laboratories will change the world overnight. As will revolutionising public transportation, power grids, storage technologies, cars etc.
A report like this could become another track from which privacy respecting companies (against the Govt.) can differentiate them selves from others.

If sonic.net (to pick one from random)consistently keeps touting "Five stars from the EFF for protecting your privacy" then runs ads where they show how poorly their competition are doing, this might sway customers.

Unfortunately this report needs an addendum -

Companies that made the ultimate sacrifice (Shut Down) rather than cooperate with Big Brother - LavaBit, SilentCircle et al.
We removed the donation button because we don't really have any running costs to cover.
Hacking of MIT website marks first anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death
Its not the issue, the issue is that these are, Federally, proceeds of crime, and could be seized by Federal law enforcement and the banks charged for money laundering offences.
I think that starting kids earlier would be a massive improvement. A kid's first exposure to any interesting subject shouldn't have to be a college level course. Would we teach math that way?

Teaching programming in grade school would be so much better. If kids are 10+ years away from hitting the job market, in an area where technology turns over every 5 years, then we don't have to pretend that we're teaching them a job skill. This gives teachers the freedom to teach things within their own limited skill sets, and to have fun with it.
Can't remember the name, but heard a while back about a system that gathered independent freelancers/entrepreneurs in small groups (3-4?), and set up regular capped-length conference calls (20m?) where by convention each spoke for just a few minutes. It was creating a chance for check-in and follow-through – accountability to peers, even if not collaborators – without the open-ended digressions of other meetups. The person who mentioned it spoke highly of it – so there's definitely something to your suggestion, if the participants and boundaries are set well.
In countries where fertility rate is much under 2.0, people tend to have two opinions on demographics:

1) If you don't have enough (read: a lot of) money then don't have children. If you're not ready to spend all your time on children while still making enough money then don't have children. If you're not the model family then don't have children. If we think you're not the best parent possible then don't have children. You better not have your children too late and certainly not too early. And yes, we're going to take your child away the first moment we suspect something from above violated.

2) People are so damn selfish, they don't understand that their prime happiness is their children, they spend their lives on themself and so we're all going to die as a nation and as an economy.

Surprisingly enough we often see both at the same time in one individual. More often than not.
SAE - Scripted Amiga Emulator JS UAE
the numbers (of stars, planets, etc) even in just our galaxy are so very large that even under rare life assumptions there are still going to be an enormous number of civilizations at any given time, never mind over all history.

The problem is we have no way of estimating the probability of life emerging given favourable conditions. It could be 1x10^-100 for all we know.
That is as depressing as it is plausible. Nice that its such a simple theory, but rings more true than any other.
When the subject at hand is about companies that don't have an option?
On the value of bitcoins:

There was another discussion on hacker news, where I commented on the fact that bitcoins should have a higher value due to lost coins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6859991

In that thread, @nl provides the most interesting look at bitcoins from the perspective of bitcoins as a part of GDP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860024

Anywho, the value is largely speculative, but most indications seem to point to a long term growth.
Part of the Drake equation is multiplying by the probability that intelligent life evolves. Of course we only have one data point, but it seems like intelligence is a pretty good response to many evolutionary pressures and so is likely to come about over time.

Of course, this depends on how frequent you think intelligence is. I think most people assume it's very frequent.