skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any lawyers here want to give an opinion on whether - from a legal perspective - this is a Ponzi scheme or a gambling site? And if it's a Ponzi scheme, are the people participating complicit in a crime?

Just because it calls itself a Ponzi scheme doesn't make it one - is it fraud when the scheme is openly labelled as such? OTOH I can see some people arguing it's not that clear that the scheme is unsustainable without further thought, research, or existing knowledge of pyramid schemes, and that it entails an unstated high element of risk, so in that sense it may be misleading.
Way to miss the point completely.
It also not only plainly labels itself a Ponzi scheme, but explains that you'll only get a return if others invest after you.
The app is making $50k/day, and the author is taking it down because he doesn't like the press attention. Taking down your app because it's too popular is unusual, and suddenly you won't be able to download one of the most popular games.
Nope not really. Probably only tards who can't seem to see that most of the successful web runs on PHP, not on their Brogrammer flavour-of-the-week language or framework.
It was determined in this particular case. But in many other cases, it was not, and this scheme was approved, for example, by PWC.

>>> This isn't a case of a company honestly trying to follow the law

First of all, this is not the case that we were discussing - it has very little to do with financial law. Secondly, in current climate, where companies can be sued for basically anything, given they have enough money to be attractive targets, of course that makes executives to try and minimize the exposure. Even though company is supposed to be able to choose their worker's pay as they please, obviously it is not so - the populist politicians want to mess with it to get themselves elected. And thus a savvy executive would certainly not want to make it too easy for them. It turns into an adversarial game, and the results are not good for anyone.

>>> If these companies think the laws are bad, it's not like large corporations have no political power. They're free to buy as many votes as they always do and get them changed.

That's what they are doing. That's where the regulatory capture comes from. As a result, the law becomes more and more complex, as each company and each interest group carves a loophole in the law for themselves and pours millions into buying off politicians. As a result, we get completely corrupt politicians, the law that is trying to serve a thousand of special interests and no longer has any connection to what was the original purpose of the law - to protect people's rights, huge barriers of entry to the competition, billions spent on political squabbles instead of doing something productive (think about how many people one could feed and clothe for the cost of one election campaign) and ultimately the consumers and taxpayers paying for all this baloney. And you response essentially is - if you don't like how we do it in America, GTFO? Is this really the best you can do?
my thought process is:
one large BTC pool. all transactions are feed into the pool. the order of the deposits dictate priority of withdrawal. Owner does not skim the transactions, only makes a large initial deposit and then markets the site like crazy.
Big assumption here is that he is running an "honest" ponzi operation.
Elon musk explained many times how Dragon will land with helicopter precision. Currently it lands with precision of a few kilometers( because of the wind, they use parachutes ).

They can do that because even on a symetrical capsule you can have lift vector control.

I can't find the video, but you can look it up with google. It is very easy to find.
Do you think it would be possible to re-use the sync-code from firefox directly?
The library wouldn't have to be iOS specific.
Not just that really, I think his point is more so that AOSP will not build and run for 99% of phones out there (i.e. non-Nexus phones). There's a lot of reverse engineering that goes on from people like CyanogenMod to make it work on other devices. Manufacturers release kernel source, as they must, but they rarely release other modifications they make for their own devices to even boot. There's a lot of stupidity in the Android "hacker" community (i.e. XDA) where people go around saying "X manufacturer doesn't release their sources, I'm boycotting X" when in reality, except for the Chinese OEMs they do release the source that they're required to release, it's just that 90% of the time that source is nowhere near enough to produce a build that you can run on your phone.
I have no experience with ruby / passenger / puma etc, but what you say about OpenBSD is wrong.

From the OpenBSD FAQ[1]:

"As mentioned in the introduction, packages are compiled from the ports tree. In this section we will explain how the ports tree works, when you should use it and how you can use it. "

The 'extremely outdated' part is also wrong. See ajacoutot@ answer on openbsd-misc[2]:
"
=> on -current (soon to be 5.5) you end up with the same GNOME version (and assorted \
dependencies) as with the latest Fedora.

