skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For starters, the incentives are just not there to destroy Bitcoin. Most governments are either positive or neutral toward Bitcoin. The ones that are hostile toward it would rather make it illegal to fight it with the law instead of with technical attacks. Financial corporations? The smart ones would realize they would benefit more from embracing Bitcoin than fighting it. And the non-smart ones don't even realize how much of a threat Bitcoin may be to their business models.

But let's just go with your assumption that some entity with big pockets decide to run a majority attack against Bitcoin miners. How much effort and money would it require?

1 year and 20 billion dollars; here is why:

The best 20-28nm mining ASICs require about 1 watt per Ghash/sec. The network is currently at 170,000,000 Ghash/sec so it would require at least 170 megawatt of ASICs, or a ~200 megawatt datacenter (with PUE = 1.15). The fastest TOP500 supercomputer facilities barely reach 20 megawatt. The biggest datacenters in the world are just about 100 megawatt. So the attacker would require two of the world's most powerful datacenters (in terms of electricity and cooling) to attack Bitcoin. But it would take at least 1 year to plan, design, build, and deploy the hardware in two such facilities. And the Bitcoin network will continue to grow during this time. It has grown by 400x in the last year (400,000 to 170,000,000 Ghash/sec). By the lowest estimate, the network will grow at least by 10x in the next year (170,000,000 Ghash/sec to 1,700,000,000 Ghash/sec). So you need to plan to build not 2, but 20 world-class 100 megawatt datacenters by August 2015 to be ready to have a chance to majority-attack Bitcoin. Knowing that a 100 megawatt datacenter costs $1 billion [1], you need pockets with $20 billion in them. And if you under-estimate the growth of the Bitcoin network in the next 12 months, you will have failed and wasted $20 billion for nothing.

[1] http://www.greendatacenternews.org/articles/share/416983/
Questionable whether this is particularly interesting yet, but Mjolnir is going to be awesome. Much wider scope in terms of what you'll be able to automate :)
Do you know about Weave?
Great article. A lot of engineers don't have personal experience with these kinds of network failures, so sharing stories of their consequences means more engineers can make informed (and conscious) decisions of how much risk can be tolerated for their applications.

One thing that you could gleam for this article-and I think that this is incorrect-is that the application or operations engineer is responsible for understanding the nuances of distributed systems. In my experience the number of people who are relying on distributed systems is much larger than the number of people who understand these issues.

So what we really need are systems we can build on whose developers understand how to build (and test!) the nuances of data convergence, consensus algorithms, split-blain avoidance, etc. We need systems to gracefully-and automatically-deal with and recover from network failures.

Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at FoundationDB
Thanks! Hope you enjoy the app. Let me know if you have any questions!
This is a really straight forward explanation of how to implement cards in Twitter. Each social platform (Pinterest, FB, Goog Now, Twitter) requires a different implementation to achieve a similar goal. This is a good nuts and bolts view of what you need to do in Twitter to make it happen
Location: Boston, MA

Remote: Possible, if desired. I primarily work in Linux, if that helps matters.

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, R and Javascript. Git. Some C and Java. Experience with SQLite and Postgres

Python tech:
Flask, Django, Jinja2, SQLAlchemy

R tech:
ggplot2, BioConductor

Javascript tech:
d3.js, jQuery, underscore.js

Resume: Available on request

Email: My HN username at GMail

I'm a self-taught full-stack web developer and developmental neurobiologist. I'm ideally hoping to work in a data-intensive role to leverage my past research experiences (at Harvard) but am excited to contribute to solving hard problems in any role. Open to contract/short-term work as well as full-time positions. Hope to hear from you soon!
> How small were desks back then, not having room for a mouse?

Desks weren't necessarily small, but the amount of paper, paper handling and organizing equipment on the typical office desk was unbelievable to the modern office worker.

http://www.devoncornwallexecutive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/content/images/2008/06/2...

http://www.sundaynightimprov.com/files/images/Tom2.preview.i...

