skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you underestimate the number of consumers and how little many people need mental stimulation. In today's world, it's easy to stay occupied with nothing more than the content on a typical cable subscription.

I'm not one such person, even though I'm much more of a consumer than a producer (I read 4-5 books a month, watch probably 15-20 hours of TV a month and 2-3 movies a month), but I know people that watch 4-5 hours a night! It doesn't even have to be good content. Instead of going "I've seen this movie/show, or it's not very good," turning it off and doing something productive, they watch the lest boring thing on, even if it's a movie they've seen 3 times, and it's halfway over. It boggles my mind.
Correct. You could also solve the "unit of account" and "store of value" problem by pegging your crypto-currency to the USD, 1:1 exchange. Then you get the advantage of the decentralized transport network and the stability of the dollar (or any other preferred real world currency).

It's tends to not be a popular opinion around here (there are probably a few with vested interests), but Bitcoin as a currency is fatally flawed. It's supply is structured so that Bitcoin perpetually increases in value, thereby perpetually slowing down the velocity of Bitcoin transactions.
5 Reasons Solar Installers Are Integrating Vertically
Sometimes "efficient" and "easy to understand and be sure is correct" don't have to be mutually exclusive; see this example [1] of Java and Go.

Note that the code is autogenerated, so it should be equally efficient. The Go version also happens to be very simple and no different than most humans would write by hand (without trying very hard to optimize).

[1] https://gist.github.com/shurcooL/9f94bbd021b4693cf584
How Do You Design Interaction?
"It's trivially easy to detect this kind of TOS abuse, even if the traffic is encrypted."

It is? How? How could you possibly differentiate traffic coming from a single household with high bandwidth usage and a single person sharing their connection if it's all tunnelled over a VPN?
I guess I mean "valuable" in the intrinsic sense, not the financial sense. If, for example, in the model that Stripe outlines, the Bitcoin network ends up powering the Bank-to-Bank side of things (away from the consumer), only a handful of counterparties are going to be involved on the BTC side of things. Millions of consumers may use Stripe/whoever to send $$ to millions of other consumers, but that might all be handled by a (relatively) few BTC flying back and forth in batches on the back-end, which doesn't necessarily require a large per-BTC price.

I know not a perfect example but that's my gist.
In general, everyone needs to chill out and not have knee jerk reactions over random links. Twitter is especially bad when it comes to conveying viewpoints on any topic.
Swift Access Control
Using the function as the first argument and the iterable as the second, makes it easy to curry functions. A port of Ramda (https://github.com/CrossEye/ramda) would be better for this reason.
CMSs are dead
The Money Transmission Framework is a combination of two types of rules:

1. Capital Requirements, licensing and Bonding for people who hold money for consumers who are not banks. These rules are consumer protection laws and make sense for businesses that offer custodial accounts denominated in bitcoin or dollars. These rules could have been applied to Instawallet, Coinbase, Mt. Gox, etc.

2. AML + KYC rules. These require people who help move money into and out of the banking system to find out who their customers are and report them to law enforcement when they do the unexpected. These rules could be applied normally to people doing exchange services, like Expresscoin, BitInstant (RIP), CoInvoice, etc.

I've spent years and hundreds of thousands of investor dollars examining the issues here, like you have. Stay tuned for a policy piece describing when these rules make sense and when they don't. Hint: If you are just posting software to github, these rules do not make sense to apply to you.
Can someone explain me the difference between google sync services vs Flock? In either case, the data leaves the device.
The really slow compiler performance was quite surprising. I switched back to coffeescript (then eventually switched to ScalaJs where they are much faster) because they were so long.
Just an option, but I built a CMS system[1] that actually generates static websites that comes with options for WYSIWYG or markdown. It's node powered, but if you're a php coder it might not be what you want, but we do use the Swig template language (based off twig, based off django...etc). The biggest thing really is that it stores all it's data in a firebase, so the actual CMS is realtime even if the website is compiled staticly.

