skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the article they confirm that they lost 850,000 BTC. What assets do they have that they could give back?
Editorializing or link bait? Either way it's a stretch.
Ah yes, the use of goto conjures up the 800-year-old essay in the room.

The way they use it is widely understood and accepted in C error handling. It's also not the only way you can screw up, either, which is a good reason why you should add a static analyser to your build process.
I don't think rent seeking is the "point in capitalism", but a side effect. You never hear proponents argue that capitalism is good because of rent seeking, though usually the same people actively exploit it in this way.
Assume, a deposit-trade-withdraw transaction takes 1 hour, and the chance of an exchange failing in a given hour is 0.01%.

If you perform a single $100,000 transaction, there is a 0.01% chance you will lose $100,000. So on average your loss is $10 but in the worst case your loss is $100,000.

If you perform 100 transactions of $1,000 (taking 100 hours) there's (roughly) a 1% chance you'll lose $1,000 so your average loss is still $10 but in the worst case your loss is only $1,000.

I agree that performing 100 transactions over 4+ days sounds like a right hassle, and prices might change by the time your trade finishes - whether this precaution is worthwhile depends on your taste for risk and whether you're trading $100 or your entire life savings in bitcoins :)

Personally if I had a million dollars of bitcoins, the last person I'd trust with it would be a bitcoin exchange :)
Actually I don't think it does for values. I just tried to 'change' the value of a font CSS property on Hacker News from Vedrana to something else and it didn't offer any font names.
Women who drink beer do drink good beer.

The author is saying that too many "good videogames" mistreat women.

The point is good beer doesn't have a history of marginalizing women they way popular videogames tend to.

On a more general note, videosgames aren't much different from music or movies. Just like bubble-gum pop singles & mindless action movies there are tired AAA videogame titles, all with dubious critical value, but enough appeal to sell to the global lowest common denominator. However, if you really care, there are niches out there doing some incredible stuff.
goto in C is perfectly fine in this sort of situation. Its the only way to do sane error handling.
How about Dead Kennedys?

But seriously, that was an extraordinarily shallow if not downright stupid comment. Not only have you equated a serious political statement with a punk band based on obviously superficial understanding of either punk as a music genre or anarchism as a political philosophy, you've completely failed to understand the main point, somewhat obfuscated by talk on Bitcoin, of his argument, namely---basing your moral reasoning on what formal coercive authorities formally declare as good or wrong is a horribly low standard of moral reasoning.
In fact, one could argue that it's necessary in order to ensure the success of your visionary ideas in this economy.
Acer are already doing this with chromebooks and indeed, a lot are buying the 199 version.
I would add:

6. Instant access to conference lines for multiple people to join at once.
What he says is not true at all. People will (almost) always recommend better solutions when someone is "asking the wrong question".

And what he says about Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky is total nonsense. There's nothing bad about quoting other peoples' articles. Why reinvent the wheel ? Even articles that contain extensive references contain insightful context.

And a lot of negativity in this video, overall.
You have to get bookkeeping exactly right.

You have to get crypto exactly right.

Bitcoin sits on top of both of those sharp pyramids.

Yesterday someone on HackerNews compared a Bitcoin account to a pressurized system where the slightest failure means you lose everything irretrievably and instantly which is a great analogy.

You don't need Good Enough for this. You need Perfect for this.
Yet again, both Microsoft and Apple following in the footsteps of Linux. Got to love the articles like with headlines like these:

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/
360Fly - Capture all of life
I mostly agree with you, but you seem to be ignoring this point: Medicaid decreased the probability of having an unpaid medical bill sent to a collection agency by 25 percent – which also benefits health care providers since the vast majority of such debts are never paid.

A lot of uninsured people can get medical care in emergency rooms which are not allowed to turn them away, but then the cost adds one more huge burden on top of an already-difficult struggle to get out of poverty.
Maybe f*cking with the debt collectors involves sending them to that page?
You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
You can't fix carelessness by devising "better" coding standards.
Sometimes people make mistakes.
I find it fascinating that people take at face value the words of a throwaway account who is quite likely making the whole thing up, given that you'd want wealth of 100m to just shrug off 250k like that. (Based on the fact that someone worth 100k can just about shrug off 250 like its nothing).
Seems we use a variety of mechanisms, not fully understood - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect
Moving Beyond the Start-up Mindset
However you may view him, I highly doubt Musk was in the room lobbying for programs that provide government funding to his companies when lawmakers decided to fund these programs. These programs are the product of popular will wanting to move towards green energy and cut funding on space exploration. Musk just happened to be the guy who was in the right place at the right time to take advantage of such programs, and do it better than anyone else (cough...Fisker Automotive). Maybe rent opportunist would be a better word than rent seeker.

