skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That "Almost all new customers" bit seems to emphasize your point. A lot of these people probably hadn't considered Overstock before they heard they were accepting BTC.
This is incorrect (not the first time Guardian has published misleading articles )

The headline says "world's largest trading nation" Total trade is the sum of trade in goods and services. China may have become the largest trader in goods but it is sixth largest in services. US is still the largest in trade in services by far and if the sum of trade in goods and services is counted, looks like China will still take few years to pass America.

Year 2012: US total trade in services = $1.02T
China total trade in services = $0.471T

Source: WTO http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres13_e/pr688_e.htm (look at Appendix 2 at the end of the article )
Allowing immigration has been a mistake.

Yeah, I got mine. Fuck all those foreigners whose ancestors didn't get here fast enough.
This is called spreading FUD. All it takes is 3 weeks.
It would be a smart move on the part of stores to operate aggressively-priced LocalBitcoins sales on the side, to reduce their cash on hand.
> Where Is Everybody?

That might not be the right question, or at least is isn't the only pertinent question. Other quesitons: "why can't we see the ones that are around now" and/or "what happened to the ones that aren't around now".

If we are detecting civilisations feom the RF output, then consider how quicly we went from no RF output to nearly blowing ourselves to bits. Many civilisations could have committed suicide in a short space of time too. Many millions of them could have shone breifly and vanished millions of years before we even started looking. That is a tad fatalistic: we haven't managed to wipe ourselves out even though we threatened it to an extent. But there is another good reason why an older civilisation would be difficult to detect: efficiency. As a civilisation's technology improves, unless they find an effectively unlimited energy source, it is likely that they will leak less and less out: communicating point-to-point methods most of the time rather than by broadcast, containing and reusing what would otherwise be waste products of enery production/use. Of course they would never be 100% efficient, but they only need to be efficient enough that by the time the side-effects of their activity reach us they are not descernable amongst the background noise from the stars, black holes and other parts of the cosmos.

Evidence of other life could be passing us by right now and our attmepts to detect it are simply insufficient, in fact the more civilisations there are out there the harder the problem could become: the signals from each would interfere making the attempt to spot any one signal amongst the background noise (in part natural noise and in part that from the other signals) that but harder.

It is all moot at the moment of course: unless they are on our doorstep, to the point where we couldn't miss them, meaningful communication in our lifetimes is very very unlikely.

Of course there are other equally possible explanations, such as us being in a simulation of sorts.
While I don't love the author and carry no brief on his behalf, I would like to point out that "you're pretentious" and "you just want to look smart[er than everybody else]" are, in my experience, the two charges most commonly leveled against one who uses acrolect (the proper name for what Wallace calls "SWE"), by one who is incapable of doing the same.
I didn't know that Iceland was considered to have corruption in any meaningful quantity!

I faintly recall a study (by an Icelandic economist, if memory serves) which showed that Iceland had one of the lowest "corruption ratings" in the entire world! Perhaps I or the study are mistaken. Wouldn't be the first time.
TIE Fighter Physics
CoffeeScript Protips
Now here's the same example in F# (a functional language); it compiles into IL similar to that produced by your C# code. Which do you find more readable?

module Program =
let n = 42

let rec sqrtGuesses x = seq {
yield x
let next_x = 0.5 * (x + (float n / x))
yield! sqrtGuesses next_x }

sqrtGuesses 1.0
|> Seq.pairwise
|> Seq.pick (fun (x, y) ->
if abs (x - y) < 1E-10 then Some y else None)
|> System.Console.WriteLine

System.Console.WriteLine (sqrt (float n))
Depends on the goals of the project, what other developers are on the project, etc. In other words, what am I trying to accomplish and how does what I'm using help me get there.

For example, I might use Elixir if I was trying to onboard Rubyists to a project on the Erlang VM or Haskell if I was building out an API with Riak (because I know the Riak client in Haskell is awesome and digestive-functors is nice to work with).

As for deciding to use (ie: play with) on the side. I'll try pretty much anything (J/Julia/mocl/Erlang/agda) if a project sufficiently captures my interest regardless of community/syntax/tooling/etc.
Oh, yes you're absolutely right. Growth didn't have to remain unsustainable... reducing costs on AWS seems like the right idea (and kudos for huge efforts there with spot instances, etc!)

My attempted point was just that during the lifetime of the company, growing the userbase was increasing burn rather than decreasing it. That's a normal VC-funded approach to things, and occasionally works dramatic wonders like Facebook. But in the case of Everpix, the negative operating margin helps explain why an exponentially growing, paying(!) userbase can still fall apart without additional funding.