Actually, if you want to see a modern version of this, the Japanese have kept the paper office alive and well.

http://www.accountant-tokyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/J...
Why the Lone Genius Is (Mostly) a Myth
Again, not a problem.
I showed this last week, but the app crashed and burned after about an hour. I'm pretty sure I figured out the issue(s) and fixed them, but I'll be interested to find out if that's really the case.
Your use-case is not the same as everyone else's. It's not necessarily the same as anyone else's. Please don't presume otherwise, and then tell people that their use-cases are wrong.
If they have 0.3% speed, wouldn't it be expected that they get 0.3% of the coins per month?

3600 coins per day * 30 days * 588.41 BTC/UDS * 0.003 = $189831.60 USD gross per month?
I wonder what the difference is in the technology of the 3.3TB/s cable and the 60TB/c cable, just strands? (approx 20 more?)
Well the current gen Haswell can drive a 4K display, and the Anandtech article suggested this GPU was the same but 'better' (more efficient and feature parity with DirectX 11_2) so I would guess that it can drive a retina display (which is nominally a 2K display on a 13" laptop)
Fun stuff. I just did a similar project (also with a laser cutter): http://instagram.com/p/rkX2rzQHQS/?modal=true

I used http://maperitive.net/ - a fairly clunky windows app that turns open street map data into vector artwork (that requires a LOT of cleanup).
Square Market - Create Your Free Online Store And Sell Online
quick to judge. where are you from?
North Carolina says no to patent trolls
The inefficiency of PC 3D APIs compared to game consoles is an ongoing discussion since at least 2007. So far all low-level APIs have been designed for one specific GPU, or at least a specific architecture (like Mantle on AMDs GCN). Apple's move was unexpected, but much easier then trying to implement a low-level API which runs equally well on a wide range of GPU architectures. DX12 and 'GLNG' will be the first to really tackle that. But I have faith since there's enough 'prior art' in the form of game console 3D APIs, Mantle and Metal.
We are looking to put together a strong core team to deliver our vision. Both myself and specially my cofounder are engineers and code constantly. We are looking for like minded folks with a true passion for state of the art algorithms to join this team.
Because pre-mined != scam. Only Bitcoin adopters that are only used to common-style cryptocoin launches think it is. And for just a bitcoin-clone, it is a scam. Ripple/Stellar's currency is not the point of the protocol at all, just a side effect.
You still need to remove '5' and 'S'. I'd like a to see people use similar algorithms for mobile input. The two most important characteristics would be to be purely lowercase and to cluster numbers and letters to minimize keyboard switching.
Strange. All I know about WordPerfect is that my company's lawyer, a classic loyal WordPerfect for DOS type, tried really hard to make the first version of WordPerfect for Windows work for him, but it kept dropping all his tables and/or illustrations to the bottom of his documents, and he gave up.

That strikes me as more than "a little buggy" as I read skimming the last few chapters; granted, I heard they did better than their other competitors who couldn't even make something that wouldn't GP fault. I also seem to remember reading about some craziness where it insisted on using its own printer drivers, a competitive advantage they had in the DOS era, in Windows.

So I have to wonder how much technical merit or lack thereof had to do with their failure; then again, the afterword's figures are appalling, without revenues initially suffering they overspent wildly, removing their margin for recovering from any number of screwups.
Why Cards?: A detailed view of Card UI/data paradigm
Thanks for the kind words. Let me know how it works out for you guys. You can always email me at john at dayboard dot co.

Yeah, there are a few other minor visual glitches as well - sorry, still ironing things out :) I'm working on it!
What misinformation and bias are you seeing?

EPRI is largely comprised of traditional utilities, it has major operations outside of California, particularly in North Carolina, which is home to much more conservative utilities than PG&E (whose own record is increasingly checkered).

