skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No need to be snarky. BitCoin is clearly already being used as a currency - it is being used in exchange for goods and services as a form of liquidity. This means it is a store of value, it is a medium of exchange, and while it isn't yet a unit of account - as others have said here, this seems to just be a matter of adoption. Of course things aare priced in dollar when the dollar remains the world reserve currency.

This idea that a currency needs all features of historical currencies to be considered a currency is ridiculous, and doesn't accommodate a "start-up" currency which is something we've never seen before - at least not globally. At the very least the definition of currency ought to change to something like: "A currency possesses at least 3 out of 5 of these qualities."

None of these qualities are permanent, unchanging qualities. That seems to be the other critical mistake economists are making - failing to see the forest for the trees. That comes from an institutional mindset where only governments (or government-connected organizations) can issue currency and so currency has the aura of permanence.
I found that smashing the arrow keys was the most effective way to play this game.
That's a great question! I kinda wanted to see if a fictional network would look somewhat similar to a real social network such as Facebook. But exploring other networks that are more secluded would be so interesting! Gathering the data would be a challenge :)
Idea I had a while back: Monster.com for anonymous interviews. Purge race, age and gender information from the interview process. Getting a broader range of candidates to the final interview would already be a huge step.

I'm not even sure in-person or phone interviews are necessary or beneficial. I'm aware of a top philosophy dept. that does professor hiring completely be application materials. Why? They found application materials were a better predictor of success than in-person judgements.
I'll agree with that, but it's dysfunction both in the hiring process and also in the R&D process.

M&A has replaced R&D, but it's an extremely wasteful and inefficient replacement. The silly social media apps are actually pretty rare; more common are firms that look like real companies but have junk technology that starts falling apart the minute it's sold.
I like this idea of getting people to questions the labels they use to describe themselves: think about what "tribes" you're in, and why.

It also gets to a deeper issue that OP starts exploring at the end: ultimately, what really matters, is who are we helping? Who are our customers and what do they need?
Any rising investment, if seen in a proper timeframe(with proper rationale) could appear to be a Ponzi scheme.

For example between Feb 2009 to Sept 2012 the price of Apple stock went from $100 to $700. Did the profits of Apple go to 7 times in this time? Not really.

But if you were to only see Apple's stock in this timeframe, AND don't understand Apple's business model, but merely heard that Apple's stock is rising and you should invest in it, then it would appear that older investors are being paid off at the expense of the newer investors.

Noriel Roubini could also very specifically perceive the question about bitcoin as "I heard a lot of my friends are getting rich through bitcoin, should I invest in bitcoin to profit from it?", and then he gives the answer that he gave.
This is very fun and addicting, now I just have to get some work done.
> FWIW, the few folks I know who tried to stay on purely technical paths ended up regretting it many years later.

Why?
Lego Computer Keyboard
Ah good point, I am sorry about that.
I think that is not flat because the iOS trait but performance, since gradiants and other anti-flat UI properties are very expensive about it.
After reading this, this is what came to mind: (from I am legend). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRctxZT-a1A Though, I don't think we'll be needing to worry about mutated zombies it's still an interesting comparison.
> By offloading network requests to either before or after your application is used, you can greatly improve the perception of the quality and responsiveness of your application.

Be careful with this. You might instead drain the battery and data plan all in vain in case i don't read any tweets that day.
I know it sounds a bit snarky, but for a lot of people it seems to be "go get a decent job instead of doing software development". Maybe not going full Gibbons, but I definitely see a lot of people move out of the software world as they get older.
> A really big factor is that people get upset when the number describing their wages goes down.

I doubt whether that is still the case in a (hypothetical) economy that is largely deflationary. In the current context, sure - but to me that seems largely a result of people being used to inflation, and I doubt that that association lasts if inflation is no longer the standard situation.

> Businesses are also disinclined to lower their prices (this isn't a rule, sure businesses lower prices, it's a description of long term aggregate behavior).

Can you elaborate on that?
Bitcoin may itself be deflationary but the problem that presents is being solved by alt-coins. Eventually the crypto-currency ecosystem will iron out the wrinkles, and Bitcoin itself will start to shed some of its bubble-esque valuation as it gets easier to use other crypto-currencies for the same purpose.

People are thinking in terms of the solution rather than in terms of the problem. You shouldn't think of Bitcoin as a thing, Litecoin as a thing, Dogecoin as a thing, and weigh each of these things on their own merits. Instead they're all just competing solutions to the same basic problem.

As problems with Bitcoin surface, the market will gravitate towards other currencies, and the infrastructure will gradually grow to accommodate them so as to provide the same level of services.

