skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An upward price trend (existing for whatever reason) encourages hoarding, which reduces liquidity. This creates a feedback loop, resulting in bubbles and crashes.

A downward price trend encourages splurging, which provides excessive liquidity. This creates a feedback loop, resulting in Zimbabwe. Bitcoin opponents have a vested interest; the desire to attack something you missed out on due to your own lack of foresight is a known psychological effect. I don't necessarily believe all of the above, but it's a pretty symmetric mirror image of the opposite argument. You could go up a notch and make the case that inflation is worse because at least an upward bubble has to end eventually whereas a downward crash can keep going down forever until the currency is replaced. I'm known for my stance that finite supply cryptocurrency is probably more deflationary than optimal (though my concerns are more about wealth concentration and the potential for use of seignorage revenue for secondary purposes rather than some idea that spending is good), but there are good reasons why one might think otherwise.

As for gold, an important point is that gold's volatility is quite recent. Before 1971, and especially before 1913, it was actually quite stable:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/charting-price-gold-all-way-ba...

Yes, that's a 6x margin that maintained itself over six centuries. The 18th century fall and the 16th century fall can likely be attributed to the sudden introduction of new supply in North America; that's an uncertainty that cryptocurrencies do not have. I don't know why gold was stable before but is not now; perhaps it's the fact that a fixed-supply commodity is stable if used as a currency but not stable if used as a form of black-swan insurance. The former use case might have more constant demand, or price stickiness might play a role.

I'm honestly not sure what will happen. Maybe cryptocurrencies will die, maybe BTC will die but others succeed, maybe BTC will become gold 2.0 and other currencies will take on other roles (if this happens, environmentalists at least would be quite happy given gold miners' current track record), or maybe something else entirely. I do agree one-world-currency domination is exceedingly unlikely though.
Oh, ThoughtBot wrote a WONDERFUL post about this today: http://robots.thoughtbot.com/shared-terminology-yet-differen...
Democratic governments are at least notionally beholden to their people. I realize that's something of a bread-and-circuses fantasy, but at the very least they have to act like they're listening and taking action, or they get voted out next election.

Corporations are under no such compulsion. Their sole motive is profit. Put Wal-Mart in charge, and they'll happily kill half the population and feed them to the other half if the accountants say it will cut costs somehow. Yeah, every now and then you get someone with a conscience in charge of a big company, but if you're going to rely on that you might as well just cut out the middleman and go straight to a "benevolent" dictatorship.

Oh, the other thing you missed is that most corpocracy scenarios (including the one that we're actually living in) aren't about corporations standing up to the government, but about them using money and influence to make sure that the government does what's best for the corps instead of what's best for the people. Giving the corps more power doesn't create a balance, it just makes it easier for them to pull the puppet strings.
You can make it so that finding a free slot is always O(1). Keep another array that is a stack of available slot indexes. When you need a free slot, pop off an index and use that slot. When you're done with a slot, push its index on the stack.
Not only is it faster than the serializations you mentioned, messages generally have a much smaller memory footprint, and it is therefore very friendly for use in contexts where bandwidth is likely to be at a premium (e.g. mobile carrier data limits). I use it exclusively in mobile apps I develop.
I am a long-time DirecTV customer and regularly (monthly) get glossy mailings from AT&T promoting U-Verse with various discounts and enticing promises of high-bandwidth internet and an advanced DVR. But when I specifically explored it, I found that it wasn't available "in my area." Apparently my neighborhood in one of the most affluent zipcodes in the nation (a few blocks from the Jobs's place) is not one where AT&T has run fiber. But still, month after month, the U-Verse brochures come through the mail slot...

Tantalized beyond measure, I went to an a physical AT&T office/showroom to get f2f human verification of what att.com was telling me. Yup, true. Plus, while there, I took a few moments to flip some channels on a U-Verse monitor. Not impressed. I generously showed the salesman how on the supposedly hi-def ESPN channel, there was clear posterization of the colors of the presenter's tie and little fine detail in hair or beards -- as compared to the consistent 720p that comes down from DTV. I was convinced by this demo that AT&T had absolutely nothing to offer in the realm of TV either; after all, if they can't get a decent picture in their own showroom...
I think that is because China has such a home grown ecosystem for google/twitter etc. alternatives

Russia? Not so much I think.
Doesn't work still. Anyway, here's my email: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/d?k=01HTjtxlLXv2ZuO...
"All bids must be made in U.S. dollars."

Which dents my plan of offering to buy each of the BTC 3,000 blocks with an offer of BTC 2,000 each.
I do not want to contradict the research by this, but our heads certainly aren't all too well adapted to punching. The brain is to a large extent floating quite freely in the cerebrospinal fluid in the skull, and when the head is punched it experiences an effect similar to a passenger in a suddenly breaking car - it is smashed against the skull as a result of inertia, often resulting in permanent brain trauma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_pugilistica

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopath...

