skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a summer job once in high school working in the office of a small business that published test preparation books and related products. They had devoted one of their rooms to a speed reading course; one day the teacher told me that as an employee I could take the course at no charge. I said that I could already read as fast as I could think, and he rolled his eyes and said, "You people who think." I believe that this skill might be useful to some people, but I prefer to avoid reading things that could profitably be speed read, because life is too short for that. For example, I haven't read the OA.
Seems to make a lawsuit even more likely. Evidence of something to hide?
I did some (very rough) math on how much it would cost to do this nationwide--in a nutshell, for the materials only, it would cost the 25%-50% of Americans who likely care enough to pay between $220-$441 as a one-time expense plus $2-$4 annual upkeep: http://schultkl.blogspot.com/2014/02/homeless-no-more-how-mu... . A thought experiment I did for my own benefit, mostly...like the article points out, there are architectural and design costs, labor costs, zoning and community buy-in issues, and so forth, and so forth.
> Happy to buy back in again, but probably wont consider it until the dust has settled, and there's a lot more dust to be kicked up in my opinion.

I rode this ride all the way down from $800 where I was investing and never sold.

Still won't, because I can't imagine the economy being that stupid. All the money that was in Gox that was going to get out already did. The rest is already deflated from the death of confidence in Gox. All the rest of the money is going into a black hole of whatever the US fed got and whatever MtGox dies with.

Unless people start panic selling their coins on the other exchanges (which I don't even get why you would - Gox is dead, the greatest blemish of incompetence in the trading scene is no more, that is a good thing), I don't see how this would impact the general btc price any more. If anything, I'd hope it would rally, but that malleable transactions nonsense probably is going to keep people scared for a while.
Which is why espionage is the world's "second oldest profession"?
Failure is OK. Your trading platform doesn't work out and you have to return the money to customers. Failure where all your customers' money disappears (to where?) is not OK and should not be allowed.
no but there's a pretty bad track record of currency collapse. Diocletian. Confederate States of America. Weimar. Yugoslavia. Argentina. Zimbabwe. Venezuela.

Edit: Looking at my list, I should have listed one for every alphabet Letter, instead of going chronologically.
Well all my programming tools feel obsolete.
Perhaps in theory the agreement is still meant to be honoured, but in practice if the agreement was with an organization that no longer exists (0 employees), who would initiate legal action to enforce the NDA? I have no experience in this area, but can't see how the NDA could be enforced by a dead organization.
Sometimes, but at others:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo. [1]

Similarly, buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo. [2]

________________________________

Notes:

1. C n v C n C n v

2. n v C n v v C n n v
The best thing for the sake of bitcoin is for Gox to be gone. Maybe we could finally have a year where the incompetence of their engineering and management staff doesn't skew the price all about like a merry-go-round.
Facebook email is dead
It's an interesting idea. Unfortunately, it suffers from one flaw: http://imgur.com/Hc5agow
Here's someone who claims to be an employee commenting on the reddit thread for this news article: http://www.reddit.com/user/SarahCoinBit/comments/
Bankruptcy courts exist for this reason.
Have you tried http://www.spreeder.com/ ?
No association, but when working for it I find I can hit 1000 without losing information.
Good when I need to cram.
The "advanced adversary" would simply break the cable (in an unattributable fashion, of course, "silly sharks") and force traffic to go over a connection they can monitor.
What is ethical Journalism?
What's an "autodraw" by the way?
Telling it like it is, man. Telling it like it is.
Nice to see lots of parallels to how we have architected things at Snowplow (trackers -> collectors -> enrich -> storage -> analytics)
I believe the proper honorific is to reference the highest office, so it's the Vice President Al Gore.
The Gox price already tanked and a huge chunk of their funds already moved out. It was the mistake of anyone who invested in Gox, and more importantly kept their money in Gox, to do so with a company that time and time again proved its incompetence.
Not necessarily.

_Melted_ ice is 0°C.

The result of ice + water depends on the quantities and starting temperatures of both. You could have very cold ice in water resulting in freezing the entire volume. Or small amounts of warm ice in water resulting in water well above the freezing point.
Spreeder shows one word at a time, right? As someone who speed-reads regularly, I find that reading three words at a time works much better than one word, especially w.r.t. retaining context.

