skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For any remotely plausible definition of "worthless," bitcoins are just as worthless as any representative money, which inclues fiat money (like a USD) and commodity-backed money (like a gold certificate). The only reason money can be used in general transactions is that people choose to accept it, and they choose to accept it because they are reasonably confident they will be able to trade it again in the future for something of at least equal value.

This is the fundamental answer to "why is any representative money valuable?" If people don't have confidence that they can offer the money in the future, they won't accept the money today.

> To me the real currency would have to be something in the realm of Folding@home. I'm not sure how it would work of if its computationally feasible, but I do know people would pay for the results of useful computations such as that.

As far as I know, that can't happen, at least not in a proof of work system. The work in a proof of work system can't be severable from the specific information it is designed to secure (in Bitcoin, that would be transactions on the block chain). This isn't exactly a scholarly source, but it's from the "Chief Cryptographer for the Ripple protocol": http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/11649/intrinsical...

I'm not very familiar with other cryptocurrency systems, like proof of stake, but I know there are some attempts at cryptocurrencies that use computation with unrelated useful side effects.
That seems like a non-standard usage of "accept". Does everyone who accepts a payment method while hedging it also not count as another vendor who accepts it?

If someone accepts PayPal while insuring against the possibility of not being paid "not accept PayPal"?

If a non-US vendor uses forward/option contracts to maintain cash flow in the local currency, do they "not accept" USD?
Yeah, that calculator was awful. I tried a solitaire game that was pretty decent though.
Ask HN: Is agency work respected in the Bay Area?
As a developer or technical manager, is it damaging to your career to work for an agency as opposed to a product company?
It Is Not Really a "Fund Drive" When They Say "Shut Up and Take Our Money"
<place holder for skeptical comment>
There is an important underlying issue here.

The NSA's legal doctrine is that collecting and retaining data is not a search under the 4th amendment, and so has no legal protection. Querying their data for information on a person is a search, but as long as that person is not a US citizen, there is still no 4th amendment protection. If they query data for a US citizen without a court order and then find out that it was a US citizen, their policy is that they immediately throw away the search and forget that they did so. Since there was no intent to search, they think that the accident is OK.

But any query that intentionally gets information about US citizens, no matter how minor, is a 4th amendment issue. Therefore, for instance, a query to find out how many Americans were accidentally searched would violate the Constitution. (This is not a hypothetical example - they refused to provide exactly that information to Congress on that rationale.)

Therefore they have built a system that stores data about all of us, and has safeguards to throw away any unconstitutional searches. The safeguards may or may not be as hard to circumvent as they claim. (I'd guess not.) But I'm sure that any attempt to find out will be met with the state secrets privilege.
More like:

- Price stays flat: "Obviously, market cap is too low to support a legitimate currency."

- Price goes up: "Obviously, it can't work because it's a deflationary currency."

- Price goes down: "Obviously it a bubble that's popping."
Ask the same question of a fiat currency, say, the USD.
I've long preferred having hackathon prizes that are in the spirit of hacking (think Arduinos, drones, various sensors).

They're fun because people might not normally buy them, but would be a great prize to say that you won at a hackathon.

A YC interview as a prize would be way too valuable to have a just-for-fun competition for.
Maybe to clear some confussion, snake case is exactly naming_things_with_underscores.
Coming next: creationist interpretation of this in a Biblical flood narrative with reference to "opening up the fountains of the deep".
Is anybody else surprised by the urgency with which they seem to be selling these coins?

They only made the announcement today and you have to be registered to bid by this coming monday?

Is this typical of government auctions?
I just checked, and it looks like I follow 500 people (which is actually way more than I would have guessed, and I'll admit is kind of ridiculous). Most of them aren't super high-output though, which helps.

I've had to unfollow lots of people who tweet a lot.

I've been using Twitter since 2007 (my account id number is in the 6-figures range). I feel like it took about a year or so to figure out how I wanted to use the service (and for there to be people I was interested in following), and it's only maybe the past year that I've discovered the benefit of unfollowing news accounts and following specific editors instead.

I also have pretty varied interests (I think the mix of people I follow is pretty evenly distributed between fashion people, photographers, news editors, functional programming people, infosec people, and comedians). That mix gets adjusted periodically as my interests shift (I unfollowed a lot of infosec people about a year ago as I've tried to extract myself from that community).

It's a work in progress.
Images on your about page are 404ing.

http://referralfeed.com/about.php

I was going to email you directly, but you don't have an email on your profile page. Your profile page is also the strangest I've ever seen. ;)
Volume of oceans = 1,335,000,000 km^3 [1]
Volume of earth = 1.08321e+12 km^3 [2]

So oceans only occupy 0.00123% of the Earth's volume. There's a lot of room below us.

