skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem here is that nobody wants Bolívars (the Venezuelan currency), since it's almost imposible to convert them back to USD or any other currency. A sales manager for Marriot was telling me that in Caracas they charge 40$ a night if you pay with USD or 300$ if you pay with bolívars. So the only people that would be willing to exchange bitcoins for bolívars would be people who live in Venezuela. So I assume that supply of bitcoins in Venezuela is really scarce, and their price should be on pair with black market dollars, so probably 6-7x the international price.

The only way around this would be if Venezuelans were to mine their own bitcoins, but given that most of the mining equipment is sold either in USD or BTC, it's just a catch 22.

So no, there is no bitcoin economy in Venezuela and as long as they keep their strict capital controls in place, there won't be any kind of economy in Venezuela.
Yes. it is now. It was a hexagon when I posted this. I changed it in response to this comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8427491

I have updated the page to read 'green polygon' now..)
You're not reading very carefully. The argument De Long makes in the excerpt that Krugman endorses is not that "a currency needs to be backed by a taxing authority and/or central bank", it is that, for a commodity (currency or not) to serve as a stable store of value, it must have something providing both a ceiling and floor for its value, and one of those (the floor) is not immediately apparent for bitcoin.

This is very different from your argument about government, as is evidenced by the fact that his two counterexamples of things where the ceiling/floor combination are available and specifically identified are the US dollar (a government-issued currency) and gold (a commodity which is not backed by a taxing authority and/or central bank.)
His body will be cremated:
https://twitter.com/TexasDSHS/status/519922160903938049

CDC guidelines allow for either cremation or burial in a hermetically sealed casket:
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/hcp/guidance-safe-handling-huma...
Well, it's one of those low-probability high-risk diseases.

You probably won't get it, but if you do there's a better than middling chance you'll die a horrible death and if you survive you're guaranteed it won't be any fun. Oh, and there's no cure and basically no treatment. You're on your own.

The treatment for it is basically "drink lots of fluids", "keep pumping blood into the patient" (since they're literally losing it all out of every hole in their body) and "pray real hard".

Even with all these resources the tale is pretty bad

Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived.

Less than 40% survival rate.
High Hopes for OnePlus’s Low-Price Phone
"this suggests the NSA may have been trying"

Well, we know that an NSA contractor on the IETF removed opportunistic crypto from the PPP protocol. See http://cryptome.org/2014/01/nsa-rep-dirt.htm

I think it would be prudent to believe that the NSA was systematically throwing up road blocks then, and it would be prudent to believe that they're doing it now. I can't even see how such a claim would be controversial. It is their job after all, at least given the presumption that foreign bad guys use and rely on domestic technology. And we know that the NSA makes that presumption.
In the video, Adam glances at the guy behind him in line as he says "checking my statement for sketchy charges". Dude looks a lot like weev. Not sure if it's the guy himself, but that has to be intentional.
Yeah. Today was kinda unexpected and the queue is a bit backed up.

Working on it.
Crude placeholder for now: http://devo.ps/roadmap/

We're reviewing the timeline with my co-founders and will update this in the coming days.
Show HN: Ruby Wrapper for the Hacker News API
If OpenBSD has anyone young enough, would've been a fun twist to have someone who wasn't even born at the time of the fix make the commit.
From what I've been hearing they seem to already have big customers using it. I wonder if it'll ever be available to individuals and small businesses.

It's pretty cool in that it appears to have some tripwire-esque stuff so that you get useful logs when malware does try to do dodgy things in their sandbox. It sounds like it can alert the user with something like, "your browser might be compromised, start a new session" and everything is captured/saved so that admins can come back later to do forensics with the session that went bad.
This is just the key escrow debate of the 90s all over again.
If it's important someone will pay you for it. This is even more true in today's crowdfunding era with kickstarter and co.
Well, I don't really doubt the idea that justifies the department's existence is that Microsoft Research will produce new developments that can be used in money-making products, but the research itself is not necessarily linked to revenue in any real way. For example, the Haskell programming language and the experimental Singularity OS are things that really have no chance of ever themselves making Microsoft money, but Microsoft Research drove their development nonetheless. The most obvious underlying motivation is not finding revenue streams, but pushing the state of the art in ways that Microsoft can learn from and use to improve other projects.
HN subsumes reddit (on hacker topics).
Right. I'm a bit surprised that Microsoft Research is so hipster-heavy.
Some of what is in this article isn't correct:

> Because fragments create, bind, and configure views, they contain a lot of view-related code. This effectively means that business logic isn't decoupled from view code — making it hard to write unit tests against fragments.

Put the business logic somewhere else. You CAN'T put it in Fragment objects, except in trivial cases, for other reasons, like you'll have different Fragments for different layouts for different screens, and different combinations of Fragments. Assuming you have a REST-backed app architecture, you can put business logic in front of your REST calls or, if data is sync'ed locally, in the ContentProvider or in a bound service wrapping the ContentProvider.