It also seems to matter whether chunks are split around punctuation or not, i.e. If the sentence is about to end after two words, the current chunk should not show the first word of the next sentence, just show the last two words of the current sentence. I couldn't find a speed-reading app that did this the way I wanted, so I wrote one for iOS (http://velocireaderapp.com/)

I also agree with the comment below that dense texts are best read without speed-reading. There's a sweet spot between easy and hard, boring and fun for texts that are ideal for speed-reading IMO.
Database benchmarking
What's the current state of benchmarking in the database world? Are there any common benchmarks used that allow users to determine which rdbms is best suited for there needs, or is it still a matter anecdote and hear say? Ie I heard MySQL is fast, but Postgres has more features: paraphrasing not stating that as facts!
It's probably more likely that many employees were oblivious to the insolvency. As long as everyone's accounts were "credited" as they should, regardless of the soundness of their cold storage accounts, it would appear as though everything was fine.

See: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ysaz2/sarahcoinbit...
Yes.

The submarine also contains a fully-operational nuclear reactor.
> What on earth? A positive correlation is a fact.

You know, you could just learn how science works. Did you follow the link I provided? It shows that correlations mean nothing without an explanation.

> This is like looking in a microscope and saying, 'ah, none of this data is true until we have a theory which can explain it'.

Yes, and that is exactly how science works -- observation means nothing unless and until it addresses a theory.

But to show you what you're missing, let's do a little experiment. Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) your version of science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, as you seem to think.

Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that you feel are necessary for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
I would say quite a bit more impressive as Madoff did the same thing that's been done hundreds of times before: take money and promise huge returns.

Here we have a company that took money and let the "investors" fight it out amongst themselves.
Excellent explanation, thank you. :)
In-Q-Tel is an interesting company. They've invested in Google (OSINT), and Keyhole (GEOINT/IMINT). Google went on to acquire Keyhole, to create Google Earth [1].

[1] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia...
They are both dead. See the statements.
Yes, the biggest difference I can see is the red character, and there are plenty of other equivalent programs too. The key phrase is "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation".
Was that returning something other than "No help desk at support.mtgox.com" when you posted?
They don't have a dedicated key, I suppose, (but then again, you have to hit <shift> to get parens…) but smart quotes are <option>+{ and <option>+<shift>+{ on OS X, and configured to be <compose>, <, " and <compose>, >, " on my Linux machine.

Smart quote are a bit of a pain, but they do look nice. Really I prefer em dash, en dash, ellipses; I regret that OS doesn't have a keyboard entry for bullet. (Then, Linux doesn't either, other than entering in the code point directly with Ctrl+Shift+U or whatever it is.)
I'm with you. In fact I've been buying some in the 500-550 range, and looking forward to the upcoming drop this week.

It wouldn't surprise me it reaches the 350-400 level, when Gox announces it is officially dead.
What is CSS for?
Not sure. The JJ Allaire mentioned here : http://www.rstudio.com/about/ is probably different from the Jeremy Allaire mentioned here : http://www.circle.com/about/?
Tips On Being A Solo Founder (And putting your ego aside)
1) unlikely, since cascading bank runs are usually a result of fractional reserve banking. Depositors in a collapsed bank are unable to pay off loans in another bank, causing collateral damage to this other bank.

2) do other exchanges have security issues? Yes. Are they vulnerable? Only time will tell. I would take Mandelbrot's modeling of insurers (banks are "insurers" of sorts) in "the (Mis)behaviour of markets[0]" to heed: Collapses are levy-distributed with fat tails (infinite variance) so they will happen more frequently than you think, especially if you are operating with a model that uses the normal distribution. Best practice is to diversify.

3) I doubt it. ADDENDUM: But in a rational world this incident (might take a bit of time for the market to realize this) should actually INCREASE confidence in BTC, since a large, irresponsible player was knocked out, and the rest of the players on the field have a net higher level of responsibility (for now).

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

(I'm linking it via overstock so you can buy it with BTC - which is, hilariously, what I did)
Mistakes?

No one wants to hear about "mistakes." That might open up the door to the possibility that they themselves are capable of making... mistakes.

What people want to hear about are "success stories." You know, things that haven't had to stand up to that most unglamorous and unforgiving of tests... the test of time.

As in, thinks like nodejs, heroku, and ah.. mongodb. After all: Why bother with perspective and overview, when you can just pad your resume with... keyword fodder?

Why, indeed?
Although we shed a tear for not being included in this Industry Leading announcement, I think we can all make a group announcement on top of this joint announcement that announces that Mt.Gox is pretty crappy.

Travis Skweres - Cofounder, CoinMKT
Yes because government currency is such a Utopia......
This news went up around 2 hours ago and market prices haven't really budged. In bitcoin, these kinds of shocks are almost always instant, and usually happen days or weeks in advance with insider knowledge trading.

