skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ann is an early adopter and moves to new iPhone as soon as they're released. She can afford to do this by selling her old phone.

Making it harder for Ann to sell her phone to Bob (who likes Apple product, and can afford to buy apps, but can't afford a new phone or who wants to support re-use of older equipement) means that Ann will delay buying that new phone.
We have 140,000 songs but we're not in a position to give them away like that.
I'd appreciate if they let me unsubscribe from their damn emails on a catch all account where I get a former employee's emails. They make you log-in to opt out and I'm not about to reset the guy's password in case he still uses linkedin.
That's not the kind of restriction that stops pool mining. The trick is to enable the pool members to steal the blocks they discover. Andrew Miller, a grad student at UMD, has an ingenious scheme for doing this. I am pretty sure I put the link in the article, under the first bullet in the "What to Do Now" section.
This isn't (just) leads. Restaurants don't usually integrate OpenTable with their reservation system -- OpenTable is their reservation system. At least around me, they are running a core business function for nearly all the best restaurants around me.
The truth is that labels aren't needed if you are a savvy business person as well as a musician, but most musicians are not. They need help understanding how to advertise, where to do so, and they need leverage in order to get better deals. More importantly, whether they need these things is secondary to the fact that most of them don't want to do these things themselves and it would be a massive distraction from the main goal of making awesome music.
Optimal stopping theory can be applied to many things where you need to make a decision without full information, like finding a job for example ... http://www.roletroll.com/blog/the-plight-of-the-long-term-un...
IANABME[1], but it seems that a solution already exists to this problem, which is to use a decentralized mining pool. The unfortunate fact is that we're in a time window right now where large miners have not yet transitioned to this ideal solution.

However, any miner in the long run would prefer to join a mining pool that does not require trusting some pool operator over one that does, all other things being equal.

Yes, the current situation is dangerous for the health of bitcoin, but I don't see any solution besides waiting for distributed, trustless pool technology to catch up in terms of usability with the centralized pools.

This problem isn't going to be solved by a hard fork, as any "fixes" done this way are untested, incomplete, and risky.

[1] I am not a bitcoin mining expert
There is so much to talk about re: point [2]...!

(Evaluating teachers using student test scores has been a push of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but it's not well-supported by evidence. One more link:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-teacher-eval... )
Oh yes, I love a good espresso, but you are right, some shops either burn the beans or over extract and make it far too bitter.
> What kind of a refined musical appreciation talent do the label execs have that they can decide what I should or should not hear?

I think you misunderstand music as an industry, and you definitely stopped reading after the GP's first sentence. Label execs have very refined taste -- for one, specific thing: finding "artists" that have broad appeal to a target demographic. And even that's a Silicon Valley-esque "lost money on 99, made money one 1" kind of situation.

Music needs labels for the same reason startups need VC: they have resources, connections, and expertise not often found within (bands|founders). Yes, it is possible to bootstrap in both situations, and yes there are companies trying to disrupt that model in both spaces. But it's not the status quo.
Their Bitcoin is broken argument doesn't really seem to work. I agree that something needs to be done to stop huge amounts of pooling but this seems to be too alarmist. The initial Bitcoin is Broken post is at http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ and a counterpoint is at https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/bitcoin-isnt-so-br... .
I don't know why you're suggesting anything along those lines, it doesn't look like the author's link to a method to stop pool mining has anything to do with restrictions like that. It seems instead the author links to a post about allowing arbitrary participants in a pool to steal the entirety of the mining reward. Thus, there would be no incentive for individuals to participate in a pool: whoever finds the solution could take the entirety of the reward.

This kills the GHashA.
I'd just wrap a simple program around curl to improve its argument passing complexity if that's your pain point but I wouldn't go on rewriting an HTTP client.

Curl is a very mature code base by now and that's something to appreciate. It handles all the edge cases well and has dealt with all the mess that you'll discover over time.
Thank you! I'm tracking the bug over here and will fix soon: https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat/issues/1153
Is there a practical use for this algorithm, or is is simply for beauty?
I remember contacting Joey in the early days via Quora. And although I was also doing a music statup, he was nothing but really helpful. Sorry it did not turn out too good.

I still believe that music can be cracked i.e made profitable, in other non US markets (like Africa - South Africa) where almost 100% of the artistes are indie and you do not need to deal with strong and evil supplier power.

Best of luck homie and I look forward to seeing what you are up to next.
This has to be the most insane, cavalierly misogynistic comment I've ever seen.

Incredible. I'm laughing and crying at the same time.
I'm saying that this is a thinly veiled revenge of the nerds. And I'm not a scientist, so my discouragement shouldn't harm anyone. It's called an opinion and it doesn't require a peer review.
Poor choice of name. All I can see is HTTP Internet Explorer.
How did you get into teaching?

