skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does a brilliant engineer have to do with success? You don't need a brilliant engineer to have a successful company. Some companies do lean heavily on their engineering department, while others simply have better direction and leadership to execute with.

Google's success was largely focused around an engineering solution to a problem - giving people search results that are more relevant than before. But other companies like Uber aren't solving engineering problems, they're solving multi-dimensional problems without relying solely on brilliant engineers for success.

Uber attempts to reduce friction in locating, requesting, and being updated on their transportation, reducing cost, and improving the quality of the service - all of which are not engineering-bound problems. Sure, being updated on the location on a map is a significant feature, but overlaying gps coordinates on a map does not require engineering genius. What does take considerable effort, though, are the varying logistics going into managing the drivers, the payment systems, the regulations, the customer service, etc that are the heart of the business.

Their apps and mobile site (at least while i've been using it) have been unreliable or limited in terms of what would be the most useful capability for its users. It's not a stretch to say the technology involved in Uber has been weak compared to the great lengths they've gone in managing real-world resources to get their product to market. I'll take 5 regular engineers and 1 really good leader over 5 brilliant engineers any day.
In addition to everything else that's wrong with DNSSEC, using Shamir to share a digital signature key is a silly idea. Multisignature trust systems / threshold signatures provide the same functionality, but without having a single secret that has to live on one computer at a single time. While I know they did their due diligence to prevent the leak of the DNSSEC root key, it's a problem they could've easily avoided by using an incredibly boring design rather than a more "clever" one like Shamir. As things stand, there is actually one key that could completely destroy DNSSEC and require the thing be bootstrapped again from scratch.
Disconnecting Consciousness from the External Environment
The original post's point was that conventional banks and credit cards offer consumer protection.

Your response was that physical cash offers no consumer protection.

So you either misunderstood or misrepresented the original point.
We chose Permanent because it means long-lasting or durable, but it has a hidden geeky meaning we liked: computing the permanent of a matrix is a #P-complete problem.
Well, let's distinguish between degrees here. Both Occupy and the Tea Party have silly, simplistic solutions to real problems, and aren't violent. The cops really have no business hassling either group, let alone infiltrating them like they want to be secret agents.

Actual militia groups.. I mean, Oklahoma City happened, right? Imagine if there was a group of hippies or, god forbid, Muslims with the level of rhetoric that some of these militia groups have along with the training routines and arsenals to prove they're serious.

My beef with how the police treat hippies and muslims is the well-documented, "infiltrate, keep suggesting violent actions until someone says 'maybe', then arrest them" routine. If someone's suggesting violent actions ahead of time and making actual preparations for such without prompting, then that may actually be a threat. Regardless of politics.

EDIT: This is not to say the ATF acted appropriately at Ruby Ridge or Waco. They shouldn't be the first ones shooting.
Offshore Wind Turbines Can Tame Hurricanes. Yay, Right? Maybe.
It is pretty obvious from the preceding sentences that this is an opinion, not a statement of fact, and hence a citation is not needed.
Predictable. Mt Gox implodes and its somehow the governments fault.
There wasn't any money - PokerStars agreed to buy the shutdown Full Tilt Company, Infrastructure and Assets in full, then re-pay all the customers of Full Tilt our of their own pocket, mainly to stop the DOJ chasing after Pokerstars as well.
He was in a position to help him, without spending too much time on it.. "Here is a list of people that could help you. I will let them know you need help".
What it’s like to be a ‘booth babe’ at cybersecurity’s biggest conference
You could ask the kids. They certainly know which classes are engaging, and which are time-biding garbage. And ultimately, assuming a teacher isn't running a movie theatre, student interest is the most important metric. You'd of course have to keep the actual weighting process a bit fluid to avoid the inmates gaining control of the asylum, but it should be quite straightforward to pick out the extreme bad and extreme good teachers.

