skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many with a vested interest in bitcoin are desperately performing damage control, evident in every thread about this issue.

Mt. Gox was a, har de har har, Magic card trading site (and ebay is for pez dispensers), and everyone knew that it was fatally flawed and fundamentally incompetent...that it was often cited as the go-to if you wanted to get into BC was just a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about, and everyone burned deserved what they got.

That it was by far the largest such site, and its metrics were canonical for BC was just an oversight, cheered on by ignorant people. And the fundemantal, basic malleability flaw, that still existed in the reference client, was "clearly" documented in some wiki page somewhere in 2011.

And if another exchange falls, the excuses will appear immediately, making it evidently clear that all was known to any in the know long before.
Languages don't have source code, they have documentation. I haven't looked through it all, but this appears to be documentation specifying (to some degree) the Wolfram Language. Therefore the language exists, regardless of whether any implementations of interpreters or compilers thereof exist and are open-source.
Because the topic is Facebook? I don't think the statement was to claim that the behavior only belongs to Facebook.
I never had a Symbian device...but always had a bit of a soft spot for them.

As someone who had and had to develop for it in the early days: those two things are directly correlated.
The Russian Stronghold in Ukraine
Faster than scrolling through pages of apps.
There are search engines for native apps already, the app stores, perhaps they should be updated to "search on device" and give the subset of results that are installed on the device already.
Has the side benefit of resulting in only 2 articles per page, increasing your productivity.
I sighed hard when they tried to play the pride card with this. Considering I get cold sweat everytime I have to watch a video on dailymotion, it's slower and clunkier than the worst youtube beta redesign. Poor Montebourg.
This comes up for every big topic of the week.

I remember when the front page was 100% Steve Jobs.

It's not too hard to use the bigrss feed and just make a filter

news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
And yet you still buy a coffee for 5USD no questions asked. Thats kind of the point :)
I've also started reading lobste.rs. It's what HN was about 2,000 days ago minus the startup news. It seems to be catching up to HN in terms of replacing it on my most visited sites new tab page.
I agree with what you're saying in the abstract but in this particular case, I don't think it holds. Everyone knows Bitcoin is still in its infancy and effectively a modern day wild west. You don't need to be fully engaged on the issue to know that, you just need a little common sense.

Just like you don't go on holiday somewhere far flung and a bit edgy and decide to walk down the street with all your money, passport, jewellery and documents on you.
I still don't understand - what does a leader-based monetary policy vs a rule-based monetary policy have to do with businesses going insolvent? If the US adopted some rule-based monetary policy (e.g. NGDP targeting or just plain old "don't print more money"), would Goldman suddenly collapse like Mt. Gox?

I can see why external regulators ensuring Mt. Gox's solvency (or various blockchain based surveillance mechanisms proposed by a number of people) might have helped this situation, but that has little to do with a central bank altering interest rates and purchasing assets to tweak the money supply.

I just don't understand the connection between monetary policy and fraud prevention/bad accounting/etc. Explain like I'm a 5 year old child.
I don't believe that there can be such thing as a free market in housing. Supply is controlled, necessarily so, by the regulation of land.
They have a padlock on their screen. What more do you want?
Except it wouldn't be the same person.

An average PHP programmer is not the same as the average Rust / C / Haskell programmer. Knowing that someone chose PHP as his tool does tell you something about the author, and it's not anything good.
I was initially surprised for the same reason as you, especially given some of pg's comments about the best ideas looking like "toys" at first.

However, looking back I would have done the same thing in his position. My prototype just looked too simplistic and didn't have a defensible business model (at that time) that VCs would have found compelling.

YC is a business that must generate returns for its owners, and my startup didn't fit the bill. Better luck next time...
Yeah I liked it as well; the notebook execution especially. Makes me sad to see how primitive iPython/iHaskell now are compared to the Mathematica editor almost 20 years ago. I hoped it would be the about same experience or better, but it's far from. Especially the web version for iHaskell (I assume the iPython web version is the same?) is horrible, absolutely horrible. But the idea is great and it is possible to make it work well as Wolfram has shown.
A formal spec would be good enough too. But since he's specifying concrete output and graphics as part of the language, it's rather hard to specify binary-compatibility without a reference implementation.

This is why there are no interpreted languages without a reference implementation that haven't failed miserably.
Would you mind expanding on why you don't think they're an interesting feature?

