skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jeff is really talking about a very specific kind of app: one that provides an interface to a web service, and that has (or could have) a comparable service accessible through a browser.

There are a lot of apps that make the bulk of the "millions of apps" that do not fit this description: games, productivity apps, apps making use of mobile hardware (microphone, camera), that couldn't possibly have web alternatives.

It's totally true that App stores have pricing/quality/discovery problems, but I'm not sure that there is a duality with the web (which could be resolved by "product x"), just an intersection.
I think income of the super rich may go into positional goods, but their wealth goes into commodities which does raise prices across the board. And that percentage may be greater than it was in the past.
This functionality is actually built into the Metro side of IE 10/11 on Windows 8. Which sadly means that nobody (especially nobody who reads HN) will ever see it.
For 40 years, this Russian family was cut of from all human contact
Iconjar
Organize, search and use icons the easy way
I wrote an IEEE single-point compatible floating point library for embedded 8088/8086 processors in the mid-to-late '80s ... my employer was very cheap!

On the other hand, I learned a ton about efficient ways to implement various algorithms and remember a great way to do square roots that involved an initial multiplication (using normalized binary FP numbers) and then converged in about six iterations.
Isn't BTC supply also artificially limited? I though that was the whole point so it wouldn't become 'inflationary'?

I can't stop being amazed by the persistent denial and non-sequitur arguments made by many BTC fans as to why none of the problems BTC has been suffering from are relevant and how BTC is nothing like a tulip bubble or a pyramid scheme, or a scam, or whatever, but the 'money' of the future. Huge price swings, theft, illicit trade, failing exchanges, problems withdrawing or converting BTC, yeah sounds like a great alternative to 'money controlled by central banks' :-S

It's just like gold, silver, and it's definitely much better than fiat, because... it's THE FUTURE, it's FREE, and it uses TECHNOLOGY!
Has the language grown much faster in recent years? I coded some microarray data analysis in Mathematica at one point a few years ago, and was very disappointed in the slow execution, it made it unusable.

It may have been a "naive" implementation that could be much improved, but a similarly naive Java implementation was much faster and not significantly more difficult to write.
well it's not that simple, because the 'nbytes' parameter to recvfrom_into is optional and you could infer as a programmer that it will read up to the size of your buffer, since your buffer has a size attribute attached to it.

I originally thought that this wouldn't be a big deal because using recvfrom_into is annoying, you have to make a mutable buffer object and the most immediate way I found to do that involved ctypes, which is scary. However, on perusal a bunch of code hosted on github uses recvfrom_into in vulnerable ways, so that's pretty exciting.

edit: I was mistaken, see below
Do the download links mostly work? I'm going to download a couple this evening. Streaming works a lot better when its over wired GB ethernet from my fileserver in the basement.

archive.org should be mirroring this, like many other university courses they already have copies of.

(Whoops, see: "The copyrights are owned jointly by the MHRD, IITs/IISc and the faculty." and "... likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons license in the future." So for licensing / copyright reasons the whole project is likely DOA, which is too bad.)
Many of those transactions were recent. Though the account dates to April, 2012, the volume of TX seems to have accelerated through 2013 and 2014.
Stross's disdain for bitcoin is existentially disappointing to me. The man wrote the first book I read where distributed autonomous corporations transacted on their own behalf. The idea of python based corporations and legal denial of service attacks blew my mind.

Bitcoin is in some ways, the realization of that dream. But Stross is so dismissive of it--no points for trying.

His disdain seems to be on the basis that Bitcoin is deflationary, but I don't think that's an issue for 2 reasons. Primarily, deflationary assets can exist side by side with inflationary ones with no problem. The existence of gold does not cause everyone to abandon fiat. I would argue the deflationary aspect is an elegant game theoretical solution to the bootstrapping problem and gaining adoption in a double-sided market.

Secondarily, if you think of Bitcoin as a money transmission protocol, a lossy protocol would be a lousy protocol.

