skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem though is that if there is even a chance a service will be shut down (with a year's notice or otherwise) then on a financial basis alone, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost.

I agree entirely with @bcantrill's comment. I look at Google's PaaS services with the very real concern that they may be switched off or changed at any time.

The reality of this is not just that it will have a financial cost but may well deal a mortal blow to the business. Unless Google makes a long term implicit (big customer) or explicit (rock solid 5-year SLA) commitment to these services they're just too risky to build a complex business on (unless it's a business which is enabled by the marginal cost savings).
> But, does it strike anyone else as odd that the IRS ignores that bitcoin _is_ actually currency? Can they even declare it to be property when the reality is that it is currency?

"Property" is a statement about a legal relationship between a person and some (tangible or intangible) thing.

"Currency" is a statement about an attribute of a thing idnependent of its legal relationship to any person.

Whether a thing is "currency" and whether it is someone's "property" are orthogonal concerns. It can be either, both, or neither. The fact that it is one does not prevent it from being the other.
What I Think of Jsonb
HyperSwitcher brings Windows-like task switching to OS X
Devices sold each year is not the same as devices in use at any given moment. Because of the break-neck pace and carrier subsidies, consumers replace smartphones faster than anything else. So obviously you're going to see fewer set-top boxes, portable gaming devices, notebooks, etc. devices being sold. But Google doesn't care how many Android devices are sold, because they don't make a dime from sales. They want the OS to be used.
This is quite unfair.

Android has had a huge impact on the phone market in terms of openness, for manufacturers as well as for end users. I took advantage of this when I put CyanogenMod on my phone using the unlocking tool provided by HTC. I didn't even think of doing something like that with my pre-Android phones.

If you choose to buy a locked-down Android device, blame yourself and then blame Linus: he's the one strongly objecting to distributing Linux under the GPLv3 license, because he dislikes the very clause that would guarantee your freedom to tinker with you device's kernel. But even if every Android was as closed as a TiVo box, it would still be an open-source victory. It would just be a victory more relevant to the manufacturers world than to the users world.

Chrome OS device are similarly hackable, each Chromebook having a switch to turn on Developer Mode. I took advantage of this to run a Debian chroot in my Chromebook's linux system.

More generally, I find it ironic that people complain about Android and Chrome OS not being "real Linux". For years we have had flame wars about Linux vs GNU/Linux terminology, and now people say that Androids and Chromebooks don't really run Linux because they are not anything like a GNU environment. Turns out the Linux vs GNU/Linux distinction is actually useful.
It did make me chuckle, I admit, but the joke is old enough to buy its own beer.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful#References
If you're mining in a pool, you should have a record of when you got each fractional allocation of Bitcoins. You could then look up the Bitcoin/USD rate at that time from historical data at one of the exchanges. This is going to be one very large spreadsheet.

One benefit is that you can probably batch rounds together and only count the bitcoins as "realized" when they are sent from the pool to you (at payout). This way you won't have to figure out the rates for each shift.
My experience at repeatedly starting companies is not that taking risk for yourself is hard -- if you have simple taste, enjoy coding and are articulate enough to identify a problem and conceive a solution… There is no reason to be, really. I mean: sitting on your ass wondering what to do is pretty much what anyone looking for a job does after that phone-call, and no one has described job seekers as heroes, certainly not developers.

What still scares the be-jeezus out of me, and anyone I’ve met is getting someone else involved, pretending that you know your thing and making them, innocent travel companions, crash with you, unaware that it’s all shadows and illusion. I’m assuming that’s why psychopaths are so good at that stage: they can hire ten people that they can’t pay, and not care for the life of them that their baby won’t have formula to eat in two months. (I’ve seen that with my own eyes. Spoiler alert: it cries.)

I am not surprised that HomeJoy founder gave her home to those first helpers: with an ounce of human decency, that must have felt like a tenth of the bare minimum she was asking from them. That discomfort must have been less that the inhumane hours. Good on her, and great for her.

The fact that Sam Altman fails to see that the problem is generally others scares me.
What would you say the difference between property and currency is?
> In the end I just grabbed a 500 GB USB HDD as it was less of a hassle.

Sneakernet wins again!
And they can subtract their investments (e.g. handguns, crowbars ) from income tax.
These days this is quite automatible. Large purchases, like houses and cars, are public.
> I think the point is though that if there is even a chance that a service will be shut down in a year then even on a financial basis, the cost savings up to that point will be drowned out by the switching cost.

There is always a chance that a service will be shut down in a year no matter who the provider is.
How does this work when mining in a pool is nearly continuous? You earn 0.000000x btc per share in a pool, and you might earn a share every few seconds.

What exchange do I use to determine the value of the btc?
But have never been upfront about that fact that it would likely take them 3 years to enter the market. Most of their email blasts are about them being right around the corner
Marc Andreessen: My prediction is that the libertarians will turn on Bitcoin
Yep, that's a big difference.