We have the latest version of gnome, cups, gnutls, libgcrypt, .....................
We have KMS with state of the art acceleration on Intel and ATI."
[1] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Ports
[2] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=139188821027488&w=2
Localize.js (https://localizejs.com) - it's the easiest way to localize your web app.

The localize.js javascript library detects phrases on the page, and injects translations into the DOM on the client-side. Unrecognized phrases are saved to your localizejs.com dashboard, where your can order human or machine translations.

As a developer, localization is really hard thing to get right. Traditionally, i18n workflows take 1-2+ weeks to setup plus a lot of ongoing maintenance. My goal with Localize.js is to automate as much of the process as possible, making i18n more accessible to startups and time-strapped developers.

It's being used in production at http://verbling.com and https://localizejs.com, with very few glitches thus far.

Let me know what you think :). If you're interested in trying it out, feel free to sign up. It's production-ready. Send me an email if you have any questions :) bp@brandonpaton.com
It's not a scam any more than gambling is. Scams are things that appear to be one thing but are another. This is not that.
According to your logic, the author of this code should write a detailed explanation in the commit message, except he probably won't. Shame isn't it?
TIL Europe is a nation.
When you use liquid fuel in an engine you are taking advantage of the fact that the fuel converts into a gas quickly and thus increases the relative pressure enough to transfer momentum to the piston head which ultimately powers the drivetrain.

In an electric power plant, this is only part of the equation, the other part is that you also use the excess heat to drive a glycol or water / steam turbine system, recovering much more energy from the fuel.

This makes up for the losses of electricity in the lines. furthermore, nuclear power is by far the safest and most energy efficient source of power. Cheaper, safer, and far more environmentally friendly than a distributed gasoline delivery and combustion system.
Feel free to PM me if you want to discuss the architecture/code/... @zimbatm on twitter
I used to work in Nokia's developer relations group. For a lot of developers, the following requirements are all hurdles that make WP more trouble than its worth:

- Learn a new language (C# is awesome but odds are the dev you are talking to already knows Java or ObjC. Telling an Android dev to learn C# is more work than telling him/her to tweak his/her Android app)

- Get Windows (a huge number of mobile devs are on MacBooks. Getting Windows costs some combination of time, money, and precious SSD space)

- Get Windows 8 (a lot people who are on Windows are on Windows 7 and have no desire to go to Windows 8)

bottom line: telling devs to tweak their Android apps for some kind of "MSMS" over GMS would represent a whole lot of lower barriers to entry.
I guess we are talking about difference things.

Sorry, I meant Pyramid scheme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

But regarding pyramid schema, you mean hierarchical structure, right? I have the same concern, but flat tagging does not help much as we can observe from many sites.

Let people browsing from multiple levels of the category is fun. The rule of thumb is: don't expect perfect structure and don't need to have everybody agree on that. Ad hoc hierarchy should be good enough like Amazon product list. Also keep it away from people who don't need to browse it.
Has any politically contentious hackers decided to live there who were not Vietnamese?
"Women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives
of the top 100 tech companies"

If there is one job role you don't want to use to point out gender disparity, it is the title of CEO. Most tech startup CEOs occupy that position because that person (irrespective of gender) went out and decided to start a company on their own or with colleagues. Before a company reaches series B, it is almost entirely unlikely that the CEO has been appointed to that position by that company's board of directors.

For post B-round companies, it's possible that some percentage of CEOs occupy that position because the board replaced the founding CEO and that a mostly male VC community is likely to appoint men to the position.

You could go on to point out that the low numbers of women as CEOs in pre-B-round companies is attributable to the difficulty women having raising money from a largely male VC community.

