skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Andresen has an alternative explanation for why there won’t be big changes in the way Bitcoin works. After the transaction issue is resolved, the work of looking after its code will increasingly be a job for caretakers, not master builders, he says.

Doesn't Andresen's response reflect more of how Bitcoin status quo will be maintained rather than actually addressing why it won't change much?

This also seems to ignore the ways in which so-called "Bitcoin 2.0" uses of the Bitcoin-platform-as-ledger will affect the actual nature of the platform, as these uses have yet to be employed on any large scale yet.
I don't know, requiring several phones within hearing range seems like it would severely limit the applicability of this technique.
If you think N phones provides at best N*(maximum sample rate of one phone) and that's assuming their phases a perfectly misaligned I'd think you'd still need quite a few to get something.

Plus the 100 Hz figure is optimistic. I dunno what kind of anti-aliasing these things have. If none you get an aliased signal and with a low order filter the practical maximum frequency detectable would be even less.
We are arguing whether it is out of the question to expect that such a system's TARGETING is based on clicking a point on a imprecise map (per the rest of the whiteboard). It is completely out of the question to expect ICBM to be targeted with a mouse. You are (incorrectly) extrapolating the mouse click to mean that there is a mouse click somewhere in the process and NOT at the exact point drawn on the board. If you follow the flow chart, it says mouse click and then gets the target location based on that imprecise click.
How news of #Ferguson spread across Twitter
I think you are at least slightly overstating how inconvenient this is. I mean, yes, I could wish it was easier. No, this isn't going to stop me from getting back on the site.
I recall watching TLC in the mid-90's, and splitting my time between it and Discovery Channel. The whole push for "A [foo] Story" turned me away, and I guess things went downhill from there.

Also, this is mind boggling:

> The Weather Channel, for instance, faced severe backlash for its attempts to add movies to its lineup (already having drifted from all-forecast programming into reality shows for much of its lineup over the course of the previous decade) in 2010.

I guess you could call this a "pivot", but if you've named yourself "The Weather Channel", I don't think you should be surprised if you get backlash because you decide to stop delivering what you said on the tin.
Agreed, I had never heard of it and the about page was no help at all.
The Domestic Cat Genome Has Been Fully Sequenced, and It's Fascinating
It still does. There's just no music in them.

So yes, yes I do.
OT, but I learned Linear Algebra out of your textbook (if that's who you are). The "Topics" section on voting paradoxes was my favorite bit. Thanks for giving it away!
Yeah, Gavin was a guest on EconTalk podcast back in 2011, when bitcoins were still $1. I listened to him talk a few minutes and said "Whatever that guy is doing I'm investing in" even though I didn't really understand Bitcoin until much later...

I still think it's no coincidence that Gavin is spearheading Bitcoin- He is impressive because he's very down-to-earth but still supernaturally smart. I'm not sure Bitcoin would have gone anywhere without him.
Don't worry about launching a real product. That's not where you start. Do you have access to customers? A market? Something that can make you money? Forget that you have all these software dev skills and focus instead on business opportunities.
No particular technical sophistication should be required to understand that terrorists do not launch intercontinental missiles.
There is a plan in progress that will fix issue with big blocks being a problem for miners. This is a first step of scaling Bitcoin to the level of thousands transactions per second.

And it's also a great read.

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2
No, I was talking about a "friend" of mine who got himself in trouble.
The best book about User Interface Design / User Experience I've read so far is Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis: http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Use-Create-Interfaces-Applica...
I did the first 50 problems, and then cherry picked another 15 or so.

At some point the math was beyond my knowledge, and I didn't find much fun in researching it.

I'm a fairly normal web developer, in my own estimation.
> but oral language changes faster than written tradition

Yes and no! Sure, if they evolve at different speed, oral changes faster than written. But, in order to have any difference at all, you have to have accepted them to diverge at a certain moment in the past.

Luckily :-) this was never the case in Italy. Starting at least with Romans, written has always been meant as a phonetic transcription of the language. The pronunciation rules did change during time, but the underlying correspondence principle has never been given up.
Oh gods! It sounds like a tongue-twister played backwards. Clearly not designed for ease of pronunciation or for singing songs.
To be fair, the linked post is largely ridiculing the arguments that orthographic reform is impossible and the author would probably agree with you that it isn't.

As for the browser extension for alternative spelling: I think it's brilliant that someone's actually done it (having had a similar idea a couple of years ago and done absolutely nothing). Unfortunately interesting links often sink without trace on HN; there's a fair bit of luck and timing involved in getting traction on here...

Unfortunately, I also dislike Cut Speling orthography (I prefer Valerie Yule's Interspel or even more basic "spelling without traps", which manages to simultaneously be more radically phonetic and look closer to the original English). That's probably the biggest problem English language reform faces: the advocates end up like the Peoples's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front...

