skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Silk Road involves using Bitcoin to subvert meat space laws. Stealing Bitcoin doesn't

Bitcoins are intangible personal property. Taking control of other people's intangible personal property without their consent, or through consent obtained fraudulently, does, in fact, violate laws on the books. Hence the SEC prosecution of Bitcoin Savings and Trust for operating a Ponzi scheme in which both the the investments and the fraudulently promised returns were bitcoins, not fiat currency.

The whole idea that Bitcoin is outside the scope of "meat space laws" is, despite its popularity, false.
The Critical Path discusses really well in the latest episode. http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/112
> You're basically saying investing is random chance.

No, what I am saying is that random choices can produce the illusion of successful investment strategies for 1/2 the practitioners. This isn't at all controversial -- it's equivalent to saying that half of people are above average in intelligence.

> What is the p-value that Warren Buffett's random investment plan outperforms the market 39/47 years?

That's not a particularly interesting question (and it's not an improbable unbroken streak of 39 years, but a mixture of successes and failures, much more likely to result from chance). What is more interesting is to ask what Buffett's market performance would have been without the announcement and herd effects? Everyone wants to invest in the same stocks Buffett invests in, and Buffet's investments are public knowledge. The herd can be relied on to make Buffett's choices after he has established his position, which means he's positioned to benefit from the public's responses to his choices.

Again, I never claimed that investing is random choice. I only said that random choices work for 1/2 the investors, and those investors are likely to attribute their success to genius instead of chance.
The semantics of C map poorly onto this kind of code. The types of decisions that need to be made here, like combining certain state values into single registers so they can be operated on in parallel, and the particular structure of branching, would be difficult to make post-hoc to a C-style program.

If you're excited about it, though, I'd encourage you to give it a shot and write a blog post about your experience! However hard it turns out to be, I bet we'd all learn something new. (:
I've not gotten a chance to play around with it yet, but there's plv8x (https://github.com/clkao/plv8x), for managing plv8 functions.
"finally" implies that Twitter was too slow in reacting to this

Were they not?
I heavily disagree that the internet is now forever broken as this writer is mentioning. One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another. The whole notion of being broken "For good" implies 'forever' and forever is a lot longer than the writer may realize.

People will know and figure out if ISPs are in fact abusing their powers. Yes, I agree that all ISPs are evil in their own way and there is nothing we can do about that. Although, I think that the ISPs know that they are making more money off of their users than they would throttling other sites thus retaining those users is of the utmost importance.
Scientific GPU Computing with Google's Go Language
The question is, how many potential Warren Buffets were there in the pool to start with? You can't ask the question "what are the chances that this particular outcome would happen?" with a sample of one, you have to use the population it is drawn from. Otherwise it would be like saying "That's amazing! The lottery numbers today were 56 23 45 12 27 91! What are the chances!" Exactly the same as any other combination (very, very low). The trick is picking them in advance.
>However, btc can be laundered rather efficiently

Can they? I think that remains an open question, and is rather unlikely to be strictly true.

>and all contact with the exchanges can be done through tor.

That's a lot of money to spend, and a lot of people are looking for it.
Was his prior history as @N already lost at that point?
The best customer service I've ever gotten was as a direct result of complaining on Twitter. Most companies care tremendously about their public image but most have yet to get that care to their dedicated customer service lines.
No need to shit on Steve Jobs in order to praise Steven Wolfram. Both are good businessmen that built great products and successful companies. And they had great respect for one another.

And it's not like Wolfram is giving stuff away for free. Have you seen how much a Mathematica license costs? I loved using Mathematica at my university, but now I just can't afford a license anymore.
The First Wave of New Chromecast Apps Is Here
Oh god I remember all of these. I'm so happy CSS came along. So very happy.

I started learning web stuff right around the Tables vs. CSS war. Terrible thing. Not many survivors. They didn't even get a wall of fallen heroes like some other wars did.

