skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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.

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.

Why would someone go long bitcoins (i.e. buy them and in such quantity) through such a difficult process as dealing with the US gov't to so quickly exit their position?

My hypothesis is that it will be either rich institutional investors, hedge funds, or similar large investors who see this as an opportunity to acquire bitcoins at an undermarket price.

I think many of those groups would sit on their position (and not sell them). Further, if they were to sell them, they would want to do so in a way that didn't dramatically affect the price (thus over many days, weeks, or months). Given that 30K bitcoins is far less than the total bought/sold on exchanges every day, it should be presumed that they can exit this position over a sufficient timeline in order to not cause negative pressure on the price (if the auction winners even want to sell -- which as I analyzed above, I don't think they would).
> Ross William Ulbricht hasn't yet been convicted of anything. I know that they aren't selling his personal bitcoins, but in the (highly unlikely) event that he is found innocent, wouldn't that mean that the Silk Road assets need to be returned to him?

If they aren't his bitcoins, why would they return them to him? The assets they are selling aren't the ones he has claimed a property interest in, they are the ones that were unclaimed (by him or anyone else) when the forfeiture action was initiated.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/January14/Silk...
...why would I expect police work to be associated with protests?

That is something I would expect, as the grandparent indicates, in the USSR. I don't expect it in the United States.
That's called content management, and it's been used in most large companies for 15+ years. Unfortunately, it's a really ugly problem, not because of technology, but because of people. I spent five years working with higher ed on content management issues, and the technology is the easy part. Getting people to change habits, getting business processes to align with technology, integrating in with all of the various systems that documents interact with, now those are hard problems.

Whoever solves that problem will be a very wealthy individual, but, like many organizational people-problems, it may be intractable from a technology perspective.
Damn, I was planning on waiting until it hit a local minimum and then buy a few, but while I was writing the above comment, the price already rebounded from $550 to $590.
While there are certainly wanton abuses of civil forfeiture statutes, linked to even in this comment thread, applying them here is a no-brainer. Silk Road was very clearly a marketplace for illegal drugs, and the brokerage fee that DPR collected (whoever he or she is) is clearly illegal.

Again, there are obviously situations where civil forfeiture is improperly utilized. This is not one of them, in my opinion.
See https://wiki.debian.org/SecureApt
and
https://www.debian.org/CD/verify
That makes a lot of sense, there are definitely use cases where to read a past value is viable, especially considering the big difference in performances between the two kind of reads.
Paypal Hack Doubles Your Money
For your sake, I hope this submission generates some discussion from
people who know (I don't know but it would be interesting to read).

If not, HN Search (from algolia.com) should really be able to help you
find both previous discussions and fellow authors who you might want to
contact:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ebook

There are a lot of "How I made $X with my ebook" submissions as well as
other interesting ebook related stuff. I don't have the answers for you
but that's how I'd try to find them. Good Luck.
I am under the impression that they are auctioning off bitcoins that belonged to "The Silk Road" and not "Ross Ulbricht".

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the bitcoin sitting inside the silkroad wallets was free for the taking by U.S. authorities.

Whether or not Ross Ulbricht's wealth is owed to the U.S. government they're not sure, so they're keeping them until the trial has completed.
Yea no good ones. He's OCD and not happy with his code. He has a lame philosophy that we must make it on our own and shouldn't have help, ie that providing the code will detract from it. ..he's the one saying he would. I get the sense he's just disorganized and all over the place, hyper focused with his latest discovery du jour. ie there is no grand plan. I used to hope he was buildin a commercial company but I just doubt he is. I want answers. If u people weren't so busy kissing his ass u would do. I love Bret Victor--I'm holding him accountable to the greatness he is.
Doesn't matter, had civil asset forfeiture.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_...
"Given the very few fossils of the australopith face, I am not optimistic that evidence of…"

That is the primary reason you shouldn't put much faith in anything you read about most early humanoids, especially not the parts that reach general audiences. We simply cannot know much from the samples we have. Yet, scientists feel the pressure of having to publish, and cannot just publish new measurements, so they hypothise away.

This, like many in the field, mostly is a "we cannot rule out that" paper; all evidence is circumstantial. It may be truly insightful or it may not be, but we simply cannot know at the moment.

