skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The price of bitcoin reached $1,000 again today on Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox

The headline is misleading. I would expect CoinDesk to use their own Bitcoin Price Index or at least a regular exchange like Bitstamp as a reference rather than an exchange from which no one can withdraw money in a reasonable time.
Could someone please explain why Target were storing PIN numbers?
By singularity, you mean the creation of artificial intelligence?

If so, then shouldn't we be encountering these AIs?
Because people with technical knowledge are considered in many humanities circles to be a priveleged group that is oppressing others. (Especially in the Bay)
I would say the highest probability is that we're in a zoo. We'd be pretty interesting to watch as a blossoming civilization.
is-a vehicle --> has 4 wheels
MtGox is a poor indicator for going rate of Bitcoin. Because it's so difficult to withdrawal USD from MtGox, their exchange rate is always higher than the going rate. Example, MtGox is currently $992/btc, where as both bitpay and bitstamp are $887/btc.
Reading between the lines, it seems that US Federal law is driving the creation of an alternative banking system. This would not be a bad thing considering the amount of concentration in the banking system and how that led to the recent big banking bust.
Ask HN: How do you decide to use programming languages/frameworks?
I've been trying languages recently to expand my toolset for web development and have touched Go, Erlang, Elixir, Haskell, Lisp Flavored Erlang, and Common Lisp in the past couple months.

Performance, expressiveness of the syntax, tooling, and community are typically what I use for my criteria. How about everyone else?
"Page xx is not part of this book preview"

Sigh, I hate crippleware.

I do love this paradox though, it makes for enjoyable conversation over a bottle of wine with just about anyone.
I believe we are it. That said, if there is alien life it could be at the same stage of industrial development that we are and it will be a long long long time before we meet.
We should take your idea and push it farther: We're not looking for life.

If we found an advanced civilization of intelligent robots, would we shrug and say "too bad they're not alive?" Of course not. So it's not life we hope to find.
Why does everyone assume that...

They don't. They really don't. Do you honestly think you're the first person to ever think of this?
I'm not a SWM and I think this stupid article has done a lot to damage the cause of equality. It is tactically, morally, and ethically stupid. I wish people would stop linking it, but sjws gonna sjw, I guess. Getting an angry response from disadvantaged people is more entertaining than doing the dull dreary or the high risk scary work of actually helping underprivileged succeed.

Ugh.
You only need 32.6 bits of information to uniquely identify everyone:

http://33bits.org/about/
Can someone please explain to me why I am supposed to care about equality in gender and race representation in this field? Because quite frankly, I don't, and everywhere I look on the Internet, people are universally accepting this as a disastrous problem which must immediately be fixed.

The comments on this article (and the article in general) all seem to imply that women in technology are bullied or ignored into oblivion. For the record, there were several girls in my high school AP Computer Science class, two were not white, and they all did pretty well for themselves both in the class and after it. They were not given any special treatment, positive or negative. Maybe I just happened to have had a great experience, but all these claims about how "There's a higher obstacle to overcome in the perception of computer science for girls" seem flaky at best.

It seems to me that we should universally encourage people to do what they're good at, regardless of race or gender, or the field they want to enter. Giving so much attention to women/minorities in technology just feels unnecessary.
The question is pretty specifically about intelligent aliens. SETI, all of that stuff.
Worst case is probably something like Warshall's algorithm (in-place mutation of a bit matrix for optimum performance). See warshall.c in BYacc or lib/bitsetv.c in Bison (relevant part reproduced below).

void
bitsetv_transitive_closure (bitsetv bsetv)
{
bitset_bindex i;
bitset_bindex j;

for (i = 0; bsetv[i]; i++)
for (j = 0; bsetv[j]; j++)
if (bitset_test (bsetv[j], i))
bitset_or (bsetv[j], bsetv[j], bsetv[i]);
}

While the algorithm can obviously be reproduced in a functional language, it does rely on destructive updates for its performance.
Yes. In order for Target to have the information mentioned, you would have needed to have bought something online from them or you would need to have a REDcard† or have filled in a survey or mailed in a refund request or phoned customer service. Merely having bought something in a store, even using a credit or debit card, would not result in that information being captured.

Of course, Target will try to track you even if you don't provide them with contact information. E.g., if you use the same credit card across multiple visits, they won't have your contact information or even your full credit card number (which they aren't allowed to store). But they will be able to analyze what you bought over time, and that's valuable.