It's still a fantastic time to get into crypto-currency. Don't feel like you missed out just because you didn't buy thousands of BTC 2 years ago and saved it till today. The rough and rowdy prospectors are just now giving way to the frontier businessmen, but there's still lots of time and stuff to do until the big players emerge and start wrapping the markets up.
Ageism is real, but if you start going to your local meetup groups, you'll be in good shape. As a young guy, I've discovered I have a bias for assuming all older people at a meetup have at least 15 years of experience on me.

Some people will hold age against you. Those people are small minded assholes -- be glad they're self selecting out.
What is the process for taking the passphrase generated on the website, to being able to import it into the Namecoin-qt client?
Advanced Nutrients Buyout and New Beginnings
A new era for Advanced Nutrients starts today with founder Michael Straumietis becoming the sole owner of the biggest producer of hydroponic nutrients. By taking the reins of the company, BigMike makes sure that Advanced Nutrients will follow a single direction - the right one. One of the very first steps being the introduction of three innovative product lines that will revolutionize the hydroponic industry.
the whole website seems really nice
Awesome. I've been meaning to do the same thing for Final Fantasy VII PC.
Please let article links to be opened in a new tab.
It looks more like a higher-level or job searching for startups. If YC thinks you're a good fit, they add you to a job pool for the start-ups to pick and choose people to actually interview the candidates. Some companies function like that, where the "startups" are the company teams.

This is all perception of whether YC will actually follow this method of course..
>Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing you.

Does this violate equal opportunity employment or is there some weird legal exclusion?
Does anyone know what are the dates for this internship? Is it May-August?
How Organisations Should Deal With The Big Data Knowledge Gap of Consumers
Wow. You can't judge your success by what your parents think, especially not Asian parents who, though they often have the best of intentions, frankly have no idea how things work in the U.S.

Anecdote: my parents, who are from Bangladesh but have lived here since about 1989, called me one day (five years ago now), deeply concerned that my brother wanted to turn down his acceptance to Cal Tech to go to this place called "Yale." They had no idea that there were avenues to success beyond getting a PhD in engineering and going to work for Lockheed-Martin. They're extremely smart, loving, and genuinely concerned parents who supported us (financially and emotionally) in every way, but had these ingrained cultural perceptions that I had to talk them out of.

Also, I'll say this: there's very little you can do with a 3.9 at Georgia Tech that you can't do with a 3.65. Your GPA is well beyond the cut-off where American companies are going to care, except perhaps the snobbiest investment banks or management consulting firms. What held back your job search was almost certainly your narrow scope, not anything about your stats on paper.
Exactly, as evidenced by individuals such as myself. But there is a hardcore contingent of libertarians who are turning this into a crusade against govt regulation, and I, as a BitCoin supporter myself, do not want to be painted by that brush. It makes it easier to attack politically, when we should be discussing BitCoin with technological concerns and on its technological merits so that people aren't blinded by politics when considering it.
Bicycle Parts and Components
Great game! Love the simplicity!

I played a round, and got to 512. But toward the end I wasn't sure if I was actually playing with a strategy, or just pressing buttons randomly with some thinking involved.

So I built a script to randomly press the arrow keys[0]! I let it play a few games, and the highest it got to was 128 before consistently losing. So I guess you'll need some decent strategy to get to 2048.

0 - https://gist.github.com/Wayfarer247/9469272
Wow, that's a generic list indeed. I may need to come up with some non-scientific way to tell which songs go well together... Maybe I'll have to take into account the current alignment of the stars.
That's where we got our data from! This project was done with a team of 4, and everyone entered data while trying to check facts from the Wikia. I realize that there are some edges that are missing and some other characters, but we hoped that this subset of characters and relations would be a good approximate of the real harry potter universe.

If you want to take a look at the data:
https://github.com/efekarakus/potter-network/tree/master/dat...
>If the claims were true anyone could hire up all of the cheap labor and stomp their discriminating competitors. That doesn't happen.

This is a religious belief, and should be treated as such.
> How would you value a Bitcoin?

I would go on bitstamp and see what people are trading them for. That would be around ~$620 at the moment.

If you think this isn't a valid way of valuing something then tell me: How would you value a 2 bedroom flat in London? My guess is you would see how much similar flats nearby are selling for (and if you say you would get an expert valuation - how are they getting the value?)
An interesting point. I doubt if it would be used for that, but it could be.
I am 45 and my current occupation is as an Agile Technical Coach. It does involve a lot of travel, so I take breaks by doing remote-pair programming to spend more time with family and to keep up my coding skills. On Saturdays, I am starting to teach in the Math and Software Engineering Academy for kids 12 to 17. I do work a lot of hours, but the mix of work makes it very satisfying. I feel blessed that I got into this field.
God damn that's addictive, final score: 3040 about an hour wasted at work :P Great concept though, love it.
I didn't say that "vim" is not modern. And I know that many people find it useful. Moreover I use it myself quite often since it is my default console editor. But I found it not so useful for myself as a primary editor. There are reasons that I prefered to skip in the root message to avoid starting of flame war.