Can we blame the scientists? No, but I wished we educated fewer in this field and/or told those working in the field "feel free to think, study and experiment for a few decades and publish something when you are certain you have a convincing argument"

On the other hand, it is intriguing to read about the latest ideas in the field, just like it is to read about our new thinking about dinosaurs, even if experience tells us our ideas about both will swing heavily (in a few decades, what color will dinosaurs be? Will they be warm-blooded? Will all of them have feathers?)
Neat, but given the site's tag line, I find it ironic that most of the source links appear to be non-functional.
I host my own Fever[1] service on nearlyfreespeech.net. Fever has a UI to access feeds and some apps, like Reeder on iOS, can pull from Fever accounts. I've had my Fever service running a few weeks before Google announced Reader was going away. I haven't had any problems with Fever.It costs me a total of $2 to $1 per month to host. Setting it up was very easy and the instructions are very detailed.

[1]:http://feedafever.com/
Just a dead cat bounce. Wait it out.
Is Google rebranding Google+? Google+ signin button changed.
Wouldn't this just be the particular exchange making the decision though?

Just, the exchange voluntarily deciding whether or not to accept the trade?

Or did they mean that if the coins were tracked regardless of who they were passed to or through how many people?

I don't see how a person deciding not to trade with a given address(govt), or any address that traded directly with that address(person who bought from govt), is creating any sort of infrastructure.

It could be worked around with by additional transfers of course, or just used directly to purchase things,

But in at least one similar type of thing I don't think it would inherently cause or require any harmful infrastructure/modification to infrastructure, even if it would be pointless.
I'm not sure how anyone can look at OAEP and call RSA "simple". Worse still: very few people will ever implement their own ECC code, but lots of people will use RSA implementations that more or less just expose the RSA primitive and fob "encoding" off on the developer.
A whole site with photos of elderly people from Instagram
Bitcoins are absolutely worthless. If there is any sign of a tech bubble, it is these worthless hashes that people pay hundreds of dollars for.

One of the genius aspects of the Bitcoin scam is the limited output and increasing difficulty as it goes on. This keeps the scam going longer. If it were like tulip bulbs, or subprime real estate, or pets.com type stocks, the bubble would eventually burst. With the types of bubbles we've seen, and the big names in tech willing to associate their names with this scam, keeping a <$15 billion market cap going is feasible for a little while.

Also keep in mind that the float is not all that high. Many bitcoins have never been traded, especially early ones. That 30k of Bitcoins are going on the market can tank the price so much shows how weak demand is for this worthless "currency".

One aspect of the pied pipers of this scam is that their theories of its value are not falsifiable. My theory is falsifiable - Bitcoins are going to go from a current market cap of over $7 billion to well below $1 billion. There theory is not falsifiable "it's valuable because it's valuable". So if it goes up they're right, if it goes down they're right.

Why are Bitcoins valuable? Anyone thinking of buying an ASIC or a Bitcoin should read from the Bitcoin boosters the answer to this question. There is no answer. Which is why Bitcoin is bound to crash.

It's possible a real online currency might happen. The Bitcoin scam is certainly postponing that day. When Bitcoin crashes, possibly with much legal involvement afterward, VCs will be very hesitant to fund an online currency for years to come.

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.

I would short Bitcoins if I could find a reliable party to do it with, and it were easier to do. That doing that is so difficult is another sign how it's not a real currency.

That this post and any post not buying into the Bitcoin hype is bound to be downvoted is yet another sign of the scam. I rarely have posts downvoted on HN, but any time I am slightly skeptical of Bitcoin's value, the Bitcoin hucksters pile on and downvote anyone questioning the scam into oblivion. It reminds me of how MLM people act on the Internet.
Ukrainian Army Use White Phosphorus Artillery to Attach Semenovka
Oh this is cool and that article was really insightful. I had no idea Nintendo was doing this. Back in the day console dev was near impossible to get into but this opens up all kinds of doors.
While there are real issues with civil forfeiture raised in that article, they largely don't apply here -- this isn't a case where the government said "let us seize your assets and we won't prosecute you" (using it as an extortion mechanism) or where the cost of contesting forfeiture exceeds the value of the assets.

Its a case where Ulbricht chose to assert a claim on certain seized property and not on others, either because he is not, in fact, DPR (which is what he claims) and didn't want to steal property that wasn't his, or because he is actually is DPR but admitting that he owned the Silk Road servers and bitcoins would make his conviction more likely because it would make it harder for him to deny being the guy behind Silk Road.
Parrot’s Mini Drones Rolling Spider and Jumping Sumo
Right. I didn't mean to imply that the water is only under the U.S. I meant to say that under the U.S. there is 3 times the volume of the world's oceans. That seems like an awfully large amount of water for an area that comprises around 2% of the Earth's surface. If this rock wraps around the entire Earth evenly, that suggests that there is 150 times the volume of water of all the Earth's oceans 700 kilometers down. The idea that the oceans, which cover 70% of the surface and may be miles, deep only make up .007 of the volume of water on Earth blows my mind.

