skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've never understood Hacker New's (majority) vitriol towards Bitcoin.

Perhaps it's because a forum full of software programmers who aren't mesmerized by the technical merits of the insanely overhyped bitcoin software are exhausted from being told that they just don't understand why this software is the future of money that will disrupt finance and liberate the masses from the tyranny of banking. I think every programmer can agree that bitcoin is a unique and interesting technical feat and even a pretty impressive demonstration of what software can achieve, but any concessions to bitcoin's technical merit seems to invite absurd levels of over-the-top evangelism that grates against any patience for bitcoin is a technical topic.

With all that stated, I still think the GP's comment is unnecessarily condescending and doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation.
> OCaml is [...] faster than Go

On what basis do you say this? I'm not claiming to know the answer, but the (terrible) internet benchmarks I can find put them roughly neck-to-neck.
HTTP 2.0 is going to be great for you Kiwis.
Hopefully you pay far less than that now: Their prices have come down. But yes, it used to be a $600 product, that was totally worth it to many developers, because of how much better it was than Eclipse. In a world full of boilerplate like Java, IntelliJ's intentions just saved so much time. I remember asking companies that were using Eclipse to please let me use my own license of IntelliJ, because just what alt + tab and alt + insert brought to the table saved more than the price of admission on any given month. I made a similar argument for a second and even third monitor, given the resulutions we had those days.
I'd argue rather it's copyright law that is "inherently litigious", and that mechanism wasn't selected by Stallman. It was selected by those who began entailing it to source code, in contrast to the earlier ecosystem that RMS came up in: where hardware was often considered a commercial product, but software was near-universally treated as simple technical information of a similar order to academic papers. Most early manufacturers shipped the source code with the product, and were delighted if customers wrote or modified code, as it increased the value of their actual commercial product: the hardware.
If it's GPL'd, what prevents the author/project owner simply changing the license though?
The Ingotchain?
I can't think of any particulars right now, but my feeling is that many of companies the 2000-era bubble would be sound and profitable today, they just got to the market too early. It's very hard to judge an idea in isolation; the key is how that idea is applied to the market under particular circumstances.

If a true bubble burst were to happen, it'd kill startups by percents, not by merit. Some investors will keep money for their portfolio companies, others will sit until the market hits bottom and they can get better deals. It'll kill everything and everyone, not just the bad companies.
Don't know about the person you were replying to, but I suspect Russia and China would see Snowden and try to copy him (noticing that these agencies have terrible OPSEC) rather than attack him (knowing he's probably being very careful)
Try asking this on

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP
They claim to have been "the market leader for optical recording media", although I suspect they were not leading in volume or revenue. The blank disc market is basically gone, so it doesn't hurt them to get out of that business.
> 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).

Atomicity is not a distributed database feature unique to Bitcoin, or even to PoW-based schemes in general.

Though if Bitcoin happens to work for your use case then by all means, don't reinvent the wheel.

> (as long as I wait for N confirmations, it's pretty certain that I now _own_ the bitcoins)

That's assuming your transaction makes it into a mined block. There have been backlogs of multiple blocks worth of transactions waiting to make it into a mined block, and there's been a huge blocksize debate going on partially because of that (which brings the potential for a fork of the blockchain into competing camps no less!)

Even after getting your transaction into a mined block, it's not unheard of to have orphaned blocks https://blockchain.info/charts/n-orphaned-blocks so you need to determine what level of atomicity you need. If it's actually 100% instead of 99.99% then even Bitcoin is not safe for your use case.
That I understand. What I don't understand is why s2 and s3 shouldn't just be vanilla strings.
The way I read it, he meant that Go is not a great language. Go is "boring" as a language. However, it actually is a great programming tool. Great as defined by how long it takes to write module X, how well module X performs, how many bugs are in X, and how easy it is for a different programmer to come along and work on X later. In a real sense, the very design that makes Go boring is responsible for the good things.
I have serious concerns about the economics of Bitcoin, but I do agree that it's interesting and innovative.
The board of directors that would make this decision would have to be a pretty short-sighted one.

Most companies that see a lot of traffic, could decide to engage in shady side activities to monetize every bit of data they see. But no leadership in their right mind would want to take that sort of gamble.

