skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The best you can do is prevent people from spending their money

And that's pretty damn good, because if you want to do the most damage to someone, you cut them off from their money.

So, most of the time these threads are abandoned, but I really do appreciate your thoughtful responses, and I'd like to continue, because I think I'm finally able to articulate my concern clearly: the trouble is that there is a distinct, separate group of miners who can form out-of-band cabals and cooperate to effectively cut anyone they want off from their money. All it would take would be for a majority of them to agree to ignore transfers from a public key, and the ledger would continue along just fine.

So, the root of banking power is currently institutional and legal, and all bitcoin is doing is giving that control to people with the most compute power. Bitcoin turns CPUs into the new gold standard (although ASICs function more like tulips).

On a related note, I'd like to understand on a practical level how people reach "the miners" and whether or not the miners have incentive to share transactions with each other once they learn of one, or whether the system relies on a "neutral" third party clearing house for unintegrated transactions. Presumably there are lots of endpoints in the world where you can put transactions, but what guarantee do you have that anyone will bother integrating yours? Do you push it to lots of endpoints to reduce the chance that happens (intentionally or by accident)? Or, another way to ask this, is: how do miners learn of unintegrated transactions?
Stay in school
Make a website/mailing list where you ask young people questions that are of interest to older people.

I would sign up for that.
What's the best wifi hotsppot?
I'm looking for a small portable wifi hotspot, that's really cheap. I know a lot of the cheap ones are crappy, but what's the least crappy one you know of?
I think a more practical idea is the notion of people running for office that vow to take a public vote for all their decisions through the internet (yes it could be done realistically with public/private key cryptography)
This looks fun - nice idea.

Submitted my one =), looking forward to what you come up with!
Here's Linus defending him on /. [1]

Linus: You can say the word "systemd", It's not a four-letter word. Seven letters. Count them.

I have to say, I don't really get the hatred of systemd. I think it improves a lot on the state of init, and no, I don't see myself getting into that whole area.

Yeah, it may have a few odd corners here and there, and I'm sure you'll find things to despise. That happens in every project. I'm not a huge fan of the binary logging, for example. But that's just an example. I much prefer systemd's infrastructure for starting services over traditional init, and I think that's a much bigger design decision.

Yeah, I've had some personality issues with some of the maintainers, but that's about how you handle bug reports and accept blame (or not) for when things go wrong. If people thought that meant that I dislike systemd, I will have to disappoint you guys.

1. http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/0058243/interviews-...
No. It's not.

About a year ago I switched cold turkey to Dvorak. Aware of Qwerty's obvious design flaws and the improvements Dvorak had made, I had been toying with the idea of learning Dvorak for quite some time. That summer I found myself with a few weeks of nothing to do, so I learned Dvorak. My regimen was to do the exercises on http://learn.dvorak.nl everyday for as long as I could. Using a computer during that time was extraordinarily painful. I had to consciously think about the placement of every single keystroke, and simple things like googling "hockey scores" became a monumental task. I even started to avoid using a computer because typing was so difficult. If that sounds terrible, it was. However, with more practice things got better, and within a few weeks I could confidently type Dvorak at a reasonable speed.

A few months later, at school, two of my friends noticed I was using a different keyboard layout. I explained to them how I switched to Dvorak, and they decided to learn it too (which decision they made completely on their own; I hadn't even suggested they try it). Apparently their learning experiences were a lot more pleasant than mine, but it makes sense that it varies from person to person.

About a year later, I am a regular Dvorak user. However, would I recommend switching? No, not really. Dvorak is better than Qwerty, that much is obvious. But, did my typing speed increase? No, not really. I hadn't done any WPM measurements before I switched, but I'm roughly the same speed as before. Is Dvorak easier on your hands? Perhaps, but not by much in my opinion. If you do have hand pains, it is much easier and likely more effective to switch to a keyboard that is more ergonomic, rather than a layout. There are loads of these keyboards out there, such as TypeMatrix, ErgoDox, Truly Ergonomic, Kinesis, knock your self out. Switching to an ergonomic keyboard is something I absolutely do recommend (your pinkies will thank you).

