skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dirt in your back yard hasn't been around for 4.4b years. Topsoil (decayed organic material and newly eroded rocks mostly) is usually pretty 'young' on geological timescales.
What Does the Mt. Gox Meltdown Mean for Bitcoin? Maybe Not Much
While this is really cool, can anyone tell me if it has become any easier to write stored procedures/functions?

Last time I tried writing stored procedures I went into a deep depression from the lack of a proper IDE/editor/debugger/tester/anything.

Is there any process out there besides time consuming trial and error? Or does everyone who writes these knows them by heart and I should just stick to programming languages?
How and why we capture TCP traffic to decode MySQL queries
Not nearly all shipping routes have a piracy problem. They've suggested to use it initially in areas such as the Baltic sea - what would the pirates do after a successful boarding there?

They can't move the ship anywhere, they would be noticed by onboard cameras and would be reachable by both boats and choppers, so at they have an hour or two to fill their boats with stuff, drive them to the shore and abandon the boats there in order to have a chance in getting away.

Robbing freight trucks at gunpoint seems like a safer and more profitable business than that.
Americans giveth and Americans taketh away.
If you don't get it, then perhaps you.
Having similar weird USB issues on my 13" late 2013 MBP. It's been really, really crappy since I bought it. Same issues with keyboard and touchpad breaking under random applications. Apple seems to be completely ignoring the issue aside from a botched "fix" in November.
Well, now we have those social sharing buttons. Just as messy and pointless
> ... like putting together a puzzle

It's funny how lots of good formalisms, notations, and DSLs all achieve this quality in different ways.

In particular, this reminds me of the mathematics of tensors, or Bra-Ket notation in QM. Both of these systems use notation to give each piece of the puzzle a particular shape, so that if you know all of the pieces you can often see immediately how they should fit together.

This seems (to me) to be the most important part of designing an API, and the brilliant strength of a good type system is that you get this quality for free.
Parody or real startup, I don't know, but I'm grabbing popcorn and upvoting either way.
Technically this is an entirely feasible idea...

Cannibalism isn't illegal...
Relevant to yesterday's news: Acquiring MtGox for "free" would cost ~$336 per user if the leaked crisis document is accurate.
And their company name ends in "Labs"!
It's not too far off. I've got the same one, and it's the only JavaScript book I've got!
If they get a single insurer and a single tiny maritime nation onboard, then they can do everything easily. "Flags of convenience" work just fine for circumventing inconveniences.
A bunch of ZeroDivisionErrors doesn't look so pretty :)
Because paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s

My, how times have changed.
Andreessen:

In the early days of the Internet, you had various fly-by-night
ISPs, some of them went out of business. You had various fly-by-night
e-commerce operators, some of them went out of business.

...

Mt. Gox has to fail in order for Bitcoin to go mainstream because
Mt. Gox was never set up to be able to take Bitcoin mainstream,
which is basically what’s happening now. The good news is we have
many new companies that are much more serious and much better run.
nice, but i wonder why they took so long to release it after all the other source engine games.
Yeah, no riches for me. It's easy to look back in retrospect and said "oh I had this opportunity" but at the time, it wasn't obvious.
Is it just me or is that background 3d? That's tripping me out.
How many were they at YouTube when they got bought?

I tend to think more about acquisitions as capital per employee, as in, that's how efficient they are at creating value. It's more interesting that comparing users because of the "users doing what" question. I'm disappointed i can't find graphs about those. Last companies I checked (but I can't remember which ones), the capital was around $1m per employee. Except for WhatsApp.
Oh, well, in that case, I guess you'll have to wait for someone at Amazon to decide to include this reading mode as an option. Or an independent software developer who has an arrangement with Amazon to read and decode the Kindle format.

> ... they show you one word at a time in rapid succession, so you don't have to move your eyes in order to speed read.

For a novel, this arrangement might work, but in technical reading, I find that I need to reread difficult sentences, sentences that express new ideas, over and over, until they sink in.
> I appreciate that he started WhatsApp from scratch but this picture that is being painted of him as some sort of homeless street person is rather warped, don't you think?

I get annoyed by this "rags-to-riches" narrative the press in America seems to like to push. It's never as simple as the articles make it seem and there's always something left out.
Mongo 2.6 Highlights
> I mean, how often can one live through the birth of a groundbreaking technology?

