skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You know what's interesting which he doesn't even mention? High frequency trading - which a lot of people think was the problem in 1987'. In 87' they just called it "computer trading" and it obviously worked a lot differently, but I believe the parallels are still there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_%281987%29

"A popular explanation for the 1987 crash was selling by program traders, most notably as a reaction to the computerized selling required by portfolio insurance hedges.[10] However, economist Dean Furbush points out that the biggest price drops occurred when trading volume was light.[11] In program trading, computers perform rapid stock executions based on external inputs, such as the price of related securities. Common strategies implemented by program trading involve an attempt to engage in arbitrage and portfolio insurance strategies. As computer technology became more available, the use of program trading grew dramatically within Wall Street firms. After the crash, many blamed program trading strategies for blindly selling stocks as markets fell, exacerbating the decline. Some economists theorized the speculative boom leading up to October was caused by program trading, and that the crash was merely a return to normalcy. Either way, program trading ended up taking the majority of the blame in the public eye for the 1987 stock market crash. U.S. Congressman Edward J. Markey, who had been warning about the possibility of a crash, stated that "Program trading was the principal cause."[12]"
Works for me for jogging, but I don't run every day.

I run every two days. The chain is still a chain, but it's just a slight more distributed one.

I printed a calendar and stuck it on my wall. Then I just mark it off with a big circle when I finish a run, or a cross when I fail.
I have not been buying since I bought at ~300 probably a year or go now. I vowed I would not buy again until it neared 300 OR stabilized for 6+ months (which is hasn't).

Might cash out my short term portfolio and dump it all in if it keeps going in this direction.

I don't want to be kicking myself again!
Can you offer an example (besides exception handling) where high level flow control concepts reduces readability or increases potential for bugs? I honestly can't think of any.

Yes, there is a "pluggable" pattern in Smalltalk where you just let people park lambdas in instance variables to accomplish customization. Too much of this will result in complaints from fellow programmers about debuggability. Also, method_missing/doesNotUnderstand: wrappers or proxying produce the same complaints.

High level flow control concepts communicate intent

Good ones do. Bad ones hide it.

This is always a win.

Uh, no. Even this can be done badly.

Without high level flow control, one has to deduce intent from more primitive units, increasing cognitive load and increasing potential for bugs.

Sometimes true. Sometimes the cost/benefit works out in their favor.

Even if I were to accept that the tendency for abuse makes checked exceptions a worse case, I don't see how in-band/manual error code checking is superior to unchecked exceptions. Uncaught exceptions provide much more context and they're tied to the point of inception.

Keep in mind that the worst problem is actually with badly caught exceptions. What you are saying is: "Granted that too many tend to use exceptions badly, if people use exceptions intelligently, they are better." For one thing, are you granting it or not? For another thing: If your shop can manage to accomplish that, power to you! Go knock yourself out! The Go team has determined a different cost/benefit analysis in the context of their language. (It has more to do than just with the semantics of exceptions.)
As an owner of a Boosted Board, how realistic is the range that they spec? Are you getting a full 6 miles?

I'm the same size as you and I have owned 2 electric skateboards (e-glide / evolve). Both of my previous boards promised much farther range than I have been able to get ... with both actually delivering about 6 miles of real range with real world riding.
You're making the error of deducing market conditions from price (or price from market conditions).

Market price is determined (in a well-functioning market) by the intersection of supply and demand. So the salary could go other way: higher, if a non-compete makes it harder for the employer to find employees willing to sign the clause, lower, if result is fewer alternatives and/or more desperate employees interested in the position.

I'd actually argue the second: that noncompetes raise employees' switching costs, and reduce their alternatives, so that a state in which noncompetes are valid and widely applied would tend to have depressed labor rates.
Sorry, I'm a developer and tapped that API link and the first docs page said not one word that stood out about the main questions I wanted answered: what exactly are you doing and what is the latency.
All of this talk, all of these comments, the charts in the TechCrunch article, etc. All of this is talking about Bitcoin the Speculative Investment. Bitcoin the Get-Rich-Quick Opportunity. Bitcoin the Penny Stock. Bitcoin the Internet Stock. Bitcoin the Tulip Bulb.