Moving on from there, you could then look at the ratio of men to women CEOs in the population of pre-funded startups so the only real bias you have left is selection bias. Yeah, a women is probably less likely to found a company because some may not see a path to funding because they think that as a women they are less investible by a largely male investment community.

With all that in mind if that 6% figure remains consistent for companies post-B, between seed and A and pre-investment, the only conclusion to make is that something else is holding them back than a glass ceiling. I don't know what that would be if this is the case, nor will I speculate. I just wanted to point out that CEO (and CTO for tech startups) are the only jobs in which your gender should be least relevant, especially in companies pre-funding.
Yes. Imagine if everyone put the following code on their sites:

<iframe src="https://accounts.google.com/Logout" width="0" height="0" ></iframe>
There's nothing more to life than profit. Except maybe regretting your priorities on your deathbed, but whatevs, you won't be worried about it for long.
I have to say yes, I would have no problem with being known for inventing a toilet brush, or flappy bird. I'd be proud, even.

I know that people can have strangely fragile egos but the idea of being upset for being known for something, no matter how benign, is completely foreign to me.
Yes, world is changing fast. I bought my first smartphone in 2008 (if Nokia E51 Symbian can be considered smartphone). That's 6 years ago.

In previous 10 years I had access to PCs (usually Windows).
The Rise of Worse is Better
Suggestion: use rot13 if you say anything potentially spoiler-y.
I've done a similar thing trying to create classifiers for scenes and buildings. It's hard to have a word for 'bottom left corner of a window with bars on it', for example. And for scenes there's no taxonomy in advance. I think it works better than expected (as good as automatic patch discovery methods), but you end up having to train a lot more classifiers because you'll get a number of redundant classifiers.

Something that might be cool is to have a step where the common people try to do the clustering, and an expert corrects them if they do something not useful. Then there'd be a back and forth between experts and crowd people. I haven't really thought that out though.
The creator makes what's leftover in the end of non-payouts whenever he decides to pull the plug.
I've just completed a composer version of Phrocco which is a Docco style documentation generator for PHP code.

http://phrocco.info
'Facebook is evil An absolutely terrible thing'
It's a big pain in the ass to register an App Store account as a company vs as an individual. Especially if it's something as small and casual as this.
I launched a paid niche iOS app for a group of enthusiastic hobbyists. It's not an explosion of awesome, but it's sold 2,000+ copies in the first two weeks.

http://tanglelibrary.com
This is almost perfect except for not including a warning:

"Warning, if people stop depositing money, you won't get 120% back, and you could lose all your money."

Also, it seems like the person running the site is not taking a cut. If that's right, he's not making a profit, and he's less likely to get in trouble when things collapse.
"all of them running MS software" is already never going to happen. If they view that as core to their future, they have already failed.

What needs to happen is that the definition of "running MS software" needs to change from an OS stack (where they've already lost) to things going on in the cloud.
Basically, you're looking for the rectangular equivalent of A189414 (http://oeis.org/A189414).

Tricky problem, even for PE. I started to retool some earlier success with it towards a quasi-DP approach, but have since got caught up in other things.
Instagram photos printed on shortbread
All payment processors take currency risk. Coinbase has an interesting approach by also being an exchange and doing some algorithmic arbitrage.

The current volatility isn't inherent to the protocol, it's just a function of market depth and liquidity which will presumably improve/stabilize as the network grows.
even if you actually hated money, it seems strange to turn your back on your passion because it came with a shit ton of money.
20% savings is not ground shaking. Remember that BTC is tackling an entrenched opponent, quasi monopolist. It'd take an order of magnitude in savings to guarantee success. Think 50% to 90% less.
But he is actually right: when dealing with obscure implementation details, the best thing to do is to encapsulate it properly, the minimum is to comment it clearly, and ideally detailed explanations should be written in the commit message.