In fact, many people die from just a single punch to the head. They become unconscious and fall on the concrete, for example:

http://www.smh.com.au/national/90-killed-in-singlepunch-assa...
It's a valid point. But TFRs are also limited by altitude (3000-4000 feet AGL). So one can dive or drop a bomb from ~0.5NM (10-15 secs). Even with a minute warning, I can't see how VIP can be evacuated out of a building especially if s/he is not on the 1st floor.
That's a good generic overview but doesn't hit how the code handles the edge-cases.
why yes that is indeed what the adults have been discussing
I just started at a startup as well straight out of college. If you are only pushing to release every 4-5 weeks, that is extremely slow. You should also suggest moving to agile with more developers in smaller teams. Odds are, if you don't feel great about being with the startup, it isn't going to end well. GL
"majority of important software innovations have come from the open bazaar, not the cathedral. The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++."

The vast majority of those were not developed by an open bazaar, but rather by focused cathedral organizations: the early Internet, UNIX, C, C++, SSH, Firefox, SSL. The bazaar maintains them or cloned the success of others (SSH).

I also think you're vastly underestimating the influence and power over millions that continues to exist from closed commercial software: Apple iOS, IBM zOS, pOS, and DB2, SAP ERP, Oracle database, middleware, and various HR/SCM/CRM/ERP suites, Microsoft Office and Windows / IIS. The big difference is that there is an order of magnitude more revenue and more people being paid to work with commercial software than with open source.

That you claim all serious servers run Apache or Ngnix on *nix is profoundly ignorant of the millions of Windows servers and IIS servers out there, some of which power very large websites. I think Ngnix is a great server, but most of the large enterprises (banks,
Telcos, etc) I've visted in my consulting run WebSphere or IIS and have never heard of HAproxy or Ngnix.

This is not to say this is a static state of affairs. Certainly in many cases the open source alternative is a better technology or better project, sometimes even the better product. Just there's a big difference between an innovative PRODUCT and an innovative PROJECT. There are lots of the latter on Github, but other than saving people some money, they're not having anywhere the economic impact a PRODUCT has.

There is scant evidence that open source leads to more innovative products. There's a lot of evidence it helps to lower the acquisition costs of supporting software for what usually wind up as partly proprietary products. All of the latest software kings: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Salesforce, Google - their primary money making innovations are closed source built on (mostly non GPL) open source . Their contributions of open componentry back to the community is welcome but limited.

The only large and "purely" open company is Red Hat, and even they go through major hoops to make it inconvenient for others (eg. oracle) to use their open source code for their own purposes (ie. Offer a RHEL clone and loss lead on support). They remain innovative. But so is SAP. So is Oracle.
Approximately 100% of people under the jurisdiction of US patent law and influenced by the American auto industry do.
They're explicitly not selling the Bitcoins seized from his personal wallet(s). They're selling the ones seized from the servers that ran Silk Road.

My bet would be that Ulbricht has denied any connection to those servers as part of his defense since claiming to own/control them would make it too easy for the government to prove its case. If, at this point, those servers belong to anyone else, they're free to come forward and claim to own them...that would stop the sale.

So if no one claims to own them, they're fair game for the government to sell.
The History of Apple.com's Nav Bar
Seems like a pretty nice place for a Great Old One to fhtagn.
Having more code with fewer guarantees is probably not worth it.
How Neuroscience Reinforces Racist Drug Policy
How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python 2nd Edition (2012)
People at work use SizeUp, which is free and beautiful: https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I use Slate, which is free and powerful: https://github.com/jigish/slate
> Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative.

I would say that it's more of today's entrepreneur genuinely believe that they're doing good, but are just terribly misguided.

Of course, that's just how it feels to me.
Good analogy. But you got the countries around the wrong way with "(US/USSR, Apple/Google)". The resemblence to the cold war is even more striking when you realise that this also parallels planned economy vs free market.

It will be interesting to see if we get the same result at the company level as we did at the country level.
You're missing the point. FirefoxOS exists to increase the market share of the web by giving lots of people in developing countries $25 smartphones built on browser technology. This creates incentives for companies to develop for the web.

Running Android apps on Firefox OS would be in direct conflict with that mission. Allowing developers to target both FFOS+Android with a single standards-track web application is definitely on mission.
Much of the "invisible hand" idea about how free markets run, and more specifically how they run efficiently, relies on the axiom that people in the market will act rationally towards their own self-interest. As with the Tragedy of the Commons, a capitalist model (generally at least) assumes that people will act towards their own self-interest even when those actions work to the detriment of the group. People that fit that description are certainly selfish (if rightfully so) and in that sense may qualify as "shitbags."
Silly question: does it work if you refresh the page? (front-end is a one-page JS app, so the page needs to refresh)
LEVAN, the Computer Program That Aims to Teach Itself Everything About Anything
I would really like to see inline code coverage as well. Does review board have a suggestion box?
Amaya Agrees to Acquire PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, for $4.9 Billion
I think it's time for Google to spin Google Fiber out to an independent company. Then wire up everywhere in the US that lacks fiber direct to the home.