Bitcoin the Currency doesn't have a chance of taking off until all of the above go away. When they do (if they do?), THEN we can have a real conversation about the future of money. Until then, however, this is going to be the same pattern we've seen over and over again for thousands of years. I hope for the sake of the folks that have invested $millions (VCs, etc.) that this time it's really different.
I think people who have amassed a quantity of these are going to learn a real lesson in the meaning of value. There's a reason precious metals like gold and silver have retained value for millennia, and schemes like this have not.

The VCs who have peddled this garbage are going to look like a bunch of frauds and fools. Not that it will materially affect them. The Cassandras who have been warning about Bitcoin will continue to be ignored, the press will still beat a door to put a microphone in front of these snake oil peddlers. With the talk of a bubble - if there is any sign of a bubble, it is a bunch of useless hashes like Bitcoin becoming worth $5-12 billion.

I suggest anyone who bought Bitcoins go read the Bitcoin FAQs of why Bitcoins are worth anything. It is complete nonsense. Moreover it is not falsifiable. It is basically "they are worth something because people think they are worth something". So even if Bitcoin crashes, that theory can still stand, since it can not be falsified. That stripe of value theorist can just say people stopped thinking Bitcoins were valuable, so their price fell.

Wise people can take the rise and fall of Bitcoin and ask real questions about where the value of commodities come from. The answer of the Bitcoin theorists, which is not that far off from mainstream economists, is a far cry from what economists like Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo, Adam Smith thought the value of commodities came from.

I already mentioned how precious metals have retained value over millenia. Some Bitcoin advocates point to the dollar and say if the dollar retains value, why can't Bitcoin? This is a complex issue which would take too long to go into here. For one thing, the dollar does not retain its value - a dollar from today is worth much less than a dollar in 1978. Also, the conspiratorial gold bugs who say the dollar is about to collapse are probably overstating the immediacy of the problem - but that does not mean there is not a kernel of truth to their worries about paper currency. Just look at the history of currency from antiquity up until the Weimar Germany Mark to see why. No magic bullet has been found since then making the dollar bullet proof. Their worries may well be found to be correct, although probably are nothing to worry about for several decades.
If you are using data-grams (i.e., UDP) you have no guarantees of ordering or delivery, so you have no way to determine which transmission the echo reply you just received corresponds to without a payload that is returned to you.

Now, a 64kbyte payload, that's unnecessary for simply making each packet unique. That size was likely chosen to allow for the path MTU discovery aspects.

One could argue, however, that "keepalive" and "path MTU discovery" should not have been commingled, but they were.
Out of curiosity, is "price correction" ever used to describe an increase in the trading price of a currency or asset?
Slowly plunging demand.
Because Utah has a lot of methane? I'm not quite following. I'd think methane production would be greater in a cow state like Iowa or Ohio than in a desert state like Utah? joke

Utah's power grid is primarily coal fired, but they use a fair bit of natural (methane) gas as well. [1] Utah has a couple of major hydroelectric dams (glen canyon, flaming gorge), and the use of solar and wind are on the rise.

NSA is building a major data warehouse in Utah; one of the considerations would have to have been cheap power. I'm guessing the Columbia river produces cheaper electricity than pretty much anywhere else, but Utah has very diverse (and affordable) power production overall.

[1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700051087/Coal-mostly-pow...