Although if I were to put up a wall now, I don't know which side to. CSS kind of won, but Bootstrap brought tables right back. I'm confused. Who won?
So the pirates jam the radio frequencies for the control signal. Convoys are incredibly inefficient which is why they are only used in war time (it takes days to form a convoy due to loading times). And no security boat can protect hundreds of miles of ocean, which is why piracy is still alive today.
But not limited to them.
I don't think Humble Bundle ever did any deal with Valve titles.
There was a link here awhile ago to see visualization s of known. Star systems. Anyone recall that link? Would wait love ro take another tour...
Thank you for saying this!

IMO there's way too much fearmongering (largely from people who have no experience trading, or from traders who don't want to see other people do better than them) about this. I've traded options on a very volatile commodity ETF before (SLV) and came out quiet well on top by playing with patterns and timing. This was in 2010, but there was the same "THE COMPUTERS CONTROL THE MARKETS AND YOU'LL GET CRUSHED" fearmongering hyperbole as there is today. It'll be there four years from now, too.

There's smart money and super fast algorithms and all that for sure, but there's plenty of dumb money moving around too. There are also plenty of people (I will note: often nontechnical individuals) who make a good living day trading. You basically just have to find a pattern ANYWHERE, IN ANYTHING and trade it over and over until it stops working (...and catch on quick). You might lose money (especially starting out), but it's not at all the experience of "you will step in and BE CRUSHED BY EXPERT TRADING ALGORITHMS" that people portray it as.

Start a brokerage account, do some reading, put in a sum of money that's consequential but that won't break you if you 100% lose it, and play around a little bit. Try focusing on one specific (preferably fairly liquid) security. You'll be amazed at how sometimes you make the right call and magically you have more money than you started with, and how you don't immediately die and get shot and lose all of your money to some corrupt evil high-speed algorithm while being eaten by wolves because, you shameful Icarus fool, you dared to trade on the public markets by yourself.

Risk-averse people (especially programmers) who have no experience trading will think you're completely insane and lambaste you, especially if you make money.
Comments like this are why I wish "Shit HN Says" still existed on Twitter. Holy crap. The level of pie-eyed idealism is just astounding.

Yeah, it's a good thing this $400M theft just happened! It's a feature, not a bug! Now we can make Bitcoin better! Derp!
If the system were to break, and nobody was around, you'd only know there was a problem when you were so compromised that your machine failed.
Vertical centering with CSS, without table emulation: http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/1/
Wolfram's The Mathematica Book is a great reference and has some good examples for learning Mathematica (plus, used editions are really cheap: http://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=mathematica+book) You can look at the contents online to see if it clicks with you: http://reference.wolfram.com/legacy/v5/

Mathematica Cookbook is also a nice reference. The book is much less systematic, but provides code that solves more realistic problems than the Mathematica documentation.
Thanks so much for sharing, David!
Didn't I mention <blink> nested in a <marquee> just the other day? I think I did.
His history as @N was never lost; you can see all 15000 tweets. He voluntarily (under coercion) renamed @N to @N_IS_STOLEN. All his tweets/history stayed with his account, now named @N_IS_STOLEN. The other guy then registered or renamed an account as @N, as anyone in the world could've done at the time. On Twitter, your handle is just an editable property of your account like your profile picture or your e-mail address.
Bringing this kind of stuff to an HN post about a business is what's shameful.
Avoid Trick Questions When Interviewing Developers
Isn't the "happy ending" part subjective too?
I have seen some companies using schemas and the search path to deploy stored procedures. In every deploy a new schema is created for the deployed version and all stored procedures are added to it from the repository. The new version of the application will use the new schema while the old version still uses the old schema. When the old schema is no longer needed it can be dropped with all procedures.

I have seen other ways to deploy stored procedures but these often require being very careful about function API:s and delta scripts.
> It is much more than that. As the LA Times said in the aftermath of the US Appeals court decision that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could not establish rules promoting net neutrality: bow down to your new internet overlords, Comcast and Verizon.