It's interesting that the "evil eye of sauron" argument always comes up for discussion involving CloudFlare, but is never even mentioned for companies like Akamai. My guess is because of the freemium approach which "has to have a catch, right?". But CloudFlare is a proven business model with substantial revenues coming from people who like and trust the service. There is no catch.

ps. former employee here who joined on the idea, and still firmly believes of offering a quality service for a very affordable cost, without being deceitful.
In my experience, its more like "get your $100, then offer you another $500". I've been offered several jobs to continue working on open source software I've written at companies where that software is being used. In all of those cases I've been allowed to continue opensourcing the changes I've made. For small projects, nobody wants to maintain their own fork.
Hiring and managing someone else, while being the point-of-contact with your clients, is doing a thing; it's a very useful life-skill, in fact. There are other useful life-skills they might be better off not delegating away the learning opportunities for, of course, but usually "chores" are less learning experiences and more "I used to do this thing, but now you're old enough to take the load off me."

Of course, if there's no life-lesson, why not just cut out the middle-man and have a local chore marketplace where kids from all around the neighbourhood can directly bid on the contract to mow your lawn. (Mostly kidding, but that'd be somewhat interesting for people who don't have kids, and don't need a full-on gardener.)
> There isn't a tremendous amount of expressiveness in go that java can't replicate, and there's enough in java missing from go that makes it a wash, for me anyway.

And thus, you've completely missed the point of Go.
Lesson learnt by kid: Money is all that matter. Never bother with anything else.
They're also likely to have to refund the entry fee if you refuse to sign the contract: even if they did mention having a secondary contract in the sales contract, they didn't make a good-faith effort to provide reasonable terms (for the reasons mentioned above about legality and compensation), so they failed to uphold any part of their end of the contract and should refund the money; if they didn't mention the second contract in the one you made to pay them, then they absolute owe you a refund for refusing to do the work they promised in exchange for your money unless you agree to a unilateral modification of the terms -- they're probably liable for the losses you incurred by assuming they'd follow their end of the agreement, since a unilateral insistence on changing the terms of the agreement once execution has begun is not an attempt to uphold your side of it; finally, in the case that they want to claim the sale was pending your agreement to those terms, their continuing to hold pending funds now that the sale fell through is simple theft.

No matter how the city of Detroit wants to spin their terms contract, they owe the people who decline to sign it a refund on their entry fee.
Two VC's enter.
One VC leaves.
I sometimes think that RMS is to a certain extent the victim of the "the first task of a successful revolution is to kill all the leaders of the revolution" effect. Raymond and others sort of hijacked what was essentially a political philosophy and dressed it up for commercial palatability. (Full disclosure: I am NOT an ESR fan, which tends to colour my view of the events, despite not really sharing RMS's deep concerns---or, at least not his energy for them.)
Well put. I think this time the bubble won't burst but slowly collapse. Insane valuations (ex. Slack) won't be possible and the employees who are making more than their ROI and get the hope of get rich quick option plans will have to dust off their resumes and go work for the companies who handled expenses properly and focused on revenue and profit.

When will this happen? Soon. If you look at the number of seed vs. A vs. B+ rounds, you'll see that A rounds are on the decline. That's important because that's the stage where companies move from a startup to /real/ companies. Lack of A rounds means investors are willing to throw a little money (seed) on potential, or go big on proven success. That's usually great, but lack of A's means they're not willing to take any risk. That's a sign this bubble is deflating.

_FWIW - I'm a technical founder of a non-funded tech company._
If CloudFlare even hinted that it was thinking of playing fast and loose with its customers' data, it would be out of business very quickly.
Well, they have. You just didnt notice or havent seen it.
By avoiding complex constructs, and having an extremely easy-to-parse (humanly, as well as electronically) syntax. Not to mention the beautiful way that composition functions.
That's not really about the IDE side of Delphi, but the compiler and runtime side of Delphi. It was an absolutely awesome product, targeting the individual developer or small team, writing a custom application. Nothing I've ever worked since compares for that. But it's limitations are the same as Ruby on Rails limitations: Wonderful at one thing, only a headache anywhere else, and as we ask developers to do other things, the tools just stop being quite so good.

Looking at what we do on websites today, and how much it costs to build it, it sure feels like we've been taking steps backwards for quite a while.
There was a time when they were considered the top brand for consumer grade CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.
It may be that we didn't give it a fair shake, as everyone who we tried it with probably would've failed anyway, but it turned what would normally be merely failing interviews into completely excruciating situations. When Googling is an option, a lot of people were spending all of their time in the interview attempting to cobble together vaguely relevant Stack Overflow responses. It wasn't just "I'm going to look up the exact name of this library function because I don't remember it", it was wholesale Googling of data structures and algorithms.