Btw, I really appreciate you guys being willing to share all these numbers. Very brave, and extremely fascinating. Best of luck in your next endeavors!
That it's DDR4 might be exciting, but there's plenty of servers around that can take more - several of the servers we have at work can take 512GB or 768GB (though we've not put anywhere near that much in any of them).
Provisioning and Deployment with Ansible
Tyson said that, for many American TV viewers, seeing one "smart black man" discuss science was enough to overturn deeply ingrained stereotypes. Stories about female founders succeeding are equally powerful, and we should highlight them in addition to focusing on the inequalities.

And how has that resulted in reducing the race disparity in science? Our problems run far deeper.

Similarly, the idea that tech disparities are rooted in high school is absolutely laughable. Socioeconomic differences manifest in HUGE easily observable differences in education, well before kids even start kindergarten.
DDR4 is still bleeding edge, and it's about twice as fast as DDR3, so 384GB of DDR4 in a system that could go on sale in the next few months is very impressive in terms of the sort of performance gains that can be expected.
Ok but what about something like tell a friend or tweets? What are strategies you apply in real scenarios?
I mean that we should spot other homeworlds being busted across the galaxy.
I'm surprised to see Hoffman praising AWS when I remember how he and his former colleagues at Joyent responded to one of the big cascading EBS failures.

http://www.joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazons...

But then, opinions change over time.
What is this article even about?

> "everyone that’s there talking, [...] - none of them has ever run infrastructure. [...] And there’s a few vocal people that do and have done stuff"

What does this even mean? So do they have experience or not? (in reality majority doesn't, but then again majority doesn't set the course for the project during the summits)

> "Until someone contributes the pieces of the stack that OpenStack needs to become a real platform, Hoffman doesn’t see it amounting to more than the Unix-based Common Desktop Environment did as a Windows alternative in the 1990s."

What pieces exactly? "accessibility" and "platform features"? They're not pieces, they don't exist in isolation. You can't add an accessibility piece, just like you cannot take a product and add security. Also, how can a desktop environment be an alternative to an operating system?

> "a lot of the internet-facing and webscale companies"

Did he really say that in a serious context?

> "all of a sudden be driving by AT&T Park and everyone’s tweeting and Instagramming during the game and your car stops working"

If you design your car in a way that the basic functions (engine, breaks, steering, etc.) compete for the same resources your IM app uses, that's a problem with basic design, not with connectivity.

This article really makes me angry. It's a load of bullshit and who-should-do-what that's either completely incorrect or left without any explanation about the reasons.

</rant>, sorry
an aging population means GDP will decline!

Ziss is unspeakable! Ziss is an unmitigated disaster for corporate profits!

GDP uber alles!

Ve must force japan to take in immigrants! For ze sake of corporate profits! GDP uber alles!
It's a nation, not a charity operation.
Google X Staff Meet With FDA Pointing Toward New Device
It's natural to express my opinions and experiences in a first-person account including emotions. That kind of thing isn't allowed in Wikipedia or textbooks, and is generally discouraged in the NYT and school essays.
Some time ago I put my directory changing tools up on GitHub at https://github.com/mattflower/bashcd

In addition to the bookmarking style capabilities other people have already mentioned it also includes integration with the locate database, the mac spotlight/mds database, and the plain old find command. It can switch to a sub directory containing a particular file. It also supports bash completion.
If im getting the banks right, they are kind of saying you should launder your clean money before they can take it.
10 out-of-the-ordinary tips for summer holidays with kids
I've done business and personally interacted with Dave Morin on several occasions. He's not mean to your face, but he is a little too smug for my tastes. His real problem is he lacks rigor and is not a fundamentally honest person. He glosses over the details and doesn't follow up well. He claims something's going to happen to avoid looking bad, and then it doesn't--or it takes forever. For example, Path has been claiming they were about to raise a $50m round for what, a year now?

Dave is a celebrity CEO. He wants to be a celebrity, and maybe a designer, and being CEO of Path is his means towards that end. The best thing for Path would be to bring in a fully capable COO to run the show. This may require eventually transitioning Dave out of the CEO seat to promote the COO if they are able to turn things around.

In contrast, I've only interacted with PG a couple of times, but I've read some of his articles. I think PG does try to be an honest person, and sometimes that doesn't come out right, especially in sound bite form. PG is definitely smug too, but it's an intellectual-light smugness that he backs up with explanations and evidence. Whereas Dave's is a celebrity smugness that he backs up with false promises that he doesn't take seriously.
Perhaps some do have such a reaction. I don't think this is the case for me specifically. He genuinely comes off as pretentious to me, and as someone who is very deeply interested in language I find the content intellectually vacuous. He hasn't really said anything, just made a few references.
This articulates what I meant much better than I did.
I think the mostly likely reason we don't see evidence for intelligent life in the universe is simply because we don't realize how unlikely it is to evolve intelligence.