Everyone with a brain knew Gox was dying a month ago. In relation to the panic you quote, this isn't a panic over the price falling - it is equivalent to one stock exchange back then stealing your money and going insolvent. Functionally, it is a private company failing, with the collateral that anyone stupid enough to have given them money is pretty much sure to lose it.

But that just means that the business failed, and it doesn't reflect much on the overall bitcoin economy at all. Hell, I was into bitcoin 2 years ago and knew right away MtGox was an incompetent lot that were bound to crash and burn. I also always kept my coins in local wallets and only had USD on an exchange long enough to wire it out or buy BTC that I could then move to my own wallets.
I think, too much emphasis on brand. Every brand came from nowhere, had to be built. Tomorrows brands are unknown today. Could Facebook beat the WhatsApp brand in-house? Sure, by investing money and developing something better. Phone apps are easily the most ephemeral of all software. Tomorrow's cool app could come along any day. It seems extremely odd for Facebook to spend serious coin on what is essentially a temporary condition - a popular app.
coinbase has a feature where you can set up recurring draws.
There is a reason the SEC mandates you be an "accredited" investor with at least $200k income in the last 2 years or $1M in assets, excluding your house.

How many customers ("investors") would Mt. Gox have if that same regulation was applied to them?
100 prisoners and a lightbulb
You can disable the SMS push.
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/639
GoxBalance – How much do they owe us?
On the bright side, we have a new term for getting screwed: goxxed.
Ah, indeed. I always feel a little guilty about editing posts, so i'm going to let it stand. This one especially, because it's such a reddit joke. But yes, you are correct.
Save for the battery that is.
At this point, the timeline of events greatly suggests that Mt. Gox's initial announcement of withdrawal freezing was the point at which they were officially dead. If the insolvency document is true, over 700,000 bitcoin was stolen, due to a bug in their cold storage (likely, it wasn't truly cold, but automated filling a hot wallet).

In the last two weeks, they were probably attempting to see if there was any way to reverse or mitigate the damage. This is the point at which they have determined that there is no 'out.' They have no where near the amount of bitcoin required to even service withdrawals.

Edit: http://support.mtgox.com/ now shows that their Zendesk account has been terminated (a new account can be registered at that address).
It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt.

--

MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly, and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it.

The transaction malleability thing was poor programming on the part of gox. Remember that we have ALL fucked up at some point, just luckily for most of us, "fucking up" doesn't mean losing than much of other peoples' money.

Mark, I doubt you read hacker news, but if you do: it's alright, dude. You bastard.
Yep.

http://i.imgur.com/QcmTMwD.jpg

Alternate: https://mtgox.zendesk.com/home
This is the same as the Coinbase statement[1] except that it contains 'abhorrent' in it, which is kind of amusing.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295114

edit: That last paragraph also reads strongly like they want increased regulation, which sort of runs counter to what BTC is supposed to represent. I wonder how that'll go over with the BTC fanboys.
Goodbye Academia
until people figure out that permanently lost coins are deflationary...
considering the time spans and number of countries, that's not actually that bad. Sure, there have been many other less famous examples, but the thing is that hyperinflation and currency collapse is actually quite rare. A lot of bitcoin boosters seemed to be under the impression that it was both inevitable and frequent. Also, this list is strongly correlated with catastrophic economic/political problems, as opposed to countries that were rolling along just fine until a sudden monetary-policy mistake.
Nah. PGP encrypted messages embedded in the blockchain
For all they did wrong, known for a very long time, they were the lead chargers in bitcoin and all these exchanges got "real investors" and after Mtgox was successful. If Mtgox were trading magic cards, the story would have been probably different for most exchanges. They deserve to shut down, and stop business. They dont deserve to get ridiculed because they didnt measure up to the expectancy created around an instrument they dealt with when it was worth nothing.
Uh, Greenwald is even more of an idiot technically by orders of magnitude.
And this, children, is why markets are regulated.
This is also one of the things that killed the British response during the American Revolutionary War, at least in the South. They forced people who would otherwise have stayed neutral (if not sympathetic to the Crown) to choose sides.... and they chose to keep their farms and land safe (i.e., they chose for the Patriots).
Whats stopping me from entering 1 billion dollars?
Bitcoin isn't an investment, it is an entirely different way of doing money. If you want to play it safe play by old money rules, if you want to be on the forefront of something many of us think is revolutionary "long term return projections" be damned.

