skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What exactly is the problem with a store of value with 500% annual returns?

I read people talking about the supposedly awful volatility, but they fail to mention that the volatility has a very distinct trajectory. Bitcoin is volatile as it increased in value by orders of magnitude year after year.

The article repeats this fear of volatility in the context of one's live savings. How frequently do people tap their life savings to pay for grocery runs? Isn't it the case that Bitcoin is by far the best possible store of value one could have adopted for their life savings over the past five years?
"Stack Overflow still uses Microsoft products. Microsoft infrastructure works and is cheap enough, so there’s no compelling reason to change." <- there's your problem :-)
We are open to the world, but being based in London, that is where most of the work has been to date.

Remote is an option for companies posting jobs, and we do see them, but not nearly as often as on-site work.

More info here:

http://onsite.io/how-it-works
http://onsite.io/faq

Cheers.
Very interesting. Importantly, the alternative approach of adjusting licensing to give apps that play by open source rules an advantage (ie. AGPL) hasn't really worked out, as there are always more liberally-licensed alternatives for components, so developers tend to simply avoid the more-viral ones, which means that their ecosystems don't grow as fast, and then it is game over.

OTOH, I have a feeling that there may be a niche or two where this can work, but there has to be an interoperability argument with a strong network effect in a federated network (eg. email). If one of the social network players had gone this route we'd be looking at a very different world today.
A few counter-points to your framing:

- As more work becomes automated, it is more likely the owners of productive capital who would bear the brunt of the tax burden, not the minority of full-time laborers.

- Many valid forms of productive work do not necessarily pay a salary (raising children being the most obvious example, but also community service, open source projects, or rolling the dice on a startup). These still create value for society in ways that our current economy measures poorly.

- In a basic income environment, there is no reason for a minimum wage to exist. This would open the doors to many jobs that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive, whether people do it for the extra income, or for the other intangibles of employment.
I hate to be the one to inform you 99% of Americans don't actually care about the middle east.
The reading you've given that quote is rather uncharitable, if perhaps heavily implied by the article's author. It's pretty obvious that Baber means he doesn't want his weapon falling into the hands of criminals, but he has no problem selling it to the military, to be put to whatever use they might find for it.

Granted, the question remains of whether US foreign policy, inasmuch as it deploys our military, is morally or ethically acceptable to you, but that's a point on which reasonable people can differ, and Baber's opinion on that point appears to differ from yours. If, from that difference, you choose to infer that Baber doesn't consider Afghans or Iraqis "people", that is of course entirely your prerogative.
I've used the Kunstmaan CMS a few times, also very easy to use. Also built with bundles (Symfony2). http://bundles.kunstmaan.be
In all javascript apps the part that is slow is the DOM, not the javascript interface.

This benchmark was taken from the webkit source code then forked into http://vuejs.org/perf/ then forked to include mercury then forked again to include elm.

Neither elm nor mercury came up with this benchmark and just added themself to it.

What this benchmarks shows is that async rendering is really fast. Mercury, vue & elm all use async rendering where DOM effects are batched and only applied once.

A better, close to real user experience benchmark would be one using mousemove since that's an event that can happen multiple times per frame.
What I'd like to see is how much cache hit they add on each level of cache. I remember some presentation of the facebook images stack where less than 10% (if I remember well) of the requests actually hit the disks; it would be interesting to see the patterns for the whole SE galaxy.
I've been using http://amsul.ca/pickadate.js/ lately and it's been excellent. Highly recommend it.
True, one can't run over rocks (or sticks or toys or anything but grass and leaves really) with a manual reel mower.

But, then again, they don't chuck rocks through your neighbors car window either. Power rotary mowers are a bit dangerous sometimes.
Excellent. More, please!

We added the date.