I have seen other big companies build big teams that over-engineer Android apps. I think that's what happened at Square.
It caught me out once... At the time I thought it was useless with no real practical application. But I was only fooling myself. Reasoning about linked lists is a basic fundamental and easy to solve. After I failed, I went away and studied it, and implemented it in code. Many many people can reason about it and describe the pointer manipulation at a high level, but then only 10% can actually put pen to whiteboard so to speak. It is a remarkable question. After you master that (take half a day), move onto trees and then maybe graphs. Practice modeling some problems with those data structures and after you do that any development job is yours for the taking.
The problem is that irrelevant whiteboarding questions are far more the norm than relevant whiteboarding questions. Most companies interview this way, so if you avoid those companies you avoid nearly everyone.

I'm a full stack developer who specializes in front-end. Knowing how to structure a front-end app, knowing/following JavaScript best practices, and understanding the arcane idiosyncrasies of JavaScript are in my opinion three of the biggest values a front-end developer can add. However, the companies that assess this stuff in interview are an extremely small minority. I usually get questions about binary trees.

It's partly because it's more difficult to assess those ways of thinking in interview, and it's partly because linked list kinds of questions are just the way interviewing has always been done, so people keep doing it.
for those unaware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_%28computing%2...
> The Qubes Windows Tools are proprietary but we distribute the binaries for free with current Qubes OS releases.

Out of curiosity: What's the reason for them being proprietary while the rest of the system seems to be free software?
... Two code paths (old&new) - I've been doing this to some extent without trying to get any insight, or make it a practice (of my own first), but often the old code just stays before deploying the newer (day or two), or before submission, and then it's killed (or #ifdef-out).

I liked the "empathy" bit though. Recently I've did the UCLA Extension TMP courses, and one of the lecturers - Jorge Cherbosque, PhD talked exactly about this and much more - here is the lecture (highly recommended)

https://www.uclaextension.edu/tmp/Pages/79th/D1.aspx

Is there a video behind the talk?
At this point though, the "con" of feeding trolls is outweighed by the "pro" of increasing public awareness. Plus, the "trolls" involved here are so severe that they no longer require a response to continue. The core of the "don't feed the trolls" argument seems to be that they will eventually give up, but that only works with the mildest of offenders.

It could however be argued that by pulling away from the public eye she actually was feeding them, and that the best course of action would be to act like they don't exist. I still find it doubtfull that it would have stopped it though, as in the minds of the most obsessed trolls the very act of ignoring them tells them their tactics are working.

Will writing this make things worse for her? Probably, but saying it's her fault makes as much sense blaming sexual assault victims for wearing anything even remotely revealing.

-sent from phone, so please forgive spelling/grammar
There are plenty of things you can do. Your passwords (or whatever authentication method you choose to use) are a "back door" to get access to your device/accounts. What do you do to keep them secure? Your password can also be used be used by the bad guys - what do you do to reduce the chance of that happening and mitigate damage if it does happen? Now instead of thinking how you protect your own information, come up with ways concerning how you would protect your neighbor's, neighborhood's, city's, etc. and work your way up.

Implementing the "back door" might be a difficult problem, but stating a priori that it's an intractable problem is just lazy thinking.
Cost to do a wire transfer with my bank: $20 and I need their account # and bank routing #

Cost to go online and have my bank mail someone a paper cheque: $0 and I need their name and address.

Guess how I send people money?
Isn't it the same as Sandboxie? http://www.sandboxie.com/
A good sign of 'enterprise' software: the marketing copy was written by someone from Marketing.

And then maybe translated to english by someone from accounting
New Relic Buys Ducksboard to Bolster Data Integration and Visualization
Sounds like a botched edit, replacing "extremely large" with "petabytes of" or vice-versa.
And unthinkingly approved by someone from sales.
Yes - either that, or naked photos of you on the internet. Imagine hackers taking every picture in your camera roll and posting it to the internet.
Any discussion w.r.t to automated test should not start with an extreme example of 100% coverage because everybody else already know that's not healthy.
Document Model Support in DynamoDB
Just fixed a bug that was causing some threads to use ~100% of the CPU, whoops :)
I love that direction. Recently stumbled upon "Microsoft Ajax Minifier" which is a prime example of the old way of naming things. What does compressing files have anything to do with async requests? At some point they were just giving the AJAX name to anything javascript related, without thinking or to not have "Java" appear in naming conventions.
It's not the same as a Golden Key because you're not handing over your private keys to somebody else, nor are you trusting them to store private information.

There's no substantive analogy to be made at all.

