skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unfortunately this is plausible: The only reliable way to trigger a run-up in a commodity is to expend a lot of capital to acquire that asset at inflated prices- You'd have to "burn through" a lot of money to get this to happen.

...so, then where was this cache of money that was destroyed to inflate the price? It would have to be a pretty large quantity to have such a drastic impact.

Occam's Razor to me suggests the answer is obvious: The vaporized deposits of MtGox users are the most obvious large cache of money, large enough to cause such a run up.

The next question is, who would do this, and why? The answer suggested by Occam's razor would be "Someone who could modify the MtGox database to create nonexistent fiat currency, but could not (or did not want to) create fake MtGox bitcoin holdings." This is because a person with this power would have reason to trade the "fake fiat" with legitimate bitcoin holders to generate bitcoins that can be leeched out of the site, and this would certainly cause the price to rise.

This doesn't answer however whether it was an inside or external party, I could imagine scenarios both with or without inside actors that would lead to this kind of activity. (Though I'd put my bet on internal fraud, based on the fact that so much effort was put into hiding the fraud and extending it over a long period, as opposed to going for quick profit.)
That reminded me. I actually developed and sold a software [1] that would disable Win key for full-screen games that would not do the workaround. I developed it after seeing frustration of my friends booted to desktop in the middle of their Counter Strike battle.

First it was a freebie, then I added blocking for Caps, Num and power keys and made it a shareware. It was even featured on TechTV by Leo Laporte (great for the bank account!).

Fun times...

[1] http://www.bytegems.com/ihatethiskeydeluxe.shtml
No, I Googled your question and it returned 0 results. Sorry.
I would think that student loan debt would cause people to more aggressively negotiate salary increases, which will drive inflation. As professional labor becomes more expensive, off shoring of high level services will increase (to offset rising labor pressure).
DL4J is fascinating! thanks for sharing, I'm definitely going to do some playing around with this framework.
Alexis Ohanian's Carthage College Commencement Address Live  ~2:40pm EDT
And a UStream mirror: http://www.carthage.edu/library/webcast/webcasting-stream-3
> WRT ultra low power computation and ignoring everything else, google TI MSP430 family or Microchips XLP (extreme low power) PIC series. Typical marketing figures are double/triple digit microamps of current per MHz of clock at a couple volts, so figure double/triple digit microwatts per MHz (and usually tops out at not many MHz),

There are plenty of manufacturers claiming now "ultra-low power" in various forms. EFM32, STM32L, Kinetis L-series come to mind now.

> which is of course fairly meaningless when compared across families because its a clock freq. Its rather important if a simple binary add takes one cycle at 300 uA/MHz vs 324 clock cycles at 30 uA/MHz, the better marketing figure does not necessarily provide best system performance figure of "actual real world work per microwatt"

Indeed. You also need to account for effects like "race to sleep" and the various special low-power operating modes. One recent interesting development in that area is "ULPBench" http://www.eembc.org/benchmark/ulp_sl.php which kinda promises to deliver a "work per microwatt" metric. Too bad it is so new that I haven't actually seen any credible results yet.
The best tool I've found for working with CSV files is csvkit[1]. I've run into some of the issues mentioned in the article and it's handled them all gracefully. It's basically a bunch of scripts mirroring sort, grep, cut, etc. but specifically for dealing with CSV files.

[1] http://csvkit.readthedocs.org/
I don't know about "escaping all consequences," unless his idea of "escaping all consequences" is having to watch his back for the rest of his life. Seems like a pretty dumb way to make a few million bucks, IMHO.
Postatic lets you create your own Hacker News
I found out that Braintree supports integrating your own merchant account for $49/mo + 0.10 per transaction. That's a great option!
More likely they've been working on the scaling algorithm in Chrome, and the logo just happened to look bad (or shall we say less than optimal).
Yeah, this is a bit weird. For some reason I'm still surprised when I see pseudo-REST being passed off as RESTful.
OpenWRT has been running quite successfully on that class of devices for some time now. Sure it is using busybox, some lightweight libc, dropbear instead of openssh for ssh etc, but in the end there is still some RAM left for applications.
Exactly. The pressures are dual. On one hand, the costs of a degree are skyrocketing to the point where the value is really being scrutinized by that measure alone.

On the other hand, the increasing disparity between what colleges provide and what employers desire is being factored into that value equation.

So, at a time when universities need to be showing more value for their ballooning price tags, they are actually providing less (in purely economic terms).
Both sites just feel wrong. Not only is there an impedance mismatch in how they operate, there is a cognitive mismatch. Manipulative walled gardens which add negative value. Internet fast food.
...and quotes inside fields must be escaped with a backslash, newlines replaced by \n, etc.