[edit] failed on humor the first time, trying again.
> Rust also has multiple return (because Rust returns via
> hidden out-param)

Not quite. Rust does have multiple returns, but that's just the obvious result of supporting tuples in the language (to say nothing of tagged unions). The hidden out-param you speak of is just there to guarantee return-value optimization, allowing the compiler to construct return values in higher stack frames to avoid the overhead of copying.
It hasn't existed long enough to confidently predict any trend (and the efficient market hypothesis suggests that's impossible even if it had.) It could drop to sub $200 and stay there forever for all anyone knows.
You're a bit behind, it's 1.23 billion monthly active users or if you feel that's a bit disingenuous: 757 million daily active users.

Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/

PS. you calculated using 400 million.
Concurrency, Parallelism, and State. And Zombies.
What about people that can separate their personal from their business? Eich never did anything at all at Mozilla to push his point of view on gay marriage. If #1 is true, then that plays to him not doing so as well as CEO.

Rice is a different story I guess. You have to decide if you think #2 is right or not. I don't happen to think she is but I can see why people are hesitant for her to be on the board.
Another theory is that big players were buying in 2013 and the same big players are selling in 2014.
Growth Hacker – Help Scale YourMechanic (YC W12)
Omfg. Time for me to buy buy buy. Market debasements almost guarantee 110% returns in short periods.

Thanks for the tip, guys and gals.
It's actually the opposite, historically rediquette was to upvote quality and not downvote just because you disagree. Where as HN policy is to downvote things you disagree with. The difference is just that reddit grew faster and had a broader focus. Without careful moderation HN will grow (both in users and topic types submitted) and will suffer from eternal september as well.
I'd recommend Leanpub[0]. They accept markdown and their workflow is pretty easy and non-exclusive.

For my book[1] I just used pandoc and Makefiles, but once the school year ends and I turn my attention back to the book getting it up on Leanpub is a priority.

[0] https://leanpub.com/authors

[1] https://learnjavathehardway.org/
1) You send a heartbeat at time t0;
2) You wait until time t1;
3) You send another heartbeat at time t2;
4) You receive a heartbeat reply at time t3;

Was your t3 receipt the result of your t0 heartbeat, or your t2 heartbeat?

That is the purpose of the payload, to distinguish which reply matches with which transmission.

Now, why variable sized with a max of 64k vs. say an 8-byte integer? The variable sized with max of 64k was most likely intended to support the second purpose in the RFC, path MTU discovery. To discover the path MTU, you need to be able to send a "too big packet", as well as adjust the packet size until you find the proper MTU value.

[edit, formatting]
The death of the presumption of innocence
They didn't rise above it. Eich stepped down. He should not have had to do that. He was CTO for many years. He was at Mozilla for many years. During that time he never tried to codify his beliefs into Mozilla corporate policy and I have zero reason to believe that he would have done so as CEO.
The exchanges have some good numbers about the flows of dollars. I haven't seen where any of them are sharing.
Thanks, I was going crazy trying to figure out the connection!
Facebook had 500MM users four years ago...
Even with the feedback vest, this seems like a something that'd be difficult to use for non-abstract musical compositions.
Well, I've been ready[1] for this for awhile. It's all coming together nicely[2]. Now I wait for the magical event that sends bitcoin back to the moon at the EOY... or wipes me out.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7210538

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYDkGJmSfy0

__________

Disclaimer: Don't copy what I'm doing unless you understand the risks; I could very well lose all my money... in fact I probably will lose it all :-P
RFC stands for "Request For Comments", which I always thought meant new stuff up for peer review. Wikipedia also describes them as:

An RFC is authored by engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviours, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humour. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet standards.
I penned a short blog post a year ago posing similar questions about the inherent value of a bitcoin:

http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2013/04/bitcoins-agent-smith-p...

I think there is a future in virtual currency but it will have to be anchored to reality.
I definitely get what you are saying. Some people will learn some tough lessons and go broke others will learn the same lesson and get rich.