If all someone needs is help remembering the name of a specific function, then I'd rather provide them with that if I remember it or just spot them it as something trivially Googleable. I wouldn't hold that against someone unless it seems like they're completely unfamiliar with the language they've chosen to use. There's no need to give an otherwise good candidate the chance to self-destruct over trivial details like that by obsessively Googling everything to make sure it's exactly correct when that's not what I care about, and in so doing they aren't paying as much attention to overall algorithmic details, which I do care about. If they need more help than trivial Googling, then they can't solve the problem anyway, and me watching them thresh around on the Internet isn't helpful to anyone.

A good analogy is laptops in classrooms. A lot of students will attempt to use laptops to take notes, even though they inevitably serve as a distraction, and study after study has confirmed that students actually learn better when they take handwritten notes. Somewhat paradoxically, studies of classes where professors have banned laptops and forced handwritten notes show higher student happiness; they're aware on some level that they're more engaged with the class and are learning better, and appreciate that the choice to distract themselves is removed, because if the choice were possible, they might not be able to exist. Well, providing someone access to Google in a coding interview is very similar to letting students use laptops in classes, in a lot of ways.
It's almost professional negligence. I had the same situation 15+ years ago when Eclipse was coming out and Java was on the rise. We really didn't know Java all that well and so Eclipse's auto-completion and doc popups were a godsend. The guy sitting there with Vi(m) was bogging down beyond belief. It got to the point, where we had to sit him down and tell him he needs to use the right tool for the job or get lost.

It's amazing that in 2015 we have people that use Emacs, Vim, or other editors that don't have intelligent, realtime code analysis and we consider that "hardcore, programmer machismo".
There are two problems with the recording media business:

- Because of cloud usage and low prices for hard drives, the usage of recording media is vanishing

- The market for CD-R, DVD-Recordables and others was always dominated by the price ... most customers just looked at the price tag, not on the quality of the media.

It is really a sad thing, because TY is really one of the last quality oriented producer of recording media around.

What is the advantage, I have, when I safe 10ct on the disc, but loose it after one year, because of bad quality? But there where just to few people around with such thinking (other companies already stopped producing higher priced media long ago).

Edit:

When I write about "quality" I don't primarily mean the trouble of buffer-underruns or wrong writes, but the problem, that many lower cost discs are prone to fail after rather short time of storage. As much I know, the TY discs not only made less troubles in writers, but also last longer as other discs.
And also there are legit usages of CD-R(W)s -- I used them long time as backup media -- but without quality suppliers, it is no option any more (the size of the discs would not necessarily be a problem, since when I backup only sources, they still fit).
This is an interesting comment. I think you can actually move from the IDE space and gradually bring in features that are of interest to Enterprise customers, who then adopt your product.

I'm watching Qlikview do this right now - their original product was and still is a client app for Windows. It allows any business user to pull through datasets of pretty much any source as a poor mans ETL, then it allows that user to do BI tasks in a very simple way. Where they are succeeding is that they haven't given up on this market, but are using it to drive interest from inside companies - eventually skunkworks divisions show its value to the business, which then buys the server software and licenses.

It's growing pretty rapidly, and they seem to have a sustainable model. But it's driven by the individual user.
- Huge bubble where startups valued at almost around $1trillion are not regulated.
- They are not required to report anything to public.
- Eventually, VC will need liquidity that may force these companies to go public.
- Once public, they are required to show significant growth to justify super high premium valuation.
- If few of the top unicorns fail to show that growth, market may tank, VCs may loose money.
- VCs who lost money may be more cautious in future but may also have hard time raising capital.
- Many Unicorns do NOT have higher entry barriers or network effects. For instance, why can't same driver serve users from Uber, Lyft & 10 other apps, cheapest for customers & highest paying for driver - an arbitrage opportunity? Or why can't someone list house on Expedia,Travelocity along with Airbnb?
They were certainly prominent in terms of quality CD-Rs; you could buy more expensive ones, but you didn't really need to.
As long as you're using the latest version then this shouldn't be a problem as the JVM is backwards compatible.
Its nice to see the rise and inevitable fall of languages. It just shows how its good to use the fundamental pr stable languages over the hip ones. The hips ones cause you to pick up, put down, rinse and repeat. The fundamentals only build on top of experience. So I am happy to build up rather than rinse and repeat just because I already have to keep up with the technology space.
I friend of mine who has dabbled in C for years is still pretty scared of it. He loves Go. He's gotten Go into production where he works. I think there are a lot of people like him.
In quality, I don't know a brand, that is better. Others that where, have already given up (eg. Kodak).