Also, there are quite decent alternatives to DNSSEC. In particular, DNSCurve: http://dnscurve.org/

PKI is admittedly a mess at the moment. News at 11. But that's irrelevant to arguments regarding Golden Keys, aka backdoors to your own, private information.
I have one of these and by god it is brilliant.
Orchestrate adds geospatial search to all-in-one database service
There was a legal battle in the early 2000s about circumventing DVD copy protections. The DVD CSS (content scramble system). The court ruling declared that the program was a 'copyright circumvention device'. It was illegal to distribute the source code. This lead to people creating illegal t-shirts with the source printed on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

Later the same thing happened for Blu-ray. Only it was an encryption key that was discovered and subsequently illegal to distribute under the DMCA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
Arms is short for armament.

Armament = Weapon.

The Department of Justice classified cryptography as a munition.

Munition = Weapon.

In law, it's always about the technicalities, down to the definition of words. Prove me wrong.
> But when you have a certain taste for specific niche of games, sometimes there is no alternative.

There absolutely is. You can just not play. Video games aren't an essential commodity; they are a luxury.

Just because I need to edit a photo using a Spot Healing Brush and I don't like cloud-based subscription doesn't mean I get to pirate Photoshop.

> I also feel that the developers deserve the support, they aren't responsible for the publishers requirements. [...] Now the question is, do you think it would've been better if no one had bought their games before? You think it would have been better if they had gone out of business? I do not believe so. PoE exists today because Obsidian could afford to build itself as a studio and recruit some of the best developers of the genre.

Except there are independent developers who succeeded without the need of going through classic big-house publishers: Mojang (before their acquisition by Microsoft) and Grinding Gear Games are two popular examples. Both of them did so with their first games. They built their reputation from scratch - nobody bought their games "before" because there were no such games.

And yes, there's nothing wrong with going out of business if you're doing a bad job and somebody else can do it better.

> Boycotting developers that are still kept in shackles will not do anything but destroy their livelihood.

On the other hand, it will promote the livelihood of those developers who took risk and published their games independently. It also isn't black and white where we either support old studios or they go bust and there are no more new games whatsoever.

One more thing. It might be a long shot, but if you're interested in grid- and turn-based RPGs, maybe give Dofus or Wakfu a shot. I'm saying it's a long shot because a) they are MMORPGs; b) they are subscription-based; c) they look cartoonish, almost anime-like. But they can get surprisingly complex and fascinating plus they are refreshing takes on seemingly played-out fantasy role-playing genre. They weren't on Kickstarter because they were developed by an indie French company for 10 years.
Sorry, but with all my fascination with eastern mysticism, I find this admiration of elegant effortless killing quite troubling. Would we see the same admiring descriptions of how a "mundane task is turned into an artistic performance" if a human was being butchered?
Rather reminded me of http://www.friesian.com/divebomb.htm
So, let's say you get your way and lose your phone, and let's say you lose it outside walking distance from your home.

How will you get a new phone? You can't call anyone. You can't drive anywhere. You can't take a bus or subway or train. You can't take a cab. You'd either have to walk or hitchhike (or, if you were with someone you know, you could catch a ride).

But where would you go? You can't go home. You could try going to a Verizon/T-Mobile/etc store, but you can't pay for a new phone. Even if you had sufficient cash on you, you'd probably need to show ID (which you can't do).

"Ah ha! Cash!", I possibly hear you say. Well, you could try to get to a branch of your bank, but you don't have ID, so you're unlikely to be able to withdraw anything (and that's assuming that you arrive when the bank is open...since you don't have your phone you can't use an ATM, of course).

So, honest question: if you had your way, how would anyone be able to replace a suddenly broken or lost phone?
Is this why the price dropped so much? Increased demand? :D
A moderately effective treatment for ebola will come out of all of this.

There hasn't been a huge sum of money poured into ebola therapies, and we already have promising options. ZMapp or a similar treatment will be scaled up over time, and if ZMapp proves itself to work across a larger base of test patients, we'll simply begin keeping X doses available at all times to shut down ebola outbreaks in the future.
Actually I think he is right and you are wrong in this case. The section of DeLong's essay that Krugman quotes in his article though is the claim that Bitcoin was designed as a weapon against government central banks and their ability to tax, and to monitor citizen financial transations. The article "Bitcoin is Evil" was written not to ask "does bitcoin work" but "is bitcoin morally bad or good?" And Krugman says "bad" because he believes it would undermine the government's ability to use monetary policy to achieve various goals.
It's not like the US intentionally infected a bunch of people in a foreign country with a disease because they were curious about it, then waited 65 years to apologize for their crimes.[1]

And certainly the US government would never lie about treating people for a disease in a government program, and then just watch them die instead of actually helping them.[2]

Snark aside, have you ever considered that maybe there's a reason people don't trust the US government to act ethically or in their interests?