I'm interested - although I will have to work on my exposition / pedagogic skills (that's why they say the teacher learns the most in classes :) ).
I was under the impression that the mining percentage would give you the same percentage chance to cook the books. 51% means you are more likely to succeed than fail in an attempt. Much like buying 51 percent of lottery tickets gives you a slightly better than even chance of winning the big prize.

in that respect, wouldn't 51% be only marginally different to 49%. Both would be a bit of a concern, but neither would be the "position to exercise complete control over which transactions appear on the blockchain" that this article refers to.

Is there some mechanism I'm missing that makes 51% be vastly more powerful than 49%?
That was my first thought, too. Then I saw the colorized output and I'm convinced, too.
You're assuming that someone with a significant investment in the space would act dishonestly. That's the only reason BTC fails as the result of something like this. Seem like MAD to me, if they were to act dishonestly they would destroy their own investment and profit potential.
>GHash [...] just reached 51% of total network mining power today.

Is this official? Seems somewhat surreal...

Not really invested in this but at the very least I'd expect some posts along the lines of "Pool X is fast approaching 50%...BTC in danger". Not "51%...game over".
Rather than a fork, wouldn't an alternate, easier approach be to form more pools that charge no fees?
Keybase code signing
Control a Robot via Twitter
Spit here: can Cue's $199 lab-in-a-box keep you healthy?
> "You can't sell a phone as a functioning device because the IMEI number on the chip is not going to reactivate. Maybe you can yank the screen and the battery and sell those for parts, then melt down the motherboard and get 85 cents," he says. "The economics are completely upside-down."

To get one kg of gold you need about 3 tons of phones - about 30,000 to 40,000 old handsets.

There are some other metals in there too.

But it's a fantastic waste of resources for perfectly good working phones to be destroyed like this.

I'm not sure how connected this is to the "dead relative left me an iPhone but it's locked" problem. In the UK Apple are correctly asking for a court order before they do anything with the phone but they sometimes do not accept grant of probate as that court order.
Article author here.

Good point. I could use better wording. The message that I was trying to convey was:

You can use Backbone models but please don’t do it like this. Backbone doesn’t do DOM diffing like React; you’ll shoot yourself in a foot.
Butterfly Labs Sweeps Cloud Hashing Refunds under the carpet
Seems like BFL found a nice scheme for interest-free loans.
Yeah, I agree; in my experience, high-end hotels often get unfairly rated on TA, in large part because they often get a lot of negative reviews from people who thought that they were too expensive or offered poor value for money. They often end up ranking far too low.

FlyerTalk is a great resource, although you do have to spend a lot of time reading a lot of reviews. The advantage of an aggregator like TripExpert, with snippets from various sources all on one page, is that you can get a much better sense much more quickly of what a place is like.
The valuation would appear to be mostly based on the leadgen portion of the business. Even with 31K restaurants paying $2500 / year for the system (which I hear is their average take per restaurant) the value would be in the low 100's of millions.

So you're right it isn't 'just' leads but that does seem to be the bulk of the valuation.

The fact that the restaurants are locked in definitely helps so there is a synergistic effect there as well from having that software out there.
Another solution: assuming as the article claims that GHash grew to it's current size because it had 0% fees. Other pools can respond by lowering their fees or introduce negative ones. I.e. they pay miners to join the pool. Or have fees but introduce a lottery system that randomly overpays members.
From the bitcoin wiki:

An attacker that controls more than 50% of the network's computing power can, for the time that he is in control, exclude and modify the ordering of transactions. This allows him to:

Reverse transactions that he sends while he's in control. This has the potential to double-spend transactions that previously had already been seen in the block chain.
Prevent some or all transactions from gaining any confirmations
Prevent some or all other miners from mining any valid blocks

The attacker can't:

Reverse other people's transactions
Prevent transactions from being sent at all (they'll show as 0/unconfirmed)
Change the number of coins generated per block
Create coins out of thin air
Send coins that never belonged to him
This article feels sensational, but I would say accurately reflects a large portion of the communities feelings.

Great accompaniment is from Peter Todd (Coinkite adviser, respected dev) who announced this AM he is selling 50% of his holdings in bitcoin until this is resolved

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/281ftd/why_i_just_s...
If you really want to scare some people you should point out that this is happening as we get ready for the US Marshal BTC auction, and could be related. I would be very reluctant to put 1.5M into BTC right now.
This is the same panic-prone author (@el33th4xor) who, in early November 2013 with Bitcoin at about $220, wrote "@el33th4xor: You heard it here first: now is a good time to sell your Bitcoins" (https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/397219415025934336)

This was just before releasing some research that he thought would cause a confidence collapse. (That is, his prediction was almost self-consciously attempting market-manipulation.) In fact, the paper just formalized some concerns discussed in the mining community for years.