RethinkDB is also a document store, whereas FoundationDB is an ordered K/V store at its core (although transactions / layers allow for richer data modeling through stateless translation "layers").

I don't think there's any data on RethinkDB and Jepsen. Would be interesting to see someone do the work to make that happen.
> But it will nevertheless be under copyright until long after we're all dead, so if you read it Microsoft could presumably still decide to sue you for copyright infringement if that ever happens to seem advantageous for them.

You'd have to actually, you know, infringe their copyrights.

It's hard to know if you're one of the many who are confused about copyright, patent, and trademark but just reading the code doesn't put you on the hook for anything.
1 USD ~ 100 PKR. Minimum wage is 10k PKR and typical college educated people earn 20k on their first job.

So minimum bus/van/route-rickshaw fare is 15 PKR. Might have gone up to 20 PKR since I was home. Max goes up to about 50-60 PKR. (you pay for how far you want to go).

taxi-rickshaws can cost anywhere from 30 PRK (1 km) to 600 PKR cross city (20-30). Depends on from where to where you are going, time of the day, and your ability to haggle.
I got 1.2 in my ZTE Open and, although there's an improvement, I wouldn't bother. Go for 1.3 release candidate (at least! 1.4 got feature complete some days ago, but it might be a little bit on the edge).
A 30,000 year old giant virus is coming back to haunt you...
I don't know anything about Mylar or the people who created it; I was speaking in more general terms. As an example of what I'm talking about, see Reinhart and Rogoff. Those two rascals would probably beg off of Github because Excel, but that's actually more proof (as if more were needed after their shenanigans) that economics papers shouldn't be written using Excel.

I don't expect other people in the research group to catch all of those types of errors, so a more openly collaborative environment would be an improvement. (I doubt R&R would set up an account for the UMass grad student who caught their error. The attempted replication that took him a month would have been much simpler if he could have git-cloned.) It doesn't have to be Github: Bitbucket would be fine. Even an academics-only or field-focused equivalent would get most of the way there, although it would exclude most interaction with the interested amateur public. Especially for those whose field is computer science, "maintaining" a Github account doesn't seem onerous.
> I'm tired of hearing all the things Google has done for Linux. Maybe we could talk a little more about how free software has facilitated the growth of one of the top tech companies on the planet.

I think the case can be made that both are true -- Linux desperately needed a way to win public acceptance, Google needed an unencumbered foundation for various projects.

Also, we mustn't forget the snowball effect -- when an operating system gets to a certain point in installed base, it becomes the operating system. All signs are that Linux will get to that point, and Google will have been one of the primary reasons.
Goat Simulator will be off the hook.
Ahhh, I forgot about that part of the paper. I read it a few weeks ago, my apologies :)
Clever is a brilliant company: I've had clients in K12 app development for years and Clever provides a stable target for integrations with student information systems.

I'm rooting for Clever to grow into higher ed, especially starting with the edX.org schools. I see enormous potential for integrations among edX open source software and the various backend university IT systems ranging from Oracle Business to legacy COBOL to in-house apps built with Java, Ruby, Python, etc.
What's a halo product?
Which exchange price would you use too?
I think just sticking to one framework is the best way to go - I decided to go rails because it's the lowest common denominator, stupid amount of resources on it and approachability for a beginner.. even then.. it's still pretty damned hard. (for me anyway)
As for cash and cocaine, you track the items that it's being spent on.

If you buy a burger with bitcoin, then, well, noone cares if you didn't pay taxes on that; but if you buy a car or a mansion with bitcoin (or bitcoin-derived resources), then the item is visible, and they can audit your income and purchases to trace the source of that money (and untraceable source = your problem).
As long as you don't need to use the external network with that data. The network costs dominate the price if you need to serve up any of that data.
I now added a handler so the tooltip disappers when you click or touch anywhere outside of it. Does this solve it?
Wow didn't know MIT was a pawn in the COINTELPRO.
500 millionth iPhone sold?
It works fine for me. So does Netbeans. Haven't tried IntellyJ, but it will probably work fine too.
New benchmarking scheme: "Entire available computing power on the planet in year XXXX"