We're launching later this week, but I can sneak you in early if you'd like. Just send an email to dave@webhook.com

[1] http://www.webhook.com
Professional Airbnb squatter
CVE-2014-4699: Linux Kernel ptrace/sysret vulnerability analysis
Clearly!

My points are straightforward, so perhaps you're reading more deeply than you need.

I understand why you would say their language is passive aggressive though.

It's been an interesting discussion at any rate. Best of luck!
Genuinely curious-- what would stop Comcast from then buying it and then raising the rates to match the rest of their prices?
So, I tried to think of counter-examples to "most (and possibly all?) early application of mathematics required computation" just for the sake of discussion.

I think I have only one, which is the establishment of axioms, both philosophically (as a method) and specifically (e.g. in Elements).

A revisionist history might say that choosing axioms doesn't require any computation, just a keen sense of style and close observation of the world.

But actually, I'm sure that the choice of axioms was a long and drawn-out process informed mostly by computation and checks that the computed values/proven theorems matched with physical intuition. After all, that's kind-of how it's done today, even by people who have lots of experience with formal systems.

Now I really want to read pre-Euclidean mathematical philosophy to see if I'm correct :-)
Why haven't you already?

They're literally announcing the untyped base library layer and the post specifically calls out the desire to build higher level abstractions. Elm is moving incredibly fast, so your question is totally unreasonable.
> First, the resulting ecosystem is technologically open. Open ecosystems have a way of getting better much faster than their closed counterpart.

Unless you are specifically in the business of making financial institutions, it would seem that Stripe (and for that matter, nearly every payment provider that a computer can interact with) is open in all the ways that matter to a normal person.

> There are a number of cryptocurrencies which already have gateways baked in at a protocol level (such as Open Transactions and Ripple). However, there are huge network effects in any financial system, and to date these other systems have failed to win the necessary user support.

So you agree with the above—that as far as history is concerned, just being open doesn't get you adopted. :)

Bitcoin's crazy volatility and speculation drives "user support." It's ironic, because (1) the volatility is what makes Bitcoin unsuitable as a currency from the perspective of everything that matters economically (like your example, value storage) but (2) the volatility makes Bitcoin phenomenally successful as a currency from the perspective of user acquisition.

I don't know why it's so hard to promote transaction systems. Maybe there's some rule out there that no one competes on the basis of transaction fees, and those who do are shut out of the cabal. That's not a conspiracy that I subscribe to. Maybe the minimum transaction fee to make things economically viable is 2.9% of every transaction. So people do make platforms with lower transaction fees, but then they can't afford to tell you about it, or they don't manage to enrich themselves enough to make it worthwhile.

But Bitcoin, it managed to lie and tell us, "the lowest possible transaction fees;" while technically true, you just pay for the economic cost of promoting the platform and enriching its owners through its volatility.

In that sense, Bitcoin has been a terrific failure as a payment system. It's much worse to buy Bitcoin at the wrong time than to pay 2.9% on every transaction. But as a payment platform, as far as venture capitalists are concerned, it's fabulously successful. The early buyers of Bitcoin did enjoy a fabulous return.

User acquisition with negative cost to the platform's owners? Brilliant.
Indeed he's attempting to apply an existing regulatory framework to new technology, which rarely works well.

The point of the article was not to focus on the consumer protection issues, but instead to point out how it could kill startups in the name of consumer protection. We are both in favor of avoiding another Mt. Gox, and the numerous other cases where user funds were lost, which includes escrow of the funds held for users. I'd be curious to get your thoughts as to what you consider the most pressing consumer protection issues, as we're working on another piece that will focus more on these.
A relaunch for The New Yorker, with high stakes
I think the opposite is the right thing. We should try to get everyone on that list.
To be clear, I explicitly say that you shouldn't install each of those plugins. They're meant as an idea of whats out there. I'm sorry you've found the series superficial. Any thoughts on what would make it more useful?
If your react state contains large lists, I think React's render() is going to be the bottleneck, not javascript arrays. That's why react state needs to be structured in a tree, so you can implement shouldComponentUpdate and get O(log n) renders. I wrote more in reply to jlongster.
Get Dropbox OAuth Token Real Quick
Satoshi wrote in the genesis block:

The Times 03/Jan/ 2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Bitcoin was released in staunch opposition to the banking system.

