skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Fiat money has value because you need it to pay taxes.

One needs to pay taxes only because the government enforces tax law. Fiat (in latin) means "by decree", as in "this money has value by government decree." Its value is backed by the government's ability to enforce legal code. (or on a meta-level, by people's belief/faith that law enforcement officers & public employees will succeed in working as agents & beneficiaries of their government). Money by government decree should be called government-fiat.

But the fiat definition of money actually works well for bitcoin too. Except instead of being decreed by government's legal code, bitcoin is decreed by cryptographers' computer code (Lawrence Lessig's slogan that "code is law" was prescient indeed). Its value is backed by the ability of computer code to enforce the information-theoretic laws of cryptography. (or on a meta-level, by people's belief/faith that financiers & tech users will succeed in working to further their interest & investment in a p2p crypto network). Bitcoin is crypto-fiat.

IMNSHO there are two types of fiat money: gov-fiat and crypto-fiat (bitcoin an instance of the latter).

> Bitcoins are only valuable as long as you can convince someone else that they are valuable.

Well it turns out that this is surprisingly easy: you just put your money where your mouth is. Its a simple strategy which has worked exceedingly well for bitcoin, in quite a short time.
Big assumption that people who were not Google+ users would tolerate having to join it just to continue using Google Reader.

A lot of people would have just been pissed off that "G+ is borging google reader just like it is everything else".
Well written and pretty funny in places. Reminded me a bit of David Foster-Wallace; I guess that was the intention. The bit about the Indian ex-doctor and his girlfriend was funny.
Is this new though? Any major city has seen young people doing exactly that with dreams of making it big. So we used to associate this more with artists, actors and alike.

Now in certain places we can add tech start-up founders to the list. And unlike the aforementioned, these are generally people who can get a well paid job if they wanted to.

It's part of being young and ambitious, and I don't see much difference between young founders begging for funding and actors going on auditions.
I like Doug a lot, and his family who run the business. His grandmother is terrific. She and her husband started the business several decades ago.

I have spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of years talking to Doug and others at Sage about the future of academic publishing. I've always enjoyed the conversations, and they have always been open to hearing my radical views :)

(I'm the founder of Academia.edu).
Brutal reality.

I remember a moment many years ago when I looked over at the bookshelf behind my desk and my eyes landed on a book titled "Doing Hard Time" (it's about real time embedded systems).

It was somewhere around 3:00AM. I had been in that room, coding, since 8 or 9 in the morning of the prior day. I had been doing 18 hour days, seven days a week, for the last year and a half. If I was awake I was in this little 10 x 20 ft room coding away.

For some reason I saw that book and my first thought was that I now knew what being imprisoned might feel like. Sad realization.

The story got much better after that low point as the product was completed and schedules became sane (but never 9 to 5).

I have to say I would not change any part of that experience. The highs and the lows were amazing. Learning, pushing yourself to the limit and back. Finding out what you are made of. Remarkable.

That said, had it not ended well the story might have been very different.
Pinterest has this one unique ability to make me feel completely unable to predict if a service is going to be of any use and of any value. I just don't get the point of that site.
Right, Comcast is providing transit to their customers, which the aforementioned transit providers could not adequately handle. Although it is not a typical transit network it is still the only route to Comcast customers.

So, if the existing backbone transit providers are not adequate, Netflix should be and needs to be covering the cost of the bandwidth when directly peered with Comcast. Otherwise the cost of this bandwidth is transferred to Comcast customers, all of which do not use the Netflix service.

It really comes down to this... Do all Comcast subscribers deserve to pay for bandwidth that is created by the minority that uses the Netflix service? I do not believe so. The cost should be with the Netflix, they create the overhead, they should pay for it.
California phone kill-switch bill fails vote in state senate
This. And the authorities are using the existence of remote wipe to pretext warrantless searches. None of this is 'consumer protection'. Its strictly aimed at thwarting the diffisuion of communications outside the reach of the government.
Goodbye, Net Neutrality. Hello, Net Discrimination
> If there are 100 people trying to use 15Mbps at once at peak hours, they need at least 1500Mbps of capacity to provide the level of service they sold.

No retail ISP on this planet offers 1:1 ratio like that to its general subscribers.