Aside from that discussion, it's hard to really argue that Musk's technology isn't disruptive and he's not a brilliant innovator. His super charger network is enabling electric vehicles in a way the major automakers could never imagine, and he did it for pennies compared to the financial resources the major automakers have. SpaceX is doing the same thing.
Clarango: A Clojure Driver for ArangoDB
Much better title would be:
Phishing and Two-Factor authentication
Common just say, we all know you what you are thinking. Bruce Schneier said it. You should know that we know what you are thinking -- yes there is a very high chance it was put there deliberately.
If true, the notion that Musk suddenly started whistling an anti-government loan in energy efficiency shortly after paying back his own loans... well, I'd say it's at least a chink in his visionary armor, if nothing else.

Doesn't make him a monster, but, like most men of vast wealth, at least somewhat of a hypocrite.
Of course, different languages come with different trade-offs, but I wholeheartedly agree that Python picked the good side of this particular trade-off.

If proper indentation is so critical to a human parsing of the code that every style guide in the world demands some type of indentation (note the lack of style guides demanding a complete lack of indentation,) then why not use that very same convention to convey that very same information to the compiler?

The C-family of languages is on the unfortunate side of this trade-off: there's one method to convey statement blocks to the compiler (brackets) and another to convey it to the reader (the indentation convention.)

TL;DR: Multiple channels with redundant information run the risk of disagreeing with each other. I don't know if anyone's come up with a catchy phrase for this, or coined some sort of "law", but it's very real. As soon as you have redundancy of information, you automatically inherit the problem of synchronizing the information between channels.
Asus tried that with the EEE netbooks.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_strikes_back_at_lin...

(Money talks. Microsoft has a lot of money.)
A lot of code editors (Xcode doesn't by default, but you can easily configure it to) have a keyboard shortcut for duplicating the current line. I have plenty of times accidentally made changes at the wrong place in a file because I was mistaken about where the cursor was.

The lesson is to always make sure to look at your diffs before you commit your changes.
Some nice suggestions in the review and most importantly the author leaves the programmer out of it and focuses on the code... except for one bit where the author cites the opinion of the masses (implying ei shares the same views). It's important that when reviewing code you only talk about the code and not the people or person who wrote it. It will happen to you one day and someone else will come along and make all sorts of remarks of your character and ability. And it will be completely unjust and unwarranted. So don't do it.

The conclusion I found wanting. "Should," is a word like, "obvious," that is best avoided. It is a sign of weak, wishful thinking and stinks of condescension. Could, would, or should have... it happened and was dealt with, it seems, in an appropriate manner. Armed with good suggestions on how to avoid it in the future perhaps we won't see the same mistake made again (hah).
When I interviewed with Tesla, before the technical phone screen, there was an HR phone screen that consisted, mostly, of an HR person trying to sell me on the company with statements like "we don't pay as well as Google or Facebook, but you'll learn so much more because you'll be part of a small team".

I wasn't convinced that I should take a below market salary so that someone who was (at the time) worth almost $10B could make another billion.

Musk is a visionary, in a number of ways. He has an impressive ability to come up with great ideas, and an impressive ability extract rents from people much poorer than he is, whether that's the average tax payer or the average Tesla employee.
You don't even need to look at tax code. Just consider the fact that many people who work for places like Walmart also get Food Stamps and Medicaid. Many US corporations would not be be profitable (or at least structured the same way) were it not for the government footing the bill at some point along the chain.
What's happened to TextDrive?
> Well, before Jason Smith started to try to monetize npm, I would have said nobody. It's open source, right?

That's not what open source man. There are still copyright notices in open source code.
Sure, but at that point, it's not RAII all the way down. RAII is a great wrapper around new and delete, but I saw people talking about how they rarely use new and delete anymore.

Edit: Actually, reading about auto_ptr<> and friends I see what you're getting at. The codebase I worked on some years ago didn't use those so I'm not totally familiar with that idiom for wrapping heap allocation.
And I'm saying that those gaming companies know the exact number that you describe as "fuckton" is. And they have decided that your "fuckton" ... well ... isn't.

I have the same issue AND I AM MALE. I like adventure games. I like RTS games that aren't clicky-twitch-fests (see Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander). I like turn-based strategy. How many like you and me are there?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games

Looking at that list, it looks like there are roughly about one million of us--male AND female. There is the occasional hit that crosses that (Portal, The Sims), but it looks like the best a company can count on is about a million. Okami (which is absolutely awesome), sold about 600,000 units, so that's also a good cross check.

Now compare that to even mediocre FPS that gets panned and note that their numbers break a million without working hard.