"they are worth something because people think they are worth something".

gold and the paper currency is printed on is only worth something because people think they are worth something.
NASA Technology Transfer Program software catalog 2014
founder mikkel svane owns 7%, founder alexander aghassipour another 7%, no numbers on 3rd cofounder

peter fenton (individual VC partner) owns 20%

devdutt yellurkar (individual VC partner) owns 25%

dana stalder (individual VC partner) owns 9%

and the actual VC firms basically own the rest of it.
Exactly. Similar thing happened to Rails last year. One big vulnerability discovery led to a couple more being discovered soon afterwards.
Was wondering when I'd see this here. Can't imagine what someone like Trent Reznor would do with it. Also, this would be great for VR!

Price-wise, I think the tech is a tad out of reach for most people right now. Something cheaper like Thalmic's Myo might be within most people's reach though. One dev even has a prototype of MIDI support for the Myo already: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2ipXPWX0cg

For reference, Imogen's gloves have been in development for quite a while now: http://theglovesproject.com/about-the-project
He asked "I need to change to be compliant with the rules" - the answer is, if you are correct, "Get your own content, or properly license this content". An easy answer really.
I would imagine something like this could be used to good effect in a contemporary dance performance.
Does it? She probably thinks she behaved ethically. It sure hasn't done anything for politicians in general either.
I think bitcoins price is going to be volatile. I think it needs to find a niche that drives a constant use or churn for it to remain stable.

Too many investors not enough users?

As someone who owns no bitcoins I find the whole thing fascinating to watch.
We use Runscope at Sailthru and are huge fans of the service.
Not a chance. The only party that seems to care is the Pirate Party, and they've basically only been on the news when the party leader was locked into her bathroom by her cat.
> But here's the tricky part. The scientists can put the rubidium atom in superposition, so that it is simultaneously in that energetic state and not in the energetic state. It's on and off. Because of this, the photon both does and does not enter the mirror, mingle, and gain its polarization change. And the photon, by virtue of having both changed and not changed, carries that superposition information and can bring it to a different atom-based qubit.

I know almost nothing about Quantum Mechanics, but this sounds amazingly ingenious.

So what did they do, some sort of parallel universe transistor where the rubidium atom acts as the gate? If you assemble a processor out of this, will it compute all possible computations at the same time? And, last but not least... how do you make it converge to the computation you actually want?

Quantum computers make my head spin.
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience
Interactive, Psychedelic Complex Functions
Two new upcoming Foundation interviews from Kevin Rose
1) Anthony Casalena from Squarespace:

https://twitter.com/grahamhancock/status/454315049402630144

2) Jackson Palmer co-creator of Dogecoin:

https://twitter.com/jacksonpalmer/status/454368835802374144
It doesn't really matter. Even if bitcoin drops to five cents a coin, it can still be used as a currency. It's only bad for people storing their wealth in bitcoin which everyone knew was a bad idea - it's always been extremely volatile. The hope is that someday it will stabilize, but no one was ever claiming that it was in the present.

I'm sick of people treating the exchange rate of bitcoin as a metric for how successful it is. It doesn't matter.

>There's a reason precious metals like gold and silver have retained value for millennia, and schemes like this have not.

Ironic you would mention that. Gold only has value because people believe it has value. It's also somewhat volatile and not immune to bubbles.

Paper currencies are far more widely used and accepted than bitcoin and work just fine.
the MtGox crisis makes buyers much more cautious of who to trust. It's really hard to actually find a trading site you can trust.
AWS doesn't oversubscribe at all. This is a pretty baseless rumor.
Crowdfunding for bunnie and xob's open-hardware Novena has reached 60%
Minors in California will soon be able to erase their online history
i'll bet you can customize the hell out of it and use it for pretty much any type of performance. new instruments (electric guitar, computer, etc) enable new types of music but are usually not restricted to that type.

i don't see why this controller couldn't be just as suitable to play a jazz number on as a piano. it outputs to MIDI so you source a piano sound and teach motions to behave in different ways (chords, melodies, tempos, arpeggiations, crescendos etc).

though i'd have to imagine getting consistent MIDI signal from the Emotiv neuroheadset would be the end game :)
The conversation you're talking about is always happening, on IRC channels and mailing lists where work is actually discussed and merit trumps speculation.
Indeed, I've used Bitcoin since 2011 and never for speculating. I buy servers with it primarily and now use it to easily transfer money. Wait until the ETFs start trading, speculation into the stratosphere but at least it might eliminate crashes from incompetent exchange operators.

