skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where are you finding your information for the 10% number? I'd be curious to see. From what I've read formal financial institutions typically charge ~10% which is why poorer people tend to use hawala in the first place.

"El Qorchi et al. (2003) state that the cost of a
hawala transaction averages around 2 to 5 percent of the total amount of the funds
involved, although Maimbo (2005) report that these fees averaged 1 to 2 percent in
Afghanistan. Passas (1999) offers several examples where hawaladars offer free
services to their compatriots, in the corridor Australia-Africa."

https://ideas.repec.org/p/una/unccee/wp0812.html

You make an interesting point about bitcoin being a potential hedge against inflation. Given the current volatility I don't see that being much use at the moment, but it certainly has potential if the volatility ever drops to a reasonable level.
Location: Mexico City

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Type: Full stack developer

Technologies: Linux, Ruby, Javascript, BDD. AngularJS, d3.js, HTML(Slim), CSS(Sass), some UI & UX.

CV: http://registry.jsonresume.org/lobo_tuerto

Email: adriandcs@gmail.com
truecrypt had a software AES implementation you could enable.. if seriously paranoid.

performance impacting though.
I am sorry if I sounded rude, I didn't mean to knock this particular project down.

I was commenting on a hypothetical future for something of its kind, and that I think HTML content is not really the way to go to make shiny WebGL things, IMO.

To be a little more on-topic, yes, as an "apply shader to this semi-static div" it is a pretty cool thing :)
See How Far Your VPs Can Take You. You May Be Surprised. – SaaStr
There is no such thing as "semi-illegal". It's either legal or illegal.
You realize that while your criticism of Bitcoin is factually accurate, your criticism could apply to just about any fiat currency.

Dollars, Euros, Yen, aren't backed by anything other than the belief that it is money.

However, I do acknowledge that states invest a lot of resources into indoctrination, so the belief in fiat currency might be stronger than the belief in cryptocurrency.
The costs of bitcoin you describe are systemic costs, not transaction fees. At 0 or 1 trillion transactions, the block rewards would be the same, which means they're not marginal costs, i.e. fees per transaction. They're unrelated.

They pertain to money supply, a necessary force to get a currency out into the world. That causes inflation, which is not a direct price people pay (the transaction fees are a direct price, and those are a few pennies). Inflation is an indirect price. But if you look at bitcoin's history, its price is thousands of percent higher than just a few years ago, meaning that the cost is not actually incurred by those who use and transact or receive bitcoin.

In the long-run, this inflation will stop, and part of the fees will be covered by a larger amount of transactions that each cost pennies. If 50 million people used bitcoin in a decade, you can still pay pennies per transaction but cut block rewards without a drop in security.

If you do the math, bitcoin is easily the cheapest currency to transact in, which is why companies like Bitpesa exist undercutting remittance, and why Bitpay offers a 0% Saas payment processing fee, and why other merchant processors like Coinbase all undercut any creditcard, or Stripe, or Square, or Paypal, and why Paypal, Stripe and Square all have implemented bitcoin options into their services, and why companies like Microsoft accept bitcoin and keep more profits than they otherwise would if they had accepted the payment through e.g. a CC or Paypal.
You don't have to be libertarian to recognize that Barre's military dictatorship was not an example of a good government. From Wikipedia:

> The United Nations Development Programme stated that "the 21-year regime of Siyad Barre had one of the worst human rights records in Africa."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siad_Barre#Human_rights_abuse_a...
Not Funny
Doctor Who gets official BitTorrent ‘box-set’ from the BBC
Optimization Considerations: Rebuilding this site
2015 iTools free download for iOS devices. – iosjailbreak-download.com
Phones, TV, even Internet seeing cords cut
The Many Faces of Tatiana Maslany
Plinr – Simple tool for planning a potluck
http://www.producthunt.com/posts/plinr

Like doodle for planning a potluck
SHIFT carshare project shuts down, founder to become full time VC
How to Wire Up Ruby on Rails and AngularJS as a Single-Page Application in 2015
All parties are developing SDI. Its the next arms race. If we stop, we lose MAD. If they stop, they lose MAD. We're a bit ahead, which isn't saying much considering its trivial to launch enough dummy warheads to outstrip our abilities and fool our interceptors. Whoever is doing better with interceptors loses out to the guy who is doing better with work-arounds. Not cut and dried, but having one deployed does save you from rogue nation launches and other scenarios that have nothing to do with MAD.

My hope is that this all gets too expensive and we all get rid of nukes entirely.
What would be the point? grocery stores are dying already. Buy buttons are cool but surely it won't take 20-30 years for grocery stores to go away?