Then again, I just spent most of my btc on tigerdirect 3 weeks ago, so I don't even have much left to call myself an investor with.
Your coins were gone months or even a year or two ago. You are just realizing it now. MtGox didn't realize they were missing either, until rather recently.
How in the hell did these guys manage to screw this up so badly? Think about the tx fees they were raking in.
EC2 is mostly only used for web hosting and other small infrastructure. Not the streaming parts, especially now that they are running their own CDN.
In a strange way, I feel this merits the HN black bar treatment if only because of its historical import.
Still, anyone who didn't think that bitcoin is incredibly risky (with a high upside) was living under a rock, There are best practicies when dealing with a risky asset such as BTC, and they're really not that hard. Speaking of which, I should probably get around to implementing those best practices myself =D
The best way to read books is with enlarged font on a tablet or e-reader that's resting on an inclined treadmill. You're already ahead of the game time wise because you're exercising and reading at the same time.
I hear this DARPA thing has been pretty active in sponsoring some stuff as well that's hit the commercial sector.
No, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse.

[1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.
I'm sure a lot more than 6% of all total bitcoins are lost to dead wallets and such already, though. Only drives up the scarcity of the rest of em.

I highly doubt Gox's coins are "gone" though. Someone has those wallets and almost certainly is going to make a pretty penny fucking over the customer base, but caveat emptor.
I know little about Bitcoin (and its community) so please correct me where I'm wrong:

If MtGox can publish all stolen Bitcoin, would it make it impossible for whoever with them to use them? Although Bitcoin is not regulated, stealing them still violates laws right? And since everything is kept track by the entire Bitcoin network, whoever uses it can't keep anonymous.
At the state actor level do you really think you will be able to distinguish a stupid bug and an intentional flaw? Its not like they will make it call home with a bunch of code, they would just use a class of attack not well known and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. That's all it takes, one little hole.

I imagine certain organisations knew about buffer overflow bugs long before they were used publicly, so imagine if this was the 70's and you saw some strcpy calls peppered into some useful code, would you really be able to know 1) the class of attack exists and 2) if it was intentional or not?
Who wants to buy a bridge?
Because bad rules can exist doesn't mean all rules are bad. Just because bad can laws exist doesn't mean all laws are bad. libertarians can't seem to understand this.
We also aren't that far off with 1TB mSATA (about 1x2 inches) drives available today. 2.5" drives are obviously much bigger than 8 microSD cards because the form factor was designed for spinning platters.
>what happens to those jobs when Google (or someone) builds a mass production driver-less car?

Lots of people will no longer be employed in low-productivity jobs of driving vehicles. That is exactly what will happen.

>as none of us can predict the future

Correct. And Henry ford didn't foresee Pizza delivery.

>You believe that this process somehow results in more jobs

The process creates higher productivity. Higher productivity leads to higher living standards and more jobs in aggregate, though not for the affected workers.

> I believe, baring massive changes in the education and social infrastructures, that this process inevitably leads to fewer jobs.

For this to be true, you must explain why this time it is different.

It's not the fact that a few thousand engineers replace millions of drivers. It's the fact that the increased productivity drives down the cost of things. The increased productivity also releases human capital and actual capital to pursue new things and create new jobs. This leads to new jobs in entirely new industries. It's comment to lament and say 'what are these new industries going to be?'. But as already stated - nobody can see the future. We don't know, but we must accept that it will happen, simply by looking at all of human history. The fashionable argument currently is that you need to reform education to make this possible, but other large-scale changes in technology have happened when people usually didn't finish high school. When a person needs to learn new skills, they generally find a way of doing so.
It's not that big a deal...it's just internet funbucks anyways, right? :D
I was referring to things that are illegal (murder, kidnapping, assault, theft etc.),because they severely harm the life, limb, or property of others. I was pointing out that just because our laws against these crimes do not stop every instance, there is no reason to abolish the law itself.

You're talking about things which have a wide variety of perfectly legitimate uses which we (quite properly) allow in spite of the fact that they can, on occasion, be used to harm. This is obviously and substantially different.

Indeed, when you think about it, these very different things are nevertheless complementary. We allow potentially dangerous things to exist because we're (reasonably) well-assured that any truly harmful applications can be dealt with using the laws we reserve for handling grievous harms.

Regarding the "example" you brought up, the difference between robbery and pot is that pot is actually quite popular and the war against it is being waged with profound incompetence and for reasons that are increasingly suspect. Robbery, on the other hand, is - and remains - widely unwelcome in nearly any setting, even among thieves.

I'll do you the favor of assuming you're actually intelligent enough to grasp all this and that you're simply trolling. God help you if you're stupid enough for these distinctions to be truly baffling.
A good summary of the front page of HN right now...
Won't let me input BTC greater than 1000, though it had no problem with my satoshi@mtgox.com email.

Given the lack of confirmation I don't see how this is useful.