Having a detailed code history isn't in any way an excuse to leave obscure code as is. If you have time to document it, you have time to make the code right.
I'm impressed by the vanity address, must have taken a lot of cpu power to hash that one out.
It's unusual, OK, I get that, but is it #7 and #9 on HN front page just because everyone is looking at each other going "WTF"? I get that you're all surprised, maybe I would be too if I'd known anything about it. Or cared.

I guess the questions are:

* Why do you care?

* What are you learning from this?

* Why is it worth your time?
Remember there are billions of people who haven't already been locked into Google services. They don't think "I need access to my years and gigabytes worth of Gmail." They think "I want email. This 'outlook.com' thing that came with my [hypothetical MS Android] phone will work fine"
I'm happy to read comments that indicate that understanding of REST is starting to improve. The old adage about sex applies to REST: "Most people that say they are doing it, aren't doing it. Those that are are probably doing it wrong".

It might be best to preface this with a list of things that REST isn't. Rest is not:

1. Pretty urls from your framework of choice that look like /dogs/breed/chow/weight/150 . Why? because the query string exists for a reason and has well defined semantics.
2. Using some framework serialization package to output xml or json for content negotiations. Why? because the hardest, most important part of REST is defining media types, and the garbage spewn by most serialization frameworks is not a clean media type.
3. Clients which access API's by curl'ing example.com/products/$productID are not restful. Why? because RESTful resources should be discoverable using hypertext. A client with a hard-coded url template is not a RESTful client.

REST, real REST, is a great architecture. In fact it's fair to say that the best example of RESTful architecture is the web you see in your browser. API's are usually a shallow copycat. What makes plain old html pages a poster child for REST? I'm glad you asked.

1. Hyper text. Guess what, JSON doesn't provide hypertext. JSON ootb is not restful. Certain standards on top of JSON (like the _link attribute) help bridge the gap. Our friends HTML and XML support hyper text. HTML in the standard way, and XML with the link attribute. If you're not using a content-type with well-defined semantics for links, you're not using REST.

2. Choices for intelligent UA's to browse or present as choices to their users. Forms provide a RESTful way to give a user a choice and allow them to manipulate or browser resources. JSON doesn't have anything like forms builtin. If I can't browse your "restful" API with my browser, you're not using REST.

the list goes on. But don't worry about it. Aside from not being quite as hip, it's perfectly ok if you're app isn't RESTful. Does your app provide a service that performs an action for the user? Maybe it's ok for that to be RPC. Does your app need to be tooling friendly for enterprise folks? It's ok to give them something SOAP related to make it easy for them to integrate their clients. Does your app do some sort of low-level file synchronization like dropbox? Then by all means run your service over HTTP so you can get through firewalls, but nobody cares if you pass back a list of binary identifiers instead of hyperlinks.

Really all that matters is that from a usability perspective, it's nice to make accessing your API easy, and HTTP is a great way to go if you want to lower the barrier to entry in using your API. Don't worry if your API doesn't use "hypertext as the engine of state" if it doesn't make sense for you. When you need to enhance your API, think of doing it the RESTful way first.
Second article about this on the front page of HN....this one being a derivative, saying nothing new, only quoting two tweets by the game author...
why would he even need an initial deposit? he can simply delay to pay people until enough other people have paid.
Build a Browser Game (http://buildabrowsergame.com) - A digital book on building a multiplayer browser game.

Game development is the reason I became a developer, like a lot of people. I've made countless games for myself, but have never released them. Started working on this since creating and writing it has the added benefit of forcing me to release a game, in addition to teaching others how to make one.
To be fair they also listed the Soviet Union as a nation. "Nation" is an ambiguous concept (or we just lack a proper term for multi-national alliances that transcend "normal" international cooperation and become meta-nations).
Good teachers probably won't go anywhere, but hopefully bad teachers will go the way of the dodo bird. I have had both good and bad teachers and three of the most influential people in my life were teachers and I still talk about all three to this day. But I can also blame my AP Comp Sci teacher for causing me to abandon computer science as my choice of major in college, causing me to take 10+ years to rediscover software engineering as a career I'm most happy with.
I think it says why, right in the first sentence: "…the easily installable Github clone…" (emphasis mine).