For money transfer, I freq hire foreign employees for a variety of things like scouting large markets in Lagos to see what kinds of apps can be made for it, a survey on local Pakistani payment methods and currency exchange storefronts, translations in various countries ect. Paying by using existing remittance methods like western union and others had me flagged immediately and all my outgoing transactions were seized for "proof of income" and all sorts of other nonsense, even for small amounts like $150 transfer to Sri Lanka. It doesn't matter if I do this completely transparently, and operate through a business once you start moving money to the developing world and they aren't family members problems arise.

I now send them bitcoins and direct them to whoever is cashing it out on localbitcoins.com.

In every case, they made more money than what I sent them since supply of bitcoins in those countries is scarce so worth much more than the price I paid(1). Argentina localbitcoins is paying almost 2x what I buy them here for.

(1)Of course I've also lucked out, there hasn't been a massive price drop between sending the coins and cashing them like there was the other day when it fell almost $200

Edit: Another bonus of bitcoin is 3rd party payment. I can pay somebody local here cash at a cafe a block away and they directly load the bitcoin address of my contractor, so I don't even pay micro transfer fees, or even need to handle coins myself. Usually it goes straight to their localbitcoin.com account and within 20mins they can sell the coins, reducing price fluctuation risk.
> gold and the paper currency is printed on is only worth something because people think they are worth something

Gold has value. It can be used by dentists. It can be used in electronics. It has been inherently valuable for millennia.

As I said, paper currency is too complex a topic to go into fully here. Unlike gold, it obviously is not inherently valuable. You can look at Weimar German marks, Confederate dollars etc. to see that. Or even a US 1978 dollar versus a US 2014 dollar, to some extent. People who think Bitcoins can be worth something because the dollar seems to have some value are going to learn a hard lesson.
Sell it now.
Ask HN: Making the move to consulting; where does someone start?
Hey guys, thought I'd post this question after much Googling. I'm a software dev who's just been made redundant from his job. I've often thought about becoming an independent contractor for various reasons and now seems like the right time to actually jump in and do it (especially with a bit of a redundancy payout as a buffer).

I'd like to hear from any Aussie folk who've made the switch and how they actually went about doing it. What was your first gig like? Any war stories? What are the actual mechanics of making the switch (requirements, where to find work, stuff like that).

Basically this is something I really want to give a shot, but I have no idea where to start :)
This is what you get when you have Winklewosses invest in anything :), it has to crash
There is one theory that no one here has mentioned yet: that Mt. Gox was responsible for Bitcoin's meteroic rise in price, and now that Mt. Gox has fallen, the price has been deflating.

There is speculation that Mt. Gox had been fractional for at least 6 months, and that Karpeles tried to buy back his losses and wound up igniting the $100-to-$1200 spike.

It's interesting that the price has fallen since then, and continues to fall. Either everyone is simultaneously becoming wary of Bitcoin, or there are other forces at work.

The other possibility is that since coin is concentrated into the hands of a few, those few can tank the price if they feel like bailing out.

Also, it's probably a good thing that the price has been correcting itself. It's still dangerous to its users, so until the fundamental problems are fixed, it probably shouldn't be priced too highly. I've written about why it's dangerous to its users here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7521906
>Gold only has value because people believe it has value.

Not true, gold has both ornamental and practical value (can be used in semiconductor components for instance).
People still use Dropbox, after they pre-emptively screwed Boxopus?

http://web.archive.org/web/20130116123236/http://blog.boxopu...
Thanks Danny!