...and, the moment you declare you handle json, people will send non-string data ("that is a number, of course it isn't quoted"), attempt to include nested data, leave out the opening and closing [] (because people will grep a file with one array per line to filter a json file; that is no way robust, but people will do it, anyways)

The main advantage of json vs csv is that there is only one json, but quite a few different variant of csv. That is a huge advantage, but csv is engrained; there are many, many tools that handle csv but not json.

And the "if you control input and output" case is not the interesting or the problematic one.
Earth's backup: Sending religious texts to the moon
Those laws were probably not on the books when this crime took place.
Pictures taken at the central of german secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst
CSV is much simpler when the records are all of one type. It gets debatable which (XML vs CSV) is simpler when you get multiple record types dumping a hierarchical data structure.

Obviously, you can make CSV files work for alternating record types, in the same way that the old mainframe files used to work with multiple record types in a file, with a type descriminator field in a know place, usually field 1, of each record. But it starts to get cluttered.
> Let's not fall for a superficial definition of "intellectually interesting".

Sure. Can you provide some examples of what's allowed and not allowed then? Because "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" actually covers each and every topic in the world. When you exclude one topic, you're actually demeaning people who find that topic interesting.
Carambola2 linked by user revelation above specs .5W power consumption. I'd assume this device would be in the same ballpark.
Quora's case is very clear cut. They derive all of their value from their users, the user created content. They then put protective barriers in place to prevent access to content others created.

For example Quora's robots.txt explicitly prohibits the wayback machine from crawling anything on quora.com. The &share=1 is a hack to trick googlebot, if Googlebot were capable of indexing registration required content, Quora would probably not provide this share=1.

Quora's technology is a glorified textbox and some links that link to content. The value is all the stuff that others have added to it. Which in itself is fine, it's something companies like Yelp do and do well to everyone's benefit. But Quora's policies again and again show a complete disregard for the public and even its users:

Requiring a real name.

No way to delete answers or questions easily (you can email to have your data deleted, which I did a long time ago).

Requiring a log in to read content (I wonder if you could convince some uninformed federal prosecutor that the share=1 trick to get around the block can be used to prosecute someone with the CFAA)

Blocking the way back machine and their shitty robots.txt

Not so long ago the hiring page on Quora asked candidates to be ready to dedicate their lives to the startup, to make it the primary focus of their lives which I thought was such a horrid thing to ask of an employee and really subtext for hiring discrimination based on age.

Quora managed to get a lot of funding because of the notability of its founders. Notability derived riding Mark Zuckerberg's wake. My opinion, based on their actions, is that these founders are evil arrogant people who think little of others including their employees, their users and the general public. Their mission is not any noble cause to share information, it's aggrandizing their self-importance. And I'm so happy that Quora is a floundering ridiculous mess of near no value. I just know they'll eventually purposefully transition into a shallow content Demand Media ehow clone. Because someday they're going to have to account for all that money they took in. They'll do that, and then a Google Panda update will kill their shit and that will be the end of it.
Web API performance: profiling Django REST framework (2013)
Stuff not being in the correct order is a perfectly fine technical reason to reject an XML file if you have a DTD based workflow. It is actually quite difficult to specify that the order of elements is irrelevant (it goes with n!, so allowing six elements exactly once, but in arbitrary order in the contents of
So in that case, you might have been the developer that screwed up the standard tools other developers dependan element makes that part of the DTD 720 times longer than specifying a fixed order).

So they could have easily played the ball back into your field if they had know what they did...
Yes, this is exactly right, but you should clarify:

Step 1: create USD_FAKE out of thin air.

Step 2: buy BTC at 1200 USD_FAKE on MtGox.

Step 3: sell BTC at 1100 USD_REAL on Bitstamp.

Step 4: profit!
This is so true. I had an experience developing on top of a third-party proprietary stack that controls their piece of hardware - after spending several years in constant "trust no one" mode, I believe, I can debug practically anything. :)

I'm actually thankful for this experience to a certain extent, because I learned how not to give up without giving a decent fight first.
I transitioned from software to brain science for my PhD. (Caltech has a unique program for this called Computation and Neural Systems.)

Universities hire regular software engineers all the time for software development work. Biology labs hire full-time "build-it" guys, and computational projects with a lot of funding hire part-time and full-time software engineers too.

So, to break in I recommend you look up some large brain science computation projects online and contact them. There are quite a lot of them in Europe. You may also be able to get into some fMRI projects.

That said, at a university, the chances of you taking more than a supporting role without a university education is slim. So, I would recommend looking for a brain-oriented startup.