You can certainly buy uncontended service, but it will start at several hundred dollars per month for about 2 Mbps.
Yes I'm well aware of that but that isn't what dynamic range is referring to in the above. The only thing you affect by reducing the volume in a digital signal is increasing the noise floor, or decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio. 16-bit audio already has a noise floor well below what a human can hear for a recording which has a "normal" volume as you might find on any CD. On top of this, when you use replaygain in your audio player, the digital volume adjustment is applied to a 24bit signal, and Windows (or whatever OS) has a 24bit or 32bit float signal path, and then most or all DACs are 24bit (for example newish Realtek integrated audio). So it really makes no difference to effective SNR either.
CEO Who Pled Guilty to Domestic Violence Maintains His "Innocence"
You wouldn't happen to have a link to a working version, by any chance? I'd like to play with it, and I'm not soon going to have the time to sort out what's wrong with the version I linked.
Same for the title. It's unsubstantiated. There are reorgs, but nothing in the article confirms that G+ is dead.
This makes the assumption that Google haters wouldn't have found some reason to hate Google anyway. Which is overly optimistic in my opinion.
No joining necessary, they just move your reader account into G+ and slowly people start using it for more than an RSS reader.
Except if you went with the "sign in with Facebook" option for third party apps.

You'll be losing saved games in Farmville for instance (maybe no big deal to you but still friction for some).

I would lose my Endomono fitness tracking account, that would make me pause.

I'm sure there are many others, just like for Google+.
I spent couple of hours for installing the patch, sending users security alert email and updating users' dashboard with security alert.
YouTubers got really pissed off with Google+ comments, but that has calmed down now because really it's still just comments below a video. What that did though was it made people (who may never have even tried +) really annoyed with it. But for RSS, imagine if they forced people to read it on +, there would be uproar.
I really don't think it's "Google haters" who have caused Google to back away from G+ — it's the fact that people were indifferent about the service to begin with.
There is no referrer in their logs for any visit from this page. Referrer headers are not sent across HTTPS->HTTP transitions; this is a secure page, and the link to Wired is not.
The author seems to think gmail would have had a seamless integration as well.

http://www.scottporad.com/2013/03/15/why-is-gmail-not-part-o...

There seems to be cognitive dissonance on people's aversion to strategic opportunism.
Ask HN: What if startup shares reverse vested?
Is there such a thing as an option grant with a decreasing quantity of shares over time? Basically reverse vesting.

What if startup shares reverse vested...

Could you do a sort of pay-with-equity with reverse vesting?
Coding in schools
could explain this in a longer way?

Considering the HMAC subset of MAC, the final value of the function should be of the same length of the base hash function.

So i.e. hmac-sha256 would be longer than hmac-sha1, but I don't understand why the latter would be simpler to check and of higher security.

Or do you mean that Poly1305 is all three (simpler, more secure, shorter mac) compared to the HMAC family?
Clime (https://github.com/moskytw/clime)
Why is Kim Jong-un always surrounded by people taking notes?
they do offer the pagespeed proxy.
Ben Horowitz on GitHub’s mistakes and startup company culture
How do you create an Entrepreneurial environment?
I'm in college and I've noticed that entrepreneurship at my college is an "underground society." Those in it know about eachother but the rest of the undergrad population doesnt know about the entrepreneurial scene. How would you recommend getting more people involved?
"Look I'm sorry mate but I'm just running this wire through your house to give your neighbor internet, if you don't let me you're in the wrong"

"Sorry but we need to tear up this highway and disrupt traffic for the next couple of weeks to lay some fibre. I know someone else did the same thing last week but they were another company and it's illegal for the local government body to stop any of us laying stuff on public land when we want"

Obviously that extreme is untenable. You may be after something a bit more useful like unbundling, but in the US you have to explain how forcing a private company to let competitors use it's cable is not outright stalinistic communism.
I'm getting deja vu... http://savetheinternet.eu/
Note that the HTTP RFC mandates that browsers should not send referers when doing HTTPS -> HTTP, so this may not be the case here.

But, yeah, this was probably to work around the duplicate detector.
This is the way I've been using Facebook for years. Most of the publications I follow have FB pages to which they submit their most pertinent content (for small publications and individual authors this usually ends up being every story or post). I can skim what's new and get other recommendations from people that I know. With a little bit of work I can also filter down what I see to just the people whose opinions I care about. At least that's the way it worked for several years.

Facebook's decision to limit the content that users see from Pages who don't pay for advertisement messes up the above strategy, and I suppose if Google had integrated Reader into Google+ the way the author suggests they may have been able to offer themselves as a better alternative.
YC's answer to this is "If you verbally commit to an investment with a YC company they will memorialize it instantly with an SMS or email, which they will ask you to confirm substantially instantly. If you renege on a deal committed to by this protocol, you will be entered into a list of Unserious People. You very much don't want to be Unserious People to all future deals associated with YC companies."

That's for actual commitments. Investors historically have a very diverse vocabulary of ways to phrase "No" (for example, any sentence which begins with "I will invest if" means "No, but I like option value, particularly when it is free.") and entrepreneurs historically have a reality distortion field where they hear "No" and think "I didn't hear Never so that's practically a Yes!"
UK centre to shoot for nuclear fusion record
Agreed. There are cases where this is not enough. For me (who are aware of the possibility of having multiple personas but is totally comfortable with national security 2014 edition to know about it ) and most ordinary people (who happily upload all their stuff to Facebook anyway) the current solution seems like a good and user friendly alternative.

