skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are still a lot of gold bugs out there who really dislike the idea of fiat currencies and believe gold is an investment. Rick Perry, the former Governor of Texas, for instance thought it was treason that the Fed printed more money during QE. Fears of hyperinflation still seem to exist out there even though we went through a brief deflationary period.

The gold in question actually isn't in the Federal Reserve in New York. It is at HSBC in a private vault [1]. Texas bought the gold back in 2011 near the height of the gold bubble [2]. It has actually lost quite a bit of its value since then since gold prices are about 25% lower since it was purchased.

Sadly, the Governor seems to still say they are moving $1 billion in gold (as opposed to $750 million). You'd think losing $250 million would be a big deal for a state.

1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/26/t...

2. http://www.ai-cio.com/channel/ASSET_ALLOCATION/UTIMCO_Bullio...
Security Theatre at Allied Irish Banks
Way to pick a good cause guys...
And this, boys and girls, is why you DELETE valuable, sensitive information when you don't need it anymore.

But, deleting information might result in an error of commission which would have your signature on it rather than an error of omission which has no one readily blameable. So, no one in the organization will ever sign off on it.
Snippets of BSD code have ended up in all kinds of GPLed projects. It would be kind of "rude" to just take a BSD-licensed project in its entirety and re-license it. It's legally questionable too. As someone who isn't the copyright holder, you can't really dictate the license.

In fact, incidentally, I believe that if you integrate BSD-licensed code into a proprietary product (where, say, it is manifested as a translation to machine code), you don't actually own those sections of machine code. They are derived works, governed by the BSD license: anyone can rip that out and use it accordingly. The code has not been turned proprietary at all---it just appears in a form that is difficult to modify and tightly coupled to proprietary code.
I think its a bit premature to predict critical mass for Go and maybe your python comparison is a reasonable prediction of where Go will finish up.
> Permission required to participate in any electronic-fiat-money-transfer-system™ = mucho

Then make a better system which doesn't burn all of Ireland's electrical output to handle 2 transactions a second, to let people transfer fiat to each other. Maybe you can call it "Pal Pay".

"But then I'd have to follow regulations!! :("

But you'd have to with Bitcoin as well. Just ask Coinbase or Circle.

"Ah, but Bitcoin gives me the option to evade the law, unlike those assholes as Google or PayPal who need 'identification' and keep whining about 'money laundering'".

Perhaps, but you could build a system to track IOUs on Tor if you'd wanted and as long as your OPSEC wasn't as shitty as DPR's "my_crimes.txt" you could evade the law for awhile too.

As it stands those are mostly orthogonal concerns, although I do appreciate how nice it is for the Feds to be able to publicly view every transaction ever made in Bitcoin, something that couldn't be done on an off-blockchain system.
We are selling small solar panel kits in small towns on those three countries. The goal is to have a few lights in places where there is no electricity grid at all (it's a for-profit company, not charity). We handle pretty much everything ourselves there since there is not a lot of services pre-built to help you. The shops are selling the kits on payplan since it's quite expensive for the local purchase power. We are the equivalent of a car dealer locally to give a comparison. And the shops are running some software to handle all of that, so this is where my problems are starting ! :)
People use IE8 still because they are running 10+ year old computers. Mobile phones tend to get upgraded much quicker.
While we're at it, any remote C++ positions?
Fairchild-Maxson Line-Of-Position Computer – National Air and Space Museum
If you would like to know more about our company email me at r@tockhq.com
absolutely fascinating, thanks for posting.
I wonder if it's solving for my problem where my kids buy a lot of video on demand. I'd like to cap that for each of them each month. It wouldn't hurt if it also was funds they could then use to replace the iPhone charger they break or lose each month.
I can't find any detailed explanation of how it worked. I did discover a picture of a "cassette" for it:

http://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/cassette-fo...
Downplaying it.
Texas likes to maintain the appearance of being just a hair's breadth away from secession at all times.
It was always a crock of shit to equate Snowden to the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal, and this is why.
That last paragraph is ridiculous. Name one feature in Rust that you think is too much complexity and I'll tell you where I need it to get my job done in Servo.

Without generics and traits, for example, there would literally be no reason for Servo to exist, because it would be too slow. Performance is not optional. Safety is not optional. They are my job. If I opposed language features that are needed for competitive performance or safety on the grounds of complexity, I would be failing to do my job.

