skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not quite sure how one "closes" a country, but they have abdicated responsibility for many of the core functions of government, and to the individual citizens who are affected I'm sure the government seems "closed", if not the country [1].

Details and semantics aside, my point was that the security that governments allegedly bring to currency, and which Bitcoin allegedly lacks, is often much less concrete than we would wish.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/24/christi...
1% doesn't seem like "good investment" money. Sounds more like a long shot investment...
I just bought a copy of Velocireader. I like it so far :)

Is there any way to raise the speed above 900wpm without going all the way to 1200wpm? The book I'm reading now is fine at 900wpm (and <=3 words per screen), but I think I could go a little faster. At 1200wpm I'm losing comprehension, so ideally I'd like to set it to 1000wpm. I can't see a way to do that.

+/- buttons at the top-right of the screen to make +5%/-5% adjustments to the speed without stopping reading would be great.

I'll get back to reading...
I'm not sure Google has the incentives in place to be interested in this, but it seems like a perfect fit for CyanogenMod as they try to grow as a platform.
I'm quite fond of cats.

Not that one though. They were all just so gratuitously annoying.

Actually, now that I think about it, Microsoft's tone-deafness on just how much people hated Clippy reminds me of Google's attitudes on G+, Real Names, and the Anschluss of all Google services.

Note that ZDNet (hardly a harsh Microsoft critic) noted when Clippy was finally killed (in 2001):

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-kills-off-clippy-3002085615/

Software giant Microsoft is laying off one of its most controversial employees: Clippy.

The software help system, a long-despised feature of Microsoft's popular Office suite of business software, is the star of a new Web marketing campaign launched on Wednesday. The campaign and a companion Web site trumpet Microsoft's forthcoming Office XP software as so easy to use that Clippy is out of a job.

And even that didn't take, they had to take out a second hit 9 years later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I
> HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide.

Seems so. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/lxlabs_funder_death/

But more than that, in his own words, he was a "man of excesses." Here is his archived blog (http://echoreply.us/ligesh.com/ligesh.com/about/index.html)
A Bitcoin Address with 782,000 BTC Moved Through It
Another thing you could learn from Bowie is how to write succinctly.

Listen dude, I don't think Bitcoin is valueless. It is an interesting solution to a number of technical challenges in distributed computing. It may even very well work as some sort of digital currency.

What I don't think is that it is going to change the world. You and every other maniac out there is actually doing a disservice to the acceptance of the technology. What kind of loony expects someone to read a 10,000 word essay that starts off with some sweeping claim about how 'everything's different now!'?

You don't know shit about the world. You couldn't possibly have enough experience or knowledge to piece together any sort of valid prediction, just like every other motherfucker out there. You've just got faith in some grand tale that honestly isn't that different from any other end-of-time story, like say, the Book of Revelations.

You're right to point the finger at economists when they make grand sweeping claims. They're just storytellers. There's a reason it is considered a liberal art.

Computer programmers and engineers aren't much more than storytellers either. There is even more danger of delusion in software because entire virtual worlds are created and then assumed to be real.

Math is the language of nature.

Truth is the language of man.

Learn to tell the difference.
Reading this, I was left with the impression that iOS apps took off by offering high quality at low cost. However, the cost differential was wrong and eventually the developers figured it was a scam and changed up.

Some provided lame platforms for pump and dump html to apps. Others made their games free and played off their users addiction.

Each day app developers burn more and more consumer trust. Eventually we will get to a point where quality matches cost, we may be there already.
Captureme – CLI utility that captures screenshots via browsers in the cloud
In the comments there are some examples of large losses due to technical or software failures:

- Knight Capital Group
- Mizuho Securities
- HyperVM

Anyone knows more cases?
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate Opinion
You can certainly be forgiven if you stopped reading the article at that sentence, because that is a frequently-beaten dead horse.

However, Atwood is actually making the exact opposite point: he goes on to say that people are justified to gripe about $3.99 apps because the quality of apps is so uneven and there's no real way to ascertain the quality of an app before you buy it.