Edit: Perhaps I should clarify. By "more, please" I mean we want substantive articles on unexpected subjects, archival and historical material welcome. Not necessarily more on this topic.
Shouldn't You Be Working?
I disagree. I think that if you took that Apollo computer and removed it from the spacecraft, it would have the same amount of computing power . You are correct in pointing out that computing power is not the same as the ability to change the world, but that does not make it meaningless.

Also, you could write the appropriate software and connect the appropriate equipment to the phones I/O port and use an iPhone to land a spacecraft on the moon. It does in fact have the "power" required.
I'm actually interested whether X200s is supported, as that's what I use now and what I'm ok with. I can see myself using this or X220. I had X60s, but it would feel limiting already: among other things, it only supports 3GB RAM. I looked into hardware support list http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards#Laptops and only see X201 and X230 mentioned, but X230 board is not supported by flashrom. Does that mean that flash chip has to be replaced (a new one soldered in the place of old one) to use this board? Should X200(s) and X220 be supported?

Looks like the hardware support situation haven't improve a single bit since the last time I looked into coreboot. That's a pity.

How well does the computer work, when it is supported? Are there stability issues? Is performance the same? Do all of the same devices work, as with proprietary BIOS?
Exactly, and for some reason people who make these sort of claims are unable to comprehend the fact that there may be a connection between believing/acting/voting as if government doesn't work and then having underfunded government projects fail hard.
Links We Love: Online Communities for Students and Educators
Online fraudsters rush to exploit Malaysian airliner crash
> It's not the first MSFT source base hosted on GitHub

It is, however, the only repo under the "Microsoft" GitHub user AFAICT (https://github.com/Microsoft).
Dude, go look up tulips on wikipedia.
Orkut is Out and These Three Online Community Platforms are In
Unless of course they invested when bitcoin was over $1000.

Ever heard the phrase "past performance is not an guarantee of future returns?"
> What?

Expecting someone who writes for the New Yorker to understand how firearms work is, I think, expecting rather too much.
Thanks for leaving a comment here indicating the change. This should be standard behavior, if it's not already.
>Bitcoin has a lot of problems as a unit of account and as a store of value, but that is not primarily what Satoshi was building

Yes, if you see bitcoin as a meme (in the traditional Dawkins sense of the word), then the unit of account aspect makes it a self-financing meme. The speculative frenzy may be unpleasant, but it is necessary bootstrapping mechanism, and not accidental.
Meanwhile, in "first-world" places like Spain we're on the verge of starvation due to global unemployment and poverty.
Similar to https://github.com/markmontymark/underscore-go
I think the correct way to phrase this would be "note the name in the 'From:' header..."

USENET and SMTP are both trivial to spoof (or were, "back in the day"). For example, alt.hackers had a bar for participation, but one set quite low: One merely had to figure out to participate in a moderated group that had no moderators.

(Pre-1993 USENET is pretty much the only thing I am nostalgic for. 2014 is great and while (2014++) {} looks even better, but when the Internet was our private playground, ah, the days, the times....)
Boom in satellite ship tracking
Not sure if this is a relevant point, but as a global reserve currency, the US dollar could act as a gateway for local bitcoin traders to enter and exit their bitcoin positions.

Whereby so long as a USD/BTC market exists and a USD/local market exists (which there is due to the petrodollar), it doesn't matter what local demand is for BTC - the USD can act to buffer any lack of local BTC demand/supply.

Shillings > USD > BTC or BTC > USD > Shillings.
Yahoo Poised to Buy Mobile Analytics and Ad Network Flurry
pdf slides :

http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/iOS...
Noticed that article writer is from Missouri. Down here in Texas we are in the plains but very dry conditions. While fescue is a good grass I don't recommend it for Texas. It might work with optimal soil conditions but in my experience that is tough to do.
More people not doing menial tasks means more people able to apply their brains. The society that can best capitalize on that resource will win.
How much of modern demos is in the system libraries? Like, if you didn't have D3D or OGL but had to write code that drew at the per-pixel level, how much larger would these demos have to be?
This "gateway system" is the foreign exchange market (or equivalent, if they choose not to adopt bitcoin).
Homelessness now a crime in cities throughout the U.S
If you are into such things, do take a look at the orbiter project (http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/) and the NASSP add-on (http://nassp.sourceforge.net/wiki/Main_Page). I spent many an after-school night flying to the moon by punching codes on a keyboard. It was amazing.

edit: Here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VDV6Gdxakc
You get all of this for free with React.