It would also be a good introduction to the rationale behind secret ballots, and when it is actually appropriate to lie.
What? That's crazy. That makes it easy for interested parties (marketers, gov't agents, etc.) to hide amongst real moderators, or in other words makes it more difficult to detect the source of spurious moderation.
Write-heavy, read-heavy, update-heavy, or all?

Consistent world-view or quick answers?

Gigabytes per day or terabytes per day?

Is the Time axis important? Do you need to go back in time and query the state of the world? Do you need queries that relate the state of the world in two different points of time?

Hmm, I should probably be charging you for this! :-) I'm distilling years down the rabbit hole into these paragraphs + saving you months of discovery.
> If you're an Apple boss, and NSA offers you cache (or other benefits, like competitor intelligence) for adding plausibly deniable bug in your code, would you turn it down?

With other companies, I might find this plausible, but I do not believe Apple is very hard-up for cash or direction on which way the market is going. It seems to me that they have more to lose from a high-profile security breach (say, if this vulnerability had been used in a mass theft) than they do to gain from anything the NSA could offer them.
TermRecord: simple self-contained HTML sharing of terminal sessions
I don't think it's a good idea to use email as heavily as OP does for his argument, especially with regards to spam and "weeding out bad actors".

> Like the spam filters developed on top of email, the best Bitcoin services providers will develop the best software to iron out any details the Bitcoin protocol has still left open to abuse.

While spam-detection is certainly a lot better than, say, 5 years ago, it's not perfect. And while the cost of false-negatives is relatively low, false-positives can have bad consequences.

I don't think average people want to trust their money with something that is as trustworthy as a spam-filter is today, let alone go through the equivalent of "I had 10 penis-enlargement-scams in my inbox this morning"-technology-maturing-phase for a payment technology.
> Is It Worth All of the Hype? Who really cares?

well, me.. that's why I'm reading your blog
Ravelry Reaches 4 million Users: Infographic
I've learned to never underestimate the supply of stupidity in the world.

We could ask the same thing about a myriad other things: scientology, religion in general, creationism, denial of climate change, racism, etc.
This is no different from real life scenarios. Suppose someone stole a $5000 ring, sold it for $2500. The ring is still stolen, the police can and will confiscate the ring, so the buyer is out of the $5000 ring and their $2500 paid for the stolen property. The ring is stolen from the owner, the money is stolen from the buyer.
This is not Google activing on the community's behalf. It's Google doing a little CYA. It's one of those situations where Google's PR is trying to quell problems that dings their bottom line of advertising revenue. This was a mirror of the FB "official" advertising vs. "bot" advertising through things like Fiver.com. Still a sham on both sides rather than really make a big stink about it.
Many of these tips address the idea that good naming improves readability. I couldn't agree more!

If you're looking for more on this topic, Brandon Rhodes gave an excellent talk on this at PyCon US last year [0].

[0] http://pyvideo.org/video/1676/the-naming-of-ducks-where-dyna....
I should have clarified that. I mean in geoscience. As far as I know, none of the majors accept undergraduate geoscience interns.

At any rate, the point I was trying to make is that the average salaries include quite a few (majority even? I dont' know...) folks in graduate programs.
Show HN: Fireform – Hook your website form into a hosted private back end
Have they been working on compilation speed? About a year ago I was trying some WebGL "bindings" that had definitions for all the constants and functions, and the game I was hacking on would take 20 seconds to compile on a fairly recent Macbook Air.
I also switched two of my research projects over to TypeScript from CoffeeScript [1,2]. I'd like to state up-front that CoffeeScript still has its merits in certain scenarios; they are two very different projects, despite both providing convenient `Class` abstractions over prototype-based inheritance.