I often keep track of bitcoin precisely because I'm thinking "if it ever drops to $500 or less than $500, I'll definitely buy". If the point of your app is to save people the trouble of constantly checking averages, it would be nice to set their minds at ease that if the price they're ever looking for comes up, they can react
A side observation I've made in my perpetual efforts to create recommendation systems is people don't really want stuff similar to what they liked before, they just don't want stuff that they've indicated they've hated and are surprisingly open about everything else.
http://hnapp.com/filter/47d96bb9ac2675f52917dc5e6e168e94
I'm not really familiar with how all these annotations work, but that is spam, no? There are a few references to casions. One message about a "SR mixer" where BTC owners send an amount to a certain address to have it mixed and returned (which I don't trust a bit). It looks to me--though as I said, I may be misunderstanding it--that this account is engaged in some light BTC phishing?

edit: oh, yup. misunderstanding. Those are transaction to the wallet, presumably because this wallet is so obviously well-heeled.
And I would be perma-banned.
MF Global is out of business because Corzine mismanaged it, and the guy wasn't even banned from the industry for stealing $800m. Hardly an example of government punishing anything. More an example of a peer of current leaders getting off.
Nothing you've said is true.
where's a good place to reach you?
> The problem is, we're not all equally engaged in the issue. Nor can we be - I can't simultaneously be an expert on every single thing that touches on my life.

That's understandable if someone just bought a couple bitcoins on a lark when they were under $100. But there are people who have lost a significant fraction of their net worth - those are the ones who really should have taken the time to know better.
Right now at least.

WWII and the French colonial period make anything American right now look pretty soft touch.
which are the countries with low taxes but with good standard of living?
Try Resonator.co it does exactly that. Links to Spotify and Rdio playlists weekly with separate purchase links in iTunes.

It's free, but you can donate to keep it going.
I'm a fan of the occasional Bitcoin news :P
well, Captn. Hindsight I had 3.6BTC and 3700€ in it and I didn't realized the sad state of Mt.Gox until it was to late.

Funny enough, I had contact with their support desk on friday and one of my fiat withdrawals reached my banking account on friday as well.

All those countless examples with their wrintings on some wall since forever must have escaped me.

Good for you wise man.

I actually thought that the biggest exchange is also the one with the best reputation and capable of handling those transactions.
I am pretty sure that webdevs touting the victory of HTML5 have no idea what native offers and how many years behind even the best web-based offering is.

It's just an example of worse-is-better in action. Many webapps offer mediocre features compared to the real thing, but they have no install latency, better monetization features than pay-in-advance or messing with serials and unlocks, and offer enough features that you can get by with them. When the need to use or access them on mobile arises, they are available, and often the native solutions are not.

I like LibreOffice Calc (or Excel, for that matter) but they don't work on my Android tablet.
A small project I have been working on Bewbr.com
Do you have a snapchat account? Do you love boobs? A daily picture of boobs will be sent to your snapchat account
Yeah or Richard Pryor in Superman III
Does Bitcoin mining really work?
Just wondering, not trolling, why you don't want any bitcoin news?
Problem would be the network effect, though. Everyone who's willing to put up with it is staying here, almost everyone else is at lobste.rs and, as mentioned, that's an exclusive club.
This is good. It's also what will allow Tesla to experiment with new innovations in batteries, whether it's technologies like Air-Zinc batteries or simply innovating around how they pack the battery cells for more efficiency. Then they can sell the better batteries to the industry to move the electric cars even faster into the mainstream.

Usually when a new type of industry/product appears, in the early years you need integration in order to squeeze all the performance gains you can get out of that new product. Only later, when things get "good enough" for most people, integration is not so important anymore, and people start valuing the modularization of the industry, customization, and so on. All of this has actually happened before with the car industry. But now the cycle is being restarted because electric cars are reforming the car industry and changing the game and how a car works.
It is much easier and faster to empty a kiddy pool of half its water than to do so for a lake, or an ocean.

If Bitcoin succeeds, this won't be a problem.
I'm not sure if you're using the word "incentive" to mean the same thing as I am.

You don't want the clowns running Mt Gox to design the next plane you're going to take.

Nobody wants that; the question is why, considering the history of the financial system since the US central bank was created (the Great Depression, the S&L crisis, the 2008 crisis, Maddoff, Enron, etc), what makes you think that having a centralized regulatory body avoids that problem?
Entrepreneurs, Advisors and Fools
Tesla Motors stock is up 13.60% right now after upgrade
Seems that quite a lot of the volume on that address[1] is about 40% of the volume of the of the stuff going through MT Gox[2]. Might be a coincidence.

[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/received-per-day?timespan=180...