[1]: http://ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/global/etopo1_ocean_volumes.html

[2]: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.htm...
Functional Programming for Hipsters [video]
"What would a new user even do after signing up? Who should I search for?"

I agree that this is the problem with Twitter, but the signup process is unlikely to be the cause. Some people are just not interested in the 140 character mental garbage that others are spewing. I understand the author likes Twitter a lot and cannot fathom the idea that Twitter is just not useful or interesting to vast numbers of people.
> A "Pareto optimal" solution is one which, given all the possibilities of action, produces the best outcome for both parties (with some negotiable surplus).

This isn't quite right. In a Pareto optimal solution, there's no way to improve things for one party without making them worse for another party, but there's no guarantee that the outcome is good for everyone. "I get everything, you get nothing" is a Pareto-optimal way of diving things up.
> 1) Why bother?

Because the stakes are high enough that 5% validates the engineering effort.

.

> 2) If 9+ is 30%, why quibble over the extra 5%

Same answer.

.

> 5) The distinction between the two is two independent implementations.

I didn't know that. Thank you for the information. :)

.

> 8 #1) Colourblindness (8% of Caucasian Men)

Jesus, really?

Luckily, my sites tend to be monochrome, so I get trapdoored on this.

.

> 8 #2) Dyslexia

I wouldn't even know where to begin making a website be dyslexia-sensitive. I don't know anyone affected and don't even know what's important there. Is there a resource about this?

.

> 9) The non-presence of ARIA does not make a site inaccessible.

In a question about why we invest no effort in accessibility, it is germane to point out the level of effort you have placed into accessibility.

And, respectfully, that markup.

.

> Unfortunately, you are presenting the opposite side of the problem.

I'm just explaining why it isn't gotten right.

.

> So you have a little more knowledge about accessibility issues than the OP - but not enough to pass a quick scrutiny.

Yeah, that was my point. My belief is that this limitation that you have correctly observed in me is the defacto case for nearly all web developers. I think it's just something most of us don't know.

Like, write a poignant guide or a learn you some consideration or something. Give people something to read, rather than to point out that they haven't read anything, you know what I mean?

.

> Perhaps, what is needed is for you and I to stop being part of the problem of disseminating half-truths

I don't believe that I have done this. I did make an error in naming the kind of recommendation though.

.

> spend that time quietly doing our jobs properly

I think that I actually do this. The world is full of a lot of hard, unfair choices, many of them outside my hands. I do my best to support as many people as I can within my time and budget constraints.

Perhaps we disagree on the choices, however.

.

> Invest the time to teach someone else how to build accessible websites

Yes, that was my point. Easy to say; too hard, apparently, for either of us to do.
The Technology Stack of Billion Dollar Startups
As the previous comments, trends change, if you watch a TV show from 10 or 20 years ago, scenes last way way longer than the current ones (right now: 1-3 seconds between each cut!)

Even pages with long copy (Basecamp) have gone to a single shorter page.

A better alternative: Check sites with A/B tests and learn from them:
http://whichtestwon.com/
http://unbounce.com/a-b-testing/shocking-results/

tl;dr: YMMV
They could be trying to be helpful by using it for two-factor authentication or as a secure means of sending potentially sensitive information. The problem can happen when well-intentioned security advocates talk about how to increase security and Yahoo takes their advice at face value, without taking into account the needs of people who don't need or want increased security, but would benefit instead from decreased security.
At what point would you accept that Bitcoin is not a scam? What percentage of the Fortune 500 accepting it? How many years? 10 years? 20 years? Can you give a number?

I mean, at least Prof. Bitcorn gave us a date. An open ended "it's a scam and you people are going to learn...someday" is not very useful.

And speaking of value, after years of paying $30 a pop to receive a few thousand dollars from Europe in 3-5 business days, being able to effortlessly send a few digits, pay a few cents, and receive that money in less than an hour is...highly valuable.
> Microsoft et al have done with Rockstar

It is my understanding that Rockstar existed prior to Microsoft and others getting involved. They merely footed the bill.
Maybe I was being prematurely futuristic and unfair, but it seems that at some point Google Maps will be better at routing than the average cabbie.

Google has all the information a cabbie has (road layout, major disruptions, historical traffic patterns, speed limits). They also have real-time traffic information. This is the kind of problem that computers tend to beat humans at, eventually.
My analogy doesn't seem flawed to me- that's exactly what I meant:

1. printing a billion dollars should be approximately just as [in]significant to USD supply as the 30k BTC to the BTC supply in circulation; that's why I said a billion, but not a million or a trillion;

2. market fluctions over/undershooting any corrections is reasonable, but not exaggerating them by multiple orders of magnitude - it may react to a 0.1% change as a 0.2% change, but not as 10% change;

3. a market that's "functioning properly" would be expected to correct for so huge overexaggerations - if some people get a little silly from time to time, then the market should (and would) take their money from them; but if most of the people get very silly frequently, then that's not a properly functioning market.
All very good points.

