skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope, his USB-stick doesn't get corrupted or unreadable ...
Well there are reasons I am adverse to buying ebooks.

DRM - if I am going to buy it I want to actually feel like I own it.

portability - will I be able to read my books in the future?

sharing - when I get a good book I let all my friend borrow it and read it. I borrow friends books a LOT, in fact thats probably the main way I read books is just borrowing my friends' books or borrowing them from the library.

selling - when I am sick of looking at a book on the bookshelf that I probably won't pick up again I either sell it or donate it to the library. So many books have passed through my hands and very very few have stayed there.
I think they might be manipulating the market. Here's my translation:

"Because people discovered that we lost or stole money, and that would destroy our operations, someone who doesn't want to be responsible for making a decision decided that we could try causing a market crash by dramatically wiping our accounts, lowering the price enough that we could buy our way back to solvency. It didn't entirely work, so we're making this announcement, which is also meant to lower the price, or if that doesn't work, allow us to segue back into operations. We will be monitoring the Bitcoin price and will react accordingly."
This is the other thing that's almost guaranteed to appear for some reason. I think Taliesin did a good rebuttal to it a while back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3974503

As for Stephen's ego, I'm surprised it keeps getting mentioned. He seems like a driven person, but then so are many people whose egos aren't discussed. He comes off as quite a decent person in this Reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tmutz/stephen_wolfram_... and in this interview with Scoble: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNf8Se_USlE

All of this has only a tenuous connection to the language itself, which is much more interesting to discuss. Sure, it may be the only self-named language (thought it arguably owes its name as much to the brand Wolfram Research as to Stephen, and I'd hoped they'd come up with a more creative name), but if one manages to shepherd a system like Mathematica through 25 years, one earns the right to self-name a language.
I can't promise you'll "change the world" but you can do some good work here:

http://www.socialcoding4good.org/

I think a good way to start changing the world is to find solutions to the problem of lack of food/water for the poorest of the poor. If we can get that right, then change is possible.
Google's Hangouts blunder helped WhatsApp
> That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...

Yes, but they cared about their user's bits.
The use of Ceph is interesting. For what? VM images? (Disclaimer: I'm a GlusterFS developer.)

Also, I hope people who sign up realize that jumpstarter.io is posting to Twitter under their names. Blech.
Access to user data and native vs. web are orthogonal concerns.

E.g., on iOS you don't have to give an app access to any data, but can still have the app installed -- access is a post-install, standardized dialog when the app requests permission.

Similarly you could easily invent web apis that would give access to data (like location, which already exists).
> For the millionth time, the problem is not in the language but on the programmer

In all honesty it does seem like a bad language choice. A choice more likely to be made by a bad programmer than a good one. At least in my experience it's the sub-par programmers who choose to do stuff in PHP and tout it as being a fantastic language. YMMV.
Sorry, this is uneducated bullshit. There was a infinite loop and that was a error in programming logic. Limiting loops a certain number of iterations is absolute bogus. Ever though how stupid it sounds to demand c to forbid while(1)?
But it is! God forbid the original function disappear or change completely and the function below it loses all context and description.
Yeah! But beside that? The whole bitcoin mining sounds to good to be true.
I don't know, investors don't seem too put off by this Crazy Bob's name.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/square-cto/
Google-backed crowdsourced website aims to track forest destruction
Silent would be worse. At least we know that the site is deliberately disabled by its owners, as opposed to a host of other hypotheticals we'd be discussing otherwise.
For Egypt's Startups, Unstable Government Is the Least of Their Worries
Well, who decides what the "greater good" is and how to achieve it? If the BitCoin exchanges get together and decide on a set of standard procedures and policies that are in any way enforced or monitored, then voila: "Governments are instituted among [BitCoin Exchanges], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", aka "tryannical political institutions" and regulation.
It can also be called the reddit hug of death.
Panic doesn't lend itself to careful writing.
One way to look at ordering features in early products is as risk reduction.

One of the biggest risks is, "nobody gives a fuck", which is why MVPs are so valuable. It lets you test market hypotheses.

But if you're building something handling real money, then a pretty obvious risk is, "The system will lose money beyond our capacity to absorb losses." Their failure to address that risk here is at best negligence.

But given the size of the loss, I don't think we should rule out fraud. The interesting question is, "When did they know they had a problem?" Sometimes shitty accounting systems are just naiveté. But when they persist over a long period of time in a way that just happens to cover up loss, embezzlement, or theft, then it's worth asking: did they keep the shitty accounting because better accounting would have forced them to admit something they were hoping to cover up?
Well, a gentleman flew all the way from the UK to Japan to have a polite chat with him, so it's not outside of reality for someone to do bad things to him fairly easily.