EPRI is generally positive source of information, but I would hesitate to call it unbiased in all regards.
The next sentence is:

> Even though these activities were condoned by many businesses across the country ...

They were an outlier even then.
Is there a 'Material Design' recommendation towards mutating icons? I would guess not, because the sorts of tangible things in which it finds its inspiration don't mutate in place. (They might slide in/out/over/etc.)

update: I did find a suggestion that such mutations can be 'delightful details', at http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/delightful-detai... – seems a bit of a stretch to me, a subtle, non-'material' UI change that's quite pretty but perhaps easy-to-miss or prone-to-user-error. I suppose as long as it's confined to toggles, as in the page's examples, the flourish is low-risk.
I don't know why you refer to them as "luxury" shuttles. As far as I can tell, most of them don't even have working Wi-Fi. Those shuttles are keeping extra cars off the highway and the road. Why is that not a good thing?

Also, not all of those shuttles are for Apple or Google, and many of them are not going anywhere near SF. They're going to areas of the South Bay where there are no practical public transport options.

Even people that live in or near Mountain View take those shuttles (instead of driving) to places where they work in the South Bay.

Same goes for Santa Clara caltrain and the Fremont BART station. Shuttles go from there to other places too.

Personally, I think the shuttles would have been far less necessary or popular if the California Bay Area had a fast, efficient transport system that actually covered it.

It's no wonder most people want to live in San Francisco, Palo Alto or Mountain View -- those locations all have some of the best public transport options and connections to other forms of transport as well. There are obviously other desirable aspects to those cities as well.

As for your argument that people should live where they work -- there's not enough housing for that. Mountain View alone certainly doesn't have enough space for everyone that works at Google. Likewise, San Francisco doesn't have enough space for everyone that works there.

Oh, sorry, let me correct that, Mountain View has plenty of housing -- if you're willing to pay ~$2700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment built in the 70s, $1.5 million+ for a new house (attached) or $2 million+ for a new, detached house.

So before you grouse about so-called Luxury shuttles, stop and think about what the real problem is.
I know a surprising amount of immigrants who moved to Vancouver because it was 'as close as' they could get to SV (since they couldn't get US visas). I huge proportion of them are glad they came here and never intend to leave (and some might, but not for a long time).

Not many people consider Vancouver as a first choice, but a lot of people who come here are happy with it and realize that it's a pretty good place to be. Outside of the SV echo chamber you can often get a better picture of what the world actually wants, vs. just what people in SV (though appealing to the SV echo chamber is what gets you the VC funding and buyouts).

Besides that, the weather is nice, the people are friendly, the cost of living is affordable for people in tech (especially compared to SV), nature is just outside the door, etc.

On top of that, it's easier to get talent; partly because people can get visas, but also partly because not every single startup and tech company is competing for the same pool of people. You won't earn a six-figure salary quite so easily, but you also won't have your employees poached away the instant it looks like a buyout isn't just over the horizon.

Thinking of it as some sort of holding pattern purgatory where people are cooling their heels staring through the bars at the Promised Land on the other side of the US border is a huge mischaracterization. SV may be the theoretical ideal, but the lifestyle is much better out here.
really detailed description of what cards are, why they matter, and directory of resources/content on the subject
> For example, flat shading with face normals

I see your point, having interlaced vs. non-interlaced data arrays. Many 3d model interchange formats use the latter because it saves some bytes. All 3D APIs use the former.

But this example works exactly the same way on every 3d API out there. Having a single index per vertex (rather than separate indices into position, normal, texcoord arrays) simplifies the vertex pipeline a little bit.

Using a single index will also make more efficient caching of vertex data and post-transform caching (ie. output of vertex shaders are cached if possible). Separate indices would need more complicated cache addressing.

Of course, with modern OpenGL, you can do more complicated addressing of data in the vertex shader. This isn't likely going to increase performance, though.

However, this is largely a non-issue. Modern 3d graphics simply isn't limited by the number of vertices or triangles. Having to duplicate some data isn't going to make a significant difference in practice.

