skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's interesting. A technology like this was predicted, on theoretical grounds from reading research, in the book Reading in the Brain[1] by Stanislas Dehaene (which I highly recommend as a very good read).

For years 500 words per minute (approximately one printed page per minute) has been my baseline speed for most of the material I read in English. I read slower in my second languages, of course. Back in my college days, when I wanted to make sure I wasn't being slowed down in my studies by a too-slow reading speed, I read a lot of books from the university library about reading skill improvement, and several jointly suggested that improving vocabulary improves reading speed. I took a course about English vocabulary based on Latin and Greek word roots, and that did seem to help for years afterward in both reading speed and reading comprehension.

[1] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

AFTER EDIT, TO REPLY TO QUESTION:

In this context, "second languages" is a quite normal designation for language(s) acquired after one's native language(s) were acquired. My user profile lists most of mine. I read best in Chinese and in German, besides English.
I am not aware of any indication that this was a ponzi scheme. Saying that it was, without evidence, is misinformation.

The loss of coins was unintentional on the behalf of MtGox. It may have been stupid that basic abc123 auditing would have probably revealed that there was a problem months/years ago, but evil has not been shown at this point in time.
Iron Man 4 – Top 5 Impressive Armors That Deserve More Screen Time
I can however see lots of application in various pattern analysis techniques based on machine learning. There's lots of places in those that a bit of fuzz won't really matter, at least for first pass filtering.

Similarly voice recognition would probably have to deal with far larger errors from the transmission and capture of sound anyway.

Just because it's not good for decryption, doesn't mean it isn't good for the overall set of NSA operations.
More important is how much they will actually pay out.

After extensive calculations the number I am currently coming up with is 0.
If Wikipedia can be believed [0], JJ Allaire [1] and Jeremy Allaire are brothers [2].

[0] I mean no slight against Wikipedia, I only mention this since the statement "He now runs a bitcoin start up in Boston" is supported by no citation (as of 2014-02-24).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Allaire
As someone who was actually at some of these protests, I don't think putting my freedom on the line for said squatters is a sign of "privileged" thinking. Both have good reason to squat in the park, though your simplistic legalistic reasoning would deny that. It just turns out that protesters en masse have more power to resist outright police action, and so they can remain longer in contravention of the laws set down by the elite. Call it the privilege of the mob if you will. At the end of the day though, both groups were forcibly evicted with great violence.

Also, I don't think you comprehend how privilege even factors into this discussion. You can't just use the word "privilege" as some sort of trump card that defeats any argument.
How many second languages can you have?
Thanks for the whitepaper and video. So, at high level the resource provider is accepting Bitcoin instead of dollars to provide a virtual instance to a customer. Does this sums up what you are trying to do?

I have hard time imagining who might be the customer that will be willing to run their virtual instance on low trust ephemeral pool and for what purpose. What are some use cases for your solution? Is there such a low trust ephemeral pool already in existence that accepts dollars? Why would someone use this solution over just launching a VPS or EC2 instance?
Poll: How many bitcoins have you lost with MtGox shutdown?
If you only had credit and no bitcoins, estimate the number of bitcoins you'd have been able to buy at the last known price (1 BTC = $135)
0 BTC (lucky you!)
0.00000001 - 1.0 BTC
1.00000001 - 2.5 BTC
2.50000001 - 5.0 BTC
5.00000001 - 10.0 BTC
10.00000001 - 25.0 BTC
25.00000001 - 50.0 BTC
50.00000001 - 100.0 BTC
100.00000001 - 250.0 BTC
250.00000001 - 500.0 BTC
500.00000001 - 1000.0 BTC
More than 1000 BTC (ouch!)
the api still returns information:

http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/ticker_fast?pretty
well, small catastophes aggregate themselves in centralized economies. I'll strongly suggest you read this (which I linked to above):

[0]http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Be...

Financial losses and windfalls / catastrophes happen far more frequently than you'd expect.

