skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people like to picture the bitcoin inventor as some sort of god who knew everything in advance. The truth is in 2008/2009 (almost?) nobody was sure that bitcoin will succeed. Even Hal Finney(famous cypherpunk, who actively participated in the developing of the idea of the bitgold by creating RPOW: http://www.finney.org/~hal/rpow/ ), even Hal Finney was sceptical: "turned [bitcoin] off because it made my computer run hot" and "was surprised to find that it was not only still going, bitcoins actually had monetary value.[late 2010]"

It is probably that not only cypherpunks thought that bitcoin is nice but weird idea, but also Satoshi Nakamoto himself. True, if it takes off, Satoshi will change the world and make some money, but what if it doesn't? Then bitcoin is like bit gold or b-money -- cool theoretical concept, and Satoshi want some recognition for his work(just like Nick Szabo or Wei Dai who used their real names).

Of course there is some chance that bitcoin will succeed, so Satoshi wants to protect himself from government hostility. He knows about Liberty Dollar(don't confuse with Liberty Reserve), he knows about e-gold, and he knows about Phil Zimmermann(criminal investigation related to PGP).

So why does Satoshi need anonymity? Well, he doesn't. All he needs is _plausible deniability_, and he maintains it pretty well.
The military part is negative-sum for the world.

A competent engineer designing weapons, even if he makes $150k to spend on food/cars/etc. and support those people, is still depriving humanity of the $100k to near-infinity of positive contribution ("consumer surplus") he could be making, some of which he'd capture as additional expected income, if he worked on something genuinely useful to humanity.

The only reason we have a military is to protect from other militaries; therefore, militarism is a parasite.
Would hydrophones be able to pick up the sound of an aircraft crashing into the ocean?
Here is a counter proposal: the government should approve this request, but stipulate that the immigrants relocate to somewhere other than silicon valley (so all of the created jobs don't end up in the once place where they aren't needed).
My thought is that it's not because they mean to be rude. It's because they pattern match. I've noticed when folks see the same pattern over and over it's difficult to see outside it.

My friends wife is an F16 fighter pilot. I was surprised to find that out. Truth is I should not have been surprised, but it went against the patterns I'm used to seeing.

I wonder if that's at play here?
Some points on my mind:

a) Most adventurous student entrepreneurs don't really MUST need a founder visa, they can use OPT. I think founders of Stripe did that.

b) Most non-immigrants already working (mostly with H1 visa) needs a founder visa. To work on a startup you founded in H1b visa is hard, consider H1b visa needs some funding/salary requirement on your startup, and that is hard to get by on the early stage of a startup. Giving these people the visa may be important to the U.S. economy consider that group of budding founders are with the most experiences.

c) Maybe approval of founder visa won't be in the near future. Right now that is really tangled with other messes in the Immigration Act, which seems hopeless at the House in the stage.

d) Really +1 for founder visa. Can't afford to lose foreign entrepreneurs to Canada.
They're going to be 'disrupted'?

I'm not sure whether or not AirBNB should ever have come thus far. They're essentially offloading all the unpleasantness and liabilities of the hotel business on random schmucks that rent out their flats.

There are two ways this could play out. AirBNB will have to start playing by the rules that everybody else plays by, or they'll completely deregulate the Hotel business and we'll all be in comment-spam ratinghell while planning trips in the future.
> In statistics, σ refers to an area under the normal distribution defined in terms of standard deviations (1σ = 1 standard deviation).

No. The Gaussian (normal distribution) is not
involved. Sigma is just the symbol for
standard deviation, that is, the square root
of the variance. So, for random variable
X where with expectation E[X] that exists
and is finite (in practice a weak
assumption), the standard deviation is
square root of E[(X - E[X])^2].

So, the standard deviation is just a number,
a measure of how 'spread out' the distribution
is, and not an "area". Then 5σ is just 5 times
the standard deviation.
No. They're not saying anything at all.
I'd say its neither.

People react to a story based on the total context, not entirely on the facts. In the previous story, (if I remember correctly), it was presented as an ordinary individual who had their place ransacked and now was afraid to live there. There was an outpouring of support due to the individual being so sympathetic and the case being delivered in such a desperate tone.

In this case the guy comes of (true or not) as entitled and antagonistic.

----

That said, a careful reading of the situations shows its not factually indentical.

The previous case was a home-owner. AirBnB now protects people who own the property from damage caused when leasing.

This case is a renter, who was essentially running a hotel room out of his apartment--an act against his lease, and perhaps even illegal in his area.
You're quite right that people tend to miss the broader point.

Could be my fault, could be that more people - on this site in particular - ought to be familiar with pg's Disagreement Hierarchy: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

...or with its even more powerful cousin http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/
stupid fuck.

