skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FBI's way of estimating "1.2 billion" involved pricing the net turn-over in Bitcoin (over the course of silk roads existence) at it's highest values in order to give the news a sensational effect.

Silkroad is a joke compared for example to some 300% increase in heroin production that Afghanistan saw after America invaded - it's just the later isn't favorable to publicize.

Notice - Even wikipedia blatantly quotes the misinformation published in the document in it's article:

It noted that, "From February 6, 2011 to July 23, 2013...
The total revenue generated from these sales was 9,519,664 Bitcoins, and the total commissions collected by Silk Road from the sales amounted to 614,305 Bitcoins. These figures are equivalent to roughly $1.2 billion in revenue and $79.8 million in commissions.

But - for the bitcoins to amount to 1.2 billion dollars they would have to be priced at a relatively high 2013 mark at least 100 magnitudes above 2011 prices (from which their estimate begins).

For the record the world-drug market is estimated at around $400 billion, so if silkroad over the course of 2.5 years had a turn over of 213 million, that would place it as accounting for .02% of the drug trade. Not the staggering blackmarket the FBI and US media have made it out to be.
Can't get those years spent in prison back after a false conviction either.
Meanwhile, in F#...

type People = JsonProvider<"http://someurl.com/people.json">
let people = People.GetSamples()

And, it's statically typed with intellisense and everything.
We should start at the lower levels. It is all easy to understand if you build up from first principals: Binary, logic gates, cpus and assembly, then it splits with compilers on one branch and LISP and Smalltalk on two others and a bunch of brush and shrubs and time to retire that metaphor.

Unlike climbing Everest or understanding how the human body works the challenges in learning to program are entirely man-made! (Except for recursion, of course.)
were you expecting Go to have a large role in code shared by ios/android/web?
He paid hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin to the assassin after the hit. If he believed he was scammed, he certainly loved it and paid soundly for the privilege. It's all in the cleartext logs of Ulbricht's laptop.
Amazon has done almost nothing with their drones. Alibaba is.
Releasing this data is a real service, thanks.

I'm unable to explain the plethora of comments nearby about peripheral issues. Weird.
You really think that there are a lot of people on HN who know what Ren&Stimpy was?
I always get amazed when I see software architectures like this. How one learns the skills required to architect such huge project? Where you learn all that?!
I wonder if they considered Xamarin?
I'd be a lot more willing to get on board with the former part of that sentence if you hadn't blundered into the latter bit.

Paul Graham was right again. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
There is a difference from RELY on compile to catch 100% of bugs, vs having an awesome type system that can take whole CLASSES of bugs and make them impossible to get past a compile.

Is a statically typed language more likely than a dynamic language to work correctly in production, if both have 0 tests? Yes.

Is either ideal? No.

Can both be improved by adding a few tests? Yes.
Brian from Backblaze here. Which browser was that? We often test with Mac/Windows and Safari/Chrome/IE/Netscape/Opera, etc. It all seems to work here. Did you tweak any browser settings or are you running stock?
Wild Apricot - Toronto, Canada - Full time
http://wildapricot.com

Wild Apricot is an industry leading SAAS membership and event management system for small to medium sized organizations. We're self-owned, been in business for 8 years, and are growing year on year.

We're hiring for a
--KICK-ASS SALES ENGINEER/REPRESENTATIVE--

We didn't have a sales function at all previously and as we build this "team" we're hiring our first sales representative.

Why "Sales Engineer"? Because I don't believe in "the Sales guy" that doesn't know the product and relies on sales-support.

- You should understand SAAS systems, and be a great communicator.

- We're looking for the perfect candidate; a balance between tech skills, as well as communication skills.

If you think you might be right for the role, please include HackerNews in the subject line and send an email to: salesrep@wildapricot.com

For the full details of the role see: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/27455587 -- for consideration please follow the instructions and don't apply through LinkedIn
Your definition of smart must be very different from mine. And of good as well, but never mind that.
It's interesting that milk consumption is down so much and the fact that whole milk is down even more make me attribute it all to the backwardness of the food pyramid that people form their diet around. I don't know though. I don't follow the pyramid, but also stay away from milk because I don't like the taste too much and I don't trust the process of how it got to me. Just grosses me out for irrational reasons. Either way, zero chance I'll ever consume a 'Fairlife'.
Yes, but let's admit it, the presence of classes will inevitably lead to their ever-presence, if only for the fact that they are what most people coming from other languages are used to.
Agree with your points. I find that posting the essay is still quite valuable, though - as an industry we are still enamored with the mythology of structurelessness.