Beyond that, CEO's of large companies are generally under guard when the crap hits the fan, and Madoff was protected by police.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "CEO" of Mt. Gox soon finds out what a tire iron tastes like.
I believe that trials are allowed on the Google Play Store. I wish that these were more widely used with Android games.
Cancer patient's 70 lethal tumours disappeared in just two weeks
A bedroom may be required to have a window (and a closet), but an office, dining room, or "bonus" room doesn't. Thus you have apartments or houses, where people sleep in offices, dining rooms, etc. Legislating this just causes people to work around it.
So it seems, in essence, that the fundamental issue is that MtGox became "Too big to fail," and this is what the repercussions on a currency market of the failure of a large and trusted institution look like.

It's an interesting object lesson for armchair economists, and I'm sure some hay will be made drawing comparisons to the US housing market crash and the value of the dollar.
A better argument would be the evidence the hash rate is going through the roof. The inertia of those miners won't be stopped by bad sentiment caused by even worse software venerabilities. You either believe in the idea of what crypto currency technologies bring us, or you don't. Invest accordingly and leave your fears at the door.
You look into things known to cause symptoms like these - enteroviruses in this case - and test for known versions in the patients. You send samples to labs to look for new, unknown viruses. You take pretty exhaustive biological and social histories from the patients, and look for commonalities - shared exposures, other underlying conditions, etc.
Did you make ANY money from your side projects this year? How to do your taxes
the Fed is not a third party w.r.t USD. its the first party. the Fed is the entity in direct control of the monetary supply. the Fed is also the entity politically mandated to protect the money supply against inflation and deflation.
Exactly, thank you for posting that. The "modest proposal" assumes the problem is only "seeing ads", but has nothing to offer someone who objects to being tracked across the web.

And I just want to point out, this refutes, not just the ad proposal, but the whole micropayment scheme: you can't have micropayments allocated according to the user's behavior without snarfing the user's whole browsing trail.

Well here's another "modest proposal" for web advertising, which solves both problems: Site owners accept only static ads and hosts them on the site domain; users are not tracked and not annoyed by animations, noise or Flash. Then the ethical argument finally works. Ad networks would resist, but if the blocking is enough of a problem they'll have to settle for it.
I agree. 'power_of_three' isn't really that much of a hardship to type and it obviates the need for a comment.
Words chosen very carefully in an attempt to keep everyone calm..
"Nice things" like searching for "cafe" on page A, finding "café" and thus concluding that search works like that, then searching for "cafe" on page B, not finding anything, and then discovering that page B actually did say "café"?
While it looks impressive, i don't think 'raytraced' is the correct term - i suspect it is just rendered
Dear MtGox Customers,

In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards,
MtGox Team
"React Accordingly" can still mean freak the 'f' out.
That's a really neat post, thanks for sharing.

I'd agree that this doesn't change the fundamentals of BTC, actually. If enough speculators didn't know that this could happen, maybe this changes perception enough to doom BTC, but it would have been doomed anyways in that case.

I'm not convinced that it's possible for BTC to become a widely used medium of exchange without also being a medium of account -- it's just too much friction for your average retail user to convert to BTC in order to buy something while holding most of their wealth in dollars or whatever. Why not just buy in dollars? If the only utility is to mask shady purchases, it might have a future in that niche, I guess, but that implies a small BTC economy in the long run.

I guess I can see a place for a crypto currency with a stable exchange rate to other currencies, as long as the crypto part holds up and the volatility mellows out, there's real utility there for people who want untraceable purchases. But BTC as "god's currency for true believers, going to take over the world because we have an unrelated ideological beef" doesn't really impress me.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a tax professional and am not giving out legal advice. What follows is my personal experience, and I am not suggesting you follow exactly. Let it only serve as an example, as you should always consult a professional yourself.
The CrypTool Script Cryptography, Mathematics, and More [pdf/281 pages]
Happiness mostly results from creating and maintaining a sense of flow. Never being satisfied is a good way to keep stuff flowing rather than becoming stagnant.
YES YES YES.

That is all. Thank you.
Which statement do you think is fraudulent?

They could actually have lost the bitcoins. They could be still having technical problems.

Fennecfoxen's theory could be illegal market manipulation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the BTC market is weird enough that it doesn't fit under the laws against that. Or at least that it'd be such a mess to prosecute that prosecutors would all find something better for their careers to do.
The metal boot on your face may be powered by open source, but it's still a metal boot. It's not really a technological problem, it's a social and political issue.
Keep in mind older transactions are pruned from the tree on most nodes. While you may see where a Bitcoin originated, not all intermediate addresses will be shown forever in some version of the Blockchain. That's not to say that someone somewhere doesn't have the full blockchain, so you should keep in mind that it depends on what blockchain you are viewing at the time of investigation.
Meanwhile, I send emails to my friends regularly. We live in different timezones/countries/..., and coordinating times for chat is difficult, so we end up exchanging emails every few weeks. Often, these emails contain multiple kilobytes of text, with snipped context to remind me of what the last topic was, fairly long descriptions of events, etc.