NIST

God says...
wastoid delicious petty to_infinity_and_beyond clever umm_what_now
taxes absetively_posilutely who's_to_say astrophysics
be_happy glam hippy humongous play Ghost smack_some_sense_into_you
Okilydokily I'm_good_you_good obviously pick_me_pick_me
umm_the_other_answer these_cans_are_defective Angel do_you_know_what_time_it_is
how_about_that husband
I'd assume you do agree that excessive speeding constitutes a crime as a it raises the chances of inflicting injury on others. If there was a statistical link between a drug and increasing the chance of the user committing violence would you still consider drugs victimless?

I raise the point as someone who is quite happy to support marijuana and alcohol use, but believe the definition of victimless is not an easy one.
Doesn't verification just mean that you're a 'real person' not necessarily a 'good person'?
Not being able to keep a complex math problem in ones head would be a memory problem as well, would it not... before my age 34 diagnosis - forget math all together... my working memory was abysmal; now I am completing 2nd year IT: ComSci. I have a chance, thanks to that "demon" stimulant medication, and a environment, where I am not told I am "lazy" any more. This article, while seemingly accurate, leaves out the obvious rare case of actual ADHD.
So you get a visa, with fewer rights? How long would that restriction on their freedom of movement last?
That's pretty wacky. Could you explain a bit more about how the transformation works? I can't quite see how you run bingo behind the scenes but display something that looks like poker. They seem too different.
Seriously. You are so biased that it is easier for you to believe that other people are downright lying than to accept inconvenient truth. I was running it in the interpreted mode. Isn't that how one is supposed to run tutorials code? And obviously I've added the following:

#load "graphics.cma";;

into the file first. And forgot about it, when writing the post. So no magic here. "Beautiful" syntax by the way.

And no, I wasn't trolling. I just wanted to see what that recursion would do. The code is not exactly crystal clear there, with names like start_x and such. But it really did not work. And the syntax is really ugly. And you can believe what you like.
Down-voters: explain, please?

You don't think the experience from this type of policy being tried somewhere else is relevant? That it won't backfire?
Much more playable than I expected.

Now someone do one based on taste and smell.
Has anyone else pondered what would happen if knowledgeable people were to help Australians perform a civil protest in the form of a resource consumption attack?

Even with data caps in place I'm sure one could perform quite a few requests/second continuously for an entire month.

Multiply that by (hundreds of?) thousands of protesters and the logging system could be overwhelmed. Especially considering such a system would likely be badly implemented by the lowest bidder.

Even if it were not overwhelmed, the requests could be tailored to trigger as many false-positives as possible.
If you want to write to policy makers in Washington then you should publish a well written Op-Ed in the WSJ, NYT or WaPo, not a blog post.
You're making interesting assumptions about myself. I speak 5 languages fluently; trust me I watch movies, shows, pieces from many, many countries. (I'm not a native English speaker).

This is valid for my tastes in music, painting, books(I've been raised with classic french litterature, but read stuff from all over the world).

(I find it amusing when I see hipsters saying they're "eclectic", yet all their bands sing in English..)

So I understand your assumption that "most" people are spot on top of a Gaussian distribution, listen to popular music, watch popular movies.. People do what other people do. I simply not. Not because I'm contrarian (although this can prove useful in this era), but simply because I have a delicate taste and been exposed to many nice things to spoil my senses.

Furthermore, my words have been distorted. There are many young actors and singers I appreciate a great deal.

PS: You can't deny that the number of cool movies has "sort of decreased". When you see the sequel of a movie like 300, and sequels for everything.. I've watched so many movies that I can tell how a movie will go and I'll be disturbingly close. Heck at one time I unraveled the plot of a movie my friend was watching while I was almost asleep and only listening to audio. Good writers, we need more of those.
Nobody's proposing to eliminate existing visa categories. Indeed, existing visas such as E-2 or EB-5 are good for allowing immigrants to start self-funded businesses. Sam's proposing a new category, for entrepreneurs that aren't bringing their own money.
I don't know if it works for other services, but it's my understanding that airbnb carries liability insurance for exactly this situation. Otherwise, what is the point of giving them a cut? At 3% for the host (in addition to guest fees), that's certainly not a small fee. Think of it like insurance. There are other avenues for renting out an apartment that don't cost anything and thus do not provide insurance or reimbursement such as craigslist.
What has DARPA done for me lately?