Also, my list is subject to dnautic's memory bias. Those are the names that I remember. There are certainly more. There is no currency in the history of the world that has lasted forever.
The website says "the highest values are not being considered". So aim for second highest I guess.
Wherefore art thou tptacek? I can't wait to hear how this is totally not surprising at all and how this is absolutely what spies have been doing since forever and therefore no action need be taken. I'm also missing my daily dose of his irrelevant ad hominem FUD against Greenwald, Barret Brown, Snowden et al.
Lavabit was just as susceptible to a state warrant though. That's why Levison had to shut it down (despite having no objection with complying with other warrants previously).
MtGox failed because they relied upon the correctness of their own implementation of the bitcoin protocol.

This was a huge mistake, one which I am sure will haunt all involved for a long time.

Coinbase is making the exact same mistake.

They rely on their own implementation of the bitcoin protocol.

Their client has been hard forked repeatedly.

Some of these incidents were random, but many were forced; not by attackers but by whitehats trying despirately to show them their error.

The danger of using their own implementation cannot be overstated.

For the love of god move to the reference client.
> Ubuntu is the dumbest place to illustrate a typical Systemtap experience

I'm not sure what to make of this. Aren't Systemtap, dtrace etc. supposed to be generic _Linux_ kernel and userspace tools that are not distribution-specific? If so, then Brendan's opinion is fair.

If not, then sure, some clarification is needed (i.e., substitute Ubuntu for Linux). And I'll add it to my ever-growing list of why production sites shouldn't be running Ubuntu. :)
I remember minimizing the terminal window to make a script run faster. Taking the text rendering out of the execution path actually had a substantial speedup for long running scripts in some cases. It was one of those things you sort of picked up from other people along the way and assumed everyone knew.

Nowadays I don't know if the difference is noticeable enough to be common knowledge though.
That would probably make it easier to solve with automation (though it might already be easy enough, I don't know.)
> So the question is: how can we protect ourselves from any of these efforts (may or may not be coming from a government)?

What's been working for me so far is just being pretty boring. Although I guess I could be even more boring (e.g. less arguing online ;).
Well, what will happen is that there's now going to be great pressure for all exchanges to prove they are not in a fractional reserve state (one of the advantages of bitcoin is that it makes such a proof possible.)

It'll be interesting to see how many of them can provide such a proof... I'm guessing most of them can (but only time will tell)

If they successfully provide this proof, there's no reason to expect a bank run.
That's why people write implementations of it instead of playing it.
I find myself having to run with ulimit -v #### in a term on linux if I think I might start eating memory because I'm sick of having to craw under my desk to power cycle.
I remember people getting angry whenever anyone pointed out that they were trusting a whole lot of their money to the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.
Yes, but in return you are learning a valuable lesson, which is that "loose" spells the word that means the opposite of tight and the word you were looking for is "lose", which is the opposite of win or gain.
Wow, reading the comments about ways to solve this above and I'm speechless... let's follow demands for regulation/self-regulation/FDIC-style insurance to its logical conclusion - it seems to me that everything will eventually come full circle and every financial institution and mechanism that people do not like today which moves them towards Bitcoin will ultimately be recreated by this new wave.

Bitcoin is not a revolution, it is not a movement, it's an iteration, and a significant one.

The same thing for the internet, today vs 1996, all the same huge media companies as before dominate the web with some new ones mixed in that jumped in early.
The last bullet in slide 83 isn't exactly a selling point.
I think the bitcoin community at large is interested in standardization for the greater good not regulation enforced through tyrannical political institutions.
No. Jails exist for this reason.
A couple of years ago a server management application called HyperVM had a 0day due to some questionable programming, hundreds of thousands of websites were lost along with a lot of money... the next day the creator took his own life. A lot of people are going to be in a very bad position right now (both customers and people inside mtgox), let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Earplugs with an old cell phone shoved into your pillowcase to act as a vibrating alarm? Supplemented by some ambient noise (like a rain machine) as needed.