The volatility is the greatest hindrance to it being a viable transaction system. I'm hopeful that well functioning derivatives (futures, options, etc) will help to stabilize the price (as is the purpose of a futures market); however, that would rely on the traders having effective forecasts on supply and demand which I view as unlikely.

Related to that, I thought of an idea a while ago for a non-profit to create a new cryptocurrency that is by design pegged to the USD. Whenever anyone wants a unit of this currency, they can buy one from the non-profit for $1 and the non-profit will mint a new coin.

Similarly, if you want to sell the currency, the non-profit will always buy it for $1. The non-profit must keep the appropriate reserves (ideally, they would keep 100% of the US dollars bought or have always sufficient credit lines).

With this design, the proposed cryptocurrency will always maintain a $1 peg, removing the insane amounts of volatility. I know that is will be hated by all those in the btc community as it brings in a centralized monetary authority who controls minting coins; however, there is a huge value to an extremely low cost transaction system that is decentralized and pseudo-anonymous (which this would still be).

The central authority would not be capable of destroying coins or changing blockchain history, only minting new coins (and as per their charter, only when they are provided $1USD for the coin).

People would not have any obligation to use this monetary authority to exchange coins, and surely other exchanges which were more user friendly would appear. Simply, by an entity existing which will always buy at a given price or sell at a given price, it will cause the intended effect without having to have any central role in the decentralized transaction system.
The Windows 8 development tutorial stuff is actually heavily visual reader emphasized.
This image will give you more idea of how much water there is on the surface in terms of spherical volume.

http://water.usgs.gov/edu/pictures/full-size/global-water-vo...
This seems to be a confirmation of a study that what was published in March: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2579584/The-v...
This exactly describes my experience with Twitter. I've had an account for over five years and tried multiple times to find some value in it. For a time, I was subscribed to a channel (is that what they're called?) that published race results I cared about. Aside from that, I struggle to find anything relevant to me. How do people normally get engaged in some community?
In addition to setting up a site/blog, immediately setup an email list that you send out updates to. You can then potentially offer a 'Pro' version of this extension and you will already have thousands (if not 10s of thousands) of potential customers.
Fair enough, I suppose I've complained in the past that folks on HN are too negative when people discuss products they've built.
Why does it need sudo to run on port 3000?
Not to mention that there probably aren't anywhere near 29,000 buy orders anywhere near the USD price you see on the Yahoo! Finance ticker. Selling 29,000 will probably sprint through the buy orders.
I had some ideas for mechanisms to peg without centralization. I stalled out at the question of what to peg to...
The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions
years after they were issued, altering the law of the land
without public notice. The revisions include “truly
substantive changes in factual statements and legal
reasoning,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at
Harvard and the author of a new study examining the
phenomenon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-is...

http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...
Uh yea, that's why we punch people in the head. It's exploiting a weakness.
The only hope is cultural change.

The only hope is cultural trust, and the only way to achieve that is to allow like-minded individuals to separate themselves into autonomous political units.

This is dangerous thinking Chris, if you start following these thoughts through to the end, rather than spinning off into happy-clappy "change the world's heart" wishing...
David: What is the primary goal?
Joshua/WOPR: You should know, Professor. You programmed me.
David: Oh, c'mon. What is the primary goal?
Joshua/WOPR: To win the game.
Fixed, thanks for pointing it out, anyone else who wants to reach out myhandle@gmail
If you want to just serve this one page quickly, you can take the result and save it as static page. Add a specific routing rule just for the url you submitted. (the page looks completely static anyway)

You can play with varnish once you don't have thousands of people who will actually want to read the contents you posted :) (a.k.a don't upgrade anything the day of the release)
Playing devils advocate, I'd say sure, it sucks that some (or most) people are selfish dickheads leading to mutually degrading situations. But it would suck almost as much to always be at mercy of your competitors good will (that he won't arbitrarily screw you, leave unpunished and with a better outcome), even if it happens sparsely. The obvious solution to this fabricated game theory dilemma is regulation, which is nothing more than eliminating those scenarios which are undesirable for society altogether. Not only it avoids the risk of being screwed, or the costs associated with being screwed, or the loss of optimality of outcomes -- but most importantly it simplifies greatly the game. Markets are quite complex already and the added constraint of having to think hard about your oponents and consider all the scenarios to make sure you're not screwing them is enormous. I think this behavior is distinct from bad faith, it's just a matter of responsibility and scope.