So then, rather than collapsing, Bitcoin went on an epic rally, and hasn't been below $339 since the same week of that doomsaying prediction.

There is certainly danger in one entity controlling 51% of the hashing power. But everyone's known this risk, as one of the design assumptions of the system, from the beginning... and also seen the tipping point approach/recede/approach repeatedly. And also, the "Bitcoin lunatic fringe", who this author mocks, has so far been right about the pool(s) attaining such power refraining from taking destructive (and self-bankrupting) next steps.

So: focused concern, yes. But @el33th4xor-style panic, no.

Further, any 'hard fork' (or forks) that were to remedy pool issues, using the "well-known" techniques referenced, would almost certainly retain some continuity with prior key balances. That is: imagine the most destructive transition possible. A total civil war between mining pools. Irreconcilable dissension in the core team (or offshoots thereof). Collapse of the Bitcoin price to values of 1-2 years ago. Still, at the end of that process, there are one or more "offshoot" chains, adopting the Bitcoin history as their own, patched and stronger than before, with pre-crisis Bitcoin balances intact.

(That is: a 51% cartel may not be actually "good" news... but it is survivable and perhaps even necessary.)

So if you like to try to trade in and out of predicted market panics, like @el33th4xor, maybe there are some trading plays here. But if you just like cryptocurrency for the long haul, keep your Bitcoin private keys (end eyes) safe & dry, and trust evolution. There are enough smart, well-funded, and relatively cool heads involved that @el33th4xor's predictions are just a car alarm going off in the night, whether the car is actually at risk or not.
People on the forums are reporting refunds for orders that were placed >6mos ago. Just submitted my refund... hoping they will also honor it. What a waste of money.
> married the first person they dated

> the marriage being very successful

> I haven't quite figured out why that is

It is not about software engineers, it is a general correlation to the "numbers" of pre-marital dates.

The lower the number of partners before marriage, the more likely is the marriage to succeed:

> http://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2010/09/sexual-partner-d...
Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists
Percol: An interactive grep tool in your terminal
Frontera Margaritas
Wanna learn how to make 3 margaritas at once?
Am I misunderstanding you or are you suggesting that anyone who provides Internet service in Portland should be subsidizing public access television?
Linked-In used to put up a message wanting to "verify" my email address and ask for a password. I made it a point to never ever give them my email password because I thought they'd help themselves. Anyone know if they do? I also gave my linked-in account it's own password in case they might try do something crappy like trying to get at my email assuming its the same password. It's not just them, half the apps on Google Play want access to my contacts, texts, and/or location - stuff the app itself has no use for.
ELI5:

Miners join in pools to mine bitcoins to even out their earnings. It's a way to diversify their risk.

Unfortunately, bigger pools let you diversify the best, and this is currently undermining the core tenet of bitcoin, which is to avoid having any one person with central control over the network.

The linked article is suggesting modifying the core software for bitcoin in order to discourage this kind of centralization. Other people, however, think the core software is fine, and that the solution is to instead improve "decentralized mining pool" technology to get rid of the problem.
The Publication Date for that edition is: July 16, 2009

I think there's even a 2013~ edition available now.
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Oxford University Scientific Society: Focus Fusion Presentation for Crowdfunding:

http://vimeo.com/97613069
React.js: Finally, a great server/client web stack
Requring an ISP to fund a public access channel is like requiring auto factories in the early 1900s to provide free hay to nearby stables.
The definition of "cool" defined as "Pseudomature behavior—ranging from minor delinquency to precocious romantic involvement" seems designed to detect poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes. It's only the word 'cool' that's getting this into the media rotation. If the headline was "Poor kids and kids from dysfunctional and abusive homes lose," I'm not sure that anybody would be interested in reading the story.

Too bad the public isn't allowed to read the study, so I can't actually see all of their metrics for defining cool other than petty crime and early sexual behavior - things that plenty of clearly not-cool kids get into.
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A woman's worth as a human being and her suitability to marry some particular man are two different things. Most men want attractive wives who are good mothers, just as many women want attractive husbands who are good fathers.
It's not really politically focused as it is focused on it from an economic class perspective. While it surely does not dig into the exact question of what affluent people do online, it covers the actual economic and power based structure of america in much more depth.
This article would be decent if they ditched the hyperbole. Like it or not, this is not Armageddon for Bitcoin - the network is still functioning as intended.
CLOUDS Interactive Documentary Open Sourced
I'm hoping this produces some good smoking guns. At least we'll know what's going on as opposed to having to infer it.