Worked wonders for me.
Yes, they seem to be gone, but the leaked document [0] shows that major stakeholders plan to inject coins back in to cover losses, and to run the new Gox.com so that it's profits go to stakeholders with losses.

The "Strategy Timeline" page says "50% covered", which sounds to me like the other big exchanges think that between bailout and arbitrage they can cover that amount initially, and hopefully earn the rest back over time. I could definitely be misreading the document. Take a look yourself. And of course, the best laid plans often go awry....

Sorry, by the way. That sucks big time.

[0] http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...
That's what they say. How can you still trust what they said?there is 0 proof there was a bug.
WhatsApp Comes Under New Scrutiny For Privacy Policy, Encryption Gaffs
the coins were not lost, but stolen through the transaction malleability bug
I tried an open source version of something similar when I was still in high-school by reading Dracula. The key benefit was't the speed that I could read using the tool, it was that I found I could read much much faster when I later picked up a book.

I recently showed spreeder to my girlfriend who found the same thing.
I'm not sure, I get your point: Rust has return..
An exchange that manipulates it's market to hide away losses and try to shore up it's balances starts to look a lot like a ponzi scheme after awhile.
Yes, if I have any schadenfreude here it's not for him. It's for all of the people who smugly told us for years that Bitcoin is superior to our "legacy" fiat managed and regulated monetary system system in every way, and anyone who can't see that is an idiot.
Computers do. Networks too, but the NSA and military have had networks far longer than the rest of us.

The only thing that has really "scaled" here is the people themselves, and I don't find it strange that all the normal real-life problems have followed people as they migrated online.
You mean custodian banks. You can manage my money all you want, but in my own accounts at an institution backed by SIPC (http://www.sipc.org/)
Yes indeed they are brothers. Homesite/Dreamweaver/CFML forever baby, that's how I got my start coding. ColdFusion so, so, so far ahead of it's time.
we use d3 for all our charts.
I see he was not alone!

But it was more likely in the past 10 days or so... :)
My meager little BTC monies are all at btc-e. Never had an issue with them so far.
If the rumors are true and Gox is tanking, I don't think Karpeles can ever adequately feel the aggregate pain that his incompetence in his role has caused MtGox customers. He deserves much worse than nasty internet comments.

There are plenty of entrepreneurs on HN alone who given the resources Gox had could manage to not (unknowingly) lose half a billion dollars due to broken programming in the timespan that Gox did.

And I say this as someone with no dog in the fight.
“Pony” botnet pilfers digital coins worth $220,000 in sustained attack
Just imagine a steel cube 3.6 meters wide. That's about 23,000 tons.
Plumbing my memory, I can add another: Brazil

The cruzeiro was replaced by the "cruzeiro real" literally "real cruzeiro", as a hack to recover from poor fiscal policy resulting in hyperinflation. The cruzeiro real was then replaced by the 'real'.

Imagine things getting so bad that the government decides to rebrand its old currency as 'fake'.
Heh yeah I used to write this type of post late at night for techcrunch. Now they put "Developing..." at the bottom and I hate it.
http://www.lyricsbaby.com/lonely-press-play-song-lyrics-damo...
It is created by Sphere Research Labs, which is Poland based. They're mainly known for spoj.com, website for competitive programming.
There are some pretty advanced topics there. Interesting.
MasterCard dives into in-app payments with its MasterPass platform
I would say brinkmanship and groupthink are a much more likely explanation than theories about defense spending or oil production or currencies, which fall flat on analysis. Not to say that people didn't make hay with government contracts, but there are easier ways to swindle public cash than to get high-placed politicians to start wars.

It also leaves out a very significant factor : vote winning. Patriotism wins elections, because it, in of itself, is just another form of groupthink.
Go talks at FOSDEM 2014
If you're getting an error "The crypto field is required", I got that when trying to enter a dollar value but no BTC value. Enter 0 for BTC.
Then to shame with all of the other actors in the industry. It is not unreasonable to expect your financial counterparties to subject themselves to audit. There are a lot of heavy bats in the Bitcoin community. If MtGox wouldn't consent to the same level of auditing any normal publicly traded US company is subject to (to say nothing of financial institution) then say so publicly and refuse to do business.