For example, I read that Sony once had good discs, but today are just re-branding discs of a much lower-quality brand.
Sounds like you could branch out and offer these infrastructure services to other businesses, too.
Yeah, back to CD-R and DVD(+-)R era, TAIYO YUDEN is the representation of high quality disc.

But the era of optical disc recording is gone, so it's a good decision to close blink disc business from business view.

For normal people like me, just have a felling that another era is gone, like the floppy disk, PCI sound card, dial-up modem, CRT monitor, film camera and so on.
I've done it twice, once in 2010 and again in 2012.

At the first company we had been using PPTP and L2TP for remote access but our employees were having tons of problems establishing connections and staying connected. Then we switched to the OpenVPN server built into our Vyatta router, along with the standard OpenVPN client. This required a ton of manual configuration on each client, but the connections were rock solid.

In 2012 I helped my new employer deploy OpenVPN Access Server, the commercial version. This one didn't need the clients to be pre-configured. Instead our employees went to a webpage, entered their LDAP username and password, and then were given a download that would do everything. The automatic configuration worked perfectly on Mac OS, Windows, and iOS. (I don't recall if anyone tried it on Linux or Android, but I never heard any problems about those.)

OpenVPN Access Server is ridiculously under-priced -- it's $10 per concurrent connection. If your usage is typical, where most users only connect occasionally, then you can connect hundreds of employees for under $1000. Even if it was a lot more expensive, my experience was quite positive and I'd still recommend this.
While your statement is meant to be ironic, yes that is pretty accurate. The same way a vehicle has a title and there are records indicating all of the owners, a bar of gold has some documents and a record of its owners.
You seem to be denying the concept of leverage and the relevance of zero-cost debt on investment strategies and portfolio allocations.
Yes sir. And I'm no "Apple guy". My first computer was a Commodore64, and I own no Mac. Never have. My only Apple products in my lifetime has been 1 iPod Nano, an AppleTV2 (only for jailbreaking/XBMC) and 1 company iPhone 5S (after 5 years and 4 Android phones, some personal, some company, all running CyanogenMod when possible).

I hate how languages like Go get lumped in with "Google", an association which to me, is negative. For many, people fawn over Google, thinking a for-profit like Google does things in their best interests. When in reality it's temporarily mutually aligned interests.

I'm at the core if anything, a Mozilla guy. Not entirely because I'm not too diehard on the JSAllTheThings movement. I strongly lean towards native, even if my work consists mostly of Python2 backend for webapps. At least with native executing code it's possible to be open source. You never know what's executing serverside. So I'm less of a fan of the so-called "open web" (an oxymoron) than most. And that's discounting the difference in end product that exists between native/web. I like my web to be it's original intended usecase- such as how HN is. Nothing too fancy, data sharing.

I think from a language/implementation standpoint that Swift hit it on the money. That's what I would have wanted out of a Python3. If that were Swift, I'd be a huge fan.
Swift just nailed what I believe people are really looking for. Go is a little sketchy in ways. I don't hate it, don't actively work against it as I do Python3... well, can't say I work against it but I don't extoll its technical churn. But Go at least is trying to solve a real problem, and solves more problems than it creates. Even if I think it squares up against Java more than it does C or Python.

Unfortunately, Swift is associated with Apple which has its own zealots (and zealous haters). It's regretful that programming is now fashion, hype, trend. But I do think they have the best-of-breed language here for general purpose use.

My money and personal contributions to these new wave of languages will definitely be to work on server-side Swift solutions. The thought of a single-language solution with a single GOOD language from backend to front if you use iOS is pretty amazing and I'm really looking forward to that, and Swift backend / web frontend as well.
Desal takes enormous amounts of power for not much water. It's not really a practical solution.
Actually, this will "create" jobs somewhere in Texas. So there will be some financial implications for ~50 or so Texans.
OP here.

Everybody

The first sentence of the article I linked to:
"The Chinese breach of the Office of Personnel Management network was wider than first acknowledged, and officials said Friday that a database holding sensitive security clearance information on millions of federal employees and contractors also was compromised."
The problem it there isn't much to actually do. Every last drop of the Colorado river is spoken for, so it's not like you can bring in more water by adding capacity there. We're taking the most we can take out of the delta, too. Where is the water going to come from?
>GPL allows any commercial activities, period

OK - then release a commercial GPL app for iOS app store.
Emacs + slime for Common lisp and tuareg mode for ocaml can do everything that my intellij can do in Java. Then I can extend Emacs to cast a spell, hex vim users and spam HN every time I fixed a bug -- even with plug-ins system I suspect intellij isn't that extensible.
Def missing KONG, open-source microservice management layer http://github.com/mashape/kong