He says we'd certainly be justified about complaining about $3.99 cups of coffee, too, if only 1 in 5 $3.99 cups of coffee was actually a decent cup of coffee!
Oh look, there's a place for this other than pastebin:

http://bugs.python.org/issue20246

Now why aren't you posting every security bug in every language to reach HN front page?
... an apt comparison in many ways. If the former fails, the latter is going to be in trouble.

The value of bitcoin is in many ways dependent on the irrational response of people who invest their money in it. Mt.Gox fails and many people are going to lose faith (at least temporarily) and consequently, the value has dropped significantly.

We're talking about an entity which at some point has held more than 5% of the BTC out there.
>> I think the reason people are reluctant to spend money on apps is the same reason they are reluctant to spend money on music or movies no matter who convenient it's made for them - people don't see value in digital goods as easily as they see it in physical goods.

I wholeheartedly disagree. By your logic, people wouldn't pay money for Windows, or Photoshop, or thousands of other software packages. Oh, and Steam! People pay $20 or more on Steam for some mediocre stuff.

The problem with paying for apps is two-fold: Frankly, 99% of apps out there aren't worthy of my money. Most of the few I actually pay for (Spotify and LastPass come to mind), I don't pay for for the app, it's for the service behind the app.

Second, app developers have done this to themselves, in two ways - first, putting out just really shitty, awful apps (especially games) that aren't worth money.

Also, in perpetuating a race to the bottom and setting the expectations way too low on price. I saw somewhere that Jobs thought the perfect price point for an app is $10 (I might be wrong on the source, but someone said it). I agree with this. If you really believe you have a great app, price that shit accordingly. If you have a great app and price it at $10, if you get a third of the downloads you'd get at $3, you're still ahead. And, your users will feel like part of an exclusive club, and invite their friends to be part of it.

Of course, this is my opinion, and no one ever listens to me.
Further, if or when Bitcoin transactions with scripted contracts become commonplace, mining would support the long-term existence and enforcement of such contracts.
> You have reached this page because you are using an older browser or are accessing this site via a browser that does NOT support virtual hosts (AOL's browser does NOT). You should upgrade your web browser to one of the following

> Netscape Navigator (v.2 or later), Microsoft Internet Explorer (v.2 or later) or Spry Mosaic (v.2 or later).

Amazing
Bitcoin is a technological breakthrough, you are just being ignorant about it.
Branding at its finest ... or worst. I think it's a little overboard, but hey ...don't knock the guy for trying to put his brand in your mind.
Better: even my Android browser lets me sort the bookmarks by frequency of use. Hell, I don't think my desktop browsers even do that.
A bit steep indeed.

A starter @ 15/20 quids would be reasonable.
Writing to storage I can allow.

Location, comms (absent some networking), messaging, address book / contacts, phone ID, Nope Nope Nope.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 is here
Hiring in the near future ?
I agree with you, but I don't know why you bothered. Articles like this just aren't worth responding to anymore. They probably never were.
Wingman app
>Now why aren't you posting every security bug in every language to reach HN front page?

Don't worry, your fellow Pythonistas ensure that every Ruby security bug reaches the front page.

(I don't actually have any skin in this argument since I don't use either language but if you are going to ask such blatantly leading questions then you don't really deserve a better response.)
Jeff Atwood is a horrible analyst and populist writer with mediocre knowledge. Noone should read his blog...
I'm a bit surprised/confused that the price has held as well as it has. http://bitcoinity.org/markets/
false. that depends on the size of the bankroll.
Curious question. How many apps do you have that are not games and very niche that don't require an internet connection?

I tend to find that the most useful apps require a connection to login, refresh data, etc.
You're right, but the pastebin leaks adds "... and here's an exploit".
No, I did mean the Greeks - but neither country is a great argument for the "fiat currency good, Bitcoin bad" argument.