[2] http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg180ztgSzm1g10z...
> Somewhat shady and full of ads - apps are worse in this regard, IMO. They also ask for access to your location, and all sort of other data access web sites don't have.

I disagree with that - App stores will reject many apps but search engines will happily index most shady websites as long as they don't serve obvious malware or try "black hat SEO". Websites can also ask for your location, store a multitude of tracking info (cookies, Flash cookies, local storage...) and while they cannot access contacts, SMS and similar information, they can get very sensitive information though phishing and possibly from browser history.

> Cross-platform web development has never really be that easy.

We could stick to the lowest common denominator (which is still simple HTML apparently), but people would complain about the obsolete UI.
Since we're using personal perspectives without data, I'm 40 and haven't used email for that purpose for years as well. I think it's just a part of the cycle of stuff we use for whatever reasons.
Sorry. That is the most I have heard.
Don't power your viral campaign on wordpress
He hits on some good points and misses on some others to me.

Most importantly, the question of why you are building an app in the first place is incredibly important. However, he's also got to consider each app maker is unique. McDonald's makes an app because they have a marketing budget so large that their strategy is to appear everywhere - including your phone. However, I generally agree with his point that not everyone needs an app, and they absolutely shouldn't be giving us the mobile equivalent of the Javascript popup every time we hit their website (personally, I like the sites that just have a header bar drop down asking if I'd like to install the app that is easy to scroll past).

I don't think the web is dead, but I do think mobile apps are the future. The best UX I can imagine based on what is around right now is something like what Facebook is trying to do - apps that deep link to each other without the user realizing they are moving between apps. The key here is that the apps must be specifically designed to maximize the user experience, not just to have an "app." We aren't at that point yet, but remembering where the mobile web was back in 2005 when I got my first data plan compared to now keeps me incredibly optimistic about its future, as does knowing that some of the smartest people out there are thinking about this problem all the time (like the guys at URX).
Can someone build an HN with no NSA related news?
With a browser extension like that, you could filter the current trend of the week by changing one word; I consider it very sophisticated.
I have no gripe since I do no longer consider that better-than-nothing security to be bad.

In return for using ssh over telnet, I get security against any passive attack and attacks past first login. Thus the functionality is on a technical basis superior to telnet (except if you use IPsec, then telnet is better than SSH).

A personal question: when you install a new personal laptop or server, do you check the fingerprints of every ssh connection? Do you prune the CA list and remove any entry that you personally can't vouch the trustfulness of? This is after all what SSL require of each user, so it would be interesting to know if a founder of an software security company do this to his own personal equipment.
Its finally updated.

"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"
That's it??
Cross-posting my comment from his blog:

Since the app ecosystem is generally closed, why aren't apps available as Shareware, with 30/45/60 day trials, or with no-questions-asked refunds within 48 hours of buying?

What you said about coffee-vs apps is spot on. I've bought some totally rubbish apps and now it's a hard sell to get me to buy any. Competing apps in a field (e.g. PDF marking up on iPad)? I can't try before I buy, so I haven't bought...
what if the hacks you used to build your MVP result in unrecoverable real world damage to your self, your investors, and your customers?
According to that document, they only have enough assets to pay 0.1%-0.3% of customer deposits. That's a 100% loss to customers.

There's no way the other Bitcoin users can afford to pay 100M to bail out their customers.
Yep, I think you're spot on. I think the most likely scenario ends up with useful cryptocurrency being to a large extent co-opted by governments (much as the web has been). That might be a blow to libertarian dreams, but I think we'll still see radical changes as a result.
From the demo video, it seems a query language to query a database of knowledge. how's this knowledge database maintained and self updated are more interesting than the query language itself.
I'm not seeing it in the latest Harmony draft, but it is already available in some implementations, and polyfills tend to have it.

(one of) The issue(s) which is coming up for us WRT O.o is that current implementations don't seem to work well with computed properties (IE es5 getter/setter functions), which is possibly a point of contention in the draft. Better to ask someone who is seriously paying attention to that stuff, though.
Yeah, kinda disappointing. That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...
>Right up until gox suspended bitcoin withdrawals almost everyone was quoting the gox price for over-the-counter transactions. Every time the gox price was used it gave mtgox.com legitimacy.

You are absolutely right about this and it certainly didn't help. I guess inertia and the fact that up until withdrawals were suspended MtGox were the second largest exchange by daily trading volume.
> "A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. It'd be extraordinarily painful, but it wouldn't devastate the currency in perpetuity."