How often can one not? And, since technology advanced to the point where information about such a groundbreaking technology gets to the whole globe in relatively short time, its been pretty hard not to be aware of it.
Yes, that sounds likely too.
Everything you said could practically be applied to any skilled profession. Being an X is hard, 99% of people fail at X. What makes trading any harder than programming or engineering or abstract mathematics or physics? Successful traders exist, plenty of people trade for a living. People have to try something to see if it's something they're good at and most people aren't good at most things. Pointing that out X is hard and most people fail is a tautology, it's true of all difficult professions.
Tell that to Google, who are actively working on breaking all those plugins in chrome, for everyone, in an attempt to force people to rewrite plugins for the chrome specific Ppapi (which can't do many of the things npapi can)
Titans of Space
It's on linode and they made the mistake of not blocking the IP only route on their server: howtosaybeerinswedish.com is also hosted there (or rather it comes first in the configuration). This doesn't say much though, but it's definitely a parody.
Pretty sure you can't sell human tissue (e.g. umbilical cords, etc.) for purposes other than medical, but I may be wrong.

They should have waited until April 1.
holy shit i wish this were real. that's the kind of company where you just wanna drop everything and work on it because it's so crazy.
And I thought soylent had the eating people market cornered. Fool me once...
I think portions of it were wide availability of web browsers, combined with the explosive adoption rates of internet usage... as time moved forward, entrenchment of the existing sites (and their quirks) got buried in...

If we'd started with xml compatible markup (all tags must close in order), and no browsers supported a quirks mode... we'd have much cleaner web browser engines and a much more usable web today.

I think that JS has a few quirks as well... so does CSS.. JS and CSS came after HTML, and even then have grown/distorted a bit. XHTML broke too many things, so we went pragmatic with HTML5. Just the same, no "new wheel" will get adopted in this space whole-sale. People have ditched XHTML and run back to HTML5.

I think a lot of things could be better, and will get better... so long as there are billions of pages/sites out there as-is, quirks mode browsers aren't going away.
how can i get my meat produced?
I never said programming was easy. I don't expect nor would want all software engineers to be good at design either. That be ing said, are you building front-facing products (say iOS or a front-end for a web application) you'd be better off with a software engineer who can design. Than a designer that can do photoshop mockups.
Not everyone on that product team should know how to design out of the engineers.

But I am saying that designer that can't code their front-end, wether thats web or mobile, is kinda weird for 2014?

I never said design was unnecessary, I said a designer who' a single skill queen (in my world) is unnecessary.
No one is advocating that design lack importance, but unless you can code the interface you design, you really don't add much value. Like an MBA with the next social media idea that will acquire a billion users in a week because it's such an amazing idea.

Implementation is the only thing that matters and ironically design is subjective enough for that.

Not to be confused with an illustrator - drawing is fuckhard.
This sorta feels like a defeatist attitude.
"Oh it requires a different sort of a brain" and etc. Not sure I agree nor even would want to agree. It's also insulting to those who do both. I'm trying to do both (still learning)
Just tell everyone you're using WebGL and submit it here.
> The fact that some of the most skeptical, cautious people in existence, people with plenty of practical experience, are willing to fund their businesses with equity capital, means that equity trading is substantially fair and that the efficient market hypothesis is at least approximately true.

That's a pretty bold claim. Given the financial crash of 08, from what I can tell the EMH has been thoroughly debunked. Markets are not efficient and all data is not priced in. Information is not absorbed quickly into the market so inefficiencies crop up everywhere all the time, those are the profit opportunities that traders make a living off of. If EMH were correct, the systematic risk that crashed the market could not have occurred. Remember, it's a hypothesis, not a theory.
Yeah. I took a look at the salami, realized my mouth was watering, then wanted to throw up.
I don't quite understand your markup anecdote. Did time pass between the $4 and $3 markups?
A huge +1 to this, from someone who worked at Facebook.
Never imagined that pop culture can reach such lows.
.org

Old school.

Were bitelabs.io or bitelabs.ly already taken?
> So you really are restricted to the Int type and the operations that can be performed on it.

That's so vague it's almost meaningless, and doesn't support the original assertion, which was "But with HASKELL, with just the type signature you can write a program that does what you want even though you don't know what the components you used do!"

Even given a simple thing like foo:: int -> int -> int, there's really no way to tell what it's doing. It could be multiplying the arguments together, dividing, adding, computing psuedo-random numbers using two seed values, ...

Not only that, but I'm not sure it's true that it's limited to the Int type because there are things like System.IO.Unsafe.
I actually just launched http://fxmachine.com with my co-founder, and so far, it looks like our system will enable anybody to achieve a sustainable income without any active involvement.

We're trading on live data (not just making claims based on forward tests) without any human involvement, though human intervention and the ability to recognize trends could have saved some of the trades that ended up being losers. Still, we're looking at sizable gains with a hands-off approach (maybe you'll need to re-train the system every year, but even that can be automated).

We've now run into the problem of telling the world about it; you'd think that 40% annual returns would have large institutions knocking down the door to give us our millions. So it goes!
Has got to be either low priority or technical limitations. I guess a Linux port of Portal 2 isn't likely to provide returns anywhere close to PC sales, so it may not have been approach furiously by Valve.