If the argument is about intrinsic value, a Bitcoin is a token that allows you to transact on the Bitcoin network and that is where it derives its value from.
Well, security is relative. On mtgox, they were more secure to price volatility, since you could sell them any time. But how can one be sure if any service is secure to the theft.
I struggle to find a use case for Spritz.

If I am reading for pleasure I am reading slowly, savoring each word and I want to go at a variable speed say 300-600wpm.

If I am reading something where each word is not important, then I am scanning, reading a line at a time and getting 1000+wpm.
Open Standards Still Need Your Vote
More like hoping the corpse have finally stopped moving, so it will stop spooking people away from BTC.
> The only predictions (both positive and negative) that I've seen have come from dogmatism and not from data.

Well, that's because we've never had a cryptocurrency of this scale before. Of course, we've had other alternate currencies (Ithaca Hours, anyone), and based on that data, Bitcoin's future doesn't look too bright? But you could make the argument that those aren't the same.

One reason that you aren't seeing much "hard" data in favor of Bitcoin is that the Austrian school of economics (which provides the foundation for deflationary economics) actively rejects empirical research and deductive reasoning[0][1].

In contrast, virtually all economic models that are taken seriously[2] do try to incorporate fundamental principles (inductive reasoning), but revise those in the face of empirical evidence when necessary (a process that's not dissimilar to what is done in, eg., quantum mechanics - a field in which theory oftentimes advances beyond the means to test theories empirically).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School

[1] https://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp

[2] Yes, I am excluding Austrian economics, because very few non-Austrian economists actually take them seriously
I'd really like to know whether it means my Django apps are now vulnerable.
While I think bitcoin might not go the distance, It's clear that crypto currencies have a place in the world. Looking back through history, practically every major technology has it's initial boom, catastrophic bust and gradual rise back to stability phase.

In the first half of the 20th century there were thousands of car manufacturers. Then came the shakedown which reduced that number to a fraction, then slowly, bit by bit, stability and diversity returned to the auto making industry.

Most people on HN probably remember the dot com bubble, and the sentiment that came with the burst; That the internet was a non starter, that it had failed. But then came the step by step rebuilding process and look at where we are now.

I think the same is true of crypto currencies. We're learning the merits, the risks and the pitfalls. Bit coin may not survive (or maybe it will) but I think long term, crypto currencies are here to stay and we'll look back on this time and marvel at how badly we handled the whole thing.

Life is always dangerous for pioneers, and everyone in the bitcoin business right now is a pioneer. Pioneers serve an important role and while the rewards can be great, the price of failure is often deadly.

One thing I will add in Bitcoins defense: People need to start using the contracts feature that was built into bitcoin from he start. There's no need for people to hold bitcoins in escrow. Keep that stuff in the blockchain where it's safe.
Sounds unlikely, as he seems intelligent enough to know he'd need (at least) millions of smoke detectors.
Interesting that Misko himself implemented this in AngularDart first, and then is going to backport to JavaScript.
Show HN: RemindMeTo – A simple, intuitive reminder tool for the command line
years ago, it was known as Slashdot effect or slashdotting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

Can we call it the HN effect?
Wolfram has gobs of money, at this point. He probably just works on whatever he thinks is cool.
Yeah it's funny how the technical perspective of this post swung rapidly to economic ideology at the end. Having confirmed that it was complete amateur hour over at MtGox, how can a critical thinking person make the huge leap that only bureaucratically controlled government currencies are viable. All it maybe shows (and this remains to be seen) is that Bitcoin is the wild west where people will steal from you and generally not face legal repercussions, but that is the social layer on top of Bitcoin and has nothing to do with its fundamental viability. When this story repeats with more professional operations and more savvy users then we'll start to get a more realistic view of whether Bitcoin can ever cross the chasm or if it's fundamentally lacking the ability to generate the trust necessary to stabilize its economy.
I was going to say "trust him with what?", because while Stallman can be respected on some bounds, I wouldn't trust him to do anything but develop software.

