skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Large retailers like Amazon don't save on their margins if they start accepting BTC because 1) BTC won't be used by any significant number of their users 2) they already get special discounts for CC processing from companies like Visa and Mastercard because of the huge volume they handle.

Fraud is as applicable to credit cards as to bitcoin. You store bitcoin with a third party service means you rely on them to keep their servers secure and hope that hackers don't obtain your credentials/identity information to log in and steal your bitcoin. I would argue it's even worse with BTC because their is no fraud protection.

Chargebacks are an issue for merchants, but a huge advantage for consumers. Ultimately the economic demand comes from the consumer and not the merchant, that is why chargebacks are still omnipresent in ecommerce today.

Two areas bitcoin could have addressed are remittances and smart contracts, yet better systems are emerging to solve those problems (Ripple, Stellar, Ether).

Your arguments could be valid in a world where everyone uses bitcoin and doesn't touch fiat. This is not the case. Bitcoin is a great technology in theory but its practical applications are quite limited.
That might work if all countries had similar culture, values, standards of living and agreements over things like how healthcare should be paid for. In reality, if a first world country opens it's borders to the rest of the world , even if the agreement is reciprocal then most of the traffic is going one way as people try and converge on the source of wealth. We already have this problem within the UK when trying to cram so many people into London.

It also raises questions like, if I can live and work wherever I want why should I only be able to vote in one fixed arbitrary place?
Did you guys not like Anand? The moment he quit the site, it's showing up on HN every day. Or have I just started noticing it?

I'm guessing VPS/cloud providers will like this one. You can already pack a lot of memory and SSD drives into a server so CPU was becoming a bit of a bottleneck.
How we upgraded our domain search using Erlang, RabbitMQ and Socket.IO
Love this. Great story telling.

A side question, I love that 100% of donations go to medical care. How does the team fund their operational costs?
Depends, do you believe in 'democracy'? If not, then nothing is wrong with that. If you do, then there's a whole lot of things that can go wrong.

ps. The argument that we don't have democracy today in the western world, holds true to an extend but it is as close to democracy as we can get.
Nobody knows how to do Fusion, AGI or figure out how to make people live longer. These are engineering ventures where step 1 isn't even vaguely understood. You make it sound as if throwing money at them will make them happen. No. We have already thrown money at these problems, and they haven't made appreciable progress at all.

The nice thing about space travel: we know what the intermediate steps are, and we also know it has a history of appreciable technological spinoffs. Like, say, microchips.

Blue sky goals are noble aspirations, but immediate (say in 10 years) achievable goals are vastly more productive.
Practice when you have a chance.

Read 'Getting to Yes' and 'Bargaining for Advantage.' Use the principles when making any large purchase or changing jobs.

Most retail cashiers can also give 10% discounts without approval. Find opportunities to negotiate.

Buy things on craigslist and be patient.

If you read the books, you'll also see more everyday situations and compromises as chances to use negotiating skills. There's no reason it needs to be money.

If you're in software you can also read patio11's valuable thoughts: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
That seems like an unnecessarily spiteful act to me. An expensive game of cat & mouse. I can't believe that British taxpayers aren't the least bit miffed at the government taking their tax dollars and wasting it on something as frivolous as this.
I don't think you'd find very many people who would support breaking up the United States -- at least in the United States. There might be support for breaking some of the states in the US into smaller entities, particularly on the West Coast.

But we have a pretty strong national culture, despite our local differences and our shared and troubled history.
The state parties set the dates. Of course the national parties can influence that, but there is no cohesive group mandating the dates.

A not very talked about aspect of U.S. politics is how much influence peddling is possible at that level.
An impressive sort of attack, I would never have thought twice about it.
FYI since RS bought MailGun, they offer each RS customer 50,000 emails per month via Mailgun (though limited to 4-5 domains).

RS seems to be moving to higher minimum service levels tool -- existing plans are grandfathered, but new users will at least have to select a $50/month minimum support plan.
Outlook seems sunny :)
> There's simply too much handwaving.

Welcome to the Scottish independence debate.

On one level it's been extraordinary - pretty much everyone has an opinion and the turnout rate is likely to be 80%+. On a more depressing level the quality of the debate and information made available has largely been extraordinarily poor.
> I find it much more useful to try to understand people's incentives than their professed philosophy if you want to explain their behavior.

Sure, but if you want to change their behavior then it helps to be able to show that it contradicts their stated beliefs.
Agreed, after watching the last debate I was stunned by the extent to which Salmond tried to handwave this.
> will there be a future where all I/O paths in AWS EC2 access PCI passthrough

That's a business, not technology question. Possible today if I/O is priced for exclusivity to one workload, same as a dedicated server. Most AWS customers want shared workload (low) pricing.