And of course, by "fiscal policy", we have come to agree that this means that banks can do what they want without any imposed limit and will always unconditionally be bailed out by the public (which mainly consists of people who are not only not benefiting from the banks' practices, but in fact are actively exploited by them for some ledger-juggling short term winnings; see the so called "housing bubble").
Oh, so can I open the project in the IDE, click on any identifier and have the source-code of the library in question automatically downloaded, after which the IDE would navigate to the right file and line? I also expect it to work while debugging, no matter the library I'm using, including the standard library, so does it work?

Because that's what I expect from a "modern" developer's environment in year 2014.
"an HN" is right if HN is meant to be read "aitch en." The a/an rule is based on phonetics.

And to your question, I guess not. :P
what did you expect, bitcoins?
> recent news reports

Of which recent news reports are they talking about?
Seems like they concluded that panic selling is over and they can't benefit from this anymore? Too bad many of their customers already sold at much lower prices.
It takes up room for articles about San Francisco real estate prices.
Depends on what you mean by recent. In the last 10 years: yes, much faster for number crunching (like SVD, Cholesky, determinant computations, etc).
Indeed, but I quote: "The pre-training uses stochastic binary units. After pre-training we cheat and use
backpropagation by pretending that they are deterministic units that send the REAL-VALUED OUTPUTS of logistics."

So without trying to sound like a pedant, the manner in which the error is introduced is effectively a hyper parameter, no? The skills involved in doing this correctly will land you the big bucks these days:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/26/google-deepmind/

My problem is that I think the programming experience of an entire hardware stack based on 7-bit floating point would be abysmal and that companies that tried to port their software stack to it would die horribly (to be fair they'd deserve it though). OTOH If they'd just stick to the limited domains where this sort of thing is applicable, my perception of it would flip 180 degrees - it's probably a pretty cool image preprocessor. What it's not is the replacement for traditional CPUs.

But the people behind this seem to have utter contempt for the engineers tasked with programming their magical doohickey, or putting this in TLDR terms:

1. Scads of 7-bit floating point processors
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!!
2012-2013 Cypriot financial crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%9313_Cypriot_financi...
Would love you to put the footage up on YouTube. Could actually pay for your hosting with Adwords depending on the license and copyright issues with all your videos. Or sent them to an archive.
Not if you had your money in MtGox
If you are short on time you prob shouldn't be on hacker news.

If you are just short enough on time that you can't filter Bitcoin related posts but have enough time to cruise HN then just skip over BC articles.

(This coming from someone who doesn't really care about BC news. But it's come from my learning that it's faster to filter out unwanted emails than to unsubscribe... that is unless you want to make a point.)
Not really - the ability to use Bitcoins to transfer useful amounts of money is very much dependant on their value and vice-versa. They probably don't need to be anywhere near the current price in order to support the current transaction volume, but I doubt $0.01/BTC would work.
The current message means absolutely nothing:

"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"
In Italy we have a word for it: "fuffa".
In simple english: something not as big as a scam, but at the same time something to not lose time with. :-)

Basically it's a currency with no warranties. My 2 cents.
Topics

1. Launch of new HN without BTC News

2. Show HN: Efficient filtering of Bitcoin related news.

3. How I avoid thinking about the white elephant.

...

;)
And it doesn't seem to have been proofread very well. "In the event of [something that has already happened]..."? I don't consider myself a particularly picky person, but come on, you could at least make the effort at a time like this.
>Is Microsoft on a mission from NSA

seriously? How about Facebook bought Whatsapp and countless acquisition by Google, Apple...etc. Is it fair to single out Microsoft when everyone got shit on by NSA?
For those of us with a high number of Android users in their circle, we should probably try to advertise sooner, so we can (potentially) make use of the inertia.
Using transients to improve the performance of custom queries
> I think people (perhaps rationally) believe that the people running the exchanges know more about keeping bitcoins secure than they themselves do.

There was nothing rational about this assumption. Banks are bonded and insured with teams of very, very good security professionals auditing their stuff. Mt fricking Gox? Not so much.
I find all the Schadenfreude over MtGoX disgusting, especially here. Sure, it was likely to fail, even more likely than your regular startup. And no, I have like 0.0005BTC.

But it's just sad. There is no joy to be derived out any of that.

Why would you want a BTC exchange to fail? Or even the whole currency?

What's the popcorn for? You're gonna laugh at posts written by people who lost money? Isn't there an endless stream of youtube videos where someone is getting hurt because of their stupidity and with higher production values (HD!) than a bitcoin forum?

A lot of commentary looks to me like a completely pointless exercise in signalling that amounts to "I don't like those libertarians/nerds who are pushing bitcoin. Dorks."