I love Gitlab and have a small installation (only 4 users). It's an wonderful github clone and it makes me happy when I use it.

However… it's a maintenance nightmare. I've never encountered a more obtuse and maintenance hostile app. I think maybe Rails apps just aren't meant to be distributed and run out in the wild. They are finicky and upgrading is a nightmare.

Compare that against, say, Wordpress, which is downright trivial to maintain. And it's darn near invisible if you're willing to sacrifice security for their in-browser updates.
Serving static files with Go
If merchants were doing sales and returns using Bitcoin it seems like you could make money on the volatility by returning items when the value of Bitcoins went up within the return window. You'd have to be willing to keep items you bought if the value of Bitcoin went down, but if you systematically made all your regular purchases that way you ought to come out ahead. Is this a real risk for merchants, or am I missing something?
No.

REST has nothing to do with HTTP. That is like saying that poetry has means using english to make sonnets that rhyme.

REST stands for representational state transfer. It is a software architecture style that sets up constraints on objects, and other data structures within a distributed network.

That is it. HTTP attempts to provide a way of doing REST, but you can even use HTTP to do things in a non-rest way.
Remember that it takes a while for transactions to complete, so the balance could be a simple counter of outstanding outgoing transactions.
Flappy bird can make it possible for him to fund his next adventure (or next 10), whatever he chooses that to be. He should think forward a bit more. It's extraordinarily rare to be in the position to take advantage of opportunities like that. What he'd be effectively doing is just handing the money off to Clumsy Bird instead. If he has any dreams for the future, he should view it as funding those dreams; which could be anything from a future game, to charity. Just my opinion obviously.
Because we all wish we'd come up with something that big.
>Click − Hover = ∞

>Click − Mousedown = 2 ms

>Click − Touchstart = ∞

I win!
I took another look and I wasn't doing the init(). I am now, but it still doesn't appear to be working. Not sure why.
I respect his morals but the people over using the game are just going to move on to some other game and get addicted to it. If he feels bad about profiting from the game, he should donate it to a charity. That amount of money can do a lot of good.
You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income.

Are you speculating that, or are you suggesting that others should speculate that?
Exactly. The most important lesson any teacher can give you is how to be autodidactic and self-sufficient; to teach you how to learn on your own, whether it be for pleasure or so solve a problem in your life, at home or in the workplace. This, unfortunately, is not what modern educational systems are set up to teach. Fortunately, some teachers out there are an exception and have an outsized impact on the lives of their students.
When - if - he removes it from the app store, Clumsy Bird [insert clone here] will take over his sales momentum, and Flappy Bird will never be heard from again.
Here's someone who recently sent 1 BTC to this ponzi scheme:

https://blockchain.info/address/1Gh2tRaqaPWFbQVabVD9rPsN1nm9...

https://blockchain.info/address/1BYbqzLvAN9PCC4LqNPPG2dHSyTn...

I'm going to watch and see what happens to them. If they don't lose their 1 BTC, then that's at least slightly interesting.

EDIT: It's been more than an hour; no repayment yet.
Beside the word "solicit" the definition you deliver applies 100% to that website. So why do you think it does not follow the definition? The returns come from new investors. It requires a constant flow of money. It will inevitably collapse at one point.
Mostly reasonable advice. An important step was missing though. Editor / IDE setup anyone? And in regards to that, I would like to point out one particular thing that might seem trivial. Color scheme. I think most people don't realize how much a proper color scheme helps reduce eyestrain, and hence general irritableness. Not to mention saving your eyes in the long run... High contrast between foreground and background color tires your eyes faster. That's why you should never use (0,0,0) or (255,255,255) as your background color.