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
Amazing what happens when western money has an interest in Africa.
There are two kinds of people in the world:

(1) Those who say 'this is stupid'; and

(2) Those who say "oh, i get it"

Rarely do they coincide empirically.
There are 72 nuclear reactors being built around the world right now. 29 of them are in China. They're building more reactors than the next four builders combined. That is, more than Russia, India, Korea and the United States put together. [1]

The Chinese government has stated that they want to decrease their reliance on coal by building more natural gas, nuclear and solar power capacity. [2]

Aside from a few regions, I don't think they've stopped building coal plants entirely, but the Chinese government pretty clearly likes nuclear power.

[1] http://www.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/UnderConstructionRe...

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/09/12/the...
> The best you can say about his stance during the war is that he was not an ideologue, but an opportunist.

The best expression known to me of this is Tom Lehrer's song "Wernher von Braun" (e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio).
That's nonsense. It doesn't automatically help security.

But compartmentalization does mean that barring a hypervisor exploit, each exploit can potentially be prevented from affecting more than a small part of the system.

I care a whole lot less if Chrome is exploited if it can't access my ssh keys, for example (not that I wouldn't still care, but the potential damage would be limited).
I agree that these interview questions are going to be around for the foreseeable future, so people need to just learn them. But it's still a waste of time -- you have a limited amount of time to devote to learning new technology. You can either spend your time building a cool side project with interesting languages, frameworks, or technologies that are highly relevant to your work or you can use it to study algorithms you will never implement outside of an interview.

When faced with this dilemma in the past I have picked the interview prep because it's necessary, but I'd rather have been building cool stuff that actually helps me do my job better.
I want a next-generation payment card shoehorned into the same form-factor as legacy credit cards about as much as I want to access the internet with an acoustic modem.

(Which is: only if there's absolutely no other way.)
That's exactly what people said when AIDS first showed up.
Do you believe that your beliefs are dictated by single
"well-timed news articles" directed by "the powers that be"?
In any reality, humans are ingenious at things you don't want them to do.
Nope. If somebody exploits your PDF reader, they still have to circumvent the OS. Sound familiar?

Now instead of one layer with hardware contact, you have two (assuming you want performance too). Twice the attack surface.
I agree ... this simulation defies "sailor's intuition" and the explanation you reference doesn't help at all - it doesn't feel anything like sailing a real boat.

I've got a small yacht and while I can easily sail into the wind with a full main sail and small jib, there's no way in your simulation to change the angle of the jib (in front of the mast) in relation to the mainsail. The physics are wrong to since the position of the keel is purposely centered behind the sails' COE (otherwise it would be easier to sail backwards than forwards).

I think you need a rudder to counteract the force of the sail swinging the boat around the keel and you need to consider that a full sail (purposely) becomes "wing-shaped" as noted above.

EDITS:

1) I should also note that it's possible in some small boats to sail almost directly into the wind ... I've managed about 15 degrees off the wind in a very lightly loaded Hobie Cat (without a jib).

2) Turbulence is an undesirable effect ... many sails have "tells" sewn into them that show you how the air is moving over the sail. You never want the tell to be wildly gyrating.
Edit (Typo): Most of those apps don't do anything which a mobile website couldn't.
Why don't you just use different user accounts and permissions? That way you don't have to trust extra code and can achieve the same goal.

Edit: But the way you talk to me, obviously I must be stupid.
The debate over Key Escrow was shut down by Clinton through unilateral executive action.

The political viability and constitutionality of the myriad issues mandatory escrow systems would give rise to were never tested. Furthermore, by the time key escrow was dropped the existing CALEA legislation was already a huge win for the FBI and DoJ. And given that it's 2014 and opportunistic/pervasive encryption is still more a pipe dream than a reality, the FBI and DoJ didn't care to expend more political capital pressing their case.

But now that we're potentially on the cusp of more pervasive encryption, we should all be prepared for some major PR battles going forward.
FLOSS Weekly 311: The D Language
It is not immediately obvious what your site is about.
Best of luck, looks promising.
Well, I've looked at the fate of enough "this is sure to work" ideas for fixing the economy to claim that my pessimism is, on average, warranted.

I haven't done an in-depth analysis of this specific proposal, however, so in that sense I haven't "looked at the evidence".
Another equally plausible hypothesis is that the other 4 interviewers gave only lukewarm feedback ("This person seems to know his/her stuff, but I'm somewhat reserved because...") and the decision ultimately against you.

Yet another hypothesis (not pleasant to consider, but it happens) is that it's got nothing to do with linked list and everything to do with another interviewer who gave you a "warm-up question", saw you spend 30 minutes on it, decided it's a lost cause and just made sure you feel good about the result (because that's the professional thing to do, and you never know if the candidate might pull off something spectacular with the next interviewer).

In general, what a candidate feels about an interview has very little correlation with how the interviewer scores the candidate. (Even for a single fixed candidate.)