I take your point that where I work might be considered a cloistered environment, but the comment about people judging your appearance is a world wide phenomena, not something that lives in one workplace.

For example:

1. Recently HN had an article about a younger guy who added a fake beard to his freelancer profile, and noticed he received more gigs as a result.

2. Attractive people get more opportunities in life http://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-get-more-job...

The average callback rate was 30% across all of the CVs sent out. For attractive women, it was 54%, and for attractive men, 47%.
Unattractive women had by far the worst results, with a 7% callback rate. Unattractive men had a 26% rate.

I could go on, but this is not a me thing, its a we (people) thing.
What does "acq" stand for? Acquisition?
>as if there is just this big pile of ex nihilo money being apportioned out unfairly.

I get the whole "wealth is not zero sum" thing, I can see how it applies at the level of a whole economy. However, at the level of an individual company, there is a finite amount of revenue, and it is divided up in a zero sum fashion. When workers see their own pay going down while the bosses pay leaps by hundreds of percent, all that stuff about fallacious piles of money doesnt really make sense.
(Assuming you mean Accelerando) You do realize that was a nightmare, not a dream? Those autonomous corporations are the antagonists.
the money first property is its volume should be controlled, preferably by human beings. It should avoid arbitrary effect such as the money coining belongs to an elite without any legitimity. Right now, bitcoin is a kind of speculative ponzi like bubble based on hash of hash which has no other value than the belief of the gullible :)
Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375B Freight Industry
Nobody can say for sure the bitcoins in that address are stolen.

But it would be very possible to reject bitcoins from certain addresses, and the protocol don't need to be changed. All it would take is make a client to reject to include transactions to/from blacklisted addresses into blockchain. And for everyone to update clients. That still would be vulnerable to 51% attack, but it is very real possibility.
So, after the change, anyone who knows my public Facebook username can now directly send me email? I wonder if we'll be able to turn that off...
You didn't need to mine any coins. You just had to pick your buy and sell points correctly.
Link to download the app: http://goo.gl/FWHVlH
Upstart was started before sytemd unlike Mir and Unity (in comparison to Wayland and Gnome 3) and it's creator having come in support of systemd[1], Ubuntu's upstream, Debian, going with it and on top of that Shuttleworth already admitting defeat. I have to seriously doub that.

[1] https://plus.google.com/111820116102071851808/posts/4eHMc2tv...
The wild-west factor has everything to do with its viability. If bitcoin is ever going to outgrow its dutch tulip mania phase and actually be a medium of exchange for legal goods, people need to feel (and be!) at least as secure as with USD in a big dumb bank.
This whole situation reminds me of Michael Bolton's virus in Office Space.
What the tech business hasn't yet grasped about human nature
Proof of stake is wildly anti-egalitarian: very literally, the rich get richer.
Yes thank you! People seem to be missing this point. The variables should be simply named something like group_counter_a, group_counter_b, group_counter_c, with an explanation of why their default values are what they are.
Any time hordes of people are rushing into a new investment with an unstable price in hopes of getting rich quick and assuring themselves that the math will protect their investment then it is exactly like Tulip Mania.
BBM for $19B
I totally get your point but you can choose to not have that validate you. I put effort into my appearance because I really enjoy it, but more than anything - anything at all - I care about how good my work is and I'd rather be a hermit in a cave celebrated for my brilliant works. The outliers that we love, generally aren't known for their attention to appearance first.
There is always that option. But what if you got some bitcoins today that turned out to have been stolen two months ago?

It might be a good idea, but it's antithetical to the community.
What are the Public Note: sections in the blockchain about?

One of the transactions from this account traces down to this address (https://blockchain.info/address/16cou7Ht6WjTzuFyDBnht9hmvXyt...) that contains 53,000 BTC. Transactions into this account have Public Notes saying things like

- Worth a shot. My sis really is dying man. https://www.facebook.com/MySisterHasCancer. Debts around 310,000.00 now. I dont get it, its nothing to you..