Awesome.
1. There's nothing wrong with making a product and putting it on your resume. I did it and it helped me land a consulting job. In consulting a projects a project.
2. You don't know until you try. it's way better to work on improving your skills than improving your game characters skills.
3. My uncle's a sales guy and he's talked his way into a lot of jobs on BS. Putting the best possible spin on your situtation is sales(excluding lying, of course).
Prelaunch and already panicked
I built stuff on Google App Engine for free, for years.
Thanks, but that's not usable enough for me.
Sounds like an absolute tax nightmare. In a pool you are awarded some small amount of coins every couple hours. Mine for a month, and you'll have hundreds or thousands of "bitcoin income" events, each with its own market price.
Ask HN: Why do ATMs run on Windows?
Seems like a lousy choice for a machine that needs to be highly secured.
Do you need to have it managed? Why not just have a service where you put in your addresses and it looks through the blockchain to find all the transactions you performed, etc. I believe as long as it keeps historical prices it could get very good results even if each BTC transaction doesn't log how much USD-et-al was involved.
How so? These aren't new rules, just old rules that are newly applied to Bitcoin. As others have noted, this is how things work for employer issued stock. You only put yourself in danger if you are ignorant of the rules and don't take necessary precautions. If you are investing enough to open yourself up to a capital gains loss of more than $3000, you have no excuse to be ignorant.

Tax tip from a non-lawyer/non-accountant - Immediately sell a percentage of your newly mined bitcoin equal to your marginal tax rate. If your tax rate is 25%, sell 25% of your bitcoin as soon as it is mined. Those coins already belong to the US government. If you don't convert to cash immediately, you are basically leveraging the government's money to invest in Bitcoin speculation.
I imagine the provider ecosystem will be the next nut to crack, both in terms of general regulation and requirements to issue 1099s and the like.
It says TrueCar has 7000 dealers now here:
http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/27/leadership/truecar-painter.p...
define 'reality'
In summary: Why create a game when you can design and implement a new programming language?
If I ammortize the time, frustration and cost over a decade it's only penny/seconds a day.
No, it's not open source.

To access this material, you must agree to the terms of the license displayed here, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
Go to the advanced search feature on Linkedin, a.k.a. "the lazy recruiters best friend". Finding target profiles is relatively straight forward. Happy Hunting!
"You are either secure, or not secure. There is no in between."

First, no, everything is in between. You're never "secure", you're secure against certain classes of threats.

Second, I didn't say "secure", I said "anonymous". Leaving someone a handwritten note is more anonymous than meeting them face-to-face and producing ID, even if they could potentially hire handwriting experts and find you.

"BTC is a permanent public ledger that can be analyzed for the rest of time. Without mixers (or similar techniques), it becomes possible to figure out lots of facts."

Certainly. Even with mixers, it's possible to figure some of it out - I've said many times, "you're never leaking less information than you think". Even so, this sort of thing requires someone do the analysis, which is far easier to automate if you've got a big long list of (btc account, TIN) of a large percentage of actors in the system.

"So don't play the ignorance game, learn about the current state of affairs and understand the risks you're taking."

I own no bitcoins, and have never used a mixer. I'm not "playing the ignorance game", I'm trying to cure my ignorance. Don't be a dick.
Everything about this website makes me happy and I read it regularly.
> you still should be able to write correct code for reading bytes from one stream, writing to another, without losing data in between.

With access to Google and the library documentation sure, but I don't use those APIs often enough to be worth keeping in memory.
That is actually true. Not every cab driver knows in minute detail every place in the city, or might know them by different names. All I said was that if someone gives you verbal directions to someplace it's easy to get there because the city structure is simple.
Ask HN: Free software to solve my process and technical reminder needs
I juggle many different projects simultaneously at work. Each project is involves different teams (processes) and technology. I find myself losing track of all the moving pieces.

Is there software available to help categorize and easily look up notes/cards? (perhaps tag based)

It would be a big bonus if the software supported multiple users to share and collaborate.

Thanks
I used to work as a programmer in a game company shipping on consoles+PC. The first time we embedded a scripting language in our engine to be used by the level designer's they surprised the whole team with their new found 'toy'. This was great and lessened the burden on programmers.
Fast forward to first milestone (everyone crunching) and the milestone was delayed ... The level designers (not being programmers) had introduced a new category of bugs. Compound that to that fact that this script language had a very very primitive debugger ... hell ...
So that means if I hold it over 1 year I can treat any gains as LONG TERM capital gains, right?
Yes, it would be great.

I don't think that world exists. I think this is true in all realms - not just cryptography or infosec...
It's a product that raises perceived quality of the rest of the brand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#Halo_effect_and_bra...
I plan to learn Clojure this year. What online resources and books can you recommend for learning the language and the tooling?
With couchdb you can set up your own couch cluster replication topology:

* master-slave

* a tree

* a ring

* a ring with overlaps

* completely connected graph

Well basically any graph topology you like. Replications can be pull or push. The downside is you are in charge of handling and setting up proxies and deciding how memebership is handled. Whether you have a proxy or not and if so how do client pick were to write etc.

Also CouchDB only offers atomic document transaction. If you need atomic multi-document transactions you have to use a transaction log based on single docs.

But you get continuous replication, a nice browser GUI that helps you debug as you develop, and most of all, a well defined conflict model when there are conflicts in your database.