With that said, using TypeScript has vastly decreased the amount of mental state I need to keep in my head when I develop one of my projects. The compiler uses the type annotations to double-check my logic, and Visual Studio gives me the ability to easily refactor interfaces as if I were using a statically typed language [3]. I could go on... but I will spare you the blog post. :)

I really wish there was a free or cross-platform alternative to Visual Studio for TypeScript autocomplete and IntelliSense. The WebStorm IDE claims to support TypeScript, but it gives me tons of incorrect compilation errors in my current projects. I hope it matures so there is an alternative. Anyone working on TypeScript tooling that is comparable to VS for different editors (e.g. Sublime)?

EDIT: Whoa, I completely missed this in the blog post; palantir is developing an Eclipse plugin [4]. They also developed a tool that converts CoffeeScript projects to TypeScript; interesting [5].

[1] https://github.com/int3/doppio Doppio: A JVM in TypeScript

[2] https://github.com/jvilk/BrowserFS BrowserFS: A full-featured file-system in your browser that emulates the Node fs API

[3] I'm referring to trivial refactorings -- renaming function/variable names and such. Refactors that are more complex, such as changing the function signature, must be done manually at call sites, but the compiler will catch your errors if you mess up or forget one.

[4] https://github.com/palantir/eclipse-typescript

[5] https://github.com/palantir/coffeescript-to-typescript
Except he wasn't, at least not in the usual sense of a party winning the majority of votes in an election. NSDAP was insignificant in the parliament, and Hitler became the chancellor through backdoor deals with industrial tycoons. His coming to power is great example of how to subvert parliamentary process (and in fact how it's regulary subverted only without the catastrophic consequences that it had in Germany's case) in a legal way.

He didn't waver from the plan, that's true, but the thing is, no significant number of people ever voted for the plan either.
You can collapse the first two to `fig up -d db redis` if you like!
What you are referring to is a design pattern called fluent interfaces[1]. They do make for very usable APIs when used to represent pipelines and filters. They are also used heavily in creating domain specific language features. In your SQL example it works very well such as in SQLAlchemy. But in that example, the chained methods are building a query as opposed to mutating the actual data. Splitting hairs.

[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluent_interface
After filing for my claim in November, I got mine back yesterday (http://ngokevin.com/blog/poker11/). It shows up in my bank account as "Doj Poker Stars".
Yes exactly, we want to make it as seamless as that. You upload your files and we emailed you back the html in 2days to a week depending on plan. $299 was for a simple website but we might have to come up with attractive fixed price plans.
Yes we do formatting to make the site mobile-friendly as well.
That's a conspiracy theory. The real reason Bitcoin might "come under attack by governments" is because the primary applications for it have been to buy drugs, hire hit men, and launder money.
tcpdump for the win!
NASA’s Kepler discovers 715 new planets
I'm not well versed in the nuances of software licensing. Are there prominent examples of other projects using a similar setup? Or is Github unique in this?

Or is it a case where Github's size/reach makes them unique in this at scale?
The Bitcoin Paradox That Undid Mt. Gox
And this is how Total Recall became a reality
That's cool but I don't think tech-savvy is the issue here, rather it is risk aversion. I have no idea if anything you just said is secure at all. The word "encryption" doesn't make me feel any better about any of this.
It's hard to overstate how much of a bad apple MtGox was.

In 2011 they were hacked causing the first huge bitcoin crash -- probably still the largest crash ever in bitcoin's history. Yet because they had the most reserves, people kept the volume there.

In 2012 their tech was incapable of supporting new volume and caused flash crashes. Yet because they had the most reserves, people kept the volume there.

For most of 2013 nobody could withdraw anything from MtGox. Yet because they had the most reserves, people kept the volume there.

No other exchange was this bad. Now you see why a lot of us are happy this company is gone. It just sucks they had to take so many people down with them.
Its less telling an experiment than you think. The Bitcoin economy isn't that sophisticated. There aren't complex Bitcoin denominated contracts that could cause ripple effects from one bank failing. But those things are useful and will arise in the Bitcoin ecosystem as it grows. And when that happens, a bank failure won't be an isolated thing like it is now.
very legacy?
Same boat here. I pretty much assume that my wife will work at least 8 hours, uncompensated, every weekend. She typically works 7-4 at school, and then an hour or two at home. Because we've worked overseas, she has no seniority (years overseas don't count where we're at). Every year since being back in the states, she has been given a slightly different set of classes that have required her to spend a sizable portion of her summer developing new materials--again, pro bono.