> Debugability

In general, hypervisors provide more debug options than a single OS, since the host OS can introspect into the guest OS, even to record/replay guest OS execution, e.g. http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/xen_com_mgr/xentt-determini...

Real-time hypervisor scheduling is an ongoing research area, e.g. here is an automotive use case, http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/11/27/rt-xen-real-time-vi... & http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~lu/papers/emsoft11.pdf

> for very large sites with thousands of instances

Yes, containers work well for Google who doesn't need to worry about isolation. Most businesses are not Google nor are they running a real-time workload. With containers, SE Linux provides a necessary layer of defense, http://opensource.com/business/14/7/docker-security-selinux & http://blog.docker.com/2014/07/new-dockercon-video-docker-se...
The history of humanity is doing things that don't scale, aren't sustainable, and then figuring out how to deal with the problems created by the massive leaps forward we made, utilizing the surpluses generated by ignoring the long term impacts of our decisions.

Burning fossil fuels and ignoring the future impact is probably the best thing we ever did as a species, especially if you like whales.
'Control of borders doesn't imply "everyone keep out."'

You should have a read of the Daily Mail.
Simplicity and uniformity?

There's less chance to screw things up if the spec says that root certs should look exactly like all other certs, rather than trimming out parts that shouldn't be needed.
Yeah, I'm not tempted back.
Fortunately, if you're using a password manager (and you don't have your password memorized), your password manager plugin will probably say "no logins saved for this site" which will clue you in on the attack.
Small claims court.

Seriously, this is precisely the kind of thing common law and the court system is for. Just the same as your recourse with cash. As for international trade, buyer beware.
Show HN: Towing Alerts For San Francisco
1. Check out Stellar and Ripple who solve this better than BTC.

2. Is a volatile virtual currency powered by market speculation the best alternative for inflation-ridden currencies? I facepalm every time I hear this argument.

3. and 4. Agreed. Bitcoin is great for merchants. Unfortunately economic demand comes from consumers. More merchants accepting bitcoin does not imply more consumers adopting it, in particular because those same merchants accept traditional payment methods in parallel (credit cards). That's a big red flag for me.
Bitcoin was created to get rid of the likes of Paypal.
Practice. Lots' of practice. And practice in cases where the outcome doesn't matter even if you have to make up situations to practice on or negotiate for others.

In addition to my own deals which I obviously work on, I also, some time ago, took on negotiating deals for others since it was fun to do. I ended up having enough takers that I started to have to charge for doing that. While the amount I am paid wouldn't make it attractive full time [1] (besides there are no residuals which I like) it still is something I do just to keep my mind active and since I have the flexibility to take chances where the outcome isn't as important. And to me, it's fun. I get a great buzz from having the correct analysis lead to a positive outcome. In some ways it's better than money.

Another thing that is good practice is simply to try and make deals for others that is to put deals together or what I might will call "shoot the gap". I do that all the time. I'll see something that I think could be helpful to 2 different people and without even getting paid for it I will try to convince both of them that they should get together on some business issue. Then when if reply or are negative I will try and overcome the objections to make a deal happen.

Risk always enters into negotiation. If you are willing to lose you can take more chances because you aren't as worried about going bust. If you can't lose (you really need something) you have to be more careful and can't be as reckless.

[1] Because in the end it's more money in my pocket doing things on my own account time wise although there is a great benefit to doing it for others as well I gather more data because there are more situations to work in and around.
lol
i thought about explaining your folly, but then i remembered that i hate financial people. so i'm content to await the inevitable fate of your l33t financial "secure messaging service".
If you were to teach programming, how would you do it?
This question follows a conversation I've recently had with a professor in which I mentioned that the internet provides for a free playground in which to try new ideas with teaching without having to worry about state accreditation and working for funds under federally standardized rules. (For instance, Salman Khan of Khan Academy has popularized the idea of "flipping the classroom" and has been running trial programs in California schools.)

So, if you were to create tutorials on a website to teach a (or various) programming languages from beginner to professional, how would you go about it?

Would you depend on creating short videos? Would you assign text based readings, or even textbooks? Maybe require students to do tons of practice problems that all build up to a major project so that the coding becomes second nature, and the project becomes an art?

What's something that you think is missing in public schools and could be fixed? How would you do it and why? (ie. Maybe you like the left to right way of doing math as is done in Asian countries and now common core is better.)
>the romantic idea of a state for every nation

Yes, why should a nation have control over its own borders and resources? Taxation should not imply representation.
>Bitcoin can save 1-3% in fees on any transaction.

Cash has no fees and debit has negligible fees (a few cents plus up to 0.05% in the US). Most B2B transactions aren't done with credit cards either.
Aaaand that's why I always have JS disabled by default.