For the sake of actually justifying the Cutspel dislike

- cutting "schwa" sounds is mostly unnecessary, not least because they often sound in most dialects much more like they're written in English than the Cutspel alternative anyway. (e.g. Most speakers of English pronounce the last syllable of "lemon" much more closely to the original spelling than to cutspel's "lemn", which appears like the "mn" sound in Autumn, omniscient, or damnation.) Brevity for brevity's sake is a bad thing.

- similarly the optional rendering "-cion", "sion" suffixes as shn is enforcing consistency for the sake of consistency, since "cion" is very simply and consistently pronounced throughout English, and also makes the words more intelligible to vast numbers of speakers of Latin languages, not to mention vast numbers of other languages that use loan words like "television" in their everyday speech (I'm glad you appear to have left that part alone)

- Cut Speling changes a very high proportion of English words, including those which are very common, whose spelling is not at all confusing, or both. This makes parsing it far more difficult than it need be for an English speaker

and Interspel

- it includes a short list of very common words which are excepted from the rules like 'the' and 'are'). This makes the reading experience much more acceptable for people familiar with written English, who are used to the words, and requires relatively little memorisation for language learner (and also hypothetically, for people familiar with Interspel to cope with standard English)

- sparing use of a single diacritic mark offer a reasonable pronunciation guide without changing word forms much for native English speakers

That said, spelling reform to avoid confusion could probably start with your surname (and mine)! Bet you always have to spell it out, repeat the "double 'l' and double 't'" and still get people write it down wrong half the time"...
This is nothing compared to the fall of TLC. It used to be called The Learning Channel!
Planning a missile strike by drawing a crude world map with an explosion (labeled "explosion") is like planning a killing spree by drawing a stick figure with an uzi in each hand mowing down other stick figures.
And how many answers did you lose? Because I lost a bunch. I'm not overstating anything, I'm honestly frustrated and dispirited because of a high degree of incompetence and bad judgment.
Presumably you mean mechnical engineering major.

That being the case, learn C for programming microcontrollers and embedded systems--not C++, not Java. Just simple plain old C.

If not that, Javascript, because it's everywhere and you can play with it in your browser.
I'm not sure what Betteridge would say about this headline but I don't think he'd like it.
MongoDB has a lot of advantages over Redis

1. Retains some friendly properties of SQL. (Query, index) so its easier to work with. Queries are javascript expressions so it fits in great with our Stack.
2. Master/slave replication (auto failover with replica sets), Sharding built-in, Easier horizontal scaling than Redis.
3. In-place updates, means you only need update one part of the document.
4. geospatial indexing, if you use geospatial data this can be very powerful
5. Data center awareness

You can do everything with Redis as well but we found that Mongo was easier to work with.
This is lovely -- very simple, but my error-finding intuition started me off entirely in the wrong direction.
Quality Software Costs Money – Heartbleed Was Free
I came here to make basically the same point you are making, but with exactly the opposite conclusion.

> But I don't see compelling evidence for a causal or directional effect there.

You don't? Mass media consolidation, pop-culture more promiscuous and superficial than ever, powered by unprecedented media consumption levels and immediate feedback through surveillance. Commercial, government and rogue. Sometimes, a mix of the three. Sorry about no referrence, I'm on the phone now. I think it's common knowledge among people who value being informed greatly.

There's a famous Orwell vs Hauxley comparison. I think it sums up the case pretty well.

http://bit.ly/1t6FV94
Would totally love this as a library for a ruby project :)
I helped out with the recent Focus Fusion crowdfunding. Our goal was $200K, we raised $180K, but it also brought in some new investors who took us well over the goal, and who gave the crowdfund the credit for their interest.

We had a very low budget so our marketing was bare-bones.

We had a lot of excitement, but also a lot of skepticism and pushback. Our hired marketing team insisted on an extremely optimistic presentation and that turned a lot of people off. Of course I don't know whether we would have done better with a more measured approach. With LPP being such a small team and so far off the beaten path we faced a lot more skepticism to start with.

The Solar Roadways campaign ran on Indiegogo at the same time and raised over $2 million. They managed to make a video go viral.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowerthewo...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways
The two main benefits I got from switching to Scrum
> The pronounciation of words changes much faster than spelling does.

Please, have a look at my answer to Xophmeister (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8182703).
Effectively banned from the site.