I honestly hope she will leave teaching. Part of her extreme work schedule is self inflicted (she genuinely values her students and wants to hold them to a high standard, which creates a lot of work for her). However, I can't see anyone doing as much as she does for an entire career.
Legal reasons, almost certainly. I don't know about Finland or Germany or EU specifically, but it seems likely they have "money transmitter" requirements to combat money laundering. I doubt the regulators and/or law know or care much about multi-sig transactions. If they touch money changing hands, they almost certainly have to comply.

You can't move money without the government's permission, you know. Very naughty.
GrubHub files for an IPO
Analysis from eBay CEO On Why PayPal + eBay Should Stay Together
The numbers are very insightful and bolster the case for staying together, but the simplest explanation is that other very smart companies, that is, Google and Amazon, are looking to bundle commerce and payment together as well. At some point, PayPal can grow faster on its own, but that point is probably not now. Hitching itself to the second largest ecommerce player seems to accelerate growth.
Using URL Shorteners, 301 and 302 Redirects to Spam Google
Oh the irony, "Dr. Zap" applies mild electric stimulation to wake up his vegetative patients. :)
Thanks for the comment, we always try and cater to as many of our users as possible. If you've used our tools, are there particular areas that cause more trouble than others? Do you find the dark or light theme easier to navigate (available in Nightly builds right now)? Would love to hear how our tools can be improved in this regard! Feel free to email me at darrin[at]mozilla.com if you'd rather not post on HN.
> The number #1 requirement for a currency is trust and confidence in it. Why would anyone trust a currency which has no consumer protection whatsoever and provides zero recourse for when things inevitably go wrong?

Well, yes, I agree that paper money has these problems, but over time, in spite of many uncertainties, and in spite of occasional manipulation of paper money's value by the owners of the printing presses ... oh, wait, you're talking about Bitcoin, not folding money. My mistake.

> A currency requires backing by a central authority.

Are you serious? Dollars don't have this property. The only thing that gives paper money authority and value is public faith and trust -- there is no "backing", in the way you're using the term. If a freely elected administration decided to manipulate the currency for some political objective, they could fatally undermine it. It's a matter of political discretion:

http://2012patriot.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/inflation-1.j...
Well that only took ~3 years. Thank you US Attorney Preet Bharara. I appreciate you protecting me from....me.
Part of me wonders if the same type of strong arming will start to happen with bitcoin.
To be fair, most of the downturn you see starting in Feb is due to this issue, it just came to a head when bankruptcy was inevitable. Not really a blip.
I think the advantage of having really good engineers is that you can then go after adjacent markets that take some technical prowess to serve, and you can defend your core market quickly against upstarts who take what you've learned but don't have the curse of legacy code and users.

Google, Facebook, and DropBox all took the strategy of "hire the very top, and try to build a really strong engineering organization even though it doesn't look like you need it." For Google, it was obvious that it was a hard problem (or maybe not - why didn't Infoseek and Lycos do this?). But for Facebook and DropBox, the problem initially seemed like it was just a simple utility, but because they hired really good engineers they made it challenging and impressive. And empirically, their trajectories seem to have worked out better than, say, MySpace and YouSendIt, two competitors that had first-mover advantage on them but didn't make engineering hiring a priority.

Obviously this doesn't apply to all markets, but I do wonder if sharing-economy companies like Uber and Lyft will eventually be displaced by a company that does hire for technical ability.
It has improved in recent releases, but I think they are focusing mostly on incremental compilation via the -watch flag. My projects still take 5-7 seconds to build from scratch on my MacBook Air.