> Storing value in an encrypted wallet on your computer is inconvenient to say the least

It's possible to store Bitcoin on sheets of paper, or entirely in your brain, safely and securely.

I get the distinct feeling you've never used Bitcoin before. Please, sign up for an account at Coinbase and buy $1000+ of BTC or otherwise put yourself in the shoes of someone who wants to buy a serious amount of coin before making these sorts of statements.

Bitcoin isn't about being a PayPal competitor. It's money outside the State, always has been, always will be. Unless of course it is corrupted from the inside out, probably by whitewashed companies who are too afraid to embrace a great thing in spite of what regulators would like them to do.
What about a voting system? With little keychains given out with only the voting system having the public key for, and any third party can validate the votes. "Coins", or voting credits can be distributed back to voters without transaction fees.
A project having enough time to schedule big rewrites (instead of new features) is often a bad sign.
Agreed. The people who say that don't understand that something that Bitcoin got right (though it can be improved) are the incentives. People looking after their own self-interest will make Bitcoin work. That's why all those clones that tried to remove the currency part failed horribly. Eg: "It's like Bitcoin's blockchain, but for a social network!".
Yahoo Reportedly About to Make Its Next Big Mobile Acquisition: Flurry
I've written up my thoughts in a comment letter to CFPB. See http://www.thinkcomputer.com/20140214.cfpbcomment.pdf.

And if you were aware of the existing regulatory framework, how is any of this different or surprising?
Is There Room for Sexy in Enterprise UX Design?
Stealing unencrypted SSH-agent keys from memory
True. While it's tough to predict the future, I'll counter that every trade isn't endlessly scalable and winner-take-all.

As a business-owner, that's where you want to be, but there will be plenty of 'jobs' serving others that will scale linearly (whether that's in relation to people, time, etc) to keep people busy.

Examples: inspecting Uber cars, community development, specialized consulting.
The problem isn't the ownership model after the fact, it's who underwrites the risk of the initial investment. Most of the time, when public organizations make bold investments, they're mis-pricing the risk (which is easy to do when you have someone else around to pick up the tab if things goes wrong). In Denmark, the utilities did a fiber-laying frenzy around a decade ago and the business case did not follow through and the consequence was enormous cost to electricity consumers who never had a say in the matter (OK, technically they did through politically appointed oversight at the utilities).

I think the coop model for getting fiber to the home is awesome. Nobody benefits more from laying last-mile fiber than the homeowner. But forcing neighbors to invest in the project if they're happy with the state of the art isn't really fair IMO.

I've actually been thinking quite a bit of how a provisioning and operations consultancy that would help eg. home owners associations and the like build and run a fiber network and essentially be their own local ISP. Does such a thing exist?
If one uses BTC primarily for exchange, one doesn't care what the "value" is. The only priorities are the convenience and reliability of the conversions into and out of BTC. These are threatened only a little by volatility, and not at all by actual BTC value.
ITunes 12 – first look
Why (if an alternative is feasible, as the basic income proponents would argue) _should_ people be forced by threat of destitution to "work" for a living? Why does it upset you that people might seek some increased freedom over how to spend their limited time? [There is, after all, a reason the term "wage slavery" came to be, extreme though the analogy it draws may be]
>> Readability is mostly a matter of experience.