†http://www.target.com/redcard/main
What do you like or dislike about Elance and ODesk?
Let's discuss...
How do you know he's a straight white male? Can you tell race, genitalia, and sexual orientation by typing style? Are you going to tell me to check my male privilege next?
What're you referring to? They all seem to be complete sentences with capitals and full-stops.
Are you talking about the employees? Surely they're still in the lock in period which prohibits any sort of trading including options.
Such commentary goes at the top of a function or class. You get more nuanced as you delve deeper into the textual abyss.
Citations or evidence required for your claims that Twatter is absolutely one of the best around.
I wanted a Lego Mindstorm kit so badly as a kid, but my parents never got me one. I think my life would have been a lot different if my home situation had at least afforded me that one thing.
Alternatively, Overstock marketing department could spend $130k of BTC on itself (keeping most of the value due to self-dealing) and make the transaction costs back in PR advertising value.
Not long ago I read a fiction piece (linked here in HN)that would imagine the world (and universe) in 10^1, 10^2, 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6... years.

In this tale, Earth would have several species achieving intelligence, all of them failing on interestelar colonization, and the last one, the wisest, figured out from the basic physics knowledge they develop, that this kind of travel would be impossible.

This basic assumption is very strong for me. Even if one civilization can travel at light speed, the multiple civilizations on our universe right now could be at millions of years of distance one of other.
If you believe that overstock will lead to increased demand for BTC (perhaps not due solely to overstock but a wave of merchants who follow suit) and that the demand outpaces BTC's inflation (i.e. the ~3600BTC mined into existence each day), then BTC's value will rise as a consequence.
Interesting. I also graduated with a degree in Real Estate at about the same time as you (bad timing) and have since moved on to the software industry (self-taught).
Linux.conf.au 2014 videos torrent
A good overview of the "Great Filter" in the context of the Fermi Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
>It's just that it isn't a crash course, or a course of any kind for any meaningful meaning of "course".

It absolutely is a crash course, for the most common colloquial definition of the term "crash course," although in a very nitpicky fashion the blog entry is not a "true course of study." The reality is when people say "crash course" in common English they almost never mean a formal course of study. Usually it's used in the context of someone needing to learn something quickly in order to do something else. A professor might spend 10 minutes at the beginning of a class doing a "crash course" on binary arithmetic, because it's needed for something else that's on the lesson plan for the day. Such a crash course might have no exercises and no materials whatsoever, but nobody reasonable is going to object to the term.

The blog entry is focused, brisk, and thorough, the key elements of a course intended to be completed rapidly for a specific purpose. Does it fail to fill a learning gap that clojure needs filled? Probably. But that doesn't make it wrong to call it a crash course.
> [Target] won't have […] even your full credit card number (which they aren't allowed to store)

They won't have my credit card number? Wasn't how got to this very discussion because they have my credit card number?

> So far, Target says, it's determined that the breached data includes customer names, credit or debit card numbers, card expiration dates, and CVVs (cards' three-digit security codes).
That's a very true. Thanks for the response!
Thats effectively whats going on here though–Coinbase is handling the bitcoin and sending USD to Overstock. So on the retailer side of things the only difference is Coinbase doesn't have the cache that PayPal does(or the baggage). They are backed by some solid VC though–so a worry about them disappearing is probably unwarranted.
From a comment below, they do about $3 million in a day.

But there has never been a day where excited dollar enthusiasts spent easy money on Overstock to help the dollar look better.

Yes, I'm insinuating that at least some of that volume is bitcoin millionaires having a laugh.
If you don't want Target to have your data don't give it to them. That's it. Do you need the government to prevent you from giving your data to Target?
Interesting scripts are being posted in the comments, really neat tricks guys.

One thing I'd like to add, if you're like me and don't want to install too much "extra" stuff on your machines: Bash has native commands called pushd and popd[0]. They work as a stack, pushd will push the current directory onto the stack and jump to the new target, then you're free to move around, do whatever you want and then call popd to pop the latest directory from the stack.

I find these very useful, especially if I'm on a machine without additional installed software and just want to do my thing effortlessly.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushd_and_popd
Will your next car Google you?
PulseWallet Lets You Pay For Things Via Your Veins
The services online aren't broadcasting the names of the people using their addresses- so it's basically anonymous to the common person.

It's true that without using a mixer (aka "money launderer") Big Government could seize the service to get your name... but what about https://localbitcoins.com/ ?
Every target pharmacy purchase.... Think about it...
In this case: the federal government. The banks didn't randomly decide they were against marijuana, they're just reluctant because while marijuana is legal for medicinal or recreational use in a few states it's still a Schedule I drug at the federal level, which makes it legally tricky to handle the proceedings from the marijuana business.
http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

(context at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6825924)
If I see ultra-bright lights, I assume the other driver has the high beams on and flash them. If you can tell that they have misconfigured low beams, you wouldn't do that, but I'm going by my experience and assume that at least a few drivers would act the same way.
But if, on average, we live longer and healthier lives (healthier is not guaranteed), then our creative lives might last longer too.