I mean if Netflix is paying Comcast $2k/month to fix the issue that's stupid but not very bad. If it's $2m/month that's a huge problem.
I've been in the same position, as you with my dad. The best thing to do is network. Put his resume on indeed.com, dice.com, working with rails (or something of that sort). There are a few cofounder sites as well (techcofounder.com is one). Rest is all chance, people with the stupidest startups are making quite a bit of money.
I am sure that is true in some cases. Had he pursued higher education, that may have happened. In this case, he was athletic, good looking and charming; in a word, popular. But he was also very good at being an asshole. I think there was the thought that "if this is working for me now, then it will always work for me."

We were friends in that we hung out with the same group of people. I made a point to hang out with this group of people and do the things they did so I could try to be popular. Luckily, I realized at some point that being myself was preferable.
What does love have to do with marriage?
That doesn't work for how locals use OpenTable, but it could work for tourists who come in for a vacation. (Hence the value to Priceline)
> Submitted title was true to its every letter.

I don't think so. Even you don't seem to think so, since you felt obliged to add the word "clone".

But the other titles you suggested are fine, so we'll use one of those.

Would you please re-read the HN guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)? You've done several things they ask you not to do. For example, "If you want to say something to us, please send it to hn@ycombinator.com."
From my point-of-view, that stuff just kinda goes without saying, when talking about the East India Company. So yeah, we all know that big companies / corporations sometimes do Bad Things. But in the context of a discussion about whether or not a corporation should have Nation-State level power, the interesting point in noting that the East India Company (of at least one iteration) was created by Royal Charter and had (essentially) it's own army, etc., is exactly that paradox of how intertwined corporations and States can be.

Again, I'm not arguing for corporations like that. I'm just interested in the discussion vis-a-vis how power can/should/might be organized and controlled.
ditto. HTTPy would have been better, methinks.
Instead of curl I was usually writing https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests
As long as large centralized pools charge no fees and use less bandwidth than p2pool, people will have no incentive to adopt p2pool.
> asm.js is still stuck with the JavaScript memory model and type system no matter how it's serialized.

What? You're stuck dealing with ints and a heap of memory... which is exactly what you get when developing native code. On top of that, you can implement any memory model and type system you want.

Are you saying you want a managed VM, so something further away from the processor? What features do you want, and which tradeoffs would it make? Why can't you just implement your managed VM on top of asm.js?
Tie guan yin :-) great tea. I also love puerh to death.
I really enjoyed reading this. <3 post mortems. Geoff and Matt are awesome (partly because they play foosball.)!
Maybe, but not necessarily the same kind of sovereign government.
Windows Live Writer going Open Source?
It's pretty easy to break delegation, but the cure is worse than the illness— to reduce mining variance there you must use hosted mining, where miners have even less control (absent more fixes…). GHash.IO is substantially hosted mining in any case.

Really the more important point to note is that pooling for variance reduction has absolutely nothing to do with delegating control. Running a outbound only bitcoin full node, past initial syncup uses less than 20kbit/sec bandwith and a fraction of a percent of cpu... it's not costly to do, purposefully so.

It's perfectly possible to individually run your own consensus decisions but agree with others to, in a provable way, pool your payments. This is what P2Pool does.

Unfortunately many Bitcoin miners don't have a rigorous mathematical understanding of how mining works— they erroneously believe it to be a race where the fastest wins disproportionally— something entirely untrue (absent some proposed attacks which are not happening in practice)... just keeping yourself from getting scammed by the many scammy hardware companies is basically a full time job itself. Then you have various technically unsophisticated Bitcoin pundits claiming that hashpower consolidations in pools isn't something to worry about... not a great mix.

Fortunately, the reasons for the current behavior are mostly inertia— if P2Pool had been invented first the symmetry would have broken differently. It's still possible that there might be a massive swing (say if GHash.io decides to steal a bunch of coins from their miners and makes a runner).
Thanks, Oo! Those were the good old days. ;)
More Matt Rognlie on Piketty – the most important point
or like math in the old days [1].

Israel Gelfand's stuff is model for enrichment at an upper level. Alexander Zvonkin's "Math from 3 to 7" book published by MSRI could be a model for younger kids.

I think the "new math"materials for the '60s and '70s and the Eastern European materials from a similar period provide a model for education. Unfortunately, they require mathy folks to present and interpret the material.

PS. I'm not criticizing public school teachers. I also feel inadequate. In order to teach DS7, I feel like I should probably work through Herstein's Abstract Algebra. I'll put it on the list... Currently I'm working through Euclid... Next Fall our homeschool will have a geometric focus... after that... who knows.

[1] See http://gcpm.rutgers.edu/books.html ... this was a pale imitation of what Soviet era math circles would offer but is still way beyond anything extant.
Anyone knows what's going on at thesixtyone? The site seems to be up and running (including pre-redesign version at old.thesixtyone.com), but I wonder how healthy is their ecosystem.

I wonder if there're any other similar projects that are still active.