I'm hoping Google will lead the way and provide a genuine alternative for retail Internet access, given the extent of their parallel network. Comcast and Verizon will then have an opportunity to learn that customers are people to be served and not cows to be milked.
If you're paying 1k for food & everything else; that 1k is definitely including sales tax. And 8% of what you spend is definitely not 8% of your total income if you're saving as much as possible. You're double counting taxes.

I only make $50k and I'm saving $30k a year. I'm fairly sure if I quadrupled my income I could at least double my savings.
My old code:
http://codetidy.com/8255/

windows.h is for QueryPerformanceCounter used only in main(); compile with gcc -Ofast

It iterates/counts all solutions + prints first of them (as 01 board) in 0.23ms on my i7 (if you redirect output to file). You can also run it for N queens changing #define Qs to something bigger.
The code as you see is silly (not needed conditional in main loop among other things) and not optimized, still it's pretty fast :) I am not sure what hardware they used but it takes 10x less time on my computer vs theirs.
Tested with OS X 10.8.5 and Safari 6.0.5, gotofail.com declared the bug wasn't present. (At first, it declined to run the test, having concluded it didn't need to; following the link to explicitly run the test gave the "safe" result)

FWIW, applying the security update also installs iTunes 11, which users of Requiem may want to take note of.
My thinking on this issue continues to evolve, but roughly: The number of Bitcoins is capped. For it to have any semblance of price stability, the amount of users would be roughly fixed. Without price stability, the number of users would decline. So either an equilibrium amount of users, or constantly rising until scarcity makes the price unstable, at which point people stop using it until the point at which it becomes stable again.
Thanks. Is the language pretty stable, but the libraries are what mostly changes between Mathematica releases? Or is there much obsolete stuff in version 5 that's not present in version 9 or 10?
We use Quicken, Personal Capital, and spreadsheet.
"Happy ending" at least is editorializing by the article's author instead of by whoever posted the link.
There's very little that's obsolete. The newer versions almost exclusively bring additions.
> "finally" implies that Twitter was too slow in reacting to this.

No comment on the use of "rightful" or "happy"? It implies that he had a valid claim to the handle and the outcome was good. Why do these pass your test?
I doubt you would be able to do "systems" level programming in either JavaScript or Python.

If you are thinking of cross-compiling, then you could look at Go from Google - it has many of the advantages of C, yet a lot of conveniences afforded by Python and similar languages.
Implementing Perfect Forward Secrecy on Amazon ELB
Only works if you have a fixed height for what you're centering though.
Buy books?! who the hell does that. No, you would go to Barnes and Noble, or Borders, find a nice comfy chair and read until your eyes bled. You justified it by reminding yourself that the book was already obsolete from the moment it was printed so you didn't need to buy it, anyway.
Have you considered leasing? That might be more financially reasonable for you. Then again, you may be in the money range where when you sell your car, it is worth more money than you have left on the loan, so you're more or less ahead.
Vert.x is a polyglot, non-blocking, event-driven application platform
Data Scientists Predict the Oscar Winners
Are there even thieves? I mean, the whole story makes zero sense.

Supposedly the root of this was multiple withdrawals over the period of months. How is it remotely possible that Gox didn't have a real-time, if not at worst case daily, comparison between their wallet holdings, as reflected in the blockchain, and their outstanding "deposits"? How could that possibly be?

I just cannot buy that story. Saying "they were incompetent" doesn't explain it. The multi-withdrawal thing only makes sense if it was a mass exploit in a short period of time.
Meet Censored Reddit, anti-NSA story suppression (the latest episode)
If you know that's all your library does, as in the case of Golang crypto/rand, then use the library. But don't just assume that's all your library is doing.
Oh! My reading of his comment is that his issue is not with the changing of the title but with its editorialization. I'm still reading it that way, even after you've clarified it for him.
That's why a mixer wouldn't steal from a small-fry thief. But a chance at 6% of all bitcoins? Every man has his price, and mine is far lower than that. I'd sooner take even a fraction of that then continue a 3% cut of day-to-day transactions.