Also, you can toggle the interpolation mode for varying variables (ie. fragment shader inputs) so you can use per-vertex normals and make them flat shaded if your whole model is going to be flat shaded.
If you are using Python, you should use the standard 'random.shuffle' which does use the Fisher-Yates algorithm.
If a person is feeling suicidal because the people in their life are not noticing their pain, I really doubt that knowing an algorithm had to do it will make them feel any better.
Bear in mind that computers were seen as glorified calculators back then rather than the business appliance of today - managers didn't have computers for the same reason they didn't have typewriters - they were machines to be operated by subordinates, preferably in the basement. In my first coputer job I was using a dumb terminal to a mainframe in another city, and it sat atop some sort of storage cabinet while I perched on a rickety stool.

Can't remember exactly what it was, but this was Ireland in mid 1980s and the hardware was already pretty creaky so some low end model from the 1970s. Print jobs were formatted by placing a loop of punched paper tape on two sprocket wheels before sending the job request to the mainframe, and offline storage was to giant vertically-mounted spinning tapes. Our department's prize possession was a 286 with a 10mb hard disk, which was what I learned DOS on. I got told off for installing Desqview without permission XD
It's not "pretty much the only economic game in town." It's big, but by no means anything like 'only.' SF is the banking capital of the west coast (Wells Fargo and Charles Schwab are HQ'd in SF. BofA was founded and still has a large presence there. And there used to be the Pacific Stock Exchange. So, fin svs/banking had and still has a huge presence), and tourism is another very big industry.

Secondly, the analysis that it's a few rich homeowners is not accurate. Since the early 1960s, Silicon Valley has been associated with low-density housing and low-slung office buildings. Which is why the space between SF and San Jose looks the way it does. It's an entire cultural perspective this issue is up against, not just a few homeowners.
You can still transition away from silicon lithography in addition to alternative transistor layout designs. Graphene is the most cited alternative, but there may be untested others, that just require rarer materials.
How Many People Have Never Drunk Alcohol?
> That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

Well, I think it would include Canadians in most circumstances - metric adoption in Canada is only marginally more pervasive than in the US - and would also include most "scientifically literate" Americans outside the context of formal scientific research (it would seem a bit absurd to suggest that because a microbiologist measures his research subjects in nanometers, he'll somehow find it optimal to use the same unit to measure his furniture).

But, yes, as a tautology, it isn't much of an argument for or against anything, apart from being a very strong argument against artificial imposition of unnecessary changes.
Hadn't heard of it before. Is this it? http://weave.intuit.com/

I don't have an iPhone but this looks like a great app
>For instance, suppose you issue a series of discount coupons. These could be identified by number: 1, 2, 3, 4, ... But of course anyone can fake the number, so you could disguise it with this encryption scheme. Because it's not a one-way hash, the number is recoverable from the coupon, by someone who knows the secret key. When you process the coupon, you decrypt the code, and invalidate that ID so the code can't be used again.

This sounds extremely over-engineered though. You have to have a database of all of the IDs to keep track of which ones are valid, right? If so, you just randomly generate the IDs rather than serializing + encrypting. There is no point in trying to hide information in the ID when it's essentially just a primary key into a database anyway.
I hear this end to moores law all the time but couldn't we just make the CPUs physically larger?

I know this probably wouldn't work for a mobile device but for desktops/servers theres a ton of room for larger dimension chips right?
Open Brain Computing Interface
Some regional governments can't keep up with demand. For example, a month or so ago, the Mountain View department responsible for reviewing and approving new developments asked the council for a temporary moratorium. They had over 90 projects in review or development and simply couldn't keep up with them all.

New (expensive) housing is popping up all over Mountain View right now...
All that would mean is that you were incorrect before when you had some mystical idea of what choice meant. Choices still matter (in the most literal sense: they are material). If complete determinism is true, the choices we make and the things we say are part of the causal stream that leads to other actions, even if that stream could only ever go one way.

