skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well we know the US Government has them, so I presume they'd be a strong target now
RFC2468 is touching.

https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2468.txt
First, this is explicitly unclaimed stuff; any who had a (in their mind) legitimate claim on those bitcoins had an option to claim [part of] them as their property; apparently noone did.

And if it's the property of Silk Road, then no matter what their deal was with the users, when it closes shop then the due process generally doesn't involve giving parts of their assets to users or creditors - the due process is to auction off those assets (as they're doing now) and settle those liabilities with US dollars; so again, people can claim that Silk Road owes them bitcoins, and they can get paid an appropriate share of this sale.
Gold and diamonds have inherent value - they're both used industrially. Bitcoin perhaps doesn't have less inherent value than a non-backed currency though; but even being decades passed gold standard, and such, currencies that have a "reliable" government as support are still pretty reliable.
In all fairness, the paper on which $100 bills are printed is quite worthless as well.

I think ever since people have stopped using gold and silver bullion (after arrowheads and knives) as currency items, there has been this consensus that money has the value that people give to it, not the value of its material (or, in BTC's case, immaterial) representations.
Of course it's the definition of a market. Why is that a problem? Nothing in your comment contradicts what I said, although I don't agree with everyone you said.
cloudflare doesnt charge based on traffic.
> For the same reason I wouldn't hand anybody involved in illegal activity my wallet.

Well, let's not go that far. I'd totally give someone my wallet if they were pointing a loaded gun at my head. Ain't nothing in there worth dying for.
Finally, progress. A great lesson to all!
That and even if the states that developed them in the first place never intended to use them, they remain in the environment for many years after, poisoning entire regions of the landscape. Sometimes to the point of making those regions uninhabitable.
Reputation should solve this problem given that life is a repeated game as long as we also are able to be long-sighted. A more formal argument can be found here: http://economics.mit.edu/files/4754

That suggests the cultural problem is decline in longer-term thinking or more likely a decline in arbitrary codes of behavior without a concomitant increase in longer-term thinking that would recreate many of those same norms.

American business used to place a high value on trust:
"A man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom. I think that is the fundamental basis of business." -J. Pierpont Morgan

As another example, Warren Buffet seldom does diligence to determine an offer; he trusts those from who he buys to deal and report honestly.
I don't think you quite understand how CSS or grieving work.
Didn't I read about the Tech Boom in Los Angeles last week?
The market was written without break statements.

switch(news) {
case 'price goes up':
theskyisfalling();
case 'price goes down':
thegroundisrising();
case 'price stays the same':
quicklookoverthere();
default:
celebrate();
}
My guess is no one has stepped forward because it would make the party guilty. It'd be like an officer saying "Whose backpack is this?" and it has a bomb in it. The owner is in big trouble if they step up.
I'd like something like this add-on to work flawlessly, maybe giving me the option to selectively save the page rather than doing it systematically.

I may not be useful when you are checking your email, and you may not want it when doing some type of transactions online, but it would be great when you are doing research on a subject: storing and organising images is simple, viewing them is simple, sharing them is simple, you get to keep the full look of the original page with all its content and being searchable, you can easily find what you are looking for.

It's a poor man's web archive but somehow, it's easier than saving pages through the Save As browser menu.

It's better than bookmarks since you can do visual and textual searches and you don't have to rely on the original content still being online.
Uber and Tesla partner up in Shanghai
WTF? "Girl Friday / Admin Assistant (SOMA / south beach)"
How Much Energy Will the 2014 World Cup Consume?
Interesting look at just how much energy is used in hosting and running the world cup? The figure is staggering!while the 2014 World Cup is going to be bigger than ever -- it’s shaping up to be the most watched, most lucrative and expensive tournament in soccer history -- it’s also going to be one of the biggest energy-consuming, greenhouse gas-spewing World Cups in history.
So... when will they be taking Pepsi off the shelf? Closing down all the Burger Kings?

LA has dozens if not hundreds of schools. If there are two lousy schools near Compton and parents can choose which ones get the funds earmarked for their child, even those lousy schools will get better fast. They don't have to become the best schools in the country for the parents and children to experience a benefit.
Controlling Your Smart Home With One Hub
Any company would be stupid to develop car manufacturing based on another company's held patents. But just ask your lawyer to talk to Tesla's lawyers to buy a very cheap, almost free license. Then we'll see if they're serious about this or not.
So much win in this! Let's move together towards Musk's Pareto Optimal solution!
Nah. Get a Briefcase of Holding.
Amazing. An effective and simple way of increasing transparency and maybe even accountability. Great work!
Why not, "because better"?
It's not all give, there is some take. By bringing other manufacturers on board, Tesla gets more assistance in building their recharging network, which is a formidable undertaking. Similarly, the more manufacturers of viable electric vehicles there are, the more mainstream they are, and the larger the overall pie. Tesla does stand to gain something out of sharing.
It's Hacker News and the government is involved. Of course it needed to be explained.
Who Gets a Press Pass? Media Credentialing Practices in the US [pdf]
Further to your point: BTC at least has the property that someone cannot arbitrarily create a new unit (without doing the requisite, increasingly difficult, work).