To avoid the mixer stealing from him, the thief could split the stash and send it to many different mixers, but he would be taking the chance that the mixers are not actually run by the same person, and that the people running the mixers do not communicate with each other. If I went through the hassle to set up a mixer, I would be sure to do it several times over just in case this very thing ever happened to me.

What would I do with the tainted bitcoins after stealing them from the thief? Probably just sit on them. Sit on them on the off-chance that I ever became desperate enough to attempt to use them.
Looks promising! I'm impressed by the domain name!
I should clarify: I'm not saying that Bitcoin is, as a legal matter, outside the scope of meat space laws. I'm suggesting it would be an interesting sociological experiment for courts and law enforcement to treat Bitcoin as something that is not protectable property. So it would still be illegal to sell drugs for Bitcoin (just as it would be illegal to give them away), but it would be legal to engage in a Bitcoin-denominated Ponzi scheme. And Bitcoin-denominated contracts would be legally unenforceable for lack of consideration. It would be fascinating to then see if the market could develop responses to deal with bad actors.
It was a joke related to everyone falling over themselves now for distributed anything in the way that everyone fell themselves for anything dynamic back in the day.
Just https://kickassapp.com/

(I actually don't know where we got the source code from; it was added before my time.)
For now, the following works for us:

- For plpgsql functions that are required by app queries, we just roll them out when we write them / when they change (via ansible).

- For plpgsql functions used in jobs, the job just reloads the relevant plpgsql functions on the relevant DBs before they start doing anything. (It's a little wasteful, but not in a way that matters for now.)

- The UDFs we've written in C don't change too often, but we deploy them manually when they do.

What are some of the headaches you've had in managing stored procs? How often is your app code changing / requiring new ones?
Steve Jobs built a business around charging students full retail and encouraging educational institutions to promote Apple computers to them. Freshman are encourage to take out loans to buy Apple products with a support life cycle that ends before they graduate. Any admiration for Mr. Jobs is based on something other than human community.
The fact that the 2014 focus goes on sale in 2013 only serves to accelerate this.

Not all vehicles are produced this way, some motorcycles are literally identical from model year to model year and get "blessed" with the year they happen to be sold.
They immediately revalued the price of gold afterward so I'm sure it was seen as theft by the govt.
Hi bluecalm! I tweaked both your code and mine to uselessly solve the problem 10000 times, and not pretty print anything, so the difference in raw 8-queens-solving speed is readily apparent. Here are the results:

bash-3.2$ make
gcc -O3 8q_C_bluecalm.c -o 8q_C_bluecalm
nasm 8q_x64_davidad.asm -DLOOPED=10000 -f macho64 -o 8q_x64_davidad.o
ld -o 8q_x64_davidad 8q_x64_davidad.o

time ./8q_C_bluecalm ; echo $?

real	0m0.802s
user	0m0.801s
sys	0m0.001s
92

time ./8q_x64_davidad ; echo $?

real	0m0.113s
user	0m0.112s
sys	0m0.000s
92

If you'd like, I'm happy to post this as a branch of my repository so others can replicate. (I only hesitate because it's a derivative work of your code.)
The shipping industry already loses about 1 container an hour on average: http://singularityhub.com/2011/04/05/10000-shipping-containe...

Piracy would have to become incredibly frequent and highly sophisticated to make a noticeable dent in the financials of the shipping industry. There are limits to what pirates can offload and carry home due to the necessity of using fast and/or stealthy ships.
Was it Floops?
So is a domain name, arguably.
InfluxDB 0.5.0-rc.1 released with new clustering and features
Any recommended references for this? Sounds like an interesting topic.
Right now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted.