EDIT: 2% = 1/50th of the surface. 3-oceans * 50 = 150. (1 * all earth's oceans) / (150 * all earth's oceans) =~ 0.00666...
I audit software, so frequently I'll pick targets on my Debian system(s) and run:

apt-get source $foo

That gives me all the source to read, and is something I do at least once a week.
Look at the restrictions, though.

Potential bidders must have $200,000 USD Deposit sent to the U.S. Marshalls from a U.S. bank account by 9am June 16th (~2 business days from now).

That disqualifies a good 99.9999% of the world from being eligible to bid.
Would Twitter be allowed to import contacts from Facebook or Google+? AFAIK they disallow the exporting of the social graph to other social networks to lock users into their network.
No, if Ulbricht had claimed the bitcoins were his (which would be kind of hard when he is also claiming that he isn't the guy behind the Silk Road), they would have remained seized as evidence but would not have been forfeited without further proceedings. They were forfeited because no one, including Ulbricht, claimed them (unlike the bitcoins that were seized from his personal computer that he did claim.)
I'm saying this is a situation where a different license might make sense. The Open Source projects that could make use of said library, can't use said library because of GPLv3. No one else wants to use it, and the project is dying on the vine. Maybe it makes sense to change the license so that the projects that could make use of it, are now legally able to. This might encourage developers to come back to the project, and improve the software ecosystem as a whole...
Bitcoins have value because they let you buy things.
I'm not sure they really belonged to The Silk Road. Didn't they really belong to the users, who had them on deposit on The Silk Road?

I guess the law would see that as belonging to the business holding them, but I'm not sure that's morally correct.
s/commutative/symmetric
This is completely false. If what you were saying were true, the price of oil would not change when the stability of the middle east was under question. Supply is the amount on the market, not the amount locked up somewhere that can't be brought to market immediately.
I didn't downvote, but I have to wonder what you're threshhold for not being a scam is? What companies will have to accept it, and how long will it have to be around?

I'm pretty amazed that people still think it's a scam when huge companies with massive legal departments are accepting it. That's some pretty extreme skepticism.

BTW, there are plenty of easy, legitimate ways to short Bitcoin, but given your extraordinarily high threshold for "non-scam", I won't bother mentioning them.

PS: Bitcoins are valuable because people are willing to buy them. Despite what most people think, money is not magic, it's just an agreement.
I know. This project uses a json schemas which are somewhat similar so xml schemas though. Maybe a converter could be developed.
I think you're right about me being in a minority here. I also think there's an unfortunate amount of neophilia in the cryptographic community, partly because you don't get publications by not doing anything new.
Twitter suggests celebrities because they are broadly known quantities. Plus, Twitter knows absolutely nothing about you when you first sign up. While it would be nice if they would suggest some smaller niche people to follow, you may not recognize any of the people they suggest - and that would be even more frustrating...
Where can I walk in with 29,0000 bitcoin x market value and walk out with suitcases full of $100 bills? I wonder if there is any legal implications of the federal government selling Bitcoin. I always felt the majority of bitcoins were mined illegially(on company, and university mainframes--without consent). I'm surprised they are asking for a deposit in cash?
Yes, that's what he meant by liquid assets.
@1
Is the connection in Bittorrent Chat working the same way as in tor? And are you randomizing payload size + providing some kind of delivery delay? If not you are still susceptible to attacks. As for the configuration part, it's relatively easy to install appropriate plugin in ekg or pidgin.
That strikes me as eerily similar once again to 1984. The government retro-actively changes recorded history when it suits.

We've always been at war with Eurasia.
It reinforces existing government policy that Bitcoin isn't intrinsically illegal, but nothing more than that.
> The government doesn't see Bitcoin as money.

I think the money in GP refers to the other side of the trade -- if you sell an asset on an exchange, you are going to then have money (received from the purchaser) that is yours on that exchange until you are able to extract it.

Ideally, that would be trivial, but that hasn't always been the case for BTC exchanges (Mt.Gox being a notable example for an extended period of time.)
Does Donald Trump or Bill Gates have to shy away the fact that they have seemingly endless amounts of money?
I'm pretty sure there was a DNS record type for telephone numbers, but it was never picked up for use by anyone. If it exists, it would be in this document:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameter...