"It is totaly bogus claim." A single example of Perl, Brainfuck or Ocaml can prove that you are wrong. "The only people that can't read their own Perl after 6 months are the people that don't really know Perl." "Replace "perl" with "APL" or "BrainFuck" (or any language with baroque syntax) and the above sentence is as (in)valid."
Maybe the key phrase is, "all over the damn place." Perhaps he's okay with it killing people in the context of a war zone, but not whatever any single person might decide to do with it.
It's Python all over again.
Chrome 36 outcasted by the “European Union” (“temporary problem” they say)
"These rules could have been applied to"

Actually, these rules ARE applied to Coinbase at the very least. Coinbase--and YC, and many YC startups--deliberately choose to ignore them.
Because it actually happened quite often with taxis before the meter system?
But who in their right mind would do the second one?

Obviously you can make code both less efficient and less readable. But starting with code that a competent programmer has written, I find it seldom makes it more readable when you make it more efficient.
The old demoscene was great.

It is still cool to see what demos the groups pull off nowadays, but we are far far away from C64, Spectrum, Amiga and Atari, PC days, doing algorithms considered impossible in such hardware.
*everything else is plug and pay
Well,

It seems like there ought to be a level between "simulating the brain" and just coming up with your own algorithm. I would imagine that level as "seeing what the brain can do at a particular low level, seeing how close you can come to duplicating that, see what unique approach you can derive there, apply to other other, repeat". That level would be "inspired by the brain without trying to simulate it". It seems like in his popular talks Hawkins implies he's doing that but that in his actual software, as you mention, he winds-up doing just a variation of standard machine learning.

It would be nice if he had postponed deciding he had a solution and instead kept banging on the problem of what algorithms can be kind of like X or Y thing that the brain appears to do. I'd like to think you could mine a bunch of ideas from this.
Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. I agree with almost all of it.

I'm not sure how practical these particular suggestions are--for example, we do already try to identify which issues have already been discussed on HN; it's just hard to get right every time. But I do think the pendulum has perhaps swung too far the other way, so we've provisionally turned off the automatic weight on NSA stories. Going forward, I hope the community will help us distinguish major articles from minor ones. People can do that by flagging minor ones and commenting here or (better) emailing hn@ycombinator.com if they see a major one that they think might be weighted unfairly. We can turn off the flags when that happens.

HN's goals here are balance and substance.
Preseed Web Lab requires inspired hackers to build great ideas into MVP
Mozilla's Shumway replacement for Flash uses TypeScript. Shumway's TypeScript translates ActionScript to JS. The Shumway team chose TypeScript for a few reasons. TypeScript's syntax is pretty close to ActionScript's, which simplifies the mapping from ActionScript to Shumway's implementation of Adobe's Flash APIs. Using three languages (AS, JS, and TS) also helps enforce modularity between the content (AS), compiler, runtime, and JITted (JS) code.

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/
Right, but it does mean the solution isn't "Just don't build the weapon"
Innovate or litigate at its finest.
That's the only thing about bitcoin that actually interests me, how easy is to make payments cutting and pasting some text.

But everything else surrounding bitcoin, I don't find it useful at all. I just want/need something like bitcoin, but connected to my €-denominated bank account. I don't want or need an alternative "digital currency" and I find the mere idea of one stupid, I just want to make exchanges with current currencies (which are already "digital", something that for some reason is missed all the time, maybe because it's much easier to get attention on the internet using buzzwords).

Because bitcoin wants to be a currency, and a decentralized one at that, it needs to do the cool, but weird shit that the blockchain is. All the cryptography behind it, i find it a massively complex waste of time that only gets justified because of the absurd fetish of decentralization. The world just needs to safely and easily exchange money through internet, nothing else. An overengineered solution that tries to workaround the current financial system for no good reason is not a great solution for that need IMO.