I also wouldn't be surprised if there were some DirectX specific stuff in there that wouldn't easily make the transition to OpenGL either. Not to mention all that driver testing they would have to do...
> Some of these happened on short bursts during the 20th century, the centuries before didn't experience life-changing technologies often.

More accurately, the "life changing" effects of new technologies (which are often a result of them being synthesized with other technologies and/or applied outside of their original context) took a lot longer to develop, largely because the spread of awareness of new technologies took longer. Which is why the frequency of the appearance of those life-changing effects of technology pretty consistently has increased as the speed and reach of information dissemination technologies has increased.
Assuming Elon Musk comes through with his statement about not inflating prices for a specific country -- Tesla might start killing it in Australia.

(S Class starts at $215,000. E Class 4 door starts at $79K. Going up to 130 (or 250 for the AMG))
What about Israel.
This is almost exactly from the plot of the movie Antiviral. It's a dystopian movie where people's insatiable love of celebrities have lead them to eat meat produced from their genetic material and infect themselves with the same viruses as their favorite celebrity. It's a strange movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2099556/
Wait, they're selling the fact they have some avoided crossing as proof of adiabaticity? How stupid do they think we are? They don't provide any data on how it slows down?
Maybe you've been whooshed?
I'm eating (cereal though, no meat) and I'm not sure I can continue.
MtGox was usually advertising the highest exchange value for Bitcoins, and it most recently was advertising fire sale level exchange rates on Bitcoins.

Once they severely restricted/shut off withdrawals, they were no longer an "exchange". People were no longer investing in Bitcoins facilitated through an exchange, they were investing in the exchange allowing withdrawals and making good on the promised high Bitcoin to USD values or low USD to Bitcoin values. All the time they were telling people it was a technical problem and they would make good on transactions. Given how insolvent they were, this had probably been going on for a significant amount of time or they just never had intentions of making good. Allowing deposits to continue despite the issues they faced was unscrupulous, and I believe it was likely a way for them to try to collect capital to make good on the "top of the line" and "bottom of the barrel" exchange rates that they had promised their customers, which they simply could never fulfill.
Take a look at flexbox. http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
That this is a top rated comment is fucking pathetic.

His name is on the door. Unlike the late beloved Steve Jobs, he does not afford himself the opportunity to blame others for product problems. It's a higher standard - one without "Hold it another way" copouts and buy our products to show your good taste values. He built his startip into a company that makes amazing products that can be used to really change the world because they help solve really hard problems in ways that scale. He's putting knowledge into the world not peddling caveat emptor planned obsolescence and digital whoopie cushions.

Now he's taken his life's work and is shipping it on the Raspberry Pi instead of taken a 30% cut of the creative output of developer and musicians.

That's the difference between what is rightfully called "great" and what is called so only insanely.
Is that seriously on the frontpage of HN? At rank #1?

Where are all the interesting articles about start-ups posted now? Reddit?
Because electric cars tend to be high performance as a side-effect of the tech used.

Personally, I am more interested in the car because of the gas savings. I won't buy the Tesla S to test it on the nurburgring.
10.9.2 has been in beta for weeks and was evidently just about to be released. It made a lot of sense from a QA perspective to do it just the way they did.
Gibson, lets hack it and sink some oil tankers.
Serious deja vu - I must have come across your website at some point. I was also very into the "pokemon sim" craze back in the day. Here's mine:

http://www.angelfire.com/wa2/charmander/
You could submit some? https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=aragot
Or bitela.bs? (.bs being the TLD for The Bahamas)
Equaldex – The Collaborative LGBT Knowledge Base
No Tumblr on this chart?
If the result of entering the Konami code were sexist, misogynist, homophobic, racist, etc. I could see how someone might not appreciate it. I don't know what the issue was in this instance...but, I've seen nerds make pretty stupid jokes that cross lines. (And, I'm coming at this not from a politically correct sort of perspective, but instead from a, "check your privilege and try to stop being an asshole to people who have less power and privilege than you".)
Seriously - only recently bootstrap started to dethrone "table" tag as the most easy to use and the most cross browser compatible page layout tag :)
Thanks for your reply; that makes a lot of sense.

However (just because I found it mildly amusing), you may be interested to know that the United State's population density is actually twice as large as that of New Zealand! In fact, New Zealand's population density is approximately equivalent to that of the U.K and Japan in 500 A.D.
One remarkable thing about this list -- with the benefit of hindsight, I only like five or six of the acquisitions all that much.
I do not like charts like this because their existence implies that cost per user somehow matters, or is a deciding factor even, in the price of an acquisition.

Even if that was the major metric in determining a price, there's often a very large difference between the number of users currently and the expected number 1 year or 5 years out.

You don't buy a company because of the number of users it has right now. You buy it because you think you can do something better with it, or to be defensive in a field, or to expand your own customer lists.