I'm responsible for a lot of Rust's features. I have never posted on LTU, and I've never written more than 50 lines of Haskell. I find most of the Rust community's philosophical language debates tiring and pointless; languages to me are tools, not philosophies. The entire core team is largely with me here. I think you have a deep misunderstanding of the language design if you believe Rust has features "just because".
They also sold $299 and $499 compilers

It's weird thinking we used to pay for compilers
The inability of the answerer there to see the experiment as being (at least in part) about how the guards responded to the construct is just fascinating.
This seems like a good idea. The big question is whether the structure can recognize enough ads, and whether it will continue to do so. For example, if a site is using HTTP2 and all the ads come in over the same TCP connection, domain-based blocking may have a problem. If (when) CDNs start doing that, ad recognition becomes tougher.
a) Perhaps a ridiculous hypothetical, but could this be the first step down the road towards secession? They'd need that gold if they ever wanted to establish their own country.

Maybe if they get the rest of the states on-board..[0]

I, for one, would be glad to sign whatever paperwork gets Texas out of the country.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._White
Ironically I thought the title meant "moved" as in "moved to tears".

Anyway, you know how when one person shits in the pool everyone has to get out? GCHQ, NSA, you're that person and this is your moment.
The problem is with publishers too small to individually attract the attention of advertisers... which is most of the ones that use advertising to begin with. Any way to solve that problem reintroduces an ad network in some form or another.

Or would you say that advertising is only for big shots, and small-time publishers should just rely on up-front payment?
I can see 3 possible scenarios here.

1. Russia/China have got hold of the files, and know how to decrypt PGP (Very unlikely).

2. A journalist with access to the files and the encryption keys has left them lying around, or was cooerced into decrypting them. (Unlikely but possible).

3. Intelligence services are lying, possibly for political gain ahead of new legislation (specifically in the UK), and/or have fallen for a bluff by China and Russia. (Most likely).
I'm not sure it does. On the one hand Go generally requires less boilerplate code than Java does. But that's only if you're writing simple models; once you factor in stuff like generics you can quickly find the simple becomes unnecessarily complex within Go.

Like with most things, it really depends on what problems you're specifically trying to solve.
I'd be interested in how that'd be better, today, than C#/WinForms (WPF is nice, but not for quick things). I only used Delphi a little, but C# and WinForms are super nice for clicky things and I don't think you'll find a machine in any sort of common use without at least .NET 2.0 on it, being at least effectively standalone.
One hidden cost of this: If Texas wants to sell gold to someone else, and it's held at the NY Fed, it often just has to be rolled down the hall, which is pretty easy from both a security and transportation point of view.

If they house it locally, they have to ship it to and from NYC or elsewhere to exchange it with others.
International Space Station from 40,000ft
"The ones who were able to migrate to safer places with gold, restarted their life much more easily..."

IOW "The wealthy were able to migrate to safer places and restart their lives more easily."

No surprise there. So it was their wealth, not gold per se, that made their move safer and restarting easier.

Gold is the most useless element in the world. But greed has no bounds and the love of men for gold seems endless.
It would be cool if you could share when you worked at FB and what general area of the infrastructure you worked on. Your statements don’t match the Facebook infrastructure I know. I recently left after spending 8.5+ years on infra, so I saw it both in the really early days, as well as how it is today.

Facebook actually built many major pieces of its infrastructure itself after finding no suitable solution in open source or commercial vendors. Efforts like this were happening even back in the early days of FB infra. I could list out many publicly known Facebook infrastructure projects that solved Hard Problems. And not just in recent years either. :-)
Berkeley to require cell phone warning labels – an ongoing debate
also, contact info.
By that logic you should also say Dlang, Rustlang, Nimlang and so on. Let's optimize for human readers instead.
To be fair, its no more ham-handed or insulting than the common refrain from the Golang proponents: "Go is for getting work done."
Sure... the Russians and Chinese (not the same people) just happened to simultaneously break some strong encryption, and the UK just happened to discover this somehow, before anything significant happened. Perfectly propaganda.

Perhaps the next press release will claim, 'paying taxes reduces the risk of death by 42%!'
This is an interesting post. It sounds believable to me.

I'd like to think that we will get to a more ethical future.
And Austria repatriated 110 tonnes from the Bank of England this year. Venezuela 160 tonnes in 2011. Many other countries are moving in this direction.

Good interview from the "father" of the German repatriation movement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=136&v=nmuNeQr276U
I think we might see a lot of progress in this field in the next couple of decades, given the amount of people that have concussions and brain injuries.
It has been for over 6000 years. And it could be useful in far less catastrophic situations.

Some economists such as Willem Buiter like to claim gold is in a "6000-year bubble", but others figures like Kyle Bass counter:

"Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It's that simple"
What kind of a giant straw man is this? The necessity of technology and society during a nuclear war making gold not important? Gold is a currency. Not a commodity, not material, a currency. It was the original shared ledger. It isn't the most important thing, but who's saying it is?

Texas just wants to make sure what they have claims to is actually in their possession. What is wrong with that?
If it wasn't going to be Golang, what's the next most likely choice?
I know he communicated with the journalists via PGP but do we know that all copies of the files were encrypted that way?
> A large number of small and new VC funds will get wiped out. This time, the difference is, its the professional players that get hit (VC's, institutional investors, hedge funds etc).