See, that's the problem. There aren't a "fuckton" of us.
Ask HN: A coder who knows business or a business man who knows how to code?
I first learned to code before I knew anything about business. Now that I've learned about the lean startup, user habits, and user acquisition, I've learned more about it than coding over the past few months. Do you think it is better to know more business than coding in a startup or vice versa?
Let's say you are the German foreign ministry's IT guy. Are you really going to say "Hey, it's OK to use services and equipment from the companies on the PRISM participants list because we can trust the denials that they work with the NSA and we can trust LI not to be a gateway for spying <cough>Athens Affair</cough>."

This is not a matter of populism or even of principle. US technology can't be trusted any more. How are you going to restore that trust without making the technology verifiable and without providing simple, reliable ways for end users to routinely put their communications and data out of reach of surveillance?

Where is the "populism" in this? This is about many 10s of billions of dollars in revenue lost and even more in lost shareholder value and opportunity.
Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?
I'm not sure this author even gets to the point of showing, by his own definition, that Musk is a rent-seeker.

He establishes a broad definition of "rent-seeking" early in the article as this:

...income from government-enforced monopolies, such as patents, copyrights or government projects...

Then he details how some of Musk's businesses have benefited from the government, but fails to actually establish how any of those benefits translate into a "government-enforced monopoly".
> LIs close before the next LI, or the UL.

Unless you have nested list.
Well I guess that was kind of unlucky. clear, color etc. all work, it just can't do font suggestions.
Why is it hypocritical to recieve federal investment, only to decide it isn't for you, after which you pay them back? And why is it hypocritical to have the government as your main client for an entirely different company (SpaceX)?

Barry Ritholtz (the author of the piece) is also the author of Bailout Nation, a book about the financial crisis that I really enjoyed reading. To project his feelings about investment bankers on Elon Musk is taking it one step too far, in my opinion. Calling him hypocritical for criticizing the government while receiving tax breaks? If that's the case, the vast majority of people living in any free country are hypocritical, too.
Very interesting spin on Musk. I don't view the space venture as rent seeking. Someone has to supply the government... Now if he pays lobbyists (does he?) then it's rent seeking.

The auto industry is much murkier, because Detroit gets a lot of subsidies too, so you have to subsidize the competition.
The government wishes to spur innovation in certain directions because it feels investment in those areas is lacking - presumably based on analysis of potential benefit of successful development in that area (eg. alternative energy, electric cars, commercial space travel). The incumbents in those sectors do not act to meet these perceived gaps. An upstart outsider comes in with aim of disrupting those industries.

This feels like incentive programs are doing exactly what they're designed for. Author should spend a couple of minutes investigating economic concepts of externalities as justification for taxation and subsidies.

The comment re. hypocrisy of opposing something a grant program you were a recipient of is a different matter from rent seeking, and yes without context (which I do not have) it sounds pretty bad form.
Legal responsibility for finishing the project and tax accountability could be separated. Anyway this is going to be just another accountancy nightmare.
That would be a pretty blatant copyright violation. Can you provide an example to substantiate the claim?
It seems highly unlikely that anyone will get all of their money back. They announced that they have debts of 6.5 billion yen and assets of only 3.84 billion yen. If they can liquidate 100% of their assets that's only enough to pay back 59% of their debts.
"A free version of Windows 8.1? Those M$FT bastards are just trying to make more money!"

-- 90% of responses that will show up here

Anyway, Microsoft definitely needs to do something to eradicate the 29% of desktop users that are still using Windows XP which is a security disaster-waiting-to-happen.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
Biggest Buyouts in Internet Stocks History
This seems like a bit of unfair muck-raking. I take his point about federal loans/investment, but as far as I know Musk still thinks tax credits to promote alternative energy are a good idea. When he stops receiving those and then claims they were a bad idea, maybe I'll believe you more. Until then, as far as I can tell he is just ingeniously taking advantage of the numerous government programs to promote good commercial behavior to enable these technologies that might never come about otherwise. that's not rent-seeking, it's smart, and it only lowers the risk of a still very risky enterprise (or three of them).

The bottom line is that what Musk is doing has the potential for massive benefits, and we will all be the beneficiaries of this. as long as how he gets there is within the spirit of the rules, i'll give him a pass.
More importantly, why Apple doesn't run test suites, basic checks? Test driven development must be everywhere
Microsoft could quickly sell a Linux version of Exchange or SharePoint even if it's just debugging a Wine version. However, by only selling Windows versions they make more money and increase the Windows ecosystem. Don't forget MS has enough cash on hand to handle huge market shifts so they can focus on maximizing short term profit.
Soooo is it acceptable/moral to gamify likes/+1/reposts/shares like this ?
That is because C is not a good language.

Don't get be wrong, it's the best language for the space that it occupies. There is no better language to implement such things.

But it still isn't good. It's just that it's failed to be replaced by anything better.
The problematic part for the big-government states is that there is nothing preventing the Swede from going to government paid school & university in Sweden, making his millions in Latvia and retiring to Spain while still getting his Swedish government pension.
Sure but they're loosing ground.