What exists with BTC is 21 million or so unique valid hashes and no others can be created. With money, say USD, there exist trillions and no guarantee that some party (the government) will not create massive amounts of additional units.
Yes, but a surface is only two dimensions, and we're measuring a volume (three dimensions). The average depth of Earth's oceans is a paltry 4.3 km.
In the not too distant future, when water becomes a valuable commodity, we'll have "I drink your milkshake" situations that will get geopolitical very fast.
They say that the tall skyscrapers sway a lot with the wind. It's perfectly safe, but it freaks people out. I've never been to the top of one to see for myself.
It almost seems like it's a joke... I hope it's a joke.
Tesla Is Going to Share All of Its Patents. It’s a Brilliant Move.
The arguments you make (speculation + deflation) have been discussed many times. The answer is always the same. Bitcoin proponents argue that they are not a problem because:

1. As the use of Bitcoin increases over time, as the exchange markets become bigger and deeper, as economic activity is surpassing speculative activity, etc, the effect of speculation are becoming smaller and smaller. There is evidence that this happening right now: graphs showing the volatility level of Bitcoin (at a coarse level: 6 months) is decreasing... I can't find a link at this moment unfortunately.

2. Although deflation is, as of today, "generally" believed to be detrimental, it is disputed. For example the very famous 1939 paper "A Program for Monetary Reform" argues (amongst many things) that deflation is healthy and normal[1]. One thing is certain: our understanding of financial systems is imperfect, and just because more economists think, today, that deflation is generally negative, does not mean it is true. Bitcoin is an experiment that will perhaps disprove it.

[1] "Some authorities regard prices falling, to some extent at least, with technological improvements, as a proper result of a successful monetary policy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Program_for_Monetary_Reform
Exterior calculus: http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.5356

Discrete diff geom: http://mesh.brown.edu/DGP/pdfs/sg06-course01.pdf
World Cup 2014 kicked off by paralyzed man in mind-controlled robot suit
On a case-by-case basis: that's probably fine. (A) It is unlikely to come up too often (lots of people don't have a favorite color), (B) while every named color adds a bit of burden to standards compliance, the bit is so terribly trivial that it's not worth mentioning; it's a single additional line in a lookup table.

There's no precedent issue here to concern ourselves with.
That game is very nice. I can't get past level 8 though. What's the trick? Be 10 years younger I think...
Zappos Turns to Twitter to Show Off Culture and Recruit Candidates
Pope francis becomes a rapper [music parody]
HN browser extension to highlight new comments and collapse comment threads
Object oriented model of the human brain with 1 deduced learning algorithm
Agreed. Seems like the author is looking for something more along the lines of "socially optimal." Also seems like he mixed up which outcome is Nash and which is socially optimal. (Deny, Deny) = (Defect, Defect) = Nash Eq. (Confess, Confess) = (Cooperate, Cooperate) = socially optimal.
No, really, no. Russian users will notice that Twitter is being blocked by the government a lot more than they'll notice that a few tweets have been blocked. Twitter has the position, and responsibility, to play hardball with these governments. A few days of lost revenue from a Russian block is nothing compared to the lost revenue from an entire nation under tyranny.

Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.
But the extra weight of having to maintain 40,000 named colors?

One in this case isn't one, it is a precedent.
And I can't help but wonder why this gets support but I am routinely downvoted and generally crapped for attempting to talk about what I have done to beat my medical death sentence. It is not intended to piss on this effort. I just honestly do not understand this. If you have genuine concern for other people, why say nice things only after they are dead? Why be so awful to the living? Why shout down someone trying to figure out how to help people with deadly conditions?

I honestly do not know where to go anymore to try to talk to people and work on anything. This isn't intended at all as dickish. If people have so much compassion, why not try to support efforts to improve things?
In an ironic twist, this tool uses Node - which is based on JavaScript (the allegedly obsolete two-decade-old language).
[1995]

... i.e. Web prehistory. It's not surprising a lot of it is gone after 19 years.
> transaction system that is decentralized ... (which this would still be).

I'm not so sure about that. The mining process is required for the decentralized consensus over transaction history and ordering. The incentive for investing resources into the mining process is the block reward - without that, people won't mine. If you have a centralized authority that controls minting, you have no block reward to offer.