DOM node reuse is perhaps the central theme of React so it's odd that you bring this up as a criticism (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OeXsL5mr4g)

Calculating the virtual DOM does come with some processing and GC overhead, yes. But any system that tracks changes for you (data binding) comes with overhead and React makes the right set of tradeoffs for real apps (since it is a function of how large your render output is, not your underlying data model). React has about a 70% edge in CPU time on Angular in the "long list" class of benchmarks (which drops to a mere 40% with the Object.observe() performance unicorn). And steady state memory usage is almost always better with a virtual DOM approach since again it only tracks what you actually render which is usually smaller than your data model (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3KksH8gfcQ).

DOM coordination boils down to non-interleaving of reads and writes to the DOM. React manages the writes for you which happen in one go. Components have a well-defined lifecycle which is also batched and are only allowed to read from the DOM during specific points in the lifecycle, which are coordinated system-wide. So out of the box if you follow the guidelines you will thrash the DOM much less (see http://blog.atom.io/2014/07/02/moving-atom-to-react.html)
Would artificial scarcity via fingerprinting (e.g. a unique hash to establish authenticity of ownership) per electronic copy help or hinder digital good resales?

I would support a token/watermark that proves authenticity of ownership, but can see where other more militant may say that this feels like a form of DRM (albeit without actual encryption or restrictions beyond the inclusion of the nonce to generate a unique signature).

In practice and within today's environment the idea of fingerprinting would be silly because it would be relatively easy to produce an unmarked copy, as is already the case with DRM protected .MOBI or .EPUB formats anyway.
Why would I want to work, if I am just paid to do nothing? Minimum wage exists now and is raised every couple of years. You don't think the same thing will happen with basic income?

If it ever happens, I can see people eventually fighting for more, because it can't support a family of 4.

On top of this, it just creates a culture of dependence, which politicians love..because why would you vote against your own free handouts?
We're in a state right now where if you are doing anything that suggests you're willing to spend money on a specific set of things, you have to do it in a private browsing window or put up with retargeting for weeks. Kind of sad.
Interesting to note that with our increased fear, things didn't get much safer. 1.5% of all shuttle launches killed their crews.
> Bitcoin has a lot of problems as a unit of account and as a store of value, but that is not primarily what Satoshi was building (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf). Bitcoin is, and has always been, a medium of exchange first and foremost.

Which is consistent with the primary function and origin of money: because there is a division of labor it means a common medium of exchange must exist. The secondary functions of money - store of value and unit of account - are precisely that...secondary. You can't have the secondaries without the primary (see: gold). I sort of wish the OP wouldn't have made the characteristic of money as being a medium of exchange out to be a "oh well money is also this". The problem is that the press got a hold of Bitcoin for it's secondary reasons and drove the eyeballs to that without defining the problem to begin with: our medium of exchange, globally, is broken.

IMHO, Bitcoin adoption curve is taking exactly the course it should be: the exchanges that are at most threatened by poor inefficiencies ("third world") are seeing the most benefit. The first world doesn't have a problem moving money because there are solutions...they just cost money. Third world doesn't have solutions. Once they all see benefit the "first world" will adopt. It won't happen overnight and it shouldn't.
Programming Fonts for your Text Editor and Terminal
I think this notion of a jobless future is extreme. Hear me out.

What we're witnessing is the dawning of a new era in which relying upon a job to earn a livelihood becomes extinct.

That's very different.