This would cost tens of billions of dollars, but Google could send them with $1B seed money. Maybe some other web companies could pitch in? And I would buy bonds from these guys in a second, there should be a return here.

Let me know if I can help.
Assuming the total computation power of the swarm is constant, it would take a 100% majority a year to rewrite a law that was passed a year ago. It would also be relativly easy to detect (noticing that you just resolved a gigantic fork, or that the law just changed), and easy to prove, as someone with a copy of the old blockchain could still prove it has a years worth of work on it.

Once this is done, you can explicitly blacklist the offending chain and get on with life.
But they're censoring dialog between two 'friends'. Email's a different beast since you don't need to whitelist the other party in order to receive communications.

I could see the argument if Skype thought the account had been hacked and was spewing out spam, but there is no reason for it to think that in this case.

Would you think this is okay if they did the same think on voice calls (when their auto-translation launches they could add this sort of censorship). Would it be okay for Skype to beep out words it thinks are spammy?
Though you can only save the presentation if you log in. Creating an account requires authorizing SlideShare to edit your LinkedIn or Facebook account.

One can use a LinkedIn account from BugMeNot (http://bugmenot.com/view/linkedin.com) to safely log into SlideShare so you can download the PDF.

(It would have been more convenient if you had just published a PDF download link alongside the SlideShare embed.)
Netflix new design
The gov't announced months ago that unclaimed assets seized from Silk Road would be auctioned. The waiting period has now expired.

And why shouldn't it be fast? There is a single person who holds over $1B USD of Bitcoin, so big Bitcoin positions are normal. If you have the US money on-hand, this is a 5 minute decision. No need to drag it out.

The real story is the losers dumping their Bitcoin positions as the market goes down, while the smart people buy up those coins too. I guess the forums and IRC channels are full of people telling you to sell cheap. And next week, they will be telling you to buy high.
The Robot Army of Good Enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSWWSq714aQ

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4923342.stm
Just hypothetically.

If the story of the great flood (Holy Bible) is real - could it be that this is where all of the water has gone? Could this water some time in the future "rise up" once more and create a second worldwide flood?
Rails Fixtures
No. When I submit, you make a call to api.rollbar.com and also in the console I get these errors: 'TypeError: resp is undefined' (line 9795) and also 'Blocked loading mixed active content "http://app-abm.marketo.com/index.php/leadCapture/save2' (line 26084). The JavaScript file is: 'https://dmmj3mmt94rvw.cloudfront.net/assets/js/app-bd80a48ab.... I hope this helps a bit more!
Lee's books are great as well, very different perspective, audience, motivation and development, but great. I am working through his first on topological manifolds now.

Also, at about the same level of difficulty but a different perspective:

http://f3.tiera.ru/2/M_Mathematics/MD_Geometry%20and%20topol...
I use SpectrumView but I have not done an exhaustive search of the space.
I naturally tend to use this "railway" approach in my code. But often I stumble upon various problems:

1. The "success, but..." scenario. Sometimes you have different types of failures to handle and this style conflates all of them into "failure". For example, I want to WARN about something my caller; everything is OK, but there is something to be known (The call went fine, but the file was not there so I created it). Should information about that value be passed on the failure pipe? If I do so I lose the ability to do simple checks like "if failure.empty?". A third pipe for "warn"? And another one for "info"? Mhhh...

2. There are different way to fail. There are cases in which you really should not go on with any computation, there are cases in which can go on, just note that you are in "danger" mode (ENOSPC).

3. What about transient failures? Should "Network just went down" be treated like "Server returned HTTP 404".

4. Sometimes you want to just ignore all the errors because you are prototyping something and you do not want a lot of boilerplate code laying around. And definitely you do not want a catch all that hides the errors.
Apple in 2014
> You want a cryptocurrency that isn't absurdly volatile? Make it steadily inflationary, not steadily deflationary.

There are cryptocurrencies that do this, PeerCoin and Dogecoin for example, and they don't seem to work out, maybe because there is a lack of incentive to be an early investor if your investment steadily loses value.

There is no significant barrier to entry for creating a cryptocurrency that represents your economic ideals, so far however, only Bitcoin seems to have the right mix of incentives.
How is adding about 20% to the subscriber base going to drastically put downward pressure on pricing for existing DirecTV users. Consolidation rarely helps overall pricing.
Amazon redirects from HTTPs to HTTP by default
Seems weird that you would have them publicly published for your enemies to read if that were the sole motivation.
> The Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates that a Nash equilibrium solution is not always Pareto optimal. The "confess-confess" solution is the Nash equilibrium. You will always be better off screwing the other person over, whether they are honest or dishonest. The "deny-deny" solution is Pareto optimal. If both parties can somehow trust each other, they will both be better off selecting this solution.