Using mining for the initial distribution of coins isn't just a way to decentralize the initial distribution - its also a big part of Bitcoin's security model, and without that, pretty much everything breaks.

(At some point, transaction fees should replace the block reward - but that requires significant usage of the currency and is only possible far into the future. Block rewards are required for bootstrapping, until you get to that point.)
D-Link’s mydlink Wi-Fi Smart Plug – Smart Home | Tech Diggers
I randomly stumbled across this several weeks ago and it's been fantastic.
Agreed. This site is toxic, if it's any consolation in day-to-day discussions with people in Silicon Valley actually doing things I've found nothing but respect and awe of what Tesla and SpaceX are doing. I wouldn't take HN to heart too much, the people actually getting shit done are not posting cynical comments on HN. (Myself included, I've been building less than usual the last year and spending too much time here.)
It's a great question - Marc Andreessen has addressed this question a couple times, and one of his analysis (if I've read it correctly) is that the only "inherent" value in Bitcoin is the value that comes from it serving as a transactional currency. I've probably bought bitcoin about a 15-20 times, and every time for the sole purpose of purchasing something. I didn't care (and the recipient didn't care) whether bitcoin was $0.00001, $1, or $1,000,000 a bitcoin - it was irrelevant to both of us. All we really cared about was whether it was non-volatile.

If that's the long term future for Bitcoin (as many people believe it is, and ignoring the value of the blockchain as a contract / consensus based negotiation mechanism for a moment), then the Bitcoin's value will eventually settle on a level that reflects its long term transactional use and "time in flight" - there is a non-zero period of time between when I purchase the bitcoin, and the recipient translates it back into local currency, in which the bitcoin will need to be purchased. Take your total daily transaction volume, and that time in flight - and you start to get a good sense of what the inherent value of bitcoin is.

That's the simple story as to why people are comfortable purchasing and holding it - it's going to be the global digital currency of choice, and as transaction volume increases, the value of the bitcoin will increase.
Metafilter related. And business analysis stuff. I apologize for the terrible title. It's my third attempt and I am leaving it as is.
We could have made the participatory government 20 years ago.

I always explain it like this (try to):

Our ancestors did not have Internet, direct participation was not possible. We therefore cant expect those ancestors of ours to have seriously considered it - at any stage. Arguably, before the Internet, everyone did his best to participate as much as they could. The new ingredient our generation introduced is for voters not to have influence on par with the technical possibilities.

If we would be overly modest we could allow that single vote to be changed when the voter wants to change it. If the voter cant change his vote the election program is not legally binding. One can say whatever he likes to get elected and enjoy 4 whole years without any consequences.

Technically we should be participating in the debate about specific issues at hand. Our officials would have little to do beyond the organization of that information (a feat easily automated) If we can do social networks and we can do flash trading then we need very little beyond a tech team and a few symbolic figure heads to make a kick ass democracy.

We can do considerably more than vote 1 time, ideas from citizens are a type of resource, value waiting to be extracted. Extraction will help it grow faster. Clearly we are missing out on incalculable riches, just sitting there, expiring while waiting for exploitation.
But sometimes those reasons are that speculators think that a future speculator will be willing to pay more for them. That only ends one way.
If you watched the talk, he explains the specific kinds of that should be stuffed into a JSON text column. It makes a difference.

This practice been done by many production sites over the years http://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Might not be considered bad practice now.
In Pakistan (from where I am from) the laws we have in place do not actually state who, if anyone, within the country can block anything on the internet. So despite
1. court orders to the effect that the government must seek ways of blocking only only offending content on youtube and not whole website
2. a resolution in the national assembly that youtube should be unblocked
nothing has happened towards unblocking. Activists have gone around and convinced everyone possible that youtube should be blocked. Everyone has claimed they are open to youtube being unblocked. Yet it remains blocked.
I think in the sales funnel it also matters on timing. The latency of digesting the landing page or offer at first should be thin and minimal, but once someones in your funnel heavy copy is great as the attention is there and you can only sell them harder...

Another classic site on copy, and direct marketing:
http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/
I may be mistaken, but aren't the larger EC2 machines priced fairly linearly with the improved resources? i.e. a machine with 2x the resources typically costs 2x as much?

If this is the case then can someone let me know the use case? Is this for better manageability? Or is it to overcommit (i.e. run 3x 4gb ram nodes on 8gb of ram).

Other then that I can't see the advantage over dynamically spinning up & down nodes as required directly on AWS.
Wait until you hear about "fractal storage" where every value in a table is a blob that contains a SQLite database, which in turn has blobs which contain SQLite databases, until it's turtles all the way down.
Got it. Misread what was said.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value, search for aliceblue.

Now look up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_blue.

It's already happened. You can argue it's a grandfathered name from color standards predating CSS, but this process right here is how these things happen.