So yeah, her solutions may be pretty questionable, but IMO as an industry we're not even at the point of exploring solutions, considering that so much of our industry doesn't even acknowledge the problem exist.

Until then it's useful to keep flogging the essay until people accept that yeah, this problem actually exists.
Placebo Water™ - Imagine the difference!™
> One aspect of English that the author overlooks completely is how welcoming it is of new words.

This. It's also one the feature I personally most love in English. In principle, you can invent new words in every language; in practice, not every language culture allows you to do that freely. I like thinking in English because of its flexibility. If I need so, I can e.g. verb a noun on the fly and everyone understands what's going on. Bending the language to better express your thoughts is easier in English than in, say, my native Polish.
If I had to place a bet now, it would be on asm.js. It's the abstraction that nobody wants but everyone can live with, because it takes the standards bodies out of the equation on the higher level decisions that have to be done differently per domain.
People who object to a law should use a martyr as a rallying cry to show people the extent which laws are unjust and convince other people and politicians that the laws should be changed.

By making your demand the freeing of someone who may be a martyr but did little to effect actual change in the laws(is not a pivotal leader in the political portion of the movement) you consider unjust, you are not progressing the ideas you believe in. Only trying to undo a single action.

If and when the laws are changed to make the bulk of their actions legal, they will likely be freed then either for legal or political reasons.
What? The designers start making incredibly strategic decisions and start cutting out functionality that was used by a margin of the customers that only benefited the competition (and the user)?
Wireless carriers compete directly with one another on price and performance regardless of geo. There's no local monopoly. Huge difference.
the ability to defend oneself from the medical ravages against the body diminishes and the cost is places upon society

The problem with that argument is that, not only is limiting it to drugs is arbitrary (why not convict the guy who becomes morbidly obese or extremely anorexic?), but I think it often is simply wrong, because it ignores the real alternative. The medical bills of an heroin addict may be expensive, but a guy who dies in his 60s from drug use is probably much cheaper if he had died in his 90s, possibly with some chronic condition.

Besides, imprisoning him is probably more expensive still, so it's cutting your nose to spite the face anyway.
Java gets quite a bit of use in ML as well.
Who's hooked on McDonald's food? And I'm pretty sure McD's isn't that bad.
How people eat dinner in NYC
Tech industry doesn't understand show Business
As Jo Freeman once said:

"Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.
This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly "laissez faire" philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, and within the women's movement is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware."

Her comments were aimed at the feminist movement of the 1970s, but her essay is universal and everyone can gain from reading it:

The Tyranny Of Structurelessness

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
This sounds very similar to the old eleven plus system in the UK; kids in the last year of primary school given a test (with an enormous impact upon their future prospects) that decided whether they went to technical, secondary modern, or grammar school.
Ask HN: When is the right time to start a bug bounty program?
I'm involved with several bootstrapped companies. Although I'm a veteran developer and familiar with some security best practices, I'm not a security expert by any means.

Bug bounties seem like an increasingly common way to ensure the security of a platform. My question is this: Is it ever too early to start a bug bounty program? Will I invite unwanted attention? Should I first be considering hiring a security researcher directly? (How could I ever afford one?) Will I get any benefit from putting my tiny projects up on HackerOne or BugCrowd?
Meadow (YC W15) ‘Ubered’ Over a Doctor to Give Me a Medical Marijuana Evaluation
> If you come back and say "job done. killed him." - well, I now know you're not to be trusted with the real deal.

Well, after DPR supposedly confirmed the first hit was carried out properly (via uploaded image of the supposedly dead FriendlyChemist), he ultimately went on to contract 4 more "hits". Three were simply because they lived with the main target and the supposed Hell's Angel made an argument it would be "cleaner" to hit them all at the house instead of risk something in public.
There's no version control for brain surgery.
Actually, an IRS agent found Google search results that tied him to Silk Road:

"That search led him to a thread on bitcointalk.org called 'A Heroin Store.' One of the posts there was from a user named 'altoid' who gave instructions on how to access Silk Road.

'You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?' altoid wrote. 'It’s kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don’t think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff. They basically use bitcoin and tor to broker anonymous transactions.'

Once Alford had the username, the rest was as simple as clicking around. In a separate thread, altoid posted that he was looking for an IT pro. 'If interested, please send your answers to the following questions to rossulbricht at gmail dot com.'