It could be that creativity doesn't have as much to do with age and health as we think, and is more related to being new in a fascinating field. If we live longer we'd have more opportunities to be new with a large number of years in front of us. You can see this effect in the small when you get excited about a new programming language or industry.

Probably lots of other effects on creativity beyond mere youth. Said the old guy.
#define at operator []

I kid...mostly.
Contrast PG's style, which had a deep influence on me: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/master/arc.arc. There's something to be said for an aesthetic of conciseness that lets one spend less time scrolling around and more time just thinking about what's in one's field of view. That includes stripping comments of unnecessary verbiage.

The article does make one good point: that when you add to a terse comment you often have to add capitals and punctuation. But that is also often a signal to me to ask why I need to switch from communicating a fact to creating a narrative. Is the narrative really necessary? Often I find some way to reorganize the code without needing to narrate it. Relevant is http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/02/portrait-of-n00b.htm.... (But I'm not claiming everybody who uses complete sentences is a noob.)
I really can't work for a few dollars an hour or meet the unrealistic high expectation from someone who cannot afford to pay the full price of a project.
Thanks - all of the alternatives look interesting but this one seems to be the shortest of them, and since "mark" installed after a simple cut & paste into my profile, I'll try it out for a while.
Enjoying the virtual reality world they made, which is probably better than the real world. If you are smart enough to create a virtual world in which you can do almost anything you wanted, why would you give two shits about the real world.

Modern day gaming is the beginning of something much more significant in my opinion.
> This shell company can not own nothing, it have to own the patent(s) in question.

Does it? IANAL but I believe it's possible to license the rights associated with a patent without transferring complete ownership. The shell organization would be a sub-licensee that does your dirty work.
What's so wrong with ASICs? Litecoin don't have them, and now they are plagued by a botnet who mines on infected PCs.
Having Trouble Visualizing Lane Closures In "Bridge-Gate"?
I consider this a dark possibility. It means that intelligence, by producing minds capable of hacking their hedonic desires, ends in nothing but a prolonged orgy of complex masturbation.
No, they would become addicted to pleasure stimulus, their version of digital heroin and become "unproductive"
What if it's easier to build a utopia than a starship?

We already have way more money going into entertainment than into space exploration, it's not that hard to imagine that all sentient species eventually learn how to hack themselves into permanent happiness, and then conclude they have no reason to risk death on the final frontier.
The Git system we use at my workplace has a private "backup" remote for each employee and a public "share" remote for each employee. So there's no problem rebasing all the time even if you push to the backup remote because it's not shared. Ultimately backups should be a totally separate concern from version control workflow anyway, even if you use Git remotes to back up your work.
New Job Fear – You are not Alone
Well there is no such thing as federally legal marijuana yet, right?
From the article: This is like finding a new alloy of steel and then building a bridge out of it to see if its any good. If Go doesn’t have generics, and you know you need generics, why the fuck did you bother with Go? These details are widely, exhaustively documented; they are not surprises.

Well, I took a good hard look at Go, and I said, "There's a lot of stuff here that's really, really sweet, but error handling is going to require 600 gross conditional statements, and I'm going to have to rewrite common algorithms over and over and over because there are no generics."

But lots of people in Go community kept saying, "Yes, it looks a little unusual, and it doesn't have all the features you'd expect, but you need to give it a fair chance, and try writing a real project or two in it. Don't be a blub programmer, afraid to try out strange new abstractions."

So I wrote a couple of medium-sized programs in Go, including a server which broke simple substitution ciphers (to help perform OCR on subtitles). This involved a lot of tweaking of algorithms and optimizing. This was maybe my second or third medium-sized Go program.

And maybe about the third time I had to tear apart the server and rewrite it, and said, "This whole experience is actual incredibly painful. Why does this code keep hurting me every time I need to redesign something?" So I paid closer attention, and I said, "You know, my code is buried under error-handling conditionals and lots of stupid little subroutines that should be in standard library—but which can't be there, because there are no generics."

Seriously, if Go had Erlang OTP-style error-handling and some ruthlessly-simplified generics, I would use it all the time. The type system rocks, the basic data structures are excellent, and the standard library is good. It's clearly well-optimized for writing certain types of programs. It's just I don't write those programs very often.

It turns out what I want is a lot closer to Elixir: Erlang concurrency semantics, decent Unicode string handling, some light metaprogramming and a Ruby-like syntax. Too bad Elixir is still so young and obscure.
Support in unreleased versions (openssl 1.0.2) counts as support?
> Why could it not be a planet filled with brainless jellyfish and green algae?

It could be even worse. Maybe we're not finding "life" because the only thing we have to compare to is life on Earth. Maybe there is life at different physical / time scales that we completely miss. Maybe what we call life, and specially intelligent life, is nothing special at all.