I'm hoping that at some point someone (banks, credit card companies, paypal) will end up doing what bitcoin doesn't wants to do.
Dude! There are no existing tools!! That's the point of the whole article!!!
Slimmer and faster JavaScript strings in Firefox
The recommended brand of fertilizer seems to be hard to find. Can someone explain what to look for that isn't a specific brand?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057470
Are you not proving the point? Saying that government-run projects are limited because of the decisions of the government doesn't seem to be a great argument for government-run projects.
Leukippos: A Synthetic Biology Lab in the Cloud
This is the list I use when deciding on episodes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092455/eprate
Running the PencilBlue CMS for free on Heroku and MongoHQ
I'm not disputing that efficient code can be easier to understand in some instances, just that the assertion that efficient code is easier to understand. Logically, disputing that just requires a single instance of efficient code that is hard to understand. I think that's a trivial enough example to be self evident. In reality, I'm just wondering what they were trying to convey with that statement. I doubt they would have written it without reason, so I'm curious to the reason.
someone should interview Smash. Legend.

http://directtovideo.wordpress.com
I'm trying it out now. Took 5min+ to sync my 180 calendar events and is taking forever (it seems right now) to sync my 1000+ contacts. I will try out for 30 day free trial, but I will only be paying the $5 yearly subscription if they allow distribution on the F-Droid repository since I prefer to not have Google Play on my phone. Open Whisper Systems has been frustratingly adamant about not wanting to distribute TextSecure on F-Droid as it doesn't do auto updates because they want to fix all bugs quickly (although current versions do notify when updates to apps are ready). Until then will be sticking with ownCloud.
Check out Plottable (https://github.com/palantir/plottable/). It's an open source library for data viz / charting, written as a layer on D3, and it's developed in Typescript.
They have a mostly incomplete Github page here (http://palantir.github.io/plottable/) with a tutorial (http://palantir.github.io/plottable/tutorials/)
A few new papers by Robert Harper
Not true. Windows 8.1 64 bit would be happy with that much.
I've read your lawsuit against coinbase. No comment.
TypeScript is heavily used inside Microsoft. The Azure preview portal is mostly typescript.

I suspect they had this in the works for a while and couldn't make build.
The Majority Of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
This was a HUGE red flag for me too.

It seems to me that the only right way to work with robotic firearms is to keep a chamber flag in them at all times except when they're on a hot range.
Cold all the time? The #1 Number You Need to Know
Ask HN: Local Wiki App from a couple days ago?
A couple days/weeks ago I saw this post of an App that was just a simple local Wiki.

It had a really nice GUI and allowed for easy cross-linking pages.

I tried everything to find it but neither google nor HN Search helped. Do any of you remember?
Okay. It hadn't been updated when I checked. Thanks for staying on top of this, dang.
Verizon FiOS finally symmetrical, upload speeds boosted to match download
On a 7kloc codebase it was around 3 seconds before the new compiler, seems to be about 1 second after.
She's grown on me over the years. She's definitely a more interesting person than Dr. Crusher, but I think she was also too much of an homage to Bones from TOS.

I recently went back and watched some TOS and was really surprised to see young her on the show.
I agree. Diffuses the quality of the related sites. Means you have to deal with twice as many moderators. I dont see why they couldnt have done a "subreddit' approach where you subscribe to the SE category you want and it shows on your homepage.
I won't go into detail here, but consider how de-anonymization of TOR network users is done with multiple layers of onion routing and encryption. All that needs to happen is that you correlate the injection of traffic to a particular node and then watch the actual traffic from a cable modem. You don't need to see the decrypted packets, you just need to know that when I inject N packets into a particular node, I get N packets out. Synchronized over a sufficiently long time series in a pattern that's only known to the attacker and you'll get a statistical certainty that a particular cable modem is being used for this kind of application and presto, your household is banned from the service.

Like I said, trivial.
I never thought of that, but if he was at least as important as the POTUS, he would of had some sort of staff.
Most people over estimate hardware cost. Buying a 300-500GB ram server maybe very expensive. But buying a distributed data base expert likely costs at least an order of magnitude higher per year.