If you want to do moreso biology, then I do not believe this path would be worthwhile to you. Lab assistant work does not pay much, and it is often very tedious work. Some techniques may take a year to get proficient at before your results start to make sense (as was my case). That said, biologists constantly amaze me -- they routinely make heroic efforts to find evidence for tiny advancements (as is necessary due to the limitations of our brain technology).
Not for something as clearly politicized as the topic of war crimes by a nation currently at war.
It would actually be great to have something like a web services donation flat rate. Basically something like http://flattr.com but but also for web services and apps, not only for creators and artists. A place where you can spend some money on the places you enjoy online without having to think too hard about it. For example, I would happily pay maybe $10 a month for reddit, Less Wrong and HN, just to cover independence, moderation, server costs and to prevent them from being forced to come up with annoying business models (like those on Quora and Scribd).
Command-Line Cloud: rss2email
I hate this. Hate, hate, hate it. This technique from the "Lean Startup" movement to gauge whether an idea might have legs by putting up a fake landing page, and then harvesting email addresses.

Hate it.

Feels actively dishonest.
Which aspects are you questioning? It's not my favorite piece I've seen published — I don't think it covers some areas in enough detail and leaves room for insinuation (e.g. Yarima was young when they met, but it wasn't until years had gone by that a relationship occurred. They (David's parents) have spoken as recently as ~7 months ago on a satellite phone, and Yarima has expressed interested on returning to America to visit on multiple occasions. She misses David's father and the relationship they had.)

David's relationship with his Dad is still strained from when he was young, there's no denying that (from my perspective). But as David's interest in Anthropology has grown, so has their ability to find common ground as individuals. I've seen him on the phone talking with Dad for hours, just like any other son.
Spot on, this is exactly why I posted it. I'm a relatively new programmer (~2 yrs into a corp gig), and for me to really grasp things at an intuitive level it always helps me understand the context in which they are conceived. This was an exceptional read to tie in the big picture so that I can further my knowledge with a deeper understanding of "why" things are the way they are.

As an aside, my mind was blown that much of this was directly inspired by the Multics project. It's really interesting that despite so many decades of apparent advances between the early 60s and today, much of what the modern OSs have are really the same.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=malaria+magnets#!/story/forever/0/...
I wasn't. I'm expressing. My own. I come. I'm getting. I haven't. I'm intending. I'm not. I know. I'm calling. I'd say. Would have left me. Ensure me. My sense. I know. I can. I'm earning. I'll give. Required from me. Put myself. Educate myself. Required from me. Put myself. Close to me. Requires me. Astonishes me. I know. In my humble opinion. I'm even.

You seem to have a problem of perspective.
I think the increased amount of college graduates has pretty much killed most negotiating power for those degrees which aren't regarded as in demand.
You can't aggressively negotiate anything if you have little power. Your student loan makes it harder for you to walk away from your job, and so it puts you at a disadvantage when negotiating.
Usually when negotiating salary increases you need some sort of justification. Having a lot of debt isn't a very good one in my humble opinion. At least I have never seen it used successfully.
Much of your thesis relies on the following:

> If you are illiterate, the number one thing you can generally do to improve your life is learn to read.

I agree that this certainly holds true today, since our culture now uses reading through and through. But in the history of our species, literacy is the weird exception, not the norm.

For your argument to hold, it needs to have been true when only, say, 3% of the population could read and write (basically, a proportion comparable to today's proportion of people who "know how to code"). This graph (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Illiteracy_france.png) suggests that the comparable era may be sometime around the medieval period, and it's not at all clear that your thesis would obviously hold true then, when other skills (hunting, barrel making, blacksmithing, etc.) would be far more immediately remunerative. When books are scarce, and few of one's peers are literate, being literate will do far less to improve one's life.
IIRC L4 is just a proof-of-concept thing to port, not necessarily what they plan for everyone to use. The Mill's security model is well-suited for a microkernel (it doesn't have the overhead traditional architectures have with microkernels).

The security model is probably the biggest thing people writing software will notice- instead of a user/kernel split with expensive transitions between separate address spaces, it's a single address space with cheap (on the order of a shared library call) transitions between arbitrary protection domains (turfs).
I haven't met his younger sister, but she has children of her own and is preoccupied with life at the moment.

His younger brother is also at University studying.

It took David 25 years to take this project upon himself. As things grow, I would not be surprised to see his siblings take interest and get involved, but for the time being, traveling to the Amazon just isn't feasible for either of them.
I doubt wage increases are going to happen because of the steady influx of H1B indentured labour. First, these people aren't nearly as encumbered by student loans as US nationals, second, they are willing to forego salary increases because of the promise of a green card, and third, they can't negotiate hard because if they do the green card just won't happen.

H1B just needs to go away and be replaced by a point system, like everywhere else in the civilized world.
Worms with good intent
I have no doubt that this is beneficial for big business to monopolize and the continued suppression of competition. It is too bad, and a sign why programmers are still beating these odds, because we can get away without an education and still find opportunities to beat the larger corporations. That looks to be changing though, as they learn to just gobble up all the ideas in buy-outs or patents.
Has anyone actually encountered one of these in the wild?