I find amusing that the general expectation is to find slightly different humans, with civilizations and communication and interstellar ships.
There was a lot of volatility in a short span of time from the China announcement to Overstock adoption.
"real job", ha you mean a "normal job" the kind people like us can't stand working.
Sad fact is this will either impact or open up a new market to some 3rd party to offer what the banks will not. Then once estabilished and working the banks will either compete or borg the company. Profit for banks has a dynamic moral, wait and see.
They weren't.

They were uploading encrypted PIN blocks to their payment processor, and the bad guys captured those along with the mag stripe data. But encrypted PIN blocks are useless to a hacker. Target can't decrypt the PIN-blocks. Only the payment processor has the key. Unfortunately, this point seems to have escaped some of the media morons, who would rather write scare headlines than get it right.

PINs are entered on separate keyboard devices, known as PIN-pads. A PIN-pad is a tamper-resistant subsystem that can be programmed to prompt the customer to enter the PIN on its separate little keyboard. The PIN-pad then encrypts the PIN, using keys which are preloaded by the payment processor, and provides the encrypted result to the POS terminal.

PIN pads have been hacked† in the past, but the methods employed require physical access to the POS terminal and are thus no where near scalable to the level of the Target hack.

†http://fraudwar.blogspot.com/2007/02/could-arrest-in-stop-an...
Your imperative version isn't atomic in a multithreaded environment, which is a major concern. (Or of it is, it has complicated system for providing atomicity).
There's a depressing non-wolf Great Filter argument. What if this sort of scenario is unavoidable for fundamental reasons... possibly involving a combination of thermodynamics, evolutionary dynamics, and game theory.

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

For this to be an explanation it would have to be that this "great filter" is so hard to avoid that someone escapes it maybe once per few thousand galaxies per many billions of years.
It makes sense to buy from Overstock if you are in US, otherwise the shipping prices are ridiculously high. I assume that the majority of orders came from US, but Bitcoin is used all over the world.
Precisely. I would expect that the algorithm itself would change over time, with modifications based partially on the state of the network.

Edit: maybe the modification strategy could provide some 'proof-of-steak' protections, without burdening the system with excessive early adopter advantages.
My personal theory is that dark matter is the great filter. We can't see them because they've taken it to a whole another level.
Stop linking to pages that don't exist...
Estradas com Baixo Volume de Tráfego
don't just examine why certain groups are underrepresented and dwell on the inequality.

Did Tyson actually say this or are you putting words in his mouth? "Dwell on the inequality"? That sounds like "Starving people of the world shouldn't dwell on their hunger, they should figure out how to solve it themselves!".
We don't have to guess, we can calculate this precisely.

The M1 supply of all USD is $2.1 Trillion [1]. Overstock has $1.1 Billion in revenue per year [2]. So they pull in .05% of US currency per year, or 0.00014% per day.

The bitcoin money supply is $12.5 Billion [3]. Overstock pulled in $130,000 in a day, which is .001% of the bitcoin money supply.

So they got 7 times the proportion of bitcoin than they get of USD.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overstock.com
[3] https://blockchain.info/charts/market-cap
Interesting points here: http://www.gwern.net/Colder%20Wars

If there's no FTL, but civilizations can accelerate massive projectiles to near light speed, there's basically no defense against devastating surprise attack. And there's little accountability to allow retaliation.

Basic game theory says either they all destroyed each other, or the survivors are staying very, very quiet.
I love The Ascent of Man. Bronowski's presentation style and the camera work (e.g. a wide shot of some landscape with Bronowski narrating then you notice actually he's a couple of hundred metres in the distance walking by) amuses me to no end, but it's a great watch. I haven't heard of the others you list, so I'll check them out, thanks.

Some of my favourites:

Microcoosmos

Anything by David Attenborough

Capturing The Friedmans

Anything by Louis Theoroux

The Music of the Primes (this was technically a 3 part series, but it's a great look at the mathematicians who have tried to find the secret to the prime numbers, most of whom drove themselves insane)

The (R)evolution of Immortal Technique - a documentary about political activist/musician, great watch
I find the argument that we're in a simulation rather compelling: http://io9.com/5799396/youre-living-in-a-computer-simulation...
Its not a matter of health. You can give a 65 year old the brain of a 20 year old, but you can't give him back his naive unindoctrinated view of the world. And the sheer wonderment of childhood and adolescence is something you can never recapture. I have a 1 year old. There are expressions of joy you will only ever see on the face of a 1 year old, because for them the most mundane experiences are nonetheless firsts. Similarly, you only experience anything for the first time no matter how long you live. And I think there is a tremendous creative energy arising from those firsts.

I'm partial to the idea that geniuses have one or two great ideas in them per lifetime, regardless of how long that life lasts. Given 150 years of life, I don't think Picasso would invent cubism then something else.