- I am from Russia. Help to buy a house. I need 100 BTC. 1MEmKEuJxXT71UgRCAhDpjDpYWSMSNcgKp I would be grateful :) Would century are numbered ;)

- I am a Chinese college students, I have a loving father, but I can not help him, he needs to do heart bypass surgery, I can not help him, because the cost of 100,000 or so needed, please help me, lifelong You pray Thank you!

Any ideas what that's all about?
> Isn't BTC supply also artificially limited?

It's limited in a known and consistent way. I'd say it was artificially limited if there was a person telling you you can't get more than 1BTC/mth while others could find a way to work around it.

Basically it's "world cannot produce more tulips" -vs- "I forbid you to start your tulip farm using law and crazy high prices". One of those will fall, the other will not. I'm not saying it's not a scam, that early adopters don't have leverage, that there are no problems, etc. Only that tulip mania does not apply here.
Criminals are lazy
> Stross's disdain for bitcoin is existentially disappointing to me. The man wrote the first book I read where distributed autonomous corporations transacted on their own behalf. The idea of python based corporations and legal denial of service attacks blew my mind.

I wouldn't read "Accelerando" as some kind of utopia, considering the eventual outcome.

> His disdain seems to be on the basis that Bitcoin is deflationary

I think cstross' problem with Bitcoin stems from exactly the same things that libertarians find so great about it: it's not taxed and nobody is in command (no monetary policy).

The fact that a major actor turned out to be incompetent highlights another area in which bitcoin is deficient: it lacks regulation (though I'll agree that the real-life banking world could use much tougher regulation and enforcement of existing rules).
The problem, as I've been trying to explain, is that if any other user does want a feature that somehow uses those perms, the app has to request them at install. There is just no other way on Android.

Realistically you can only use apps that aren't developed further.
Baseimage-docker 0.9.7 released
It usually prevents the business' core from going away (if Microsoft moves the headquarter to London or Seattle for instance). The point would be less to preserve market value than jobs, technical expertise and surrounding ecosystem.

Not that I strongly agree with this line of thinking, I'm unopiniated at best.
Ah, so now people will have a database process, an application process, and maybe a wolfram process to handle tough computation...
Trinitarian theology?
maybe it's more a throughput thing, if the brain is massively parallel, it's a giant pipeline with many things in flight all the time
>Out of curiosity, what's your opinion on crypto-currencies that aren't deflationary?

Now, that sounds like a good idea. But at that point, we're talking about a cryptocurrency equivalent of real grown-up money

I'm extremely amused, because Dogecoin is inflationary. So Dogecoin is "real grown-up money" by your definition.
I doubt this is the thief's wallet because it would mean that they somehow managed to execute withdrawals of 3k and 5k bitcoin 7 and 5 days ago respectively - MtGox has stopped all withdrawals for weeks/months now.

The number of transactions seems low as well, the malleability bug would have involved thousands of smaller transactions.

It would also be insanely stupid for a sophisticated hacker to funnel their loot through a single wallet. Someone who understands transaction malleability enough to exploit it likely won't be making that mistake.

It isn't hard to pick out a number of bitcoin and then dive into the blockchain and find a wallet that has a same/similar number of bitcoins. Similar types of misidentification happen during the Silk Road and Sheep Marketplace heists.
It sounds like a winning investment strategy would be to go short on whatever you are investing in.
Being an Agency Tech Vendor for a Global Brand
I don't understand what deflation has to do with this. Did the inflationary nature (or "real" monetary policy) of the USD somehow prevent Madoff/MF global/etc?
That's what I thought. Something is afoul about it and it's not only incompetence. I think there was intent and malice here. It will be rather interesting to see where this goes.
Interesting. Is Full-Time Remote a possibility? (Personally, I'm East Coast, about 6 hours out from Chattanooga).
If games are still "the new rock and roll", Is Flappy Bird Punk?
This was one of the reasons WhatsApp was a big success, at least in Europe, and I suspect it's a reason it's not as well known in USA (they usually have hundreds or unlimited texts included in their plans).