Even for the people I share a house with, we found that email with a mailing list is the most effective way to post notifications to everyone, send reminders, etc.

I haven't come across a serious rival to email for those use cases.
I think its worth posting. It's the first piece of code I've seen on hacker news in a while. It also makes a great point about good variable names making code clear.
Meta: It's weird that the 'i' in "Voice" in the title is not actually an 'i', but instead U+0131 (LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0131/index.htm). It doesn't appear in the actual article's title, so I guess it's just a typo.
THE HUMAN PUNCHING BAG
Cute, but they also traded and held USD.
There is a direct PDF link here:

http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
The original bug report said "very highly unlikely it's technically remotely exploitable", but it seems that may not be the case.

"Working with the exploit, its trivial to get a working remote exploit to work, below is a simple rewritten RCE from the exploit PoC": https://www.trustedsec.com/february-2014/python-remote-code-...
Tried it, like it. Worried about how easy it is to create a site without any 'are you human' checks though. Isn't this going to create tonnes of bot sites?
I don't think they are suggesting it's the thief's wallet - it's presumably the Gox hot storage wallet.
Xbox360 game hacks
I'm a 33 yr Old call of duty player, I'm into IT as well and I'm looking for a good "USB aimbot"/ multi hack if anyone knows of one, I would be very appreciative
I don't think that severs the connection to you; you are now connected to the service, and so is your friend, and therefore potentially to each other.
When the price of electricity is higher than the mining payout, the hash rate will again plummet. Even though hashing with ASICs is much more efficient than CPUs or GPUs, it still takes electricity. And if the transaction rate remains low, the payouts are going to be smaller and smaller.

Mining capacity should act like a utility company that spins up and down power stations in response to demand for electricity. Mining slows until transactions payments go up enough to make it worthwhile. (And that doesn't even cover the fact that mining is still a lottery for the pools).
You might notice that many Americans now live safely in what was formerly the wild west.
Privet,

It's a beautiful world - you could launch online business anywhere and offer useful services and products worldwide.

You could hire people to do bits and pieces for you from anywhere as well.

H1B-ing are for people who want to work for someone and sit on someone's chair 9 to 5.

You could launch product or service in your pajamas and test you idea without bothing with all that.
If business will take off - the visa stuff will be taken care of, if needed.
honestly none of us really knows what happened behind the scenes. there's no indication it was a ponzi scheme. there's no indication it wasn't. what do you think really happened?

all I know is that an awful lot of people lost money.
Living the libertarian idyll.
>> Did he say there was an "insult to the dollar currency" when Lehman Brothers went under?

He didn't say as much, but it wouldn't have been that inappropriate if he had. The fall of Lehman Brothers actually was a symptom of a failing currency, just because the USD and most other currencies around the world are failing much slower than BTC, doesn't mean they're doing alright either. There's a world-wide currency war going on where everybody is trying to devaluate their currency to try to inflate away debt, so yeah, you could say the fall of Lehman Brothers was (part of) an "insult to the dollar currency". That doesn't make BTC any better as a currency though, somehow people who like BTC always seem to mix these two things up.
My point was that web applications would typically have access to more data per default, in a world with no native apps with all your applications in "the cloud" more of your data would likely also be in the hands of others. I don't think they are orthogonal concerns at all.

Regarding the Coding horror link here though, I do agree with the point about native applications that essentially are repackaged web pages.
So, does the retail establishment keep the consumer there for 15 minutes while the transaction is verified to avoid that whole double-spend issue?

Consumers know to treat gift cards like cash (they lose em, they lose everything) and that they have no protections. Credit cards and debit cards are a very different thing. And they're backed by these things called banks which are regulated and insured, as opposed to bitcoins which some people keep in unregulated exchanges that can lose nearly 7% of the entire bitcoin currency without anyone noticing.
Same with the configuration management room. I was able to catch the first talk but there were so many people waiting outside throughout the entire day it was difficult to get back in later.
I'm getting old on HN; some stories are repeating and repeating, and there was an XKCD about it, it's repeating too and I'm repeating myself too, ohh I'm getting old on HN...
I'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there.

So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate, it even really sucks, but shit happens. Sometimes that shit is an apocalyptic event.