If so, did it "help", i.e. was it a net positive?
Can we stop being liberal in what we accept from others? It only leads to an unfixable mess.
The idea that JSON is the substitute made me chuckle. JSON is more verbose to boot.
CSV is a poor format but JSON is not panacea, actually personally I'd never use it for anything that's not web (browser) related.
The slide that shows them #1 share in "Cloud"... does anyone know what that actually means?
Do I absolutely need to get a degree in this area to participate in this kind of research?

Absolutely not. Every research lab I've ever known, even at MIT, has significant needs for what's called a Technical Assistant. It's similar to a Research Assistant, but you help code experiments, program analytic scripts, create visualizations and write reports. These labs run the gamut from single unit recording to whole brain imaging.

Do they need software development expertise?

Yes, all do.

Is it difficult to adjust my skillset from being just a software developer?

That answer depends on the lab and its existing group of researchers, assistants, and students. There's a learning curve but you are far better off than the many, many researchers and students who have no programming background.

How does division of labor usually work in groups like these?

The principal investigator (PI) is responsible for everyone and is the one to get the major grants, have or seek tenure, and plot the general direction of the research based on their history of publications. Post-doctoral researchers are recruited on their way to becoming PIs of their own labs. Graduate students usually work on their own research, sometimes with their own smaller grants. Research and technical assistants work for all of the above on the day-to-day responsibilities.

I imagine there are always some biology- and some software-oriented folks in one group. What could be my first step in that direction?

It depends foremost on geography and your interests. Before uprooting your life, look for research groups at the nearest university. Find the PIs whose research is most interesting to you. Write them a very brief email (4-6 sentences) explaining your background and interest in working part-time on technical software challenges they might have. If you don't have many PIs near you, it will be more challenging. You won't hear back from most. But remember, you're looking for experience. If you are dependable and professional, you'll find some to grow with. Then you'll be better positioned to seek a full-time job in a great lab that really fits your interests. After a few years, you'll be qualified for graduate school. You don't necessarily need an undergraduate degree if you are working with a leading researcher who can vouch for you.
Laboratorio de Sistemas (Clive operating system written in Go)
Start : (Markus: $0) (Joe: 1BTC)

Step 1: (Markus: $1200) (Joe: 1BTC)

Step 2: (Markus: 1BTC) (Joe: $1200)

Step 3: (Markus: $200) (Joe: 1BTC, $1000)

Step 4: Piss off Joe by preventing him from withdrawing his imaginary profits.

I don't understand what Markus gains in this situation.
CSVs were simpler back in the 80s, when there were a few products (e.g. - Lotus 123, xBASE) that all wrote RFC 4180 compliant text (and I'm pretty sure there was no RFC 4180 yet)

No alternate delimiters, no backslashes.

Now I have to put up with offshore staff trying to use apostrophes (') instead of quotes (") :-(

Barring alternate delimiters, and disallowing newlines* in fields, I can write the parser for 4180 in about 30 lines of perl, reading a char at a time and flipping between about 4 states. (avoids getting root access and days of paperwork to install from CPAN)

* disallowing newlines in the data is admittedly a big restriction, but it works for many use-case/applications, and allows the caller to pull in a line before calling the parse function.

For Java, the "Ostermiller" library is pretty good for CSV handling, and has a few options for dealing with freaky variants.
On Debating
a non trivial percentage of your posts are complaints about the quality of HN submissions, (35% or 50% depending on how you count), maybe you should find another website to read if you dislike this one so much?
It's a substantial reduction in costs, but fab set-up costs for a given design alone are still extremely high ($millions), so it won't be something you do on a whim.
Traditional education is reaching a breaking point, IMO. Tuition costs keep rising at a runaway pace, while the prospects delivered by a diploma are dwindling just as quickly, which is having a catastrophic effect not only on the lives of graduates but on the economy at large.

Why is the education system so broken, at every level, when people are more fixated than ever on the importance of getting a degree? And how do we fix it?
You may be interested in some other articles, our publications listing are here, http://jointhegoodproject.com/media/publications/
Reminds me a bit of the movie Jungle 2 Jungle (1997) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119432/ and Krippendorf's Tribe (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120725/

(the screenplays are different, but from a similar timeframe between '85 and '94)
The idea that big companies who fail to innovate will die off or get acquired is hardly an earth-shattering prediction... it's just the way things have always happened.

The more interesting long term question is how much IT infrastructure will organizations want to own and how much they will want to push off to service providers. I think Cisco will find it hard to maintain their margins and growth if enterprises make a major shift to off-prem cloud infrastructure.
I don't like Quora, and yet I find myself on Quore surprisingly often because a lot of the questions and answers highlighted in the emails that I still get in my inbox are so interesting.

Does anyone know of a less unpleasant site with Quora-like content?
Operation Choke Point: Feds target legal business via banks