You can't expect to get away forever with charging 15 cent + tax per SMS.
> What happened to the hard drives with the wallet numbers and private keys?

The hard drives are still there, but the wallets are empty. The coins were stolen.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/29/welcome-to-the-french-tech-...
Why would you even suggest doing something that you believe to be illegal and unethical?
Not everyone interested in Bitcoin are libertarian gold-hoarders :)

Some of us are interested in it because Bitcoin represents an experiment into a distributed network for ownership, in the same way that the Internet is a distributed network for data.

Ultimately, the economics of Bitcoin don't hugely matter in the long term, because crypto-currencies can be programmatically traded between different blockchains using distributed contracts. The hard part is getting an interface up between "normal" currency and crypto-currencies.

There are already some crypto-currencies out there that experiment with different economies and setups. Dogecoin (yes, that Doge) has a fixed inflation rate, for instance, while Peercoin uses a proof-of-stake/proof-of-work mixup that gets around Bitcoin's large use of computing power.
In Beijing, Complaints About Smog Grow Louder and Retaliation Grows Swifter
No; you can't lose more than your principal. So your initial 1k would be all you "lost". UNLESS you locked those gains in by paying taxes on them; though in that case you would just be re-collecting tax you already paid very slowly...
please tell me about your next investment so I can keep my money safe
This is not about a product not being profitable, but about an alternative strategy being more profitable, and an open system does indeed discourage choosing the alternative strategy, precisely because it prevents a single actor from being able to withdraw the product from the market.

With email (well, email before people were stupid enough to use gmail), if a single provider withdraws their email offering from the market, that does not really have much of an effect on the system as a whole, the affected users just switch to a different provider and email overall just continues to work as it always did - which in turn should discourage companies from withdrawing their email offerings in favour of their proprietary offerings, as they would expect people to switch to a different provider rather than to their proprietary offering.

Well, in practice, though, people just seem to be too stupid to understand such basic economic realities as network effects and the effects of monopolies/dictatorships/other concentrations of power and what the long-term effects of those are, and so facebook and twitter do actually have users, so something about that theory must be wrong, I guess.
Something that happened in 1934 is a "relatively recent development"? Relative to dinosaurs, sure. Relative to the modern world? No.
Migrating existing data around destructive Rails migrations
nicely, it seems that the python3 version of socketmodule doesn't use these on-stack Py_buffer objects, so wasn't affected.
Bitcoin MT Gox CEO says the business is at a turning point
When I installed it used the data channel to send messages, with SMS as fallback.
I hate being one of the, "Hey this isn't the original title, downvote!" but the submitted title here doesn't do justice to the already relevant title of the OP, and the breadth of OP's material:

"Probabilistic Programming and Bayesian Methods for Hackers"

This is truly a labor of love, and at version 0.1, very readable. I got through about half of it on the subway ride to work.
I hear they are going to revert back to trading Magic cards
Would I be a zealot if I said the printing press precipitated a revolution in human society and culture? I'm just saying something similar about bitcoin IF it meets certain conditions in the future. If you bothered to read the article you would notice that I'm sceptical that it actually will.

Anyway - we're done here. I made a claim and presented an argument. You chastised that claim without reading the argument or even addressing the summarised version I just wrote for you. I am willing to listen to a counter-argument and consider it, but you refuse to provide one. So this is a waste of both our time.

I don't get how you can behave this way and yet accuse me of behaving like a religious zealot. Refusing to actually address an argument for a claim, while at the same time attacking that claim feels a lot like all the of the conversations I've had with zealots myself.
I'm not trying to promote Benedict Evans as some kind of guru, merely quoting him as a source of information (rather than pulling something out of my ass). I usually find him reliable if not revelatory.