If the fact that Google needs to know who their customers are isn't acceptable then people need to find other services. Google can pinpoint us pretty much anyway they are just being upfront about it in my opinion.
This post was meant to inform of Vic's departure from Google. It suddenly became a slug fest of Google +.
Relevant: http://www.snotr.com/video/3806/Porn_Buddies
> Given the number of opportunities out there today, including opportunities outside of Startupville, there's no reason an experienced or talented candidate has to gamble on a startup that might not be able to make payroll if a funding round doesn't close in the next n weeks or months.

You're absolutely right. There's no compelling reason to work in Startupsville. If you're there, then you're already being fairly irrational. Knowing the (current) runway isn't going to make it any less so.

> A founder, executive or hiring manager at a startup should be able to look you in the eye and tell you how much runway the company has based on its current cash position, cash flow and burn rate.

Is this actually true, or a pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking thing? The article seems to paint the latter picture. I've been in situations where overconfidence and unrealistic optimism were the norm rather than the exception. Like auto sales.

You'll fall out pretty quick if you can't get with the program and insist on being a wet blanket. You have to get good at reading between the lines because nobody talks straight. Opportunities are there, but mostly only for the morally loose.
High-School-Age Heroes Create Ketchup Lid That Doesn't Squirt Water
In my cynical opinion, this is like blaming a raindrop for the flood.
ha! i forgot that i wrote that blog post.

you'd think that between that post and this one that i have some reason for caring that google+ succeed. i don't...i have no vested interest.

i just annoys me when big companies with massive amounts of resources bungle stuff. it seems like with so much talent and money it would be easier to get stuff right.
nss and nspr, to name one alternative.
I Just Love (♥) C++
"(used to) have bad business practices"

I think you mean "still have bad business practices." Comcast regularly gets rated as the worst company in the country by consumers (in some cases the worst entity, public or private, beating out the IRS for that coveted position).

nearly 1/3 of the US have only a single option for broadband internet, and that company is typically a relatively unregulated company with low business costs that charges high prices. That's just a recipe for bad behavior.
That's not the biggest problem, to me. Google+ maybe has not hit the target usage stats google wanted, but even when you love google+, it's awkward to use.

I'm a daily google+ user and quite like the product. But when it comes to publishing, it always feels a bit off.

I don't have a single public identity. I'm a rails developer, a news addict, a french citizen and since recently, a 3d printer user. Recently, I decided to open a french blog about 3d printing, since I felt it was lacking.

Now, each time I want to publish something in one of those topics, I always hesitate. How many posts about that subject did I wrote recently ? May I publish an other one without annoying people that are following me for something else ? It's especially a problem with my french articles, since most of people following me won't understand french.

As for now, here are my options :

- publishing my french articles to a selected group of french people, hiding the content to anyone that might be interested and I don't know of

- publishing my french articles as public post, and annoying everyone that does not read french or are not interested in 3d printing

- not publishing anything

Sadly, it often comes to that last option.

Being able to place people in circles is a great thing. But it's half backed : we should be able to publish circles and let people subscribe to them, so we can write content without fearing to be annoying.

Having a product making your users feel they are annoying is probably not a good thing.
Thanks! It may be encoding problem, I'll take a look at it today.
Also note how cavalierly and routinely the Times (and most other "traditional" publishers) avoid actually linking to this thread, or basically anything other than internal links to other Times articles.
I think Cryptol will make it much easier to become qualified to write crypto because it makes the programming more similar to the math. Your average programmer will be able to start learning how to implement crypto from a much more rigorously mathematical standpoint, and inexperienced developers will write safer code. Seems pretty neat.
Andy warhol amiga paintings
> This entire story underlies to me the need to bootstrap into something that is already working and has numbers before talking to anyone about taking money.

I could not agree more. There are certainly exceptions, but they should be that, not the standard/norm. Aside from the high risk from a business perspective, you're putting other people's financial situation in jeopardy, not to mention you have an obligation to investors to return their money, thus you are working for them despite what equity % they have.

My hard-line for my start-up was that I must be able to pay salary from site revenue, and before I could bring anyone on I had to make sure it could support at least 1 person's living expenses (me) because I do not want to risk other's situations/lives on a promise or a "trust me" or a "by the way I need money" sort of deal.

It's certainly a slower process but I'm learning a lot along the way in the area's (non-technical) I'm not as familiar with. I guess the other thing is I'd prefer to be able to travel while I work and I don't feel that'd be possible if I were taking VC-money. Either way, it's a fun game, to work on your idea and bring it to fruition.
How to mint your own virtual money
Why Google switched to numeric captchas
France mulls car-sharing GPS app ban
Show HN: Totally different and 3D version of traditional Snakes and Ladders game
Hi,
I am presenting this post on behalf of my friends company. I liked their concept and taught of presenting it to HN Readers before they launch:

They have made totally different and 3D version of traditional Snakes & Ladders game.