I think the world will survive the occasional honorarium done in this fashion. I would even be willing to wager that the world will survive a great many honoraria done in this fashion, if that's what people want; it's just an entry in a lookup table. There's no meaningful risk here; standards have always been what people can agree upon.
>>The volatility in the bitcoin price just demonstrates how the majority of the people trading it have no conception of how to value the underlying asset (i.e. demand for a low cost transaction system) and thus it is speculators leading speculators a la the blind leading the blind.

True, but discovering prices for things that otherwise have no price is something markets do routinely every day.

>>The current sharp price decrease is because people are worried that whoever wins this auction (and the subsequent auction of DPR's coins) will want to exit that position. Thus their will be an oversupply in the market and cause the price to decrease. Expecting this, people are taking that into account and trying to get out before the oversupply, causing a self fulfilling prophecy based on bad underlying analysis.

There's nothing unique about this situation from the standpoint of how markets work; the only unique thing is nature of the asset itself. Even so, bitcoins are not fundamentally different from a precious metal like gold. The price of gold isn't based on the value of the products you could make from it; very little gold gets put to any actual use. Gold is valuable primarily as a result of it's being scarce and the fact that people have given it value arbitrarily, just like bitcoin.

What I read in to the price shock is that the U.S. Marshalls probably should have anticipated this result of dumping the entire quantity at once, and they probably should have released it gradually to smooth out the effect on prices. The Marshalls may not have had the right backgrounds and somebody at the top failed to see it coming.
Not really. I bought my lunch in bitcoin today. Bitcoin transactions are usually priced in dollars so the volatility is immaterial to its use in transactions.
I'm not here to give chances, but to report issues. Too sensitive, maybe?
If they seize stocks do they sell them at auction rather than on the open market?
How to get mosquitoes to breed themselves to death
I'm sure the last thing on Eric's mind right now is CSS and especially the implication of a RFC putting the name of his daughter in a technical specification.

It's one of those nerdy endearing gestures that, while made with good intent, only end up causing more pain while simultaneously opening all kinds of strange questions (such as should we build memorials in our technical specifications every time a tragedy hits someone in the community).

Now's a moment to grief, but after long time, a moment comes to move on. Specifications can't "move on". We shouldn't turn them into graveyards where we bury our feelings.
It's the twenty-first century. Assuming we open a precedent that some day grows the named colors to 40,000 entries (which seems like a stretch)... Is maintaining approximately 1.4MB of data in a lookup table really something we are afraid we can't do? I'm pretty sure my computer has forgotten how to count that low.

Is it even a significant burden on the creation of new standards-compliant web browsers? Explain to me how we could go about crafting the development process of a new web browser where populating its table of named colors doesn't reduce to throwing a couple of scripts at a standard normative document to convert that document into the language-du-jour.

Fear of precedent on this question is practically over-stated.
Well, that's market information sort of thing. Note that there are many more bitcoins in federal custody. And that the prospect of large amounts of bitcoins re-entering the market will cause some investors to dump their bitcoins.

To add onto your analogy, if they government did print billions more than normal, then investors would project that behavior out, try to figure out what was wrong, and exasperate the effects.
Think of Angular directives, Ember components, and React components as attempting to solve the problem of web components in your view.

I'm using react right now in a rails application at work. While it hasn't totally replaced my haml views, I definitely sprinkle it in where appropriate. It does a great job of handling dynamic uis and gives a standard, easy to understand structure to my javascript. I think of it is as a next step beyond jQuery.

In my opinion, React forces you to think of your view as a hierarchy. You are forced to think about what components make up your view and what its responsibilities should be. React components also come with some standard methods in regards to the lifecycle of each components and the state of your data as it flows up and down the hierarchy of your components.

I've really enjoyed the experience thus far. I'm not necessarily a fan of putting any sort of html-like structure in my javascripts, but Pete Hunt, one of the core contributors to React, explains his reasonings quite well in many talks you can find on Youtube.

--

Also, Khan Academy uses Facebook React in its perseus q&a system. You can view blog posts by two Khan developers about React here:

http://benalpert.com/2013/06/09/using-react-to-speed-up-khan...

http://joelburget.com/backbone-to-react/
Finally Good PR actually means doing something good!
hopefully companies/firms will do more advertising, marketing and PR that consists of contributing value to society and CSR. This will hopefully also shake up the awful inefficiencies within charities (not taking anything from the amazing work they do)
instead of polishing a turd or diverting money to ads.
This doesn't count as insurance, though, because no risk is ever actually held, it's farmed out. The most anti-bitcoin person in the world will accept USD that has been converted from bitcoin by an entity that is actually taking the risk, because by necessity it needs to hold lots of bitcoin reserves just to do business.