If I was them I'd rather make less money now and stay relevant for the next 20 years than satisfy my immediate greed and disappear* in the next decade ...

* disappear is too strong but my English being limited I don't have the word I need to convey what I mean.
How Technology Must Grow Up
I guess an even more obvious case would be a cryptographic hash, with the variables being the input and the output.

But in this case still there is a correlation. In fact, the existence of the correlation is trivial to see: after a known transformation (the PRNG/hash itself) the correlation becomes linear.
I don't disagree :) Thanks for your feedback, I think determining sensible defaults for what to show in the console is a good discussion to have!
The rise of OpenStreetMap
Microsoft Adds Full TypeScript Support To Visual Studio
FWIW, #3 is from the original owner who sold the site to Karpeles in 2011. Doesn't excuse #1, #2, and many other things, though.
No you don't need perfection to add some basic controls that would have prevented most of the damage here.
The programmer did something to cause doubling of that particular line. Habitual braces placed at the onset of writing the if()... would have made that act, whatever it was, obvious and obviously wrong.

The 2nd version fails as an example because it hides the act of creation then surprises you with "here, look at this, anything wrong?" with the author knowing full well he's making it wrong.

My takeaway from this whole discussion is: assume failure, prove success. The offending function failed by presuming success; it did not positively confirm every criteria for success, with even the "fail:" section executed by success.
The difference here is that they had a very public deadline.
I was until recently a devoted scroll-wheel-user. But I'm starting to see the first signs of arthritis in my fingers (far too early if you ask me) and scroll wheels are becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

I've been surprised to find that dragging an old-fashioned scroll bar is actually a faster and more accurate than the wheel if you're scrolling by more than a page or so.
Musk heeded the advice. On March 8, he appeared at a hearing before Pitts’s committee, which oversees spending, at the Capitol in Austin. Oliveira and a SpaceX lobbyist appeared with him.

“Any support Texas can offer would be helpful,” Musk said at the hearing. While Texas was the leading candidate, “We are absolutely looking at other locations.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-12/states-competing-fo...

He was clearly out there playing states against each other when looking at launch sites for SpaceX. Though to be fair, it feels like every big company in America is doing something like this when they want to expand.
WordPress, SSH, Backups and jQuery | Web Dev Week #3
Hey @brador

Thanks for that, it's a cool thing to hear :)

If you have any suggestions I'd like to hear them.

As for searching for projects, it's certainly tough to find them, I'd say HN new page has a lot that get overlooked. Reddit sometimes but harder to find IMO. It would certainly be nice if there was somewhere for people to purely post their projects or if HN had some type of filtering.

How hard could it be to make something like that? Want to give it a go?

@jh3y
Because TDD in low level languages is a pain in the behind.

And sometimes impossible

In Python/Ruby sure, it's easy. In Java, or even C++, it's doable, but not great, and it requires some heavy tricks.

But they surely need tests, but not necessarily TDD.
I really love how you phrased that. You didn't take anything from obvious talents of Elon Musk, yet, as someone inspired by him, you can't do yourself wrong as well.
So you wanna start a conference...: In Da Beginning
Native frameworks have historically drawn on demand, with a bit blit for the unchanged scrolled bit and as little drawing as possible into the newly exposed area - with or without double buffering, depending. And this on hardware far, far less powerful than the original iPhone.
Why are we not linking source articles? I thought we were just hating on aggregators a second ago.

This links to the Verge which repackaged the original ZDNet article: http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-monetization-dilemma-bundlin...
I would argue Apple after Steve Jobs's death is more of a rent seeker then Tesla with Elon Musk.

You don't hear anything but lawsuits from Apple these days and no innovation at all.

At least Musk is still pushing the envelope.
Just wanted to say that for a company blog post, this was really great. It's data-rich, it tells a compelling story, the site has a solid visual design, and the multiple calls to action were well placed and didn't detract from the post.

I don't know this industry niche well, but I'm guessing Rafflecopter is a chief competitor. I think if they see this blog post, it'll rattle their knees a little :)
Hey keehun,

It would be cool if there was like a categories thing for HN though right because sometimes there are loads of other things on here. How hard do you think it would be to make something maybe that people could just post their projects too and then could filter by day, week, month in popularity.

I'd be interested in making something like that I think. Couldn't be too hard surely.
> But is TSLA another Google, or just another DoubleClick? DCLK zoomed from $2 to $200 without ever showing a profit, something Tesla has yet to do with its cars. It then famously crashed.

From the linked Forbes article. How does this comparison even begin to make sense? Comparing a car manufacturer to two ad companies?

EDIT: Checked the publication date on that Forbes article, May 2013. So trying to support a thesis about via an article now a year out of date.
I'm not sure I'd class the first 64bit mobile phone + OS (months ahead of any competition) as "no innovation".