But I'm wondering why people keep teach me and advice me how to use vim and emacs? I didn't ask any advices on these two editors. I just asked about alternatives. Maybe not so famous alternatives, but anyway.

I respect your feelings on your favourite editor. And I don't claim you to change your mind about it, nor I want to change mine. I just asked about alternative products.
Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Hit by 150,000 DDoS Attacks Per Second Before Collapse
Any other crypto currency on the road? Like Dogecoins?
Relevant text:

Hong Kong's Air Traffic Control Center reported on Mar 10th 2014 around 17:30L (09:30Z) that an airliner enroute on airway L642 reported via HF radio that they saw a large field of debris at position N9.72 E107.42 about 80nm southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, about 50nm off the south-eastern coast of Vietnam in the South China Sea and about 281nm northeast of the last known radar position. Ships have been dispatched to the reported debris field.
You're using baked-in world population distribution information exactly to make that statement.
> They transfer immediately to local currency (because their suppliers can't be paid in bitcoin).

That is correct, but the question which arises, why are companies introducing this level of complexity for no reason? Why are people hell bent on paying for goods through bitcoins?

Yes its true that currently its a means of money transfer but there is no reason why companies won't just start holding bitcoins. There is no added utility offered in USD which cannot be offered by bitcoins. Once enough market for bitcoin appears people will switch to holding in dollars.
5 things we learned from our 'Women in IT' Google Hangout
Awesome ! Can't wait for the first list !
By the numbers, most people need an intermediary to move even a modest amount of bitcoin. They don't have any.

You can say there is no dependence on a single intermediary.

This is a quibble, but I think it's an important one, for example, a lot of the arguments about using bitcoin in Argentina or whatever ignore the part where Argentinians don't have a whole lot of bitcoin to start using.
I Looked at the site for z.m.l (http://www.z-m-l.com/). It doesn't seem to do math, so it's a nonstarter.

BTW, Pandoc (which does do LaTeX math) really needs no improvement, only more widespread implementation (e.g., an online site, and/or a chrome extension coded in javascript.) I suppose its being written in Haskell has been an impediment.
-Wall -Werror -Wextra -ansi -pedantic As a student I think this are very useful flags, it keeps the code in good shape and prevents common pitfalls. Of course sometimes I have to use -g3 ;)
Flappy Toy
I would say otherwise - the key in protecting identities doesn't lie with information, but on requring not-information.

As per classic security principles, for any risky endeavor "something you know" shouldn't be enough, but it should be combined with "something you have" and/or "something you are".

It doesn't need to be frequent - you can require proof of identity only when [re]issuing proper, private security credentials (no matter if they're passwords, keys or hardware authentification tokens), but it means that the merchant/bank clerk/whoever can't impersonate you afterwards.
We need to be clearer with this so apologies for the confusion. Calculate the sha256 of the passphrase to get the namecoin private key (in hex form). Then import the pk into namecoind or namecoin-qt with importprivkey.
Don't forget Houston and the oil and gas industry. The geophysical and service companies are also full of advanced degrees.
Heroin-assisted treatment
Just calculate the sha256 of the passphrase and you'll get your private key for importing.
> At the very least the definition of currency ought to change to something like: "A currency possesses at least 3 out of 5 of these qualities.

Actually, if you look at the definition of "currency" from various sources, you'll come across stuff like this:

"1. Money in any form when in actual use as a medium of exchange, especially circulating paper money."

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/currency)

... and for "money":

"1. A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account."

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Money)

The problem doesn't seem to be that the definition is incorrect; the problem seems to be that people assume their own definition based on what they're used to, rather than adhering to something you'd find in a dictionary - commonly the motivation appears to be using "it's not a currency" as a (fallacious) reason to express their dislike of something like Bitcoin.
That's probably a safe assumption. I'd imagine he was looking for another very senior-level job. In that case, it seems silly to use it as an example for why there might be a shortage of talent for entry-level to mid-level engineers. It doesn't seem like his experience was detrimental, or that he didn't fit some specific pattern (based on age, etc).
As someone who recently jumped into using hardware to make industrial design prototypes, I can say the biggest hurdle I've faced is the programming aspect of it. Currently there doesn't seem to be a quick way of making a GUI that controls hardware. I would love to do this through HTML, but without knowing Python, I'm basically SOL. Adafruit and Sparkfun tutorials can only take you so far, but when you need to make an interface for your hardware, the options are much more limited for the non-programmer.
As someone who occasionally hires, a masters doesn't really show much in terms of talent, but it does sometimes show a level of specialization. And, there are times when I need a specialist (e.g. image processing, feature analysis, statistics, etc.). But, generally, I don't need a lot of specialists.