Re. non-Cypriots, I'm sure that you're right - but the subject was the state's management of its currency, regardless of who owns it. One thing that your example does flush out though is that fiat currency can be crippled by speculation too - and at least Bitcoin does not conflate a currency and a tax regime.

I'm not a cheerleader for Bitcoin specifically, I'm just really, really sceptical about the robustness of traditional currency.
Nope. The variable name is bad.
Please stop spamming your copycoin. Doge offers nothing new other than the picture of a dog. If you think more coins is better (whatever that means, for an infinitely divisible currency), you might as well just used Infinitecoin or whatever.
Previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7293741
I'm originally from Northern California and did my time in the Bay Area, and even though it would be better for my startup* to be there, I'm in France and very, very happy here.

Every day spent is one you'll never get back. Every day should count.

*Shameless plug: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/brodlist/x/6476711
How to check your competitors traffic from social media
Monitoring your competitors is one of the most important online marketing strategy. It’s vital to know what they are doing in terms of SEO or social media. Have you ever wondered how much traffic your competitors are getting from social media? Ask no more, because I am going to show you a quick trick that you can use for free.
I'm currently surveying 600 of my early users of my android app.

What's disconcerting so far is their answer to the following question:

The app will be 100% free for you forever (thank you for the support) however what do you think is reasonable pricing? Consider, that some of the revenue will be re-invested in making the app better for all users

It's early days now but it's trending towards $1/$2 when in reality I believe that it's worth allot more to anyone who gets a fair amount of value from it.
Why does every definition of new future super cool messaging system imply "immediate". I quite don't like that. Not everything needs to be a chat and immediate.
Strange, I (non-native speaker) can't anymore, while having had no problem with spritz at 500wpm.

But otoh their text is much easier to comprehend. Still, with the marked letter it just felt easier.

I'm guessing the one marked letter in the same position keep my eyes focused on that point, making the reading less stressful.
Feel free to send your resume jobs@jumpstarter.io
Like all sensible crypto systems it doesn't matter if the server is compromised, encryption is done client-side. The project is open-source, so you can verify this for yourself.
Where's the source code? Is this something like CDF that can be only used from Wolfram's binary blob plugin/exes?

If they don't release the sources for the compiler/interpreter it will be as popular as their Computable Document Format.
This HW is a lot like [the Parallella's](http://www.parallella.org/)
And again:

Ray ID: 1024c433662706ee
I got the same message with IE11 too. I saw the eye without texture in Firefox & Chrome. Probably, the webserver gets hammered - the "HN effect".
It isn't really Forbes, just a guy with a blog that happens to be on their site.
> So you have to hope that the server you're talking to hosts the code that you're looking at.

What could a malicious server do?
The interview was intense (as many others have reported) with PG asking rapid-fire questions about the app, business model, team, etc.

In the end I was rejected because my app "could be built by a decent developer in a weekend," which in hindsight was 100% correct. That should have been obvious to me since it only took me a few weekends to build the MVP (and I'm a mediocre developer at best), but somehow it wasn't.

I ended up substantially changing my business model as a direct result of my 10 minute YC interview. Still waiting to see if that was the right call, but I have a hunch it was...
First week of launching an OSS project
What is sad for me is chrome new way of handling thing, not french accents (which can be a bother, but they're cute, so that's ok).

Most pages nowadays are small enough that it won't be a bother, but their still are some cases (newspaper posts, blog analysis, etc...) where accent sensitiveness will be an issue.
Ask HN: How many bitcoins did you have in your mtgox wallet when it shut down?
Also i would like to ask HN users whose bitcoins are stuck/lost in mtgox wallets, what are you planning to do regarding the situation on mtgox?
How traceable are bitcoins? Would it be possible to track when someone tried to offload the stolen bitcoins on one of the major exchanges by tracing back to this address or some Gox logs?

Given the value of the stolen coins are in the range of 0.5B USD it's not unreasonable to suspect that some government capacity would investigate this.