It would seem to be Jepsen like test doesn't make sense for CDB as it doesn't ship with a default single cluster setup.
this is one of the many reasons we advise startups not to hire during YC. most startups we work with wait to hire until they have raised enough money to make it reasonably safe to join them.

and employees should always ask a startup how much runway they have. if they won't tell you, it's a big red flag.
I'm not sure why you think that the non-Chinese XP machines won't be potential customers. In my experience, the largest remaining IE8 (and even IE6) holdouts are big enterprises and government organizations. Those organizations are also some of the richest potential customers out there.

For our product (enterprise task and workflow management), we see about 2% IE6/7 and about 5% IE8 in our customer base. Of those customers, most are planning to upgrade away from XP sometime in the next year or two.
World’s First Burrito Kiosk
Bootflat, an open source Flat UI KIT based on Bootstrap 3.1.0
It's likely that the taxable event would occur when you can control the bitcoins. For instance, many pools have a minimum payout and you can't withdraw any until you meet that minimum. Based on other IRS rules, the taxable event would occur when you reach that withdrawal minimum.

As for the exchange to use for the value, it would probably be legitimate to use an average of a few exchanges, if the prices are wildly divergent.
> It's so simple to create your own special DSL that everyone does it. Now i have to learn a thousand languages.

Every library you use in any language is a DSL that you have to learn.

Lisps give you more power when defining a DSL, which means people can make them harder to use and understand, but it also means they have the power to make it easier to use and understand.
> So we should be tracking our bitcoin in our wallets by age, such that when spending we incur long term capital gain vs short term (if possible)?

That would have been daunting in the paper-records era, but with Bitcoin, discovering the tax implications may be a matter of running a shell script against a database of transactions.

In modern investment tax accounting, most issues revolve around comparing the present value of an asset against something called its "cost basis", meaning the price paid for the asset when it was purchased. This should be an easy issue to sort out for a virtual currency if proper records are kept.
And when that chance is perceived to be particularly high at Google people will act accordingly.

Even if you think it's equal, we're probably in a regime of "nobody got fired for building on AWS".
Week-old article, good insight; very relevant in Italy were Beppe Grillo uses social media like a wild-fire -- and has failed to deliver change quite dramatically.

Shame that there isn’t more on the social class (age, gender, occupation, family situation, and position on the social graph) of that more sensitive population.

Reminds me of Duncan Watts metaphor: You don't estimate the size of a forest fire by the size of the match…
Umm, just as with any other expensive property - they ask you to declare them; and if you conveniently forget to declare it, but at some time later (say, after 5 years) they somehow find that out, then you go to jail.

Are you sure that you can hide that stash (and all purchases/deals made from it) permanently?
It might very well come on April 8th, since malware authors who find exploits in the period leading up to that date would wisely wait until right after the no-more-patching cliff to release their new 0days.
Yes. All TrueCar claims now is "Don't overpay", the idea is just that TrueCar makes sure you don't get ripped off. It doesn't necessarily push the dealer to the limit on price. Dealers should have incentive to offer good deals though, because they make money through volume.

I think a reverse-auction situation could work very well on a small scale. Maybe you could make a simple app/system for running your own reverse-auction effectively/simply? Keep it relatively small so dealers don't put up a boycott or similar.
IANA Accountant, but I would guess until/unless the IRS has blessed some particular entity, you can use any public-facing exchange but you should probably be consistent.
Intel Unveils Devil Canyon Chip
The coins received from mining are treated as income by calculating the dollar value at the time they were received by the miner.

If they are later sold, the change in value is treated as a capital gain (or loss). The mining expenses would probably be somewhat deductible (but this isn't the same thing as a cost basis).

The thing that is probably going to catch people out is they are going to not pay self employment taxes on the mining income (it's going to be hard to defend as a hobby).
Sure, but what am I going to do with that data? It's very rare that I'd want to twiddle the individual bits; 99% of the time a stream is an opaque handle that I pass through to an ObjectInputStream or an XML parser or write to an http response.
Anatomy of a Pitch (baseball)
I wonder what is the current status of Win2000 custom support.
> "Funny that this site provides no tools for posting code snippets"

Indent code by at least 4 spaces. (Just like in Markdown in e.g. Stack Overflow.)

like
this
and indent some more
Does this mean MtGox users can claim capital loss when filing taxes now? How will users be able to prove that?
Crashbase
Backups are not MVP! First to market!
Show HN: HTML5 clone of OS X AirDrop – Easy P2P file transfers in a browser
This is exactly why a sales tax would make things so much easier. Who care about historic price points of when you bought and sold BTC, let alone the historic electricity costs and pool fees when you mined it. You buy a milk shake, you pay taxes. Want food, etc. to be taxed differently? Still easier than figuring out if you are operating a railroad/fishing farm in Alaska while running a BTC mining rig to heat your house using sustainable energy from your newly installed solar panels.