That’s all Alford needed to get a warrant to gain access to that email. By comparing the data found in the email to the data found on Ulbricht’s laptop, the government has created an even more convincing argument that Ross Ulbricht is, in fact, Silk Road’s Dread Pirate Roberts."

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/silk-road-trial-irs-special-a...
For Java there's always OpenJDK, which I believe is 100% open source.
BitShares launched a week ago and no one noticed
Is it going to be opensourced ?
I added this line:

127.0.0.1	disqus.com

to /etc/hosts and have actually noticed a measurable increase in my happiness, especially when it comes to reading and discussing news.
Google's Project Tango – Incredible 3D Mapping Tablet Prototype
Which Endangered Species Would You Save? (2014)
I'm sure there is. That doesn't mean I have to agree that it's good and proper justice.
But he had millions of Bitcoin, and every reason to believe that Bitcoin would rise in value. He lived very modestly for what he had, so it's not like this is anything other than a number in a computer fro him.

This was discussed in depth on HN when the story first broke -- unless I'm wrong the story goes something like this:

S1: I will disclose the silk road's confidential information unless you pay me $500k, because I owe S2 that money.
DPR: Let me talk to S2.
S2: Hello, this is S2.
DPR: I will give you $150k to kill S1. I have paid much less for a hit, so consider yourself lucky to get this deal.
S2: Done and done, have a nice day.

Paying to "have someone killed" is a good way to give them some money, but not the money they wanted, while still scaring them off.
Yev from Backblaze here ->

WE'RE WORKING ON IT BRIAN!
PODCAST: Building an MSP Sales Machine: MSPradio 38
taste test: http://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/2/3/7971373/fairlife-coca-...

verdict, tastes like milk, bit of malty aftertaste, typically offensive marketing
50% more protein, 30% less sugar, and lactose free. Any one of those on their own would be a differentiator from conventional milk that consumers would potentially look for.
Ask HN: Interviews and Offers Help Needed
Hi HN,

Currently, I have an offer which I'll probably have to get back to them within a week. I'm also interviewing with another company but I have to finish some coding challenges (1 small application, 3 puzzle programs). I'm not sure if I can make it through the challenges and interview process and then offer by the time I need to get back with the other employer. Any advice?

Thanks.
Under Armour to pay $560M for MyFitnessPal, Endomondo fitness tracking apps
If there's anything that still is a horrible UI on WP8 it's the email app. It's wretched folder interactions are useless. More than any other "base app", the email app needs updating. Of course the new email app MS pushed to Android/iOS is gorgeous, but not for us WP8 folks. We're not good enough.
No, he's not stupid, he just subscribes to a "there's nothing really wrong with black market drug rings and murder" ideology. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how dumb that is.
Except, unfortunately, natural languages don't really work this way. There's so much additional information spliced in phrases, constructs, choice of words, tone, etc. that building this Vernacular Metatranslator is an GAI-complete task. At this point we're back in the Babelfish territory. Not saying it's impossible, but we seem to be far from required technology level to do that.
Let's refer to it as "teleportation", please. I don't believe that a spaceship is 'destroyed' or 'created' when this happens.

-signed, Thomas Riker.
Brian from Backblaze here. Why do we get a bad grade for not talking with IE6? I'm honestly curious... I thought anybody who supported IE6 should be downgraded, because IE6 was end of lifed, inherently using it is a bad bad bad thing. It is literally safer to not use it than use it, right?

I don't think it's even possible to run IE6 on Windows Vista or Windows 7 or Windows 8, but I'm not entirely sure of that.
I don't really get it either. Or rather, I get it, and it seems like a great idea, but it seems fundamentally at odds with the full autonomy and lack-of-management ideas. The point, as I understand it, is to have single decision-makers, but have nobody be the decision maker for too many things. That seems an awful lot like it is just good management, but any time someone executes on a decision they didn't make, they aren't being autonomous.

Is the point perhaps instead that everybody makes all their own decisions and if there isn't consensus on how things are done, then they are just done differently by each person? If so, how do you pick technology and deployment stacks and keep a consistent design story?
They killed two men, and shot at more people. Hampton's pregnant girlfriend could have been killed.

But really, all we need is this:

>I ... don't support... democracy

You're the real terrorist.
> I love C/C++, but it's getting harder to find work in that language unless you want to focus on embedded systems.