If the stolen coins can indeed be detected - how would they go about extracting the value? Seems like a large scale, risky money laundry effort would be needed.
I don't see why trusting random strangers with data is a good default, in fact so good that it should be the only option. I don't see why anyone but advertising firms and the like would actually want such a future.
An acquisition isn't necessarily cause for celebration.

Remember, Bear Stearns was "acquired" by JP Morgan.
Egyptian military lies on national TV about finding a cure for cancer.
That's not fair, it really is Forbes publishing it, they just happen to be fine spending their brand on random blogs.
Guide to Swap Hard Drive PCB
Depending on the application you can run plugged in. This would be great for long time lapses and the like.
Looks neat, and using Ceph is exciting. But slightly unimpressed with claims of "zero latency" and suggesting infinite scaling of hosts!

Also, would like to know where the hardware is. Is it your own hosted in Stockholm? Multiple datacentres or just one?
Yes but what we're looking at here is: can we use cognitive bias to increase the number of people who pay for the full version.

So you give someone a demo for free. They know it's a demo and they know it's free. They will be cautious about buying a full version.

But if you give them a game for free, and then they find out whilst using it that it's only a demo, they will experience "loss aversion" and are more likely to upgrade since people experiencing loss aversion are more likely to gamble as they try to reconcile their loss.
Every security bug of this severity in every major language reaches the HN frontpage, especially if there's an easy proof of concept exploit for it.
Even my postman finds Ruby and Rails exploits, given they are such low hanging fruit.
Omg, I nearly missed that:

What did I create a ssh server for? The same thing I created a DNS server for fun and for KalyHost.

I'm not sure "disbelief" is sufficient to describe how I feel right now.
Please add flask!
The architecture page is great http://jumpstarter.io/technical but all these providers are for a 'Shared nothing' setup.

What would hosting like this - heroku style - look like for JVM-backed apps? E.g. written in Closure, Scala or plain old Java, where you want to persist stuff between requests?
Sorry It's in arabic, but he explains the method as follows "We feet the patient Aids like it's Kebab, and that is a scientific miracle"

And he goes on thanking every single person in the military for the rest of the session.

Damn I wish i had time to translate all of that !, it's hilarious !
Nokia Fails Once More
Programming With Types, Not Tutorials
Get the pitchforks and the torches! Looks like we've got ourselves a witch-hunt.
I lost 2.5 btc. If someone with better understanding of the situation on mtgox could answer the other question, it will be very welcome.
How is this related to my comment?
How to re-platform e-commerce in the age of the cross-channel consumer
Wow, good catch !
The real story behind The Hour of Code. Turns out it’s not just a big PR stunt
They went to your "Other" inbox, which nobody ever checks. It's the same place messages from non-friends go.

Actually, now that I look at it, there's a message from somebody who found my wallet once. Fortunately he also discovered me on LinkedIn, or I would never have noticed.
sounds like it might be depression, don't be afraid to visit a doctor
Same in Chrome 34, Ubuntu 13.10, GTX Titan, NVIDIA 331.49.
Directly from the FAQ:

Hehehehehehe! Do you know what Spritz means in German? ROFL! LMAO!

One of our founders is from Munich, so yes, we know. We bet you
won’t forget it though, will you?
We'll add it to our requests list but no ETA as of yet! :)
So, what about it? Does it belong to some BTC exchange? Or is it all stolen, or something?

I'm pretty sure there are lots of company and governmental bank accounts with lots of money moving through them...
Context would be nice.
Same time MtGox Disappeared
Never mind that the NSA will probably just get access to the endpoints anyway.
I lost 1.5BTC I purchased as a 'long term' investment or even to use them when BTC became usable.

Now I guess their gone.
grails is the best framework I have seen so far. sensible defaults inspired from rails is good. you don't have to learn groovy since it is a superset of java. you can learn on the way .... very less entry barrier and learning curve
That link is priceless. What does it remind me of? I have a half-memory of a fake scientific paper full of nonsense words and incomprehensible diagrams that was very amusing. It was a bit like this: http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/9581/waltz19pq.jpg

Anyone know what I'm on about?
MtGox has about 700k+ BTC
This refers back to http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S..., an allegedly leaked MtGox document detailing their crisis management strategy, where a theft of 744,408 BTC is discussed.
While I am still terribly sad that I didn't mine bitcoins with my workstation 3-4 years ago, I am glad I can stand at the sidelines and watch this amazing drama unfold.