Between Instacart (which in it's "final form" is basically amazon for groceries) and Amazon (don't forget the Echo, which was basically built for the same usecase) grocery stores don't really have long left. Certainly less than 10-15 years?
Reddit.js – A Browser Based Reddit API Wrapper
I'm not confusing the two. The government was brutal, and it was also strong. It censored the media. It nationalized all major industries. It carried out large scale terror campaigns against political dissidents and Somali clans. It suppressed civil liberties on a very wide scale.
I don't mean literally exporting water, I mean growing water-intensive crops and then exporting those. Same effect.
> And this periodically actually happens to real government-backed currencies in the world, especially during times of hyperinflation

Right, but that happens sometimes, and never with proper governance. (but what is "proper governance" you ask? It's a tautology that says that governments that never allow hyperinflation never suffer from hyperinflation)

ALL asset bubbles collapse. The magnitude of the collapse is determined by the non-monetary value of the asset. (e.g. tulip bulbs collapse harder than real-estate). Because the non-monetary value of Bitcoin is negative (you need to burn electricity to use Bitcoin), this implies the eventual collapse of Bitcoin will be absolute.
I think that memory limited apps are more common, at least when they're bootstrapped. Look at Digital Ocean, Linode or DreamHost. You get a VPS for $20 bucks with 2 GB of ram. My phone has 2 GB. My laptops have 16 GB. Life is different on these types of machines.

This makes picking tech rather difficult. On the one hand C++ or D would work well here since they both offer good memory management (D's hybrid approach is nice). They are incredibly heavy (and D confuses me. The collection wars still come: up Tango vs Phoebe). So i don't know how productive I'd be given that I'm the only person in my startup. On the other hand the JVM can tune itself and even Clojure so maybe memory wouldn't be an issue for a higher level language.

Picking a database is hard too. I want to use NoSQL (wrote a book on it, should use it). I like ArangoDB. Sadly, like MongoDB it is mmapped. There are no efficient, swanky memory management tricks like you get in an older model SQL engine. But it makes sharding/replicating a breeze. So rather than having to tweak the crap out of MySQL or Postgres and get into the engine replacement (eventually), I take a hit up front. I just have to vertically scale ArangoDB for a while until it makes more sense to replicate/shard.
it's basically React, let's be honest here. Not that React invented anything but that Angular 2 clearly wants to use the exact same system it didn't use at first place.
Software is a House
> SDI made sense.

SDI could be said to plausibly make some kind of sense only in the context of the proposed broad national shield being propaganda to serve as (1) a tool to get the USSR to accelerate its spending in a way that would hasten its collapse, and (2) domestic political cover for more limited shields that would protect key military command and control sites.

If Teller's exuberant promotion of SDI was knowing participation in those propaganda efforts, then it was extremely dishonest but perhaps defensible as not completely nonsensical; on its face, however, it was nonsense.

> We still have SDI. Now we call its "Strategic Missile Defense" and its our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches and other attacks.

No, our biggest counter against rogue nation nuke launches is, and remains, a combination of assured destruction of any attacker and active steps to prevent undeterrable actors from gaining the capacity to make such attacks in the first place.

Strategic missile defense of any kind remains, and will for the forseeable future, an extremely limited tool, and far less than SDI was sold as by proponents like Teller.

> It also has Putin scared as he can't match it and is demanding we don't continue to build new sites in Eastern Europe out of desperation.

There's a whole lot I could say about this, but I'll let this suffice: you can't say in one post defend MAD with "With madmen like Putin running nukes, MAD makes sense", and then defend Strategic Missile Defense with the argument that it undermines mad and makes Putin scared and more aggressive.
> Physical currency such as gold or cash is for Criminals, Cowards, and Crazies.

Or people that want to have dinner in Germany, or Greece or a hundred other places.

Cash has its uses, it requires no telecommunications infrastructure to function and as long as you're not buying a new car or a house can be quite handy.

That's why so many places still use it.
Go ahead and vote for the next FED chairman!
SurveyMonkey announces Benchmarks
How the internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge
>Sebastian, a 32-year-old student with several part-time jobs and 12 years of service in the German armed forces, was dumped by the Japanese girlfriend he had been seeing for a year because he had 'no future' in Japan, she said.

Just what I need to read as I'm in the happiest relationship of my life with a Japanese girl.
I already addressed this:

n practice we're seeing ~25% loss of capacity at 40k miles in LEAF real world testing. 30% loss at 50k miles is the accepted norm. Capacity goes down annually after that. It seems that some cars are doing better, but play cars owned by the rich that get very few miles like the early Tesla sportscars. Real world daily-drivers like the LEAF experience the exact decay that was predicted. Lithium-ion isnt some new hot tech we don't understand. We understand it very well.
Take a look here: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/6/sp15/6.042/
Yousician - http://company.yousician.com/careers/ - Helsinki - UI/UX Engineer - Full time, visa

If you prefer video, check this out first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de_qk-Hr25I

We’re the fastest growing music education company in the world with over 13 million users. The company develops high-tech guitar learning software that gives users real time feedback on how they play. Yousician’s cutting edge audio technology can listen to any real acoustic or electric guitar without the use of additional equipment. The service combines the addictive features of computer games with guitar exercises to make the learning process easy, fun and motivating.