Sorry but the scientific community needs to address a number of points that are raised. It may be psudoscience, but there are a number of things that can't be explained by science, and in these cases, looking for answers is better than ignoring the issue. In the talk he doesn't say any of these things are true, but seems to be exploring the possibility. I am sure when it was first suggested that the earth was round, that it sounded equally ridiculous.
Ask HN: Do you recognize this problem? Ownership of Business Rules
Dear HN,

In the spirit of failing early, I'd like to ask you for some feedback to see if a problem we've been facing quite a while at a small ISP also applies in other companies. A first check to see if this idea is viable.

As an ISP we deliver different flavors of internet and value added services. We have multiple brands, each with their own proposition, discounts, region specific value added services, etc.

To capture these business rules we've built a domain-specific business rule engine as a service. A serious omission however was leaving out the maintenance part, so every change to a proposition requires configuration effort from a developer.

I was wondering how general this problem is. From my perspective the essence boils down to operations on sets combined with some decision making logic, and could therefore be applicable in many contexts.

Would you be willing to pay for a solution that gives non-programmers (e.g. a Marketing & Sales department) the ability to configure the product portfolio using custom rules?

Some further characteristics about the solution:

- Developers will be able to configure their own API

- Configuration (changes) should be tested as well [0]

- Rules can be applied in a specific time frame (e.g. a customer registered two weeks ago) and are versioned.

I'm very interested in your take on this and welcome any feedback, advice, extra requirements, etc.

Thanks!

[0] http://workshop.unspace.ca/post/67567487259/duck-programming
We now find ourselves with 999 channels of "Ow, my balls".

Idiocracy was prophesy.
It's still around and does exactly what this thread is asking for. http://plaxo.com
The Importance of Idempotence
I feel I should mention 'The Bible' of usability: The Design of Everyday Things [1], which is highly recommended.

[1] http://amzn.com/0465050654
Funny/Scary. Imagine that instead of the nuclear war map, the landlords encountered the image you described. OP would be in detention/questioning right now.
Being overweight or obese 'linked to 10 common cancers'
"But with an algorithm that allows them to assemble in parallel, then they can shape up faster"-Could a variation of the Paxos algorithm accomplish this? It sounds like the task of achieving agreement among several robots without a centralized leader is analogous to the decentralized parliament described in Lamport's Paxos paper.
Remember when American TV news stations reported the news - and not opinion pieces?
"Rules of thumb for novice designers"

http://shazow.net/everything/rules-of-thumb-for-novice-desig...
Much of the post-9/11 response to terrorism fits it.

"We captured a bunch of people. Some are harmless unfortunate bystanders. Some are dangerous people who are nevertheless not immune to handcuffs. Still, we'd better lock them up in harsh conditions without trial just in case."

"Iraq probably has no nuclear weapons and no means to deliver one, but we'd better invade the country just in case. We don't want to be wrong and end up with a mushroom cloud over Manhattan."
I guess I don't fully understand what you're saying here. For me, a "project" is "I'm going to do something for you, and you'll pay me." The only way I could gain more money that way is by raising my rate. (My projects are one-to-one.)

Otherwise, time becomes the biggest limitation. I've toyed with the idea of hiring people to work for me, but I really like sleeping at night, and I'm not sure that I can do that if I'm worrying about being able to pay people. I've heard that more people will spawn more projects and more money, but time and time again I come back to the thinking: I'm not unhappy with what I have now. No need to rock the boat.

Time, as always, will tell.
Well, if The Left say it is a bad idea, then of course it must be.

However, George Bush was one of the best presidents ever for Africa: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7831460.stm
Right, don't encrypt all the things, because that makes us find crypto vulnerabilities sooner.

Also, side channel attacks are hard, so let's just use plaintext.
Variation in charges for common blood tests in California hospitals
Tip: just before you pull out your card to pay the fees, look into the kid's eyes and say something like "ummmm, this seems a lot, I don't really feel comfortable paying this much, can we reduce this at all?" The guy starts sweating as he sees his commission disappearing into the sunset, replaced by the prospect of a grovelling call to the property owner. They will often knock off about 50%. Sometimes you can just refuse to pay. Depends on the market.

NB for best results, start your contract at the worst time of the year for landlords, usually just after all the students have finished moving. Also, be at least a foot taller than your letting agent.
I'm currently watching "10 things" on the History Channel. I have a strong feeling this show is an attempt to capitalize on the BuzzFeed model
You could apply the same point to any piece of software exposed to the Internet. I don't see how one vuln makes you think we should start sending everything in plaintext again.

(Full disclosure: my startup surrounds certificates and PKI)
>Silicon Valley can afford better software people than labs can.

LabCorp made (income) $600 million last year. Quest made $1.5 billion.

They can afford teams of very capable developers. They can have the best software, the best presentation, slick mobile apps, speedy information systems.

They don't not because they can't afford it, but because they don't want to afford it. As is the case with many of these companies that get disrupted by tech startups, they see it as a cost center and minimize it.