Also, there seem to be two types of people who go for masters. There are those that really love their particular specialty, and are willing to sacrifice significant opportunity costs to master it. I respect that group. And, then there are those that think that a masters will get them more pay, but who also had calculated that they couldn't increase their pay the hard way (e.g. working for it). I'm wary of the that group.

Also, when hiring a specialist, I don't want one who has focused on topics that any good developer with a B.S. can research independently: operating systems, languages, data structures, algorithms. I want one with a particular domain specialty - someone who can read recent research papers, and implement it.
>Who is claiming that first world women are an untapped source of cheap labor? In what field?

The people who claim that women are discriminated against purely based on gender. If women really are being discriminated based on gender, and companies are hiring less qualified men in favor of more qualified women, then someone should be able to hire up all of the women who are being snubbed by all of the sexist companies and have a competitive advantage over them, right? Same situation with older people, right? Unless of course if this isn't about age or sex. I'm female and not getting any younger by the way. But I still don't buy the bull others try to sell.

>Age discrimination in this context applies to employee hiring.

Are older people better employees or worse? Are they hiring based on age or the other things and age is only an easy thing to blame?

>Is "risk taking" a criteria your company applies when looking for talent?

No startup is a sure thing. Younger people are less risk averse. It's not that a company wants people who will take risks it's that older people want more of a sure thing. They walk in and expect a salary which matches their years of experience, while most places hiring have no use for their experience. Their experience would add no value to their business, and so hiring a younger person who does not demand such a high salary is a better option.

>For one thing, the market can't reward new approaches if no-one tries them.

There is no law keeping the people clamoring about ageism from do that. No one can force others to nor should they be able to. Clearly if they believe that hiring older people is such a good move they should be able to make a lot of money.

I'm unaware of laws which make it harder or impossible for older people to get hired?
MediaTemple now does Managed WordPress Hosting
Show HN: Scientific Gaming – Minnesota Spacewar reconstructed
I don't want to pollute this thread with an offtopic discussion. If you want to talk about it feel free to send me an email, it's on my profile.
That would be fine if there was no copyright.

GPL use is only useful as long as copyright exist: should it not exist then GPL is not just not useful anymore but not needed at all!

I'd just disassemble what you did and release it as open source again :D
Show HN: A daily summary of what's happened in the world of Bitcoin
1. -fomit-frame-pointer is implied by O3 on most platforms now

2. "too likely to cause harm, too unlikely to make a significant performance difference in most cases."

Please define "most cases". Without this, GCC will have significant trouble being able to derive the bounds of most loops, and in turn, will not be able to vectorize, unroll, peel, split, etc.

Saying "unlikely to make a significant performance different in most cases" is probably very very wrong for most people. The last benchmarks I saw across a wide variety of apps showed the perf difference was 10% in most cases, and a lot more in others.
It means you've been accepted for an interview at a YC company.
Go to management and learn to play politics. Sooner or later you'll have to. There will always be someone younger and cheaper that will be good enough for the not so challenging lob you have. You just can't compete with them. Yes, there are places where one can advance much longer on a pure technical path, but there are so few these jobs and places that it's just no realistical if you are not in top 1% both in technical or luck skills.

If you want more money, sooner or later you'll have to "take more responsibility" and "lead the team". While being on the management level just above the programmers, you'll still have some contact with the technical part, but when you progress further, you'll loose it and become the pure bean counter and look at other programmers as resources.

And you will hate that, but you still have this mortgage you have to pay, and to save for your kids colledge, maybe go few times a year on vacation, or you need to do that latest gadget as an impulse buy.

And with the time, you will hate your job, as much as anyone else at that position. You will start to question whether it was the right choice to become software engineer. But it was. You had some ten years when you liked your job and found it both well paid and satisfying, which is much more average person, even with a degree, can realistically hope to have.

/rant

Being in a similar situation, I had to vent a bit. I made my choice to switch to the dark side and go the management route. I know I'll hate it, but that's the reality where I live. I know I could get a few more years as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, but USA is among the last places on earth where I would like to raise my family. So, management, here I come.
Sure, that's because currently they're worth ~$600.

I'm a big fan of bitcoin, but even I can see that they could potentially become worthless. However, the odds of that are incredibly small (it would need either a breakthrough in cryptography or a critical bug to be discovered)