It's getting harder even if you do want to focus on embedded systems. I see the hiring bars for those positions getting increasingly higher, to the point where it is almost impossible to switch in if you didn't start there or back if you took a break.
It was only multiple choice. When he brought home the results and told me how his school counselor assured him she would help him get into building maintenance I took him over to our trash can and we threw it away. As a parent you can't trust the school.. what a disaster. I believe most parents are overworked and don't have a good handle on what is happening with their kids in school. Schools has no incentive to make sure the kids succeed in life.
Upvoted for the fun "growing glasses" phrase.
Why the Future of Advertising Is Not Advertising
Games are fine but the business isn't
Is the Disneyland Measles Outbreak a Turning Point in the Vaccine Wars?
Valve always gets brought up as an example of a flat structure that works (and it already has been in this thread). Here's an interview with a former Valve hardware engineer describing how the system works in practice: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/195786/ExValve_hardware_e.... She likened the experience to high school, in terms of cliques that developed (which is about what you would expect). Her entire team got fired by Gabe Newell, which I kinda feel should answer any questions you have about whether there's actually a boss - whoever can tell you that you don't have a job tomorrow is in fact your boss, even if they don't want to acknowledge it. She agrees with what a lot of people have already said, that this works in small groups, but that it doesn't scale well.

Honestly, it sounded like a pretty crappy place to work, although she freely admits that she was bitter, and that it's very much a case of a disillusioned zealot. I've enjoyed working with most of the bosses I've had, and I've always thought that it's nice to have people who give you direction and quality feedback. I've had some really terrible bosses too, but the idea that since there are some bad bosses we should throw out the whole structure of management seems like a big over-reaction.
I don't own any Apple devices, so I can't test, but it works well on my Android phone (being Bootstrap and using responsive design). The top menu collapses into a button with three horizontal bars which shows the menu upon click. The documentation-specific navigation is always displayed expanded when in the docs section of the site, but the contents are displayed underneath it. What does it look like for you?
> Nobody believes murders were actually carried out.

Then I'd question why DPR went on to direct 4 additional murders? In the email logs an image of the supposedly dead FriendlyChemist was uploaded to DPR and he confirmed it was in fact him and was satisfied the hit was carried out... believing it enough to send an additional $500,000 for the next hits.

DPR had pictures of the real-life FriendlyChemist, as he required photo id of any insider working on SR. He also sent all of FriendlyChemists personal information (name, address, wife and kids' names, etc) to the supposed Hell's Angel during one of their email exchanges -- but none of the data is real and can't be traced to any actual people.

It's all just weird...
> and even tried to arrange the murder of five people who threatened the anonymity of buyers and sellers.

1) No one was murdered

2) If drug trade was somehow regulated legally and decriminalized like in Portugal instead of being outright illegal, there would be no perverse incentive to murder to begin with... and there would probably also be no incentive for a Silk Road

When is US law going to realize that overly strict punishments (come on, does this guy really deserve life in prison?) simply create a perverse incentive to harm in order to ensure people stay quiet, and that creating black markets results in negative externalities? If the punishments were less severe (or even simply allowed but highly taxed/regulated) then there would be less murder of witnesses, period.

I can't find a tremendous amount of evidence around this, except for this: https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/yablon_dan...

(I think I'm becoming libertarian?)
I love Akka, but I thought their implementation relies on regular JVM threads at the moment, isn't it? (I had a wishful thinking at first that they are using user-threads at first, but they are not like quasar or goroutines in any way from what I read, Actors might reuse threads and seem like a "lighter thread" but they are still using plain old JVM threads, for now at least)
The Key to Successful Content Marketing
I think you pointed out my only concern quite well.

The C# role is mainly developing application level software which would talk to the C/C++ drivers and such. This C# will be fitted into another framework which is the top level platform.

Can you please elaborate on this
"But really, it's pretty trivial to learn a language. C# is a fantastic language, but it seems that it is likely that your role will be taking you further away from your future plans, not nearer them."

As people have pointed out, learning a new language seems definitely like a good addition to the skill set, but I wouldn't want to do it at the expense of pigeon holing myself.

TL;DR: I am not sure if I should become better in C/C++ or pick up C#?
The intermediate setup should normally work for you, at least with some clients. Seems ok with JuiceSSH.
After watching the ttyrec of the bot ascension, I was surprised to see that the bot farmed on a sink, not an altar, and hence used the puddings only for item drops and not for sacrifices.

That makes me a lot more optimistic that the bot is close to being able to ascend without farming, especially since I believe its character already had multiple amulets of life saving and a bag of holding even before starting to farm.