What's more, not all users are created equal! When Flickr for instance was aquired, what percentage of users were paying users?

I think its hard to make any real generalizations here, but better than a chart of cost per user, I think this is probably closer to a chart of how badly Company X feels it needs some audience. It's some formulation of growth, panic, defensiveness, etc.
Soylent should acquire these guys.
Though I have no interest in owning bitcoins, I agree with this. On with the experiment!
I'm not sure how this relates to my comment. Its not a binary issue of whether a currency can or cannot function on its own. Currencies functioned on their own okay before, and after the Fed, they've arguable done better. Whether you believe it or not is immaterial to my point--we have a wealth of evidence that robust currency can exist without a central authority. Just because bitcoin rebounds after some period of time doesn't mean that a) it wouldn't have been worse if there was central authority and regulation, b) that the rebound is translatable to other currencies, or to other crises, c) that the rebound was a result of anything other than exogenous increases in demand.
Stock price should include risk. Just like a lottery ticket might be worth $0.5 and costs $1 to buy that doesn't mean that after the draw it's not worth buying it off someone for $10 dollars.

In this case I'd expect that he is also suggesting that he believes the stock to be overvalued on typical ways to evaluate stock but from what he believes the company will actually accomplish he thinks the value is higher.
Ask HN: What is your go-to random data generator?
I'm having trouble finding a decent one.

>inb4 google (i have looked)
"Cookies are delicious delicacies"

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213186
It's an API that puts an LLS line through everything. If it isn't meaningful, ignore it.
Note that I've seen VOIP latency increase in the wake of a cable-company deploying a phone option. Disguising the nature of the traffic caused the latency to drop again.
The only case where a completely random strategy works is if there are black swan events occurring at equally random intervals. I agree on the buy-and-hold index fund advice.
I don't have the ability to downvote today, but please take this to Reddit.
It would be interesting to compare this to the equivalent metric for companies that went public: the market cap per user at IPO (or maybe X days after the IPO if there's a lot of volatility?). I'm curious how the valuations differ between IPOs and acquisitions. On one hand IPOs are determined by the open market instead of opaque decisions by a small handful of people. On the other hand, private acquisitions are probably less regulated and allow for more insider information in the pricing (?).

Some other dimensions I'd be interested in are the number of employees, year, current number of users, and (for public companies) current market cap. For acquisitions I'd be curious if there are any decent objective metrics of the "success" of the acquisition.
Untested on Linux? Seems rather silly since Linux is the easiest to test on. It is free and installs wo a license in a VM. Guess I wont be the ginny pig.
I think it's the comma. The visualization code must just grab the first set of numbers.
Paramount Grounds 'Top Gun' Tweeter
Apple case study; the fragility of software
I think only porn sites use that term these days :D
Who said it had to be lethal? You would certainly be able to build a human unfriendly environment if you didn't have to differentiate between crew and pirates. It could be loud noises, bright lights, electrifying things, pepper spray mists, tear gas etc etc.
Because only Reddit can appreciate some good humor, amirite?
Overall I think there are a lot of factors, many that we the public are not privy to, that form the basis of these deals. All of this analysis and speculation is a form of entertainment. And that's fine I guess...
I think what you listed is marketing fluff.

Things I am looking out for:

a) Contributes some sort of additional benefit on the part of the computations being performed, e.g. seti@home
b) Backed by a physical medium such as gold
c) Very anonymous as opposed to public

I think the future will involve many different crypto currencies. There could be compelling business reasons for a company to issue their own currencies.

For example, lets presume there is a cloud AI brain. You can send inquiries to this brain for complex questions you have. This AI is composed of the miners. Like BTC you either can purchase to "AI Coins" or mine them.

In this respect the crypto currency could create its own self-sustaining entity with a real value. Yet it would not really owned by anyone. If the currency got too expensive, at some point you could have a competitor and the prices would balance out.

Speculators can fuck themselves, in the literal sense. For example, the dot com/domain name market had a handful of people buy up most of the good generic domain names. They parked them and earned pay per click revenue from Google and Yahoo. Google realized how much traffic was coming from "direct navigation" and basically put an end to type in domain traffic (and arguably consumers were trained to go elsewhere.) Had these domain names been developed in to good businesses rather than sat on, we would actually expect to see a good web site behind (insert keyword).com. When Google started hijacking the browser there would have been many more complainers.

BTC and other crypto-currencies right now have an outsized proportion of speculators verses those who are actually doing things. When prices rise, you get rich just by buying. Why devote any of your work to anything other than buying?

Right now the best thing that can happen for BTC and crypto-currency is for people to build software that uses it and actually works. Marketing is just painting the same thing over in a new color.
I have the disturbing desire to eat some of my own cloned, cured, salami.
One should read: The Island of Stone Money.