This part is very confusing to me. I've always understood that deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum. Have I misunderstood the prisoner's dilemma all these years?
Google I/O 2014 Android App Released • vlogg.com
Erik Meijer: Duality and the End of Reactive [video]
If by rise up once more you mean it rose up the first time, then no--the bible claims it just rained a bunch of days.
How is it a false dichotomy if things like jailbreaks and console homebrew essentially rely on the lack of memory safety to work?

> Your device isn't free if the NSA or some criminal has owned it.

It's not free if you can't own it either - and that's where the problem lies: how do we stop the secure systems we create from being used and secured against us.
Google detects chess notations as Bosnian, tries to translate them
Where Rapportive meets your personal assistant
I'm pretty sure that a chrome extension can take a screenshot of the full page not just whats visible

EDIT: here it is: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/desktopCapture#metho...
وظائف جريدة الأهرام الجمعة 13/6/2014
Lawyer here. Just very quickly, (i) a CEO's blog post itself is not legally binding on the company by nature, but it is a reflection of a corporate decision (typically the Board of Directors)behind the post. An action of this nature can only be challenged in court by the shareholders or dissenting board members in certain cases. (ii) a legal patent holder has every right of disposal over the patent, including the act of revoking it. (iii)I did not look for precedents for this but if a different company would re-issue Tesla's designs on their own name and tried to sue Tesla (i.e. trolling), I have serious doubts concerning not only on whether such revoked patents can be re-issued in somebody elses name but also, assuming thats possible, any judge or court would award any penalties to the original patent author in such lawsuit.
I can trivially compute (x', E_{k'}(x')) for k' and x' of my choosing.

True, I oversimplified a bit. I was referring to situations where you don't know k' and x', e.g., x' = x and k' = k ^ \epsilon for some value \epsilon.
I'm by no means defending the lunacy, but it would be an efficient way of transferring such a huge amount of water: heat it up using the core or the holy kettle and let the steam rise up through the earth, which would then fall down as rain.
There is going to be some future work on some of the form elements. They're really not quite where they need to be.
oh yeah, what was i thinking O_o sorry, my bad.
Amazon Introduces Prime Music
The licenser is afforded the freedom to sell licenses at whatever price they choose, because they have a monopoly on the IP which is being licensed.
Prime Music
She's completely missed the point. When I buy something I want to know what is in it. I want to know if ifs genetically manipulated too, but that is beside the point.

Putting ingredients into a food product and then not labeling the package in sufficient detail for the consumer to evaluate the contents is fraud.

Her argument is that very few people are allergic to nuts, so you shouldn't have to label the product as having an item with some genes from a nut product. Wrong wrong wrong.
BTC mining pool just reached 50% global mining power
This seems about as meaningful as saying the employees' overall goal is to eat food, because without food their bodies will not be able to continue doing great things.
More customers allows them to negotiate better pricing with TV networks, but I guarantee none of the savings from this will be passed on to customers.
A strong case can be made that the risk of nuclear war that we incurred is worse than a conventional ww3. Say we had a 1/2 risk of nuclear war and a probable cost of conventional war would be 1/10 of a nuclear ww3.
Didn't OS/2 run Win16 apps better than Windows, by virtualizing them essentially?
Standard Analytics IO
Hmm, I can see how that sort of thing makes sense given the current state of the patent system, but personally I don't believe that so-called 'offensive' patents are irredeemable. Rather, it seems to me that they are simply far too broadly granted, and generally for far too long a time period. I have no problem with a patent-enforced monopoly if it is granted for a true innovation, and for a reasonable length of time.

For example, in the smartphone industry, where a product is old in a year and obsolete in three, it doesn't make sense to me for patents to last decades. On the other hand, it does seem reasonable to reward significant innovation by granting a patent for a long enough time period to establish a strong market position, before opening things up to competition. The tricky thing is, that ideal time period would be highly variable based on the industry and even the specific idea being patented. Still, surely there's room for improvement there.
Very nice explanation of monads.

sigfpe's blog has the "original" tutorial:
http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/08/you-could-have-invented-monad...
You cannot linearly scale volume under a surface in a sphere by the surface difference. If Earth was a cylinder - then you could ;)

So it will be significantly less than 150 times more than surface oceans. Still huge probably.
http://xkcd.com/1364/
>> deny was the screw-over move in the prisoner's dilemma. But this segment suggests that confessing is a local optimum.

The competition is between you and the other prisoner, not vs the state. Confessing screws over the other prisoner.