You probably know this, but just for others' information: Type inference is expensive, as it requires global information about the project. As a result, compiling one TypeScript file in a project results in the compiler recompiling all of the referenced modules and definitions to re-build up that inference information from scratch. Using the -watch flag keeps the compiler alive with that information in-tact in memory, enabling incremental recompilation.
One of the reasons I'm cynical about online communities is because certain users will seem to have invested their entire life into participating, e.g. spending 12-16 hours a day online (per their post history). Basement Dweller is an dumb insult, but some useful distinction could be made about these people.
I guess we disagree on the definition of a currency then. You are treating currencies like consumer products. Currencies are stores of value that people have to rely on for our market based economy to work on. The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Bitcoin is backed by the full faith and credit of... satoshi nakamoto? If the dollar wasn't backed by the US government with strong regulations then I wouldn't use it to store my value and target wouldn't accept it. It is unethical to distribute a currency without insurances/regulations controlling it. You are messing with people's life savings and livelihood, its irresponsible to not protect consumers. Furthermore, with your stove example, there are certain regulations that the stove has to meet to be sold. http://www.wsiltv.com/news/local/EPA-Proposes-New-Regulation... This is done to protect consumers and society. You may say its people own faults for not doing proper risk assessment, but not everyone is educated and smart enough to understand this stuff. If you want true mass adoption of bitcoin then it will need regulation and consumer protection.
Of course not, but governments view this as a finance / banking system and will tend to regulate it the same way. They will fit that square peg through the round hole.
I'm not making an anti-government, much less an ideological anti-regulation argument. Regulation could potentially benefit crypto-currency. If Bitcoin succeeds it is almost certain to prompt the creation of regulations, even laws, that pertain, some beneficial, some not.

I'm saying that state actors are a different scale of threat, and that goes un-addressed in the article by a Coinbase founder. If they've got the balls to go up against such threats, they're not saying.

I'd be very pleased if it turns out you can successfully harden a p2p protocol against state actors.
Amazing but the only good wallet generator is one that runs offline.
Inside Song: Guitar Twang, Cookie Monster Vocals and Other Crucial Minutia
So the question remains: Is there a bitcoin wallet that offers such a guarantee?

The Federal Government has up to $100,000 for deposits.

Banks themselves will provide funds bank in case of fraud, to increase consumer confidence.

Credit Cards have a number of consumer guarantees (for example, did you know if you purchase an item with a credit card, the credit card company will extend the warranty of the item in many cases--read the fine print).

As another commenter said, yes I'm "paying" for that insurance by giving up some amount of control, but I think before BitCoin or another decentralized currency can reach critical mass, it will need service providers to offer similar protections.

My opinion, anyway.
no longer best problem ever sigh, site still not up
You can already cause injuries with phased array radars, right?
I love this editor! Instantly switched to it - now to wait for some Gophers to create some neat packages for Go.

This editor is so easy to extend that it took me three hours to learn how to tweak the UI from scratch (and I have NO Nodejs experience - dependencies are easy to install).

https://github.com/sergiotapia/atom-darcula

Everything is tweakable using CSS and that's fantastic. It's super fast as well, no difference whatever between this and Sublime Text 3 for me. Love it and will gladly buy it once it leaves Beta.
But you do realize that those arguments are for _bitcoin_ and not for _exchanges_? The decentralization of _bitcoin_ is supposedly an advantage precisely because _exchanges_ (like MtGox) and other central organizations like banks are prone to failure due to fraud and mismanagement.

So, they are essentially saying "We need bitcoin because we don't want to trust institutions like MtGox because they might fail" and you say "They are hypocritical because the failure that they are warning us about and that they suggest a solution to did indeed happen". You have a strange definition of hypocrisy.
Impossible. You'd have to somehow convince ALL miners to not process them.

Fungibility prevents you from simply blacklisting these coins.

http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.it/2013/12/why-bitcoin-fun...