Money seems to be an excellent motivator, but when death is on the line people seem to embrace a little more out of the box thinking. Rent seeking and collusion to avoid innovation seem to be problems with both the money and violence types of power.
Yes, there are reasons, but it doesn't matter because whatever there reasons are - you'd disagree with it anyways, correct?
I can believe, however, that neuroscience gets it worse, because it has more obvious applications in the lives of readers/viewers etc.
No one was proposing that in Canada either... :(
What visas are being mainly used now?
>The rule of thumb is that hedge funds charge a 2% per year management fee and keep 20% of all profits,

>All returns shown are net of fees

So, subtract 20% from the 3 positive numbers, and that's about 6% in fees (this may be off by a bit, I'm quickly approximating the math in my head). Subtract another ~8% for 4 years of fees, and that's about 14% combined fees. 26% - 14% = 12%. Seems to be about right.

The author could have made the way he calculated the fees more clear, but his point stands that a huge % of hedge fund profits go to fees.
I we 100% sure that the plane turned to west? This line aligns with; where the plane lost, and where the oil platform worker noticed a fire on the sky. May be the plane was on the sky, or on the water why pinging?
In Australia they have something similar for a few professions(teaching being a big one). Generally it's 1 year in somewhere really undesirable, then 2 more years in ok places then freedom. Though in those cases you're being sponsored by a government organisation that is generally also your employer.

The only way I could see making it work in this case would be if it was specific cities doing the sponsoring and requiring the business to be run out of incubator type offices for X amount of time. So not very well at all.
Exactly

Yes, the regular virtualenv may work with Python 3 but it's a small detail in a frustrating setup. When I finally found out how you're supposed to do in > 3.4 it was a relief, still

Just tested 3.4 as it is like in 2.X, so, problem solved and no-one has to worry about this anymore.
Because it involves an important issue within our industry, and how a major company is dealing with it.
All I see locally is a ".onecache" file - a binary file that appears to contain the notes themselves, and a directory named "OneNoteOfflineCache_Files" of attachments (embedded images, etc.) I don't recognize the header on the onecache file, so I'm guessing it's proprietary.
The more I play 2048, the more I feel that it's addictive because it's simple and it's based on "consolidation", both concepts naturally compatible with the brain.
> a) Most adventurous student entrepreneurs don't really MUST need a founder visa, they can use OPT. I think founders of Stripe did that.

Founder of Stripe here. Not disagreeing with anything you've said, but I feel I should point out that OPT is far from ideal: it doesn't last very long, it requires the job is related to the field of study, full-time work is permitted only during vacations prior to completion of a degree, etc. Still, it can be a useful stopgap in some cases, as you point out.
With Google's Robot-Buying Binge, A Hat Tip To The Future
What an entitled prick. "I have money, therefore give me control over government processes."
Central planning worked so well for the Soviets. Does your rule still apply if one of them is called Musk?
> FFT algorithms were not patented, but imagine what a shame it would be if they were.

The only way this conclusion follows is if you're judging patentability of an idea by the impact the idea has had. This is plainly absurd. Lets consider the opposite, what if it were invented but the algorithm kept secret because patent protection didn't exist. Would humanity have been better off in that scenario? Processes like the FFT are exactly the types of software that are reasonable to patent, and yet you want to claim the opposite precisely because it was non-obvious and so important?
The problems described here aren't just limited to startups: Support personnel is often neglected in large companies too. A couple of years ago, I was working at a very large company that was also suffering from high turnover. Calls were made first by business analysts, who really didn't understand what the heck was going on, and implemented in some fashion or another by developers like me, who were far removed from the realities of the software. With all that turnover, nobody that was actually working on the software understood what the real use cases were, so if a decision actually matched what a user wanted, it was probably by accident.

Having worked at better shops, I realized this was only going to lead to dismal failure, so I started asking around for real information on what was going on. And guess what: There was a support team, 90% female, who nobody actually consulted for anything, and was paid peanuts. And yet, they actually had more information about the practical uses of the application, and where to take it, than the PhD totting analysts. After a few weeks talking to said support team, and explaining how to actually make sense of what we were doing, I was seen as some kind of Messiah by management, when all I actually did was actually pay attention to the people that had the actual knowledge.

As far as sexism, yes, it's very sad that most of us view so few females that are even put in a position to succeed that it's easy to make assumptions about people's knowledge. I've been lucky to have worked with a couple of extremely good female programmers, and about a dozen women doing support work, so that I am at least not astounded when a woman at a user group isn't just a recruiter. But that doesn't mean I won't make wrong assumptions. The best most of us can do is recover quickly, and remember that while there are few women in the industry, their skill and knowledge is no different than the one of men.
> From a practical standpoint, widespread polygamy (which usually means polygyny) can lead to imbalances in marriage opportunity

So can widespread monogamy in certain circumstances. In fact, that's pretty much why polygamy usually manifests as polygyny -- in societies with norms favoring men fighting, or engaging in other high-risk activities and protecting women (and children, usually, but while that's important to the motivation, its irrelevant to the effect), after certain types of events, such as large scale (for the community affected) conflict, an exclusive monogamy rule means most women have no mates and prevents a society from rebounding (and makes it more likely that there culture will die out).