On top of that, how would choice make more sense in a random universe?
(USA) Just wanted to point out that "BTW" is most commonly expected to be an acronym for "by the way" whereas the shorthand for "between" is typically written "b/w"

edit: title has been fixed! :)
A couple of years ago, I interviewed for a Bay Area company that provided me with a great programming problem that I've been using for years to prototype with new languages.

Write a Rate Counting Proxy Service for a REST API that does the following:

* Stores state of requesting IP and a count of API calls made.
* Makes appropriate tradeoffs to limit I/O per request.
* Highly concurrent
* Maintains counts offline when shutting down/starting up.

I was asked to do the assignment in Java, despite not really knowing a lot of Java. It was a fun weekend project and I've continued to use it as a good "learning project" in other languages.
Here's how I'd like this to work. Each algo is implemented server side on well specified hardware. I can upload sample data to benchmark the algorithm. After reviewing the results I could then pay a small amount for the source code in a language of my choosing (or language + bindings).

All code would be unrestricted and the value-add would be in the search, review, and benchmarking functionality of the service.

This is the same model that makes me pay Amazon for instant video rather than nothing to TPB.
+1 please do. As an accelerator connected to US capital & experience, same language/culture, and being in the same timezone with a 2hr flight, this can only mean great things. A lot of engineers in the community here (myself included) are not necessarily willing to give up life in beautiful Vancouver to move to an industrial park in Silicon Valley.
Why wouldn't it be?

The Macbook Pro Retinas already use the onboard Intel GPUs on all but the highest-end models, and they'll only be more powerful with Broadwell I suspect.
I just recently built and tested out a Kaveri based mini NUC scale computer. I used this case: www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129185 and it runs really swell. I even gave it a nice workout in kdenlive baking a multi-track video project I made on my i7 desktop - on my desktop it took 50 minutes, on the Kaveri it took 4 hours. But that is still within the realm of reason.

The part is 25w TDP, but there are passive heatsinks for it, but even with the fan I have it at 25% speed and its quieter than a mechanical hard drive.
There's several:

http://map.project-osrm.org/
http://graphhopper.com/maps/
http://open.mapquest.com/

For mobile, try the Scout app (Android / iOS). Disclaimer: I am on the Scout team. (I also made this 2007-now comparison site.)
That's just trying to change the underlying economics of profit.

Subsidies make things profitable which otherwise wouldn't be.

Taxes make things less profitable than they otherwise would be.

Regulations are a lottery-fine system where you "buy" a ticket to "win" by not complying with the regs. If you "win" the lottery you pay a fine of some sort. It's like speeding tickets in cars; they don't ensure 100% compliance with the speed limit but a rough approximation by fining some people who don't obey.

I agree with you that these are ways to change behavior and I would also agree that they're fairly effective. But I am not sure that they motivate people in non-economic methods. I think they just shift the landscape of the economics.

I think one possible way to motivate people to do something without economics is to make it illegal but poorly enforced. This will encourage contrarians to engage in it just out of spite. I'll agree that spite probably isn't the best driver of change but it's all I can come up with. This is supposedly what Frederick II did in Prussia during the 1700s to encourage people to cultivate potatoes for the sake of diversifying the food supply.

The other way I've heard of motivating people to do things is basically to ask politely. I saw a study somewhere (can't find the link after 10min) that compliance with the law is inversely proportional to the amount of force. It was related to speed limits and they found that the more aggressive the wording was regarding how it's illegal to speed the less people complied. This seems like it's on the other end of spectrum above: more authoritarian encouraged non-compliance and more polite encourages compliance.

They're non-economic at least on the surface.
it's user-hostile insofar as no one wants their likes showing up in their friends' feeds. from a consumption point of view it makes little difference; you see content and interact with it. note that there is absolutely no way to opt out of this feature.