What makes me angry though is their utter failure to communicate, to admit what happened. I feel like they're taunting their ex customers, or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all. That's what's really off-putting, and that's what breeds speculation about them being the ones who perpetrated the theft in the first place (which I personally don't believe). Instead what we see here is an absolute non-message from them.

It's like this Seinfeld episode with the shirt at the dry cleaners. We know they shrunk it, they know they shrunk it, so they should just come right out and admit "we shrunk it"!
Is this what I think it is? A resurrection of those free hosted formmail scripts we used when I started writing web pages in the late 20th century?

Edit: http://www.formmail.com/ still seems to be going, in fact.
This seems to me like a straightforward extension of Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. Should hardly be surprising.
So, she got mugged and the robbers dropped the glass because its worthless?
It's actually not. People click a tweet button, then review and post their tweet. :)
They also mentioned buying back at low prices in one of those leaked documents.

What I don't understand is why people would continue selling at any reasonable volumes at firesale prices when other exchanges are doing "fine" (Bitstamp down ~25% vs 2 months ago). Unless I misunderstand it, the malleability bug won't prevent sending btc to other wallets. Is mtgox going to block their users from sending btc and only allow them to sell internally? That would be pretty much equivalent to seizing all their users' coins. Is it just the combination of lots people who own small enough amounts of btc not to care going "fuck it, I just want out"? People not trusting other exchanges after this, or betting that other exchanges will crash too before they can get accounts verified at them and sell their coins?
When has the passive voice ever actually worked to calm a lynch mob?
Three Steps to Effective Code Reviews
That is not a fundamental issue of the apps. It's a flaw of app management. The core of my analogy remains unchallenged. Besides, there is an app for that: http://lifehacker.com/5645850/apps-uninstall-bulk-removes-an...
Big Data + Intelligence = Smart Data
Just curious, how do you feel if a font, let's say it is a decent font, is designed to make the apostrophe look like a prime symbol?
This is actually possible on Windows Phone, and used extensively. It's the pretty version of having a lite/express/free and pro/full/complete app.
The reason I trust normal contracts to work is that I pay for guys with guns to enforce them. I call them "police", and my payments "tax". But if you are doing deals that are illegal, you have to provide your own enforcement.

The rational interest of a criminal here wouldn't be revenge. It would be reputation maintenance. The reason mafia loan sharks are known for breaking kneecaps isn't that they're personally upset, or that they can't afford the loss. It's that they can't afford anybody else thinking that their loans are something they can walk away from.
This is absurd and unconscionable. There is no excuse whatsoever for not having a 10.9 patch ready to go at the same time as iOS. There is especially no excuse for still not having a 10.9 patch five days later.

I would love to see a detailed postmortem about exactly how this bug happened in the first place and why it's taking so long to fix it on the Mac side. Unfortunately, given how secretive the company is, I'm sure we'll never have more than speculation.
NSA will have the ISP keys, that's a given.
You should not leave your coins on any exchange. Store them locally - offline preferably.
"Ray traced" probably refers specifically to the shader in the lens running a tiny ray tracer to optically distort the view of the iris.
It's only remotely exploitable in Python applications that use socket.recvfrom_into in a particular, unsafe way. I'm not sure how many are out there in practice.
Notable Cryptocurrencies
This was a worry to us. It'd be a big detriment to us if that happened. We're trying to keep the user the priority, rather than nasty captchas. So we've got our own implementations. The moment we see bots, we'll switch our strategy. :)
In general resolvers look up one type and cache the result for that one type. CNAMEs are special; firstly clients never lookup CNAMEs, it's never the qtype. A CNAME is a special kind of answer that says "This name should be considered equivalent to this other name, go find out what that other name has" and as-such the CNAME is cacheable for queries of all types.

It is a race condition, but this race condition only exists if you ignore the DNS RFCs and try to get behavior that DNS just plain doesn't support. I don't mean to point fingers, but in this case that's what happened; CloudFlare's behavior ignores the RFCs [1] and leads to nondeterministic results.

[1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domai...
Stephen Wolfram Unleashes A New Programming Language
You are right. Most apps are utterly useless and not worth a single penny.

Many people have no problem with paying for software.

For instance, Liine can charge $49.99 for their Lemur iPad app because the touch screen really brings something to the table. However, a dedicated control surface will beat a generic touch screen all the time. Even with a Lemur, most people would prefer real hardware with dedicated encoders, knobs, buttons and faders.

In the same vein, there are actually not that many instances where an iPad or smartphone version of an application is superior to its desktop version. In fact, in most cases, the touch screen experience is frustrating, fiddly and utterly annoying.
> I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

I don't know, but I don't think so. For the law you may be trading in monopoly money at your risk.