Yousician also created the worlds #1 guitar tuner app Guitar Tuna and has won numerous international business awards including WIRED’s hottest Finnish startup, SXSW, Midem, Launch.edu, and educational awards such as Sunday Times 'World's best apps' or Best European Learning Game. Yousician believes that musicality can and should be as commonplace as literacy today, and it is the company’s declared mission to achieve this.

As a UI/UX Developer you’ll be taking the lead in implementing, testing and evaluating the front end design of our products, the user interface and user experience. You’ll work in close collaboration with the UX design team, back-end team & visual artists and play an important role in product design meetings.

This is a chance to do something new and unique and to impact the lives of millions of future Jimi Hendrixs around the world. We have the most talented, creative people who thrive in a dynamic environment & do not shy away from crazy ideas and hope you can be one of them.

We’re looking for someone driven and passionate about working on the visual aspects of a product - someone who takes pride in making it look and feel great. We expect you to have experience implementing the visual design and UI in a published app using Unity3D, web or native mobile technologies. You have excellent user interface development skills and have experience with responsive design & UI animations. We want you to be self-driven and keen to work in a team using the “Lean Startup” methodology. But importantly, we want you to be reliable and trustworthy, with a keen eye for detail and aesthetics.

To apply, drop a one line email with a link to your LinkedIn or GitHub profile and subject "Hello from Hacker News" to careers@yousician.com
There is a big excluded middle between "all government officials are directly elected" and "the general public has no agency in government policy".
Personally, I think what the US anti-trust regulators did was pretty sensible, but I do wonder why Larry Page thought some of this stuff was a good idea in the first place.
5 best tools for animating games
That's where CNNIC comes in. All they need to do is issue their own fake certificate for (insert blocked site here).
It all started with a 300 page reading notes, which, in my opinion, is pretty long already, but, boy, 1000 pages is a lot indeed :).
Your comment was ambiguous. I thought you were asking me for the basis of my claim that Somalia lacks a strong government. If you think the civil war doesn't have anything to do with Somalia's current problems, I'm open to being persuaded.
Obama: ‘historic’ Iran framework could make world safer
Yeah, that's my point: if you're happy with this all-or-nothing logic, you can just use dummy target files.

Allowing steps to partially succeed seems like adding quite a lot of complexity, and I'm not sure where it would be beneficial.
Vendors queuing to launch Ubuntu smartphones – Shuttleworth
Based on the other comments you've made in this thread, it seems like you wouldn't have recommended anyone to use Truecrypt even when talk of auditing it started.

Why fund an audit then? Why beat this particular dead horse?

Can you imagine being that open source developer, putting hours of your (incredibly valuable, if you're a talented crypto dev) time into a project that gets relentlessly shit on, later raising more money to hunt through backdoors than you've ever seen for it?

How would you that make you feel? How would you feel when you thought about working on the code? When you thought about fixing bugs reported by people who were paid to look for them by people who openly distrust you?

That isn't a rhetorical question. I'd like you to imagine the situation the Truecrypt devs were in, try to empathize with them, and tell us about it.

I'm not trying to say Truecrypt should never have been audited, or that open-source projects in general should never be audited. But I do think this particular case was badly handled, and I don't think that's such a horrible thing to say. Things are mishandled all the time. We can always learn from our mistakes. Let's learn from this experience and make the next cross-platform crypto tool better for everyone.
Most common Git screwups/questions and solutions
That's a description of a speculative asset, which is a concept that's orthogonal to a store of value. For instance, a speculative asset that plummets in value can be valuable (to short sellers and put option holders).

In particular: the effectiveness of a store of value is based on its ability to retain its value over time. The effectiveness of a speculative asset is based on its users ability to transact based on predictions (up or down) of its future value, regardless of its true value.
Announcing Hummingbird
> Is that likely to intersect with TrueCrypt use in a troublesome way

/shrug While it's certain that if you're operating inside a mandatory profile you are at the mercy of whoever created it... but that doesn't mean that people don't try to circumvent restrictions placed on them by their Administrators.

It's also not clear to me just how common Mandatory Profiles are actually.
> I think the etymology of the word "nerd" has evolved to mean that [...]

I don't think the definition of the word "etymology" has evolved to mean "definition" (or "current usage").
I'm not defending the hypothesis that any government is better than no government. So sure, having a really really bad government could be worse for Somalia than having none at all.
Uggh, yes. I did have one recruiter even excitedly email me tech crunch links over the next few days as they got "more press".