I quickly found record types for ISDN and X.25, but I don't have time to pick through for PTSN.

Edit: See also: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1183#section-3.2
They are in blocks of 3000. You obviously can't even bid if you don't have 200k.
If there was logic, it would be repeatable, and all those providing advice on said logic would be millionaires therefore doing something other than answering this very question.

Same goes for capital markets which is why only brokers and Warren Buffett "make money".
Some nice finds here, but there's an issue. The conclusions are served completely isolated from the kind of people the research was done with.

We're not all the same, we don't all react the same to the same traits of your marketing efforts.

Certain kind of people will become convinced your product is good if you make them watch a 30 minute marketing video without a way to control or skip the video. While others will quickly roll their eyes and close the page.

Certain kinds of people like discounts and coupons (irrationally, as the site says). Others despise them (maybe also irrationally) and would never shop from a place whose message is "barrel bottom bargain products".

First rule of marketing - identify your target. Get to know them. Research what those people like and don't like. It can get very specific, and it's just as much cultural (if not more) as it is psychological.

If you follow a list of generic tips, you'll end up targeting an artificial construct, a Frankenstein monster whose sum of traits are supposed to represent "the average man". However, targeting the average man can only achieve average results.
I agree the on-boarding process when registering an account is painfully bad on the desktop. I'm wondering what the breakdown is on desktop vs mobile account creation.
> I'm saying this is a situation where a different license might make sense.

I completely agree. That's why I asked in my original comment why the other library authors don't want to move from GPLv2 to GPLv3+, or why the LibreDWG authors won't switch to a non-copyleft license if they've changed their minds on copyleft.
Great idea. I tried this addon now. One limitation I see is that it's only saving single screenshot for each URL, not full page. So on a long (vertically scrolling) page only a small part is saved.
You'd still be able to buy things if the exchange rate was 1 cent. Where's the rest of the value coming from?
CrossFit's Dirty Little Secret (2013)
Actually, when talking about possibilities for election fraud in contested places, threats seem much more common and plausible than simple votes-for-cash trade. It's more widespread in places with less democratic traditions, but USA history has also a fair share of examples.

The most common current method worldwide for "vote buying" seems to be done by large regional employers organizing voting as such for their employees (time schedules, transportation, lunch/party after voting), sometimes that can be very effective as strategic voting (i.e., bussing large numbers of voters to a different district). If the votes would be actually verifiable, then even without any illegal violence it'd simply mean near-permanent unemployment in that town for "wrong-party" people.

And that's about ordinary elections. For a different example, the recent referendum for Crimea joining Russia, according to their official results, had ~32000 people voting against. I'm not informed about what's happening in Crimea now, but I'm very sure that if I was one of them, I wouldn't want that vote to be verifiable - the hypothetical risks far outweigh any possible benefits.
Top KDE meeting asks for your financial help.
Twitter: the greatest one to many communications platform since radio and they haven't spent a dime marketing their "channels". Onboarding isn't as big an issue as ignorance of the product. Anyone still buying Star Magazine or Time hasn't figured out how to leverage Twitter to get the same info but real time. Twitter... If you are going to do a good job, take credit for it man!
Mozilla Bug Report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1024642

Webkit Bug Report: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133804

Apparently both of them are just waiting for Eric to confirm that this is OK.
I've been watching [0] for the past ten minutes or so.

Fucking hell, individual instances of radon-222 are more predictable.

[0] http://bitcointicker.co
> Surely this creates precedent of US government recognised legitimacy?

It confirms that the government recognizes that bitcoins are real things which can be bought and sold, but that is both so patently obvious and so well established in legal actions that the government has taken around bitcoin already that confirming it is like confirming that the earth isn't flat.
> I built a car that was better than Google's self driving car in every way except one -- A person had to drive it.

You built your own car, in the 80s? Awesome. Got any pics? What were the stats? I imagine designing your own engine and gearbox was fun!

Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but it's to point out something very important. The OP actually built what he's talking about. Sure, it had some limitations, but he really did build it. You, however, did not build a car.
That interface is inspired. Bollinger bands, slick dark theme, nice font, real time, restful url (looking at 4 hour right now)... very cool.
Skype now censoring links
I sent a friend a message in Skype while trying to get him hooked up with a porn star (one can dream) ;)

Skype removed the link on his side without any indication of doing so on my side. I

Here's the censored link (perhaps NSFW, but not pornographic either)
http://www.niteflirt.com/listings/show/9553321-Celebrity-Adult-Starlet-Porn-Star-Tara-Lynn-Foxx