The amount of lost BTC is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I personally cannot believe it possible that this is not an insider job. I admit, I've traded on MtGox (speculation in 2011) but things were different back then and I never had my own wallet. My assumption is that it would be trivial to run DAILY reporting that verifies the amount of BTC you think you have on deposit with what you actually do. This is banking 101 and the ONLY way to ensure there is not a bug in your transaction handling.

You are right brudgers that you cannot necessarily expect somebody to police themselves. But Coinbase. Winklevosses. Etc. I'm looking at you. These guys are CLEARLY crooks and have been all along and you let yourselves get snowed.
There's Bitcoin laundering. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service
probably for the better. Everyone wins!
I gambled and used another even less reputable exchange that has not as of yet stolen my money! Woot! Ask me next week.
Yeah...the only money I've personally put into any cryptocurrency has always been with the understanding that it may either be worth nothing tomorrow or could be lost in an instant. (But I also don't store my coins in an exchange, so that helps.)
According to this[0] the HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide.

[0] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/security/25559-hyperv...
Considering the term goxxed is a staple of bitcoin vernacular I wonder why they decided to use it as their rebranding.
Oh please. Saying that bitcoins are worth $400MM is like saying that a collection of "limited edition" Beanie Babies is worth $400MM.
Because to my understanding, 2-tiered search means that the routing search engine scrapes data from the second level search engines and return it to the users. The second level search engines, e.g., Stack Overflow, are usually running by separate entities from the routing search engine, say DDG. If DDG does not own all the second level search engines, how can they get the local indexes and ranking algorithms from them? And even if DDG does get it, it's no longer decentralized any more. So what's the difference from Google?
metabunk.org . nuff said
I'm sure it will happen again. And again. And again. And again.

The ponzi never dies because no one who participates every believes that _they_ are the one who's going to get screwed.
Yeah, they should have a time limit for the submitted code. Ironically, they are famous for www.spoj.com, a competitive programming website, where one of the measures of incorrect program is "time limit exceeded"
MtGox LTC ticker still online
Ah, now I get it. It's magic: now you see it, now you don't
Bitcoin prices falling
I have serious doubts that the people reporting 1k+ are honest...
Maybe they didn't screw up. Maybe they just cashed out.
They took a lot of money and mismanaged it. They absolutely deserve the ridicule. They had a lot of time to get their act together.
But that's another example of a currency collapsing as a result of external (political) pressures. This was something that Bitcoin did all by itself.
I'm impressed. I often get my Mac to read things to me as I find it difficult to follow text.

This was great.
D3 Demo: Berkeley Restaurant Health Inspection Visualization
This is totally different from an accredited investment.

People using Mt.Gox were not investing in Mt.Gox, they were investing in USD and BTC, and allowing Mt.Gox to hold it for them.
First time I visited mtgox.com was a few hours ago. Still have it open in my browser.

For the nostalgic:
http://imgur.com/a/qok0O
0. It wasn't luck. Who keeps their money in an exchange?
I did, and I've used it to solve issues on Ubuntu, reproduced in the lab. It's not very featured yet, and it can panic and freeze the kernel. That's why I said "Not safe for production use yet".
That's too outcome oriented. Probably a less useful train of thought than focusing on the motivations, victories, and failures along the way to the outcome.
right now in the red across all exchanges, aprox 25% drop (4:32am UTC)
In mid October before the huge rise in value, I started a USD withdrawal of $2700 to my american bank account and despite repeated emails claiming that the bank transfer process was simply delayed, it has never come through.

Luckily I only lost $500 in this grand btc experiment since most of that value was gained through trading
Except for the CORS issue have you seen an exploit related to WebGL? As detailed in my post it's unlikely there are any. In fact it's far more likely there are bugs in JavaScript implementations or JPEG decoders or video decoders or font renderers than WebGL.