I also "enjoy" name dropping like: "Someone on our board was like employee #17 at Amazon! He may have even talked to Jeff Bezos once!"
> One deficiency I've come across, which seems to be well-known, is the M:N problem -- where one step takes M input files and has N output files. Make rules seem to expect to have only 1 output, and the workarounds like .SECONDARY prevent some features of Make from working correctly.

Jeez, you know, this is the sort of thing that I would hate to get somewhat deep into using make, only to then discover.

I often see hackers lamenting that a plethora of build tools exist instead of everyone just using make, but I'm not so sure that this state of affairs is less preferable. Maybe it's better if the build tool understands some things about the platform it's building for.
What's your opinion of XTS in general for disk encryption?

Are there any known exploitations of weakness in XTS that might work their way back to TrueCrypt?

Most folks use TrueCrypt's disk encryption as a "file container", when they effectively want to encrypt files. Do you know of any tools (cross-platform or otherwise) that would provide the same UX as TrueCrypt while not relying on FDE?
> Just ask Ross William Ulbricht.

Ross William Ulbricht wasn't caught because of Bitcoin. I read the FBI report and there was absolutely no mention of the blockchain if I recall correctly.
I think bitcoin will be incredibly useful in the digital goods economy. Global digital marketplaces need payment solutions that transcend nationalities. If you create an album of music and want to sell digital copies online you should be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world using any currency. Bitcoin allows that to happen. If you want to create a video content channel and let people pay a monthly subscription there should not be any type of restriction because of what country the viewer lives in. All of these borders and constraints are artificial and unnecessary in a digital economy. If you want to create a digital service that operates entirely on the internet, why should you be restricted to using a subset of currencies? Bitcoin can be the transaction layer that makes all the human constraints irrelevant. Digital goods also offer essentially no cost of replication so the only real limitation on the size of the digital economy is the number of agents participating in it, which increases daily. The tools needed to create and consume digital products are becoming cheaper every year and more people are gaining access to them globally. IMO the future of the world economy is going to be increasingly digital, and increasingly created by independent producers. Games, books, education, movies, short format shows, PC and mobile applications, web services, photography, art, comics, all will be available to anyone in the world at very low cost and with no necessity for restriction. As I see it the only thing holding back this digital revolution is that consumers are largely ignorant as to it's existence and continue to support antiquated development and delivery systems. I do not think that the rising young generations have this impediment in their habits. What really seems to be missing is a global system for independent content discovery. I'd like to see a universal amazon style digital product aggregation and distribution system that only uses digital currency. The store would provide discovery and distribution (maybe digital currency exchange as well) to a global audience for a transaction fee that beats traditional payment methods. A wiki style product information page that allows users to provide additional product details and translations for localization would be interesting to see (while difficult to moderate).

tl;dr with bitcoin anyone in the world can create a digital product with nearly zero replication or distribution costs and sell it to anyone else in the world basically instantly. That infrastructure exists today but is underutilized.
Google Android Apps on Chrome
I didn’t say anything about small government or market deregulation. Small vs large is orthogonal to strong vs. weak.
The New Normal – We're All Security Companies Now
Beyerdynamic headphones are chunky, resilient, and you can buy spare parts and effectively replace the whole headset piece by piece. But they are not ergonomic for city walking/metro/bus/train. Lots of trailing bits of metal &c depending on model. And many models are high impedance (200 Ohm/400 Ohm) so less useful for portable devices with limited voltage swing.

So my point is: not just fashion. Suitability for job as well.
> "hey, bro! check out this cool bowl of cereal I'm eating"

People who use snap chat have more interesting lives than you.
The article we're discussing might be wrong, but it's fairly level-headed.

Responses like this, with breathless invocations of the world-changing implications of Bitcoin and heroes-and-villains narratives about governments and banks, sap credibility from Bitcoin.

They suggest that very simple arguments with Bitcoin critics can't be addressed without stipulating that Bitcoin is going to rewrite all of commerce and perhaps even all of regulation. Virtually nobody in the real world is willing to stipulate that.

If Bitcoin is going to work out in the long run, it will need arguments that work even if the IRS retains its ability to enforce tax laws and the DOJ retains its ability to regulate casinos.
I got my Amiga as a freshman in high school. It was so much better than anything else out at the time, yet never caught on.

Is there anything like that happening today, where there is something significantly better than its competitors, but has no traction. I don't mean something debatable (e.g., Windows Phone vs iPhone or MacOS vs Windows), but something clear cut?

Probably the closest thing I could think of is Tesla, if they go belly up.
-> Inheritance (transactions that unlock by date)

-> flavored money (only spendable in certain ways)

-> contingent funds (if home_inspector_signs_off then pay electrical_contractor)

-> trustless escrow

-> complex securities (if dow is down but nasdaq is up pay 10% of difference)