This is what I'm getting at. Is that extent of it? Before the housing crash, most institutional investors thought it would be confined to the subprime market... but that wasn't true at all.

Where are the VCs getting all their money? Are mainstream banks exposed? Hedge funds? Corporations? Retirement funds?
> Would China spend billions and send thousands to combat AIDS, Malaria, and Ebola?

China is already sending money and people in various countries of the world as foreign aid. A quick wikipedia search indicates [0] that their overall budget amounts to ~190 billion USD. The same page also explains that 45% of the budget goes to Africa. Take this with a grain of salt, because China's definition of aid isn't the same as what you'd expect (there's a huge component of trade behind the aid itself). As a comparison, the 2016 budget for USAID [1] is 22.3 billion USD.

So, yeah, if the US were to disappear, I'm 100% positive other countries would fill the place, and China would be one of them.

> The war on terror has claimed so few American lives that were it in actual war our gross total deaths would be statistically insignificant.

How inconsiderate. The war on terror made between 80 000 and 1.5 million casualties [2], and you say that's not warmongering ?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_foreign_aid

[1] http://www.usaid.gov/results-and-data/budget-spending

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Terror#Casualties
Survival/elementary civilizing skills on the whole are objectively more important than gold. If we could not draw water, produce food, bear/raise children, make clothing, build shelter, we would be much worse off than if we didn't have any gold.

Disagreement over different skills worth relative to one another, disagreement over what plans to execute as a team etc. dissembles the individual skills' value compared with gold.

People who can't agree where to put a bridge, what crops to plant, or whether or not to go to war will all want gold. The consensus about gold's value is a stronger component of gold's worth than its actual intrinsic value is.

Imagine there's a person with a drill for wells and a person with a material amount of gold. If each walks into a town where people are dehydrated, the people of the town will hopefully be more excited to see the drill person than the gold person.

If they each walk into 5 random towns, however, one would imagine the gold guy would have a more positive reception on average, because gold's beauty is independent of people's circumstances or culture, whereas the value of a well is very contingent on whether or not people want a new source of water. Historical royalty who did not want for anything were always happy to see more gold. Precious metals are one solution of the age old conundrum: "What gift do you get for the man who has everything?"

This relatively inelastic desirability makes gold valuable for trade. As a proxy for human energy and people's resources, gold can solve many different problems that a drill cannot.
`
Gosh, I hope hipsters do not discover this.
4. A version left encrypted at any point and time on some old SSD or NAND cells that were then recovered, without journalist or other handlers aware this could happen.

5. GCHQ or NSA had same or similar documents lifted (umm... leveraging Office of Personnel Management or a similar type hack) and they are preparing a cover story.

plenty of conspiracies to go around but as someone else said... until some proof is shown there's no reason to give much weight to the statement that individuals needed to be moved.
An easier read of this is that it is political pandering of an obvious sort.
Done. I guess next step would be categorizing them since, for instance, now I'm thinking of all the security-related blogs...
Except for the part where you need to make anything you put it in GPL too...

>freedom to use the software as you wish in whatever way you wish.

unless you want to use it next to closed source, in which case you can't.
And, how were wealthy able to carry their wealth with them? Primarily it was gold (compact and valuable), easier to carry. Look into history of Gold and you will learn much more about why and how Gold became the medium of exchange. Do you think anyone going to care about USD or Euro as medium of exchange during bad times?
Two out of the three points mentioned are not applicable anymore: good government and open immigration policy. Canada just thist past week introduced a second class citizenship which can be revoked at the mercy of a Citizenship Officer if they deem that I am not intent on staying in Canada. So for example if I go work in US, my citizenship can be taken away.

This ofcourse was introduced by the current corrupt Harper government and can be aimed at liberals who oppose government plans to sell off our natural resources to oil and water companies for peanuts at a high risk to its citizens.

Anyone wanting to immigrate to or open business in Canada, think twice, as this is not the same country you once knew.
I know you're not seriously looking for an answer but meh...

I've actually created a service (B2B) which requires bitcoin as I need atomicity, which bitcoin delivers perfectly (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins). This is where PayPal fails, people can get refunds, chargebacks from credit card providers & PayPal can limit/suspend your account without notice (which they are famous for doing). I'm not a pro/anti bitcoin evangalist but I'm just throwing out there an example of what "programmable money" actually means. Bank transfers work well for non-refundable payments as well but most banks don't offer an API so bitcoins is the best alternative for my use case.