In this game instead of traditional flat board, player needs to climb a 3D tower. On way he will face snakes and ladders at different steps.

You can have the first look of our game here:
https://www.behance.net/wip/577365/1060829

And after having the look of it if you felt like its interesting then PM me your email id I will send you the android apk (pre-launch) of the same.

P.S Please provide your valuable feedback over the same.
Sadly, no dynamic js is being executed.
Can you point to a Mozilla Corporation (not to be confused with Mozilla Foundation) employee who tweeted something like that?
Personally I feel, best of the companies can take rotten decision sometimes,specially when they are reactionary. IMHO That doesn't mean we can generalize it.
There's an important difference. If you give somebody power over people and they are unable to empathize, then they can't be trusted to act responsibly. Many sociopaths seek power precisely because they like exploiting people. If you're interested further in the topic, try reading Snakes in Suits or The Psychopath Test.

Similarly, we shouldn't give people with peophillic issues power over small children.

Broken people deserve our support, and we should work to heal them. But in doing so, we can't let them break other people.
Advanced animation path » legomushroom
I'd feel weird naming him without asking. But if you want to read more about this sort of approach, there's a book called Servant Leadership, plus a lot of literature around it. It's also the basic approach in Lean Manufacturing.
Transforming arbitrary shellcode into English prose
Show HN: Render a Street View scene as point cloud using the captured LiDAR data
http://callum.com/sandbox/webglex/streetcloud/<p>Managed to get the rendering working with help from other people generous enough open source and to write about their code.
RadiumOne CEO escapes felony charges
Crypto Stick Storage ("version 2") Available as Beta
If 100% of Google Reader users enthusiastically adopted Google+, would that have even come close to what they were hoping to ultimately get? That's probably a rounding error by Facebook's usage numbers.
Yeah. For precisely this reason, I maintain two Twitter accounts: business me and personal me. It kills me that Google+'s Circles were only about privacy control, not targeted sharing.
Technically it is not a gas station. What does the law say?
This has always been the top problem with Google+ for me.
Maybe I want to hear about your code or your religion but I really really don't have the time and energy to wade through your cats, politics, etc.
I don't really think this would have helped much, but I do think that it highlights a part of why G+ has not been a very big success. It just lacks a compelling use case to make you come back to it after you discover that it doesn't have Facebook's network effect. There's nothing it does that Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook don't do better, aside from look kind of googly and force you to pick which one of your 5 gmail/apps account identities you want to really use.
Lol. The kids once again learn there's nothing new under the sun.
Dropbox sync with file exclusion.
You can turn this feeling around into something more productive/lucrative: The feeling is a reminder that there are audiences that don't perceive value the same way you do. Specifically, audiences that are not male, geek/technical, software engineers.

Their audience is probably mostly female, non-technical, and has lots of desire to spend lots of money.

Flipping this around, imagine someone who is not the intended audience stumbling across HN. They'd probably think the Yahoo front page delivers better news signal than this site.
As a Google-hater, I can confirm that. They could have invented an RSS reader that cures cancer, and I'd still hate them. The only thing they can do with Google+ that would make me happy is cave in its metaphorical skull with a falling piano.
It was actually a really good product, but the thing has had zero traction with real people.

If no one uses a product then it's clearly providing no value. That's pretty much the definition of a bad product.
I read it is as: Stripe is organising a retreat for its developers where they can work on Open Source—imagining that it would give them the time to contribute (more) to the Open Source software they already use at Stripe.
A new CPU load metric for power-efficient scheduler: CPU ConCurrency
All companies bungle stuff, regardless of their size.

The main difference is that small companies go down when their bold attempt backfires or fails. Large companies usually have financial buffers in place to stomach the blow.

[Insert classic Dilbert strip about only doing the 10% of projects that will succeed.]
Proper date support in JavaScript
If I had been able to selectively subscribe to technical content of posters rather than also hearing about their cats, there is no reason I would not be using it over Twitter and Facebook to catch up on people's microblogging/thoughts.

I never had a use for Facebook-style surveillance, I don't want it and I don't care how many annoying people it has who I don't want to hear from, this was for me always a ludicrous argument.

But Plus is ultimately still a failure
Maybe the argument is right, but Eric Schmidt was replaced by Larry Page on April 4, 2010 and G+ was launched on September 20, 2011. So the former can not be responsible for how G+ works. What he failed was to not have created a social network sooner.
Having to open a new tab with an auto-playing video to see the comment someone replied to is not okay. Having to do it for every comment in a long thread is not okay. The only reason people have stopped talking about it is that talking about it accomplishes nothing; Google just wants their site to be shit.