Incidentally, I never figured out how to pronounce "Mt.Gox" But now I know: "Empty Gox" sounds about right :-)
The Higgs Boson Re-Explained (Comic)
To save you doing the math, that many bitcoins is about $375 million at today's prices - not that the market is deep enough to be able to sell it for anywhere near that price.
8 great LinkedIn tools for business
I did not say that apps should not use the internet at all! For updates, new content and so on some reliance on the internet is totally fine, I just hate apps which will not work offline altough there is no logical reason to do so. I uninstalled several singleplayer games just for this reason.

The only apps which I regularly use on my phone are:

- sms/messages

- email

- whatsapp

- webbrowser

- alien blue for reddit

- weather app

- look up contacts/phone numbers

- camera app / panorama app

- sudoko style puzzle game

- a simple app to track my spendings

- some other small single player games

So the first half of the list obvioulsy requires internet connection but the rest should be strictly offline except for updates and perhaps new content.

And I am not so much worried about my phone apps but more about programs which I need for work on my deal computer. Right now I am using Word/Office a lot but somehow I am afraid that in a few years there will only be some cloud based online version left.
It never had more than a few thousand BTC (except for a few peaks) at any point in time. [1]

[1] - https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Drt3c8pSdrky...
1) Why the clickbait title?
2) What do you want my Geolocation for?
3) Why can't I middle click or ctrl+click any links in the article?
Not yet, but I heard some guy in Japan was thinking of setting up an online exchange for magic the gathering cards.
I think in another 5-10 years bitcoin will finally be realized as one of the great scams of our time
Yup, switching from that page to HN was not pleasant.
"a large number of people believed the Cypriot currency was in fact not likely to remain "valueless"

The currency in use in Cyprus is the Euro - the problem with Cyprus was their dodgy banks not the currency itself.
If you're using gold as money, then you are certainly trusting many third parties.

Consider; what does using gold as money mean? Are we trading notional gold? Certificates that claim to represent gold in some vault? Obviously you need to trust the issuer of the certificates. Are you using minted gold coins? Obviously you need to trust the mint and more generally the entire financial system that equates those coins with a certain value. (The history of coin clipping, adulteration of coinage, and the results of having multiple currencies circulating at once[1] should show why this is important.) In fact, the only way that you don't actually need to trust a 3rd part is if...

...you're trading a known quantity of gold to someone else strictly for its value as gold. In which case you are actually trading in gold as a commodity; the technical term is barter. It simply does not fit the definition of money.

[1]: Eg, Gresham's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
perhaps : http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfra...
Wasn't it said they lost 700k BTC? Also just comparing balances doesn't seem like a very strong indicator of identity to me.
I recently got a Cumulus drive for my Oric-1/Atmos collection. The Oric-1 is an ancient 8-bit computer from the 80's with 48k RAM (64k if you're tricky..) .. and now with the Cumulus .. it has an 8-gigabyte storage system.

Yes, a 48k machine: with 8gigs of storage. WTF, amiright? :P its hell fun having such a system, crammed with everything .. and still trying to figure out what to do with it. 8-bit Wikipedia dump on the horizon!
This might be a bit heavy for you but will be helpful should you decide to take up freelance "full time" - http://www.microbusinesshub.co.uk/freelance-rates-calculator...
The catastrophe of 2008 (to consumers) was that the market decided to make credit scarce. It makes sense that the government can't force banks to take unjustified risks once they've wised up to the recklessness of their lending.

This is very different from money just disappearing out of checking accounts, which is what happened with MtGox. Even if that did happen, the FDIC would make the depositors whole.
MtGox is the context i believe