Hardly foolproof, but 95% of the time it truly doesn't improve my web experience.
It feels to me (in the interests of transparency, I'm another no voter) that there needs to be a second referendum if it is a yes vote where we get to vote on exactly the settlement which is agreed.
Javascript, Objective-C, Java, Ruby
Donors have an option of "tipping" Watsi apart from the donating to the patient's treatment. But I'm not sure if this alone covers their operating costs.
Going down this list made me realize how tempting it would be to have a buy button right next to the tweet.
> Another thing that bothers some people (not me) are function names like "car" and "cdr", which come from the assembly language instructions of the 1950s era computer where the first Lisp was implemented. I think most people use "first" and "rest" these days, but car, cdr, cadr, etc. are still used all over the place.

What I often see on the Internet is people complaining about car/cdr and suggesting to replace them with first/rest or equivalent. Most of the times those people don't understand why doing so is a bad idea.

Cons cells can be (and are, all the time) used to build arbitrary data structures, not just lists. "first" and "rest" or "head" and "tail" make sense if you're dealing with a linked list (and notice, that Common Lisp does provide you such named functions), but they are not right names if your structure is a tree, or a graph (yes, you can build cyclical structures with cons cells).

Sure, car/cdr terms are relicts of the old architecture, but I'm yet to see someone propose names that are agnostic to data structures constructed with cons cells. And, as some old Lisp hacker mentioned somewhere, car/cdr combinations like caaddr, etc. are easy to say over the phone ;).
The most amazing thing to me is that people with very high skills are put in the same lottery pool with people doing administrative jobs. What's even more tragic (for both America and the graduates) is that the more skilled they are, the less likely they can find a commensurate job back in the developing home. On a personal note, the prospect of deportation put a heavy strain on my relationship--I'm sure many have to go through the same ordeal.
Ask HN: Best place for a professional to get a computer science degree?
I've been working professionally for about 6 years in Ruby, iOS and UNIX but I never attained a degree.

Recently I've been wondering if anywhere does good ones online that I could do in my spare time or whether it's even a good idea?

Specifically being a UK resident I'd mainly like one to more easily attain a H-1B visa but also to perhaps go over some of the deeper concepts again.
So how are you going to stand out by creating a resume that looks like every other resume created on this site?
The Psychology of Video Game Addiction
From their Google Doc transparency file.

"100% of every donation to patients on Watsi directly funds medical treatment - our overhead costs are covered by optional donor tips, cause marketing partnerships, and private donors, foundations and corporations."

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KQ2uWkJf5-5f34uttGmA...
I smell a 'reallygood[x]' empire brewing. This is nice.
Which is what Slack does, the ideal use case I was describing.

The person I was replying to inquired as to why uploading the image and pasting a link was a problem. He said:

"Limechat shows image links inline, which is good enough for me anyway. In some ways it is even preferable to tying things to one particular storage solution like s3."
A sad, sad day :(
Jobs was a designer, not an engineer. Wozniak was the software developer for Steve Jobs. It isn't that Steve Jobs was a joke of an engineer so much as Steve Jobs was not an engineer. He was a charismatic leader who inspires people to push themselves to and potentially past the breaking point.

When you can inspire people to push themselves harder than they would push themselves normally, you tend to see a lot of greatness. The way he did it was basically to be a sociopath however, which is unfortunate for all who worked directly with him.
I never said anything would be free forever. I said "we'll see" in reference to credit card-like fees.
Use Quassel, open source and cross-platform.

http://quassel-irc.org/
If you would live in Argentina, like me, and your currency loss 95% value in less than 10 years, you will understand why.
They (his vendor) are undoubtedly insured, if something goes wrong he will of course have someone to sue. No problem!
> I don't see why it would not be admitted.

Inability to come to mutually agreeable terms -- Scotlands wants (1) essentially automatic admission without the normal new state process, and (2) to keep the UK's special exemption for using the sterling, and (3) to get part of the UK's rebates.

AFAICT, much of the rest of the EU is opposed to all three of those. Spain is particularly opposed to the first (and possibly to Scottish admission at all), because an independent Scotland getting into the EU, especially on fast-track process, is seen as encouraging Catalonian independence.

> The EU is not in the habit of turning down that kind of country: wealthy, peaceful, of Christian heritage and adjoining several EU countries.

First, I think you are considering the wrong category: the category of interest is "states having recently broken away from existing EU member-states", particularly as the UK isn't the only EU member with regions that have some pro-independence sentiments, and admitting such a breakaway state is something that states that have their own aspiring breakaway regions are likely to see as providing encouragement to those breakaway regions.

Also, an independent Scotland would be adjoining exactly one other country (the UK), and one of the reasons that seems to keep being cited for it leaving is that, even with Scotland still in the UK and exerting pro-EU pressure, the future of the UK in the EU is locally considered less than certain, so I'm not sure where you get that "adjoining several EU countries" is a fair description.

> And if you want to play that game, it's not certain that England will remain in the EU.