Other advantages over PayPal are the OP codes and multisig which are a powerful thing for programmers to use. Bitcoin is great for merchants/developers but it has many disadvantages for customers.
I'm not really an Ember dude, but i might have some input on 3. In react, when you start, it looks the same way. A bunch of functions passed down like 5 components. Fortunately, there's a way better way, and it's flux. I'm guessing Ember will let you use something like flux.
I don't read his/her criticism that way. It's that users of Rust tend to make over complex systems.
> and paid 20 bucks for that, by the way

That's another reason this contract would probably be invalid: no consideration.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/consideration-every-c...
Firefox is also dabbling with built-in tracking protection (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594158). I'll be curious to see how Google faces this trend with Chrome going forward. Apple may be able to get away with enabling users to block web ads while serving them native ads (in the guise of privacy), but if Google tried to do the same (i.e. with Google-served ads being somehow "blessed" by virtue of not sharing your personal details with advertisers) then they'd be painting a target on their forehead for antitrust lawsuits.
There is no veil here, and no reason to pretend there is something legitimate preventing Amazon from treating people like human beings. I'm not going to argue with you, unless you tell me you've worked there. Then at least I will attempt to understand why you believed such treatment is acceptable.
Great list. I enjoy reading corporate engineer blogs for the practical info vs purely technical ones
Never.

I'm saying this from a personal experience running a B2B company for 7 years and switching to B2C model three years ago. I would never go back.

Sure, having a couple of big customers looks like a more stable option at first, but when big ones hit the ground, they hit hard.

The levels of stress are beyond compare.

Of course, there are drawbacks and some things are different. If you aim for large market, you have to invest in marketing/PR much more - but you are allowed to care less on the customer support front.

(I hope I won't be eating my words in a couple of years, but from current POV, it seems much better to have a huge base of small customers than a few big ones).
Some combination of Scala and C++ probably. Golang's central value to me right now is that I can keep a team that is split on those lines happy and cohesive. Which is more than enough of a benefit for me to put my own distaste in the background

The next language I want to learn is OCaml, but thats because I'm sort of obsessed with unikernels.
However, looking at Twitters front page I see it establishing connections to 6 different domains, that's one TLS session for each one.
It has a side effect - it does not create more little UTXOs in blockchain. And it allows for instant transaction confirmation, while on blockchain you need to wait for block just to be sure.

I see Lightning network as a great optimisation on top of Bitcoin.
That was the first thing I thought. Turning over IP and offering indemnification... for what exactly?

That indemnification clause is utterly ridiculous in this context. Our company works with a lot of governments, and indemnification clauses of this type are extremely common any time there is software involved. What's crazy about this circumstance is that the participants aren't contractors writing code for the city... Or are they? Based on the indemnification requirement, it seems that's how the city views it.

It appears un-enforcable to me (IANAL, but I do deal with this shit a lot). However, just because a contract can't be enforced doesn't mean it won't cause you trouble. I'd walk before I signed a contract like this at a hackathon. No "chance" at a prize is worth this kind of exposure.
> No surprise there. So it was their wealth, not gold per se, that made their move safer and restarting easier.

If you're wealthy but cannot easily carry said wealth with you across borders or conflict lines or hide it from a kleptocratic Government then there's not that much that you can do.

Case in point, the high middle classes from my Eastern-European country, who after WW2 were wiped clean by the Government in just a couple of years, the result of industry and real estate nationalizations, combined with a forced revaluation of paper money. Holding gold could have protected one against all this, at least partially.
Pursue progess
Are relations between Russia and China so cozy that they'd share intelligence of this magnitude?

Alternatively, is it believable that they both miraculously broke the encryption at exactly the time?
Actually, what made me stop using Borland (C++ Builder) was switching to Linux (going to open source GCC and wxWidgets library) and web (Browsers and PHP getting good enough to build bigger projects in it).

Borland failed to deliver usable solutions for Linux and web at the time and after I got used to new tools I simply did not bother to try anymore.
They only fixed it after Theo posted angry messages on the OpenBSD mailing lists about it, the story got posted to Slashdot, it became a huge controversy and the SFLC got involved.
Liquid markets have many benefits.
More likely is that the Snowden documents have been widely distributed in encrypted form (as one of the Wikileaks insurance releases) and Russia/China have managed to brute force the key.
You don't need permission to use cash.

You need permission to use cash with someone's online infrastructure because the world is rife with bad actors.

A payment system isn't graded by "permissions", it is graded by how well it handles disputes. That is why in it's current state, the future-of-money-Bitcoin™ won't work for many, many people and isn't competitive. (even with multi-sig escrow)
> I think its a bit premature to predict critical mass for Go

If Go was only used by it's sponsoring company and a few "language-whores" on non-critical systems, then I might have agreed with you. But in spite of Go being one of the "new kids on the block", there are already quite a few sizeable projects and organisations outside of Google who are using Go for fundamental parts of their software stack (eg Cloudflare, Canonical and Docker).

So like or loathe the language, I'd argue that it's already reached critical mass.