Software rules the world. Any business that doesn't adapt to this will see strange little upstarts steal all of their thunder.
In the GitHub description (https://github.com/kivy/kivy), it says about Kivy:

"Open source software library for creating NUI applications, running on Windows, Linux, MacOSX, Android and iOS"

I guess that is why I searched for NUI and I probably found your lib. I don't remember that I have heard that term "NUI" before.
A single page site for people to quickly sell things. Craigslist, but faster.

Think sub 2 hour turnaround. Maybe simple sorting methods. Infinite scroll.

That's something that I could see being built in 2 weeks. Has the potential to become more than just a project too.
Will these tech titans doing #IceBucketChallenge also donate to ALS research?
Thank you very much, Do you think codeacademy is better for me to kickstart or from somewhere else. Also what about python, do you think its important?
ShellCheck – Online shell script analyzer
Avoiding the rough part of town at night is cautious. Turning in a neighbor for basically nothing is sensationalist.
There are about a million exucses (er, reasons).

Some of them are legit: older professors often have better handwriting at blackboard; chalk is sometimes better for certain drawings; left-hand smear; etc.

I suspect the biggest reason is that, in math circles, blackboards have a much larger cool/nostagia factor.
I admit I laughed heavily when I saw that as the first warm up in Concrete Mathematics.

And then just breathed deeply with how quickly it got beyond me. :)
This is something I've struggled with - I am always the cautious type. This is good advice I think for many projects , even those that are not quite moonshots.
> Depopulation is everyone's highest priority towards the third world.

Which is utterly misguided if the motivation behind the goal is to conserve energy and resources. The population growth rate of first world countries is lower, however we consume far more resources per child than third world countries do. Calling for those countries to make drastic changes without examining and curtailing our own overuse of resources is problematic and irresponsible. Al Bartlett[1] addresses this in his engaging lecture[2] on population and energy.

If the primary motivation is instead humanitarian, e.g. to raise the quality of life, then I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on it.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCm2QQZVYk (The video's title is hyperbole and is not the title of the lecture, though the lesson is certainly important.)
> Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of many of the schools—the Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams—with which Minerva hopes to compete.

Sorry, but nope. To date, there isn't a single entity that carries more prestige and influence than getting an "Ivy league" type high education.

> The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning.

This is sound in principle, but education only won't have the returns that the Ivies do. Ivies are successful because they are filtering mechanisms, not because their teachers are substantially better than the rest of the competition.

If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is the likes of YC.
If what you are saying is true (and it sure seems to be) then we should also expect a decrease in the quality of available attorneys. That would also be in agreement of my recent real-life experiences.

Now I know it's a tough job blah, blah, but seriously the best experiences I've had with attorneys recently is when they did nothing but held my through the unnecessary complex and unfriendly legal system. I felt I got my money's worth in those instances from their familiarity of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. But I recently spent money on a lawyer that completely screwed everything up. I am certain that I would have been better off cluelessly stumbling into court.
Alexis de Tocqueville on American Newspapers
It's a right because people can do it, and they would also kill or die to keep doing it. It's that simple. If you tell someone they cannot reproduce, or forcibly sterilize them, they might try to escape your control or kill you.

If you say it is not a right, you are also saying that someone may prevent another from doing it, by force, and en masse. On a large scale, this is a time-shifted equivalent of genocide. So I say procreation is a right, and if you want to limit the exercise of it, you must provide sufficient incentives for that to be done voluntarily.

But while procreation itself is a right, you and your brood of snot-nosed brats shouldn't get automatic additional support from society when you exercise that right irresponsibly. My support has strings attached. Mostly, they are all variants of the "don't be a dick" rule.
Scheme.

Cf. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/s...
See also the version you can compile yourself and run in the terminal, written in Haskell:

https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
Be sure to pick a fast enough hash function to keep up with a DoS attack when I flood you with connections attempts.

The weak hash function may not be significant. If I snoop a connection I get all the information to reconstruct the IV and I get the XOR crush of the MD5 result. If I try to brute force this I can find a shared secret that will make a collision on the 32 bit number in about 2^32 trials, but that won't help me when I try to make my own connection with a different IV. There are probably something like 2^96 secrets that will make the collision so the odds me me guessing the right one are hopeless.

If there is an analytic reversal of the hash function that yields some constraints on the secret, and I collect enough SYN packets to eliminate all but one secret, then I can connect to your port.
> In fact this is something I'd want to solve in general - embedding objects in webpages has long been a mess, to the point where we've resorted to specific <VIDEO> and <AUDIO> tags rather than trying to solve "embed another file in this web page" in a general way

Like <embed> and <object> tags in HTML?