Instead of submitting to an employer to be productive members of society, we'll need to actually produce.

We'll all need to be entrepreneurs: creative problem-solvers who go out and get our own. Not necessarily venture-backed billionaire-destined heroes, but tradesmen solving small to midsize problems in our communities. Remember human life before the 401(k)? Enterprising souls who earned livings without mega-corporations?

All this technology we're developing now will be instrumental for that era. With Meteor, a tattoo-artist can (and has) create an enterprise-ready app. That's the epitome of productivity in a technology-driven society, and I think we'll see more of that as we move into this 'jobless' environment. AKA 'innovate or die'.

Problems to solve aren't going anywhere (technology always causes people to think there's "nothing left to do." there always is). The need to earn our keep isn't either (we'll always need food, shelter, and love).

This jobless future is exaggerated...but the effects aren't. We'll just need to be more enterprising and more creative in how we handle those effects.
Why I’m breaking up with Amazon Web Services
I do not believe that a cellphone/a phone number should directly be tied to a geographical address.

If lost or stolen, there's no real way to "disown" a number without also inducing fraudulent disown announcements; also if a thief snatches e.g. a purse with key and phone, he will immediately know where to break in.
I don't disagree with the article, but I hope this isn't taken as an excuse to do nothing about current high unemployment due to low aggregate demand, which the government can certainly do something about.
Any reason why you think this? YAML seems like a more intuitive choice for describing the session/window/pane hierarchy IMO. Your "visual" notation does seem useful, but I'm not so sure if the benefits merit taking on a new configuration format in my tools layer.

I'll give it a fair shot though :).
New York to Bitcoin Startups: Get Permission
The growth has to stop very soon - exponential functions can go on only so long. And when it stops the volatility will not stop - this is a prediction of course - but I am pretty sure that it will be this way.
I just read a book [1] which argues that while the Americans didn't worry too much about getting the most they could out of their manpower on D-Day - because they had several million more troops waiting to go - the British were conscious of their limited manpower and so optimized their landing in a number of ways, such as longer aerial bombing and specialized tanks for breaking through obstacles on the beach.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Victory-Problem-Solvers-Turn...
and they also mention that they could possibly run on a lot less hardware... 7-8 machines + network gear (7 if the load balancer is an appliance, 8 if its a server).
Bitcoin, no matter how you word it or rationalize it will always have a root problem and inherent risk...it is backed by nothing. Users today think its usage gives it market value and it can but to a limit. Money (USD) originally (the dollar bill) worked because it was back by gold. A metal that worked because everyone on the planet wants it. That dollar bill was a "check" or agreement stating, this dollar bill represents this much gold thus the value of money. The USA today does not have gold backing its money-- so as you can see we already have a bitcoin and the USA will not allow you to complete with its money - enjoy
When should the government enter a "private" market opportunity? I think the answer is "Only when necessary to advance the public good."

It seems people want to have one model or the other ALWAYS. But it is not that easy. We don't want firefighters being a private business because a house would burn before you can pay for the service. Or police: the service is typically needed where those with least ability to pay live.

However, it also does not follow that government should enter, say, into the haircut business or the fashion business. But the simple "threat" that it would be possible should send the message to private participants that service at reasonable cost is expected in some markets.

To the extent that access to information and communication is a necessary requirement in the Republic, then it seems to me that it is the government role to ensure this.

EDIT: I wonder at what level though. It seems that if the service is necessary, local initiatives have the least chance to be successful. Maybe this is one of those projects where states have a better chance.
If Brendan Eich wouldn't have rushed the JavaScript design, Netscape would've chosen another language which was already in the works (or complete?). It was apparently similar to PHP, and probably would've been worse than JavaScript.
Show HN: Turn your R, Ruby, or Python scripts into simple forms anyone can use
Keynes put forward a similar thesis decades ago and we were supposed to be there by now. Check this out:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/revisiting-keynes

Perhaps there is something more basic in our natural dispositions than either of these great economic thinkers is appreciating. We don't really want an excess of leisure to the extent that mass boredom results.