I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.
Hard to pay back? The Americans can print all they money they ever need, and the debt is denominated in that currency.

(Additionally, isn't the amount of government debt held by the Chinese only something like 10% of the total government debt?)
Thanks for the update! I haven't toyed around with D in a while---but it was a mostly pleasant experience the last time I did.
Israeli cooperation is making Silicon Wadi the Valley’s major competitor
In Rust, (right now) you can choose between a 1:1 or a N:M mapping between OS threads and Rust tasks. With N:M threading, the runtime necessarily does (some of) that internally.
People are looking to static sites more and more for a couple of reasons:

1. speed - you can't beat an optimized static sites hosted on a CDN. In part I suppose the increased focus on speed i driven by mobile traffic.
2. Github - front-end developers have now gotten really used to having everything under version control. Dumping the most important content into an unversioned database just doesn't feel as good as having everything as Markdown in Github
3. Jekyll - or rather build tools and static site generators in general. The combination of GitHub and Jekyll and flag ship projects such as the Obama Campaign platform [1] definitively played an essential role in the growth of static site generators we're seeing now.

Our clients range from beginners launching their very first HTML site, over agencies with really cool flows built around Middlemand/GitHub/Draft/Similar services, to companies that are integrating site publishing into their products in various forms.

One of the cool examples is a startup doing a site builder for progressive candidates running for national campaigns. They use our API to handle the publishing, and use our form feature for gathering volunteer submissions and contact mails.

In general I think publishing a website with a form on it, is one of the most basic features of the web. Making it faster, easier and better is a pretty obvious plus for a lot of people.

[1] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-millio...
Microsoft Office Online
Clickable:

https://github.com/awslabs/route53-infima#shuffleshard

http://git.io/332VLA
Refining Software: Include Quality in ‘Minimum Viable’
Fair point, but like it or not, cost per user matters.

- When investing in or acquiring companies, people may use this metric in addition to price/sales or in rare cases for tech companies price/EBITDA valuation multiples. It forms the basis for comps analysis which bankers, M&A types and VCs do all the time.

- Companies use the ratio in similar ways when fundraising or talking to acquirers. "Based on how many users we have and comparable transactions, we're worth $X million"

- While you may buy users looking forward, you also may look at how you can "monetize" existing users, i.e., if we can get $X per existing user, that would be worth Y.

It is of course not the only metric that an acquirer evaluates (at least the good ones), but they do look at it as do investors, bankers and startups. So good or bad, it is here to stay.
OUTERNET – beam free Wi-fi to every person on Earth from space
Is Go really the best name they could come up with?
Not necessarily. A horizontal rule (or flourish) is often used in fiction as a context-shift indicator within a chapter. Technical documents are not the only documents.
Since when does an ISP negotiate peering agreements? It seems like a conflict of interest there, when Comcast's trunk business is actively thwarting the internet delivery service part of the business.

It's like McDonalds charging their suppliers because they're 'sending a lot of product into our kitchens.'
That's not enough evidence to support that claim.

When anyone can sell any amount of bitcoins they like so the price could adjust freely, then the price would not be a scam.
I guess we could do it with hstore. I wonder what sort of performance I'll get on it for a hashmap workload. Hmm...
For anyone else who thought to check, no the photos do not appear to contain any GPS coordinates in the EXIF data, so they have the treasure hunting grounds all to themselves.
Use urandom, but that's not the end of it. It may be that urandom supports non-blocking reads. Most implementations only check if read() returns -1 then abort, without checking for EAGAIN, not to mention EINTR, or some other subtleties like making sure not to request more than SSIZE_MAX bytes. The randombytes function in NaCl does it right, unfortunately libsodium did their own thing.

If you use Python, read from os.urandom, which is a wrapper to the system's CSPRNG. Don't use random.randint or random.getrandbits...