As for the CORS issue, MS shipped CSS first and CSS had the same issue. Namely that you could change the :visited property to something heavy and then through timing divine a user's web history. Once that was discovered it was fixed. I suspect it was similar to WebGL where someone was like

"hey, you know, it might be possible to use timing to figure out some stuff"

"yea, but that seems pretty unlikely"

a few months later someone shows a working timing attack.

"oh shit, let's fix that"

As for DOSing, as detailed in my post, we (or I) didn't see that as the same level of important because there's no incentive to do it. Sure we worked on fixing it (and that's why WebGL is now enabled by default on several Android devices who's drivers can deal with the issue). But even on devices that can't deal with the issue there's no incentive to DOS someone's machine because they aren't going to visit your website a 2nd or 3rd time if you do that and you weren't able to do accomplish anything else except to get them stop visiting your website. Awesome. I'm going to go make a site right now that people actively avoid visiting. Yea!

You also realize that Mozilla started the WebGL spec, not Google and that Mozilla also released WebGL long before v1. Opera was also involved and MS was welcome to join but never bothered. WebGL is not proprietary. Never has been. So claiming Google is copying Microsoft by pushing proprietary standards is pretty disingenuous.

Want some MS evil evidence? Just Bing it

http://www.bing.com/search?q=microsoft+fud+2013
On some level, if you lose many life savings worth of wealth through what I can only assume was gross negligence and incompetence, you should expect the hatred. It's not like you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars -- or even tens, for the pedants who want us to take the integral of the value through the buy side of the order book -- through an honest mistake. He deserves the infamy he's getting.
> It sounds like self-regulation.

Because that has worked wonders for the other industries -- let's have pharma companies, oil, food producers, just self regulate.
There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing. This must have been building for a long time.

Was there never any attempt to compare BTC in wallets to customer balances?

Or did MtGox know about this problem, and hope to cover it up over time?

Either case is at least gross negligence if not criminal fraud.

Yes, we all fuck up at some point. But I don't pretend to be a surgeon and perforate a patient's aorta. Pretending to be competent to gain people's trust is fraud.

I sympathize with those who lost money in this clusterfuck.

No sympathy for Karpeles.
OP here.

<Shameless Promo>
http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Engineers/

This is a meetup group I created. We had our first meeting last friday.
Would love to have another one this Friday - will hold it at a casual restaurant/bar on campus at Stanford.

(Disclosure - although I'm a cofounder of the Stanford Bitcoin Group this group is by me and NOT the SBG).

</Shameless Promo>
"we used to have more faith in brains". The context here was Jason Calacanis was asking PG what signals if any, had changed over the course of time, when selecting teams.

Perhaps this goes nicely with this New Yorker article[1] summarizing the gap between high-IQ and what I would call instrumental rationality (as opposed to epistemic rationality). Also, it's quite possibly old hat to those who've read 'Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow' and related literature.

Speaking personally, while I'm possibly different to many here on HN, I enjoyed a sort of ruthless pragmatism in my teens and 20's and almost dogmatic focus. These days, I'm falling more into the theory trap, and tend to enjoy the conceptual and theoretical, far more than accumulating operational domain expertise. I do wonder if that's a permanent inclination, or if it turns out to be more cyclic in nature.

[1] "Why smart people are stupid",
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06...
World first computer security program
This is whitewashing because this isn't the same thing as a company failing. They (likely) stole millions of dollars (equivalent) from a huge base of customers. That's not the same thing as losing money for your investors, which is effectively what happens when a business actually fails.
Could this be the largest documented heist of BTC in history?
I imagine something like the Silk Road closure - immediate short term panic drops, with a rebound because really the remaining money Gox had was already for the most part lost, and has been lost for a month or longer. I'd argue the markets already endured that loss over this last retrace to $500 with all the nonsense coming from Gox in the first place.