Maybe there are a lot more evolutionary paths life can take on a world than just something similar to what happened here on Earth. Maybe typically it's unlikely for life to evolve to become much more than plant-like life forms.

I'm sure there are species in the universe which have evolved intelligence but I think they're much rarer than we would assume here on our perfect example world, Earth.
The article was implying new grants.
You would almost never want to save dollars, in the sense of putting them under your mattress and forgetting about them.

What you would want to do is invest your dollars, either in assets or in a savings/checking account, to get some return above the rate of inflation.

This is partly why the Fed is trying to raise inflation: a low, steady level of inflation encourages people to spend and invest in the economy, rather than simply sitting on dollars.
Consumerism dramatically amplifies all said effects. Many of these issues would be solved for a long time by simply mitigating that mindset.
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...
The only interesting part of this article was the link to the Google+ rant about how Google is better than Amazon in all things except platform.
Later in the thread someone points out that there is a important distinction between paid editing and paid advocacy.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-January/129470.html

I don't know how it bears on this event precisely but it seems that SS was doing the former.
Just saw a recent news post reporting the executives at High Times are about to start a private-equity fund called the HTG Fund that will provide and cash and credit to cannabis-related businesses. Wonder if they'll also be able to provide advice on handling large amounts of cash.
"Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." [1]

[1]J. B. S. Haldane. Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 286
In the future, I think that even when we end up interacting with the real world we'll have a virtual one mapped over it, ala alternate reality stuff. Check out Rainbows End for what I mean there.

We can't stop interacting with the real world, but I imagine in the future most people wont. Current boredom is a reflection of our current technology and creative state in virtual worlds, not indicative of what the future will hold, it's only going to get better and while nature is amazing is so many ways human imagination trumps it. Whenever we do see something new we take it and add to it.
These higher-order functions are a very inefficient way to write loops in Go. When you chain them you will end up with multiple sequential iterations instead of only one. Sort should not allocate and return a new slice, it's better to sort in-place, etc.
No, because you need to debug the code you're actually running, not some other code that's easier to debug.
Thanks for your effort. This is not about the library. Your site's mobile version is kinda broken. The left menu thingy always remain in the site and you can't read the main context. This happened to me on my Android Firefox Browser.
When I predict that VR will trump reality I never mean to imply a virtual happy Utopia or that such a thing was inevitable. Our future might be a virtual dystopia for all I know, but virtual reality is my bet where most intelligent beings end up going. I think virtual worlds > reality would explain the Fermi paradox nicely.
They also make a distinction (important!) between paid editing and paid advocacy. Read further in the thread.
I noticed the same and was resisting the urge to post it here. :)

I certainly hope it was intentional. :D
…in which case this algorithm will be terrible because it busy-waits instead of having condition variables…

I'm seeing sched_yield() calls in there. It looks like a blocked process will yield its CPU core to available, productive work.

If there isn't enough work to keep all the CPU cores busy then it will spin around asking "Am I ready?" more often than required, but at that point you have a machine under less than full load and it doesn't really matter. (power use aside, also assuming they stay in cache while doing that).
It's important to recognize the words "don't just dwell" in that paragraph as well as the last paragraph, which says "in addition to focusing on inequality." Tyson wasn't encouraging anyone to ignore problems.
> You cannot take deposits without falling under federal regulatory compliance.

It sounds like there's a need for a "safety deposit box delivery" service. They'll deliver a safety box to you, which you fill with whatever makes you happy. You close it, and they pick up the filled and locked box. It then gets stored in a secure vault.

That would avoid a lot of fear surrounding the personal transport of money.

It sounds to me like a business ready for disruption.
Au Revoir, iTunes Match
> advice on handling large amounts of cash.

I will always be willing to accept gifts.

Hey if there is a topic about drugs on a tech forum, I don't think the established ethics apply.
> given the diversity that we have now, there can be millions of forms of life all existing at the same place/time.

Sure, each niche favors a different specialist, but why do you think that whichever process led to the emergence of life will be any good at producing competing specialists? I'd think that evolution of existing organisms would be infinitely better at this task, as existing organisms have both a numerical advantage and the strategic advantage of DNA (a "playbook" of previous successful strategies to draw inspiration from).

Very few niches are available for the emergence of life, even though there are clearly many available for the evolution of existing life. The available niches require a level of sophistication that spontaneous process cannot achieve but that evolution can achieve (e.g. photosynthesis).
In what way is this different from the wait-free circular buffer implementation described by Sape Mullender [1] (of Plan 9 fame). I listened in to a presentation he gave last november and one of the take-aways was that it scales poorly with the number of cores.