This, to me, is ideal capitalistic behavior: oblivious, but with good faith (not trying to 'unfairly' or 'destructively' bring down your opponent) -- and it should come with swift regulations and laws flexible enough to punish edge cases.

We have a truly unrecognized gift as a species: morality. Not because it's cute or honorable (that would be a circular assessment), but because it allows us to reach those Pareto optimal spots. We just have to use it in proper settings, with proper rules.
I probably wasn't as clear as I thought. The problem I'm trying to solve is this: we often put of tasks because we don't know where to begin. But someone has likely figured it out already.

Thanks for the feedback!
There is no such a thing as CSS4. The specification model has changed. We now have versions per module.
It definitely has some impact. From my [limited] experience it seems you'll need one person to really deeply understand Angular to be your team guru and Angular advocate. Angular might take a bit to grasp. If you'll have every teammate only sort-of know what's going on it will create a lot of trouble. That's surely not exclusive to Angular but from what I experienced it's easier to get away with nasty hacks in other frameworks.
Did all team members agree to use it? My primary concern would be how each team member will like it, especially if they have prior front-end dev experience.
That still isn't quite right. Pareto optimal better describes transitions than states. A state can be described as Pareto optimal only in the sense that there are no Pareto optimal transitions out of it. So for example, in prisoner's dilemma, all of the states are Pareto optimal because none of the moves are. No matter what anyone does, somebody will be worse off than the alternative.

As another example, "I get everything, you get nothing" isn't necessarily Pareto optimal because there could be something non-rivalrous that the person getting nothing could have without depriving the person getting everything of it.
An observation: you all are quick to demand other folks do work for you.
Drill baby, drill!
This article expresses perfectly why:

a) I'm very cautious about working with American companies
b) Why my contractors nearly all bitch about working with American companies (I use a lot of contractors on oDesk and they tell me the same thing).

America's great but the lack of trust in business is the one thing that really grates on me.
A couple hundred million people are required to pay taxes using it. That implies that there is some inelastic demand for dollars.

That factor alone obviously doesn't prevent every currency collapse, but it is a key difference between "government fiat" and "geek fiat" currencies.
There's a fundamental difference between "centralized, like gmail.com" and "decentralized, like everyone running their own mail server" (which is what what I built, OT, etc. are) and "decentralized, like bitcoin (well, bitmessage, in this analogy)".

I'd argue that gmail is farther from "everyone runs a mail server" than "everyone runs a mail server" is from something like bitcoin/bitmessage.
I wonder if they are using ZipWhip. ZipWhip launched this capability early in 2013 and explained that they partnered with the land line operators directly to expose it.

http://blog.zipwhip.com/2013/05/14/zipwhip-expands-landline-...
wouldn't it be more thoughtful to remember becca and support her family through a charitable donation or something along those lines rather than trivialize an internet spec?

i feel for the family though and i think it was kind of jeff to reach out to them in a special way today.

EDIT: just so others are aware what the family's wishes are:

"The family requests charitable donations be made in Rebecca’s name to the Philadelphia Ronald McDonald House or the St. Baldrick’s Foundation. They further request that those who attend the services and are comfortable wearing purple do so in honor of Rebecca and her favorite color."
-Their henchmen wear uniforms so you don't confuse them with normal people

-They operate from fixed headquarters

-Some of them are elected

-They have a complaints department

-Certain social services are provided
OT: but I need something like this but a client that sits in the background. Basically like quassel-core but that thing is written in C++ and is a hassle to install and configure.
The flood story is covered in many cultures.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilgamesh_flood_myth

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth
There is already a bit of negativity in this thread, but personally I found such a list to be quite interesting.

I don't think anyone in their right mind is going to take every little fact as gospel, but the writer has saved everyone time by providing a nice summary and a link to the text in which the facts were discovered. From there you can make your own decisions.
really like this article... but your font (or font weight) hurts my eyes :(
That was a calculation, assuming that they would loose more in the suit than in opening up it's patents, this isn't the same at all, though it is a direct response to the question.
That's not a guess.
> There is no logic. Searching for logic behind bitcoin's price is a fool's errand.

The logic is that people (or algorithms that people put in control of their bitcoins) offered to sell bitcoins at a certain price, and other people (or algorithms) decided to accept that offer. One side decided that they prefer x USD to y bitcoins, and the other side decided that they prefer y bitcoins to x USD. So they agreed to swap. That is precisely the same logic that goes into literally every commercial transaction.

To look for some concise one-sentence explanation for the aggregate preferences of a bunch of people, however, is a fool's errand. And that doesn't change when "more than a couple hundred people" are trading.