Of course its not; I don't dispute that at all.
Ask HN: Does anyone ever hire non-tech help from here?
I'm a very tech savvy generalist (previous experience includes some tech and design with mostly business). I responded to the Freelancer and "Who wants to be hired" posts but got no response and noticed that both threads were full of replies about purely technical postings. So I wondered if HNers actually posted/searched here at all when hiring for non-tech positions. Thought I should ask separately in case there was a non-tech hiring thread that I missed.

My reply (with skill description) to Sept hiring thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8253729

Thanks.
I'm in the same situation as you - my significant other is working on her PhD for CS in a few years and laments this very prospect happening.
Increasing the power output of solar panels is very costly. The more money you put into it, the smaller increase you get. It's like charging a battery to 100%, you'll spend enormous amount of energy ($$) for nothing at some point.
But "crony capitalism" is a much more accurate way to describe the US right now than "Democracy", so why do you choose this over that?

I think it's a very weak argument to say "this is the closest we can currently get to X, therefore it can be said we have X". What we have now, as I said above, can be said to be closer to other things than it is closer to democracy. We should then pick the thing we're closest to, out of all the things we're close to. And that is not democracy.
- Chargebacks happen when cards are stolen. Cards are stolen because they are fundamentally pull payment methods. Every time you pay, you hand the keys to your money over to someone else. Think about this for a second, because it is absolutely insane.

Whenever you pay with a credit card, you have to trust the merchant to (1) charge the right amount, (2) only do it once, and (3) themselves take your privacy seriously enough to not have your information stolen by another party, who, if they did get hold of your card info, could abuse it at will and then share with more 3rd parties or have it stolen from them!

Credit cards are broken fundamentally. If the only kinds of payments were push payments, where consumers choose when to pay and the merchant has no ability to pull at will, the entire issue of credit card thefts - think Target, Home Depot, or the Russian hackers - would simply not exist.

So chargebacks due to fraud simply wouldn't be there. Sure, there are other use cases for chargebacks, like you felt you didn't get what you paid for or something, but that switches to a customer service issue which increases competition among merchants.

- Who cares about volatility? You don't need to own bitcoin to use it. When you want to send it, buy it at the time, then send it. Big whoop.

Also what is volatility on $100? Are you that concerned about losing or gaining $5, $10, $20 in a day, with a total maximum limit of losing at most $100 if it goes to zero, which seems extremely unlikely? Nobody said you have to invest your life savings. Participating in the technology is as expensive or as cheap as you would like.

- "Bankless people need banks, not cryptocurrencies." - Why? You didn't actually say.

"There's no difference to a bankless person between a mobile app to an online bank and a bitcoin gateway." - Which is great, because since "people need banks" (your words), bitcoin can finally provide it to them.

- "My credit card pays me back a chunk of that "1-3% tax on everything," my bitcoin wallet doesn't." - This is short-term thinking. Wouldn't you want something that can provide lower fees to gain market share in the long term, so that discount is not just available to the exclusive group of people who qualify for nice credit cards, but to every person, regardless of qualifications or payment methods?

- Last point is covered by my first point.
GlusterFS offers WORM volumes. Volumes made available with NFS/SMB.
> (Chrome requires some tricks because it only accepts scripts from the store these days).

Eh? Tampermonkey makes it dead easy to write and run userscripts in Chrome. I've already written them for half a dozen sites I go to that could use a little tweaking.
It appears to be entirely foiled NoScript (i.e. Javascript whitelisting).
Thanks, Josh! Our operational costs are covered by foundations, philanthropists, and donors who leave an optional tip during checkout. More in our FAQ: watsi.org/faq
Legally binding (if so) is not the same as something will actually happen. It's an important distinction.

Don't confuse what the laws says can happen with what will happen.

Look people don't need much of a leg to stand on if they want to sue if the pot of gold is big enough. But at least, in my experience, people are usually hard pressed to sue over verbal contracts or for that matter obviously even many written and executed contracts.

Keep in mind that the advice that many lawyers will give you is going to generally steer away from telling you to take chances lest you then go and pin the blame on him when you are the edge case.
>I'd far rather have the right to live and work anywhere in the EU //

https://www.gov.uk/working-abroad, "You have the right to work in any country in the European Economic Area (EEA) without a work permit if you’re a UK citizen."

So presumably you'd vote No to maintain this right and stay in the EU? I'm confused as that seemed contrary to the rest of your comment.

Parts of the UK could easily be overwhelmed by open borders with the rest of the Schengen Area. Perhaps Scotland will fair better, maybe it's less attractive to migrants. What is certain though is, with a Yes vote, that unless the rUK vote to become part of the Schengen agreement there will need to be border controls between Scotland and the Common Travel Area (CTA).
Show HN: Docker.DotNet, C# client for Docker API