I'm reminded of two quotes by Pascal:

"The source of all man's unhappiness is his inability to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts."

"If a soldier or labourer complains of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing."
Snowden's Favourite OS Tails Has Zero-Day Vulnerabilities Lurking Inside
1) Nope, just stating what I've seen time and time again to be the case/interpretation of your points. This might not be the case for you, but I do want to point out an alternate perspective that is infrequently given coverage in such threads.

2) Also nope! Sorry if I seem a bit amused now. Controlling implies "You have to do such-and-such and be dominated by me, and I don't have to do such-and-such and be dominated by you." My philosophy is that what I expect from my partner, I follow all the way through myself. There is no power issue, because both contribute equally to the relationship.

I will again point out the seeming contradiction between "I don't need to be faithful; my partner[s] do," or if you don't like that, "Men don't need to be faithful; women do." Perhaps that's not what you intend, but it sure sounds that way.

In terms of "controlling," if you expect fidelity from your partners but not yourself, and if you say that expecting fidelity sounds controlling, that would logically imply you are controlling.

Incidentally, I hope you recognize nothing I've said should be taken as ad hominem attacks. Again, I'm just pointing out how many people might take your points.
Yeah, actually if one HAD to skip either Mythology or MotW, skip Mythology.
Public Displays of Transaction
Bitcoin (the currency) is a terrible medium of exchange. It may make for a decent store of value. Are you sure you're using those terms correctly?

Bitcoin (the protocol) is awesome for payments. But that is a separate issue from the monetary policy underlying bitcoin (the currency), which is stacked against being a medium of exchange.
It's refreshing to read something like that on HN. Usually it's more "Hey look, I made tons of money by doing <insert technology here>"
Gold is the typical store of value asset, and the story there is very similar.
I don't really understand how buying your own gun/rifle/whatever would be of any help in surviving a war. The last couple of recent wars (think Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc) were fought mostly with "big tech" (airplanes, bombs, tanks, etc) which is pretty deadly to low level mosquitoes like civilians and foot soldiers.
And while talking about inequality, I am quite uncertain about how a gun/rifle would help you. You would shoot the guy going through your trash? Or the guy stealing your bike?
I am quite skeptical that a proliferation of this kind of thing would help you much with your "problems".
There's a couple of user-contrib projects that do similar things for inserts & updates. Dapper Extensions is the one I'm using.

https://github.com/tmsmith/Dapper-Extensions
Reconstruction of cell lineages from large-scale fluorescence microscopy data
This guy obviously knows the dictum "never point a firearm at anything unless you intend to destroy it."

Apparently writers from the New Yorker fall within that set for him.
i think saying that spain is on the verge of starvation kind of does a disservice to people who actually are.

there's no shortage of food in europe.
Well, someone's going to do it.
Mowing height is almost entirely dependent on the type of grass you have. Mow St Augustine low and you'll have major problems. But let bermuda grow to 4 inches and you'll have a different set of problems. Find out what kind of grass you have and mow according to that.

http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintai...
They're all inconsequential to code quality except for some like i++ vs ++i which isn't even style, it's syntax. preincrement before, postincrement after, not hard to remember
I experienced exactly this when I cracked open the source to a GNU tool to see if I could figure it out.
Can we improve react.addons.update then? Mori is not syntax compatible with javascript datastructures, and needs to be marshalled to interop with javascript components. If you include marshalling overhead, mori is in the same ballpark as react.addons.update.

http://jsperf.com/sprout-vs-mori/3
Or maybe he just likes screwing with their heads, and as a fellow Southron well familiar with the oft-condescending ways of Yankees, I don't suppose I can blame him too strongly for that.
why not get them to move to asp.net maybe or at least something more like it
How did the LinkedIn one work? Someone was just searching for a consultant?