This is also probably why in history polygamy loses acceptance as a general norm as the scale of society gets larger and these kind of events affecting a whole society become less common.
I am not talking about debtors prison, that is someone who goes to prison to pay off debts because they are in over their head and becomes a servant. I am talking about rehabilitation for a crime committed against others who worked hard for their money. There is a difference.

If you run a ponzi scheme, you are incurring large debtors prison type effects on others (taking their rights they earned -- they lose their hard earned money and have to work harder to get it back). The punishment should be the same for ponzi fraudsters at that level. They need to work throughout their sentence at a job to feel what they have done to others. They would also maybe get more insight out of it and rehabilitate more in life feeling the effects of what they have done. I am talking about cases for high profile fraud, again not debt prison for non-criminals but more like a fine that fits the crime just as we do today with that not costing us room and board.

What would be better for a guy like Bernie Madoff? Sitting in an everything provided cushy prison after stealing everyone's money or having to work back that debt through a job in society? He'd get alot more rehabilitation seeing how hard it is for the duration of his sentence. It will never happen but it is more closely rehabilitation than sitting in a prison costing tax payers even more. It would also keep him away from other high profile criminals. Locking him up and costing yearly to do so might make some feel good but it is a net loss further in many cases.
It's a dream to think that law was enacted to put an end to those kinds of troubles.

Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain.

Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore.

The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals?

The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it?

Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters

Get real people!!

Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.
"Maybe he was too ambitious in asking for 10,000 startup visas per year." hmm, lowering expectations a couple of orders of magnitude for a highly selective group? i'm a fan of YC and all, and agree that it'll probably end up being the cream of the crop thus a great likelihood to succeed, but i really do wish this issue was tackled properly - its so painful. I'd personally love to build something here (happily even with my own capital) but can't. I appreciate the call for action, though, but man - trying to immigrate here is rough.. when the conversation becomes 'let us just prove it with 100', while time keeps ticking on.. i wonder if anything will really happen.
Okay, sounds like a misunderstanding about what "web app" means. Sorry about that!

I think of a web app as the client side alone, which can be quite a substantial amount of code with something like GMail or Google Maps. Of course on the server side, you can make a mostly-independent choice of language, RPC mechanisms aside. But for the client side, I'd choose a language based on how well it compiles to JavaScript and can use browser API's and JavaScript libraries.

I don't know whether OCaml is ahead of Haskell in this space. I've tinkered with Elm a little bit.
I'm actually in the process of writing an app to do this. If you'd be interested in seeing the MVP when it is ready, feel signup to our mailing list: http://launch.renewalmonitor.com/
Help bring Amazon-like Bitcoin marketplace to life
This is foolish logic.

AirBnB vouched for the trustworthiness of this "David" fellow through their "Verified" badge. This is also their duty and responsibility as the facilitator between renters and rentees. And the process is the same on eBay--if your deal somehow turns out be less than legitimate, eBay will step in and attempt to resolve the situation, as the facilitator between buyer and seller. It is not that it is eBay or AirBnB's "fault", but they do have a reputation to uphold by being a responsive and trustworthy deal facilitator.

Also, craigslist is a listing of classified, and does not facilitate or participate in deals in any way. It is a flawed comparison.
> The only thing that gives me solace is that the industries summarily executed this morning have an A+ lobbying game

So don't worry, A+ lobbying beats supreme court. I understand that this is just the opinion of one guy, but it is deeply disturbing that no-one has called him on that.
It really depends. Traditionally, the US navy was to stop pirates from screwing with US exports. IMHO it was a pretty effective policy. we pay taxes, our stuff gets to new markets.

Iraqi oil is apparently doing nice things for XOM, not sure if they payoff will be worth the price. Afghanistan seems like a loser. There's nothing there we can take to pay for the war.
What about credit cards, debit cards, checking, savings, ATM, online banking, mortgages, heloc, etc?
The thing is...we've been talking about geeks and discrimination for years now. "Ignorance" is no longer a valid excuse.
My favorite tidbit from the article:

'This has allowed researchers like Wise, at Unbounded Robotics, to tackle harder problems, such as trying to teach bots to plug themselves in.

"Just to recognize one type of outlet in different lighting conditions was a very difficult problem," Wise says.'
There's a subreddit for these: http://www.reddit.com/r/2048/
The interface is a bit tricky to use (I couldn't get the drop-off marker placed) but the data is amazing.
Oh, ok. Look everyone, now it's the number that's the problem. How many more ways can we think of to discredit this notion, which is clearly so in need of discrediting? Get to work, people.