He implemented this in Plan 9, but the performance gain was not tremendous due to shared memory effects among the cores.

[1] http://lore.ua.ac.be/Teaching/CapitaMaster/antwerpen-threads
You can be extremely "precise" without conforming to a strict generic format chosen by someone else who didn't know anything about your project. I don't know why you consider conformity to externally-imposed rulesets to be equivalent to accuracy of expression.

Sonnets can be beautiful and meaningful, but imagine what a pain it would be if everything were written that way.
Say what else you like about Southern American English, but we solve the second-person plural problem quite handily with nominative and oblique y'all, and genitive y'all's.
I feel sorry for those buying bitcoins at prices $900+, seriously! China has two more weeks until the shut down - so far Huobi and a couple of other exchanges still allow bank transfers into the exchanges and the Chinese are making their last profits. When Yuan stops flowing into the exchanges (or becomes much harder), the only Yuans you can get to buy is when you sell. I'm sure people will figure out to buy via friends from outside the country, but you can't really do the current level of speculation not having quick transfers in and out. Keep in mind most of the trade volume is in China! Mt.Gox has ridiculously low volume, yet, both Bitstamp and BTC-e follow it although they have much more volume now. Remember on the 14th the Taobao restriction also kicks in. Also, hearings won't be very positive this time as it looks. Anyway, November was a great month, but not every month in November! Also, the initial excitement about Overstock will quickly subside. It just can't get any better than this.
Or perhaps not that many Bitcoin holders need an area rug right now?

Most of my wealth is in USD, and yet in my entire life I've never bought anything from Overstock. I suspect there are millions of USD holders that can say the same. I don't think that says anything bad about the USD.
Market Clearing Without Consternation?: The Case of Uber’s “Surge” Pricing
Ask HN: Have you dreamed about your hack/project/business?
While I been working on my recent Hashtag for Email app, I definitely been dreaming about listening to important insights about designs and user experience.

And also literally dreaming about having a few users on my app. Coming up with design and technology decisions in my sleep, the more I research, the more I read and learn.

Not fantasy of making money, but imaginary of technology, and problem solving.

Just wondering if thats normal for all entrepreneurs?
I've had a couple of engagements that went well. And I've been invited to bid on some team engagements that appeared to be well defined, well managed, and well structured. But the customer "required" 40 hr/week and paid "okay", but not well enough to suck up 40 hours of my week. I would have considered it if it had been deliverable-based rather than time-based.

But, as the other commenters have stated, most of the jobs pay too little, require immediate turnaround and/or have initial scopes which turn out to be poorly though-out.
I don't see why the closing of silk road should have resulted in a drop of the price if "prices rise immediately in anticipation of positive future events." The closing of silk road lead people to anticipate that bitcoin would come to be associted with mostly legitimate purposes instead of nefarious ones in the future. So the price rose. (That was only part of it though; the senate hearings had a greater effect.)
Hindsight is always 20/20.

Yes, I'm able to say in perfect safety 70 years after the fact that it was a mistake. If I had been alive and asked on Dec 10, 1941 the same question, I doubt I'd give the same answer.
Infinite levels of undo does sound like something that would cause a big memory leak for a long-running simulation. It could be accomplished in an imperative language if it was written in a functional style (assuming the language is sufficiently powerful).
Meta Pro - The Iron Man HUD Augmented Reality Glasses
Yeah, I've often been interested in RTS games and that kind of lock-step "flip" between two "pages" of states sounds like the right way to go.

I tinker with SpringRTS a bit and actually its developers have had a lot of trouble with not using that kind of frame-by-frame approach - since every unit is fiddling with the same shared state, it makes threading problematic.

Actually, my complete idea (thinking of this using a more procedural language with mutable objects) was to have two state-pages, but only one state-page is read-only. Basically, you have two state-pages: Present and Future. Present is read-only, and Future can only be edited by the same actor. This lets the actor do self-modification without the overhead of the message-queue, but peer-modification goes through the message queue. Peers can read each other's read-only "Present", but not their mutable "future", and can insert queue entries to modify each other's future. Of course, you'd have to sort the queue-entries before executing them during the queue-processing step to make it deterministic (RTS games use lockstep synchronization so everything must be deterministic).

This would be appropriate if your code had a lot of procedural logic going on like programmatic animation or something (again, SpringRTS) and so putting every self-modifying operation into a queue might be too heavyweight. But that's not very functional.
Love to be able to see this glove!
The library is Go. What you're suggesting seems to be extending Go so that it becomes some other language derived from Go. Extending Go might make for a cleaner and/or better generics solution but if you have to have customized compiler to run the code then you're no longer running Go.
That's a great project and I'm going to dive into the source pretty soon! However I'm not sure I really like the tone used in the README.md... :/