Do I regret switching to Dvorak? No, I don't. I'm no worse off than before, and maybe even slightly better. However, is learning Dvorak worth it? For its ergonomic benefits, no, and my two friends that learned Dvorak share this opinion. If you want to learn Dvorak, by all means go ahead, but don't do so with the wrong expectations.
How art became irrelevant
The Ello Bill of Rights for Social Network Users
Yeah, I had similar thoughts

svgcandy.com is available, which would convey much of the same idea
It still doesn't seem like scheme even if it gets those features. Lots of languages have those features and we don't consider scheme.
I followed my boss to a new company, and Ruby is what they were already using.
It's always amazing to me to see all the hype around containerization and build once, run anywhere, and a lot of the tech trends happening now and realize that we've been reinventing the wheel, since products like AS/400 (a.k.a System/38 a.k.a iSeries) have been doing it since before PCs were ever a thing. It's perhaps even more funny when the reimplementation is inferior to the original product (which seems to happen with some level of regularity). It's a shame mid-range IBM iron is both expensive and sort of vendor-locked as it's really often a rather nice system to build for; system/38 really was revolutionary and really has influence more than I think we often give it credit for.
All the cars are cooperating. Sensors everywhere. The position of every moving object on the road is tracked to within a meter. Any car that enters the bicycle's safety zone gradually slows down to 10mph long before there's any chance of contact. It would probably cause a very minor delay for cars, and none in cases where the cars can route around the bicycle. Or whatever... There are probably a thousand safe ways to make it so bicycles can go nuts in a world with 100% computer controlled cars.
I was thinking of doing something like this. What about a forum type site where older people could directly ask us questions?
I'm deeply sorry to hear this response.

It's true that I don't respond to every candidate, but I also never promised to. I DO read every single resume sent to me, guaranteed. Normally I just only reach out to people that I think are a good fit for us. I end up responding to at least a dozen candidates for each HN posting. Please keep in mind there is no automation here, and no recruiters - it's just me, and I have to balance running a company.

That said, you are 100% right that I should send at least some response to everyone, even people we aren't going to move forward with. I'm working on a process for this and will start doing it soon.

In the meantime, I want to personally apologize if you feel I wasted your time. If you want to send me a note via email I'm happy to give you some individual feedback on your application and why we didn't feel it was a good fit.
The iTunes Era Is Over
the Require.js logo has the hover title 'Redis'.
Maybe a dumb question...so I wrote out the derivation for the generating function and am of course getting x/1-x-x^2. Is the idea just that multiplying through by x just shifts the generating function so you end up with the generating function for f(n)x^(n+1)? Which still gives the resulting decimal expansion?
Ask HN: Becoming a successful solopreneur
There are several successful solopreneurs on HN:

Patrick McKenzie:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/

Dan Grossman

http://www.awio.com

Although they occasionally deal with contractors, they are one man shops. There are benefits and costs to do this.

It really limits your "impact" and how much money you can make...however there is a lot less stress involved.

Would you want to be a successful solopreneur or do you feel the traditional startup is the right path?
>Well, they're not really playing text-based adventures. The fun and challenge of most adventures is that you don't necessarily know all the possible actions, and you have to guess what possible state transitions might exist.

Making the environment only partially observable is fairly normal for RL papers. Of course, having a binary success condition encoded as, "Did you reach state Accept of this very extremely large, partially-observable deterministic (potentially pushdown instead of finite) state machine?" does make it hard to use RL, since last I heard, RL requires that the reward feature be continuously valued and that it actually vary when incremental progress towards the goal is made.
Did your core languages change during each switch? What is your current stack/expertise?
We'd probably be better off giving those people a default-deny firewall and calling it NAT to pacify them. But I doubt that will happen.
Yes, that's one way. But also since there are fewer PoPs, more emphasis is placed on the quality of the connection (premium bandwidth). Maintaining a low ttfb and total transfer time means keeping more spare CPU power available. And high performance storage (since it's storing many files that perhaps aren't accessed frequently).

As time goes on, it'll become a lot clearer what I mean. The goal here definitely isn't to reproduce cloudflare.

I think the feature that's going live later tonight is a good example of something that's a big benefit to smaller sites and requires more resources: Normally, each edge node in a CDN contacts the origin server and caches the file on that node. By tomorrow morning, you'll be able to tell Nuevo Cloud that if one edge node has a cache miss, it should also tell the other edge nodes about the file so they too can cache it. Essentially, 1 cache miss anywhere in the world, and you've primed the cache on the entire network.

What that means in practice is that there's a single request for a file, and it gets transferred to 8 different locations, and stored at each location for 30 days.
It's interesting to note how so many of the innovative research OS of the 80s and 90s were based on firmly object oriented architectures that enabled their features. This is in spite of OO being much maligned by contemporary FP evangelists. I'm not aware of what research has been done on FP (pure or impure) operating systems. I know of House, but it doesn't actually have any interesting features per se beyond the novelty of being written in Haskell.
Advice for non technical founders recruiting developer?
We have an MVP built and ready to test in the market. We know we need to sell the vision and ourselves hard to any candidate. But from a developer's perspective, what are the top things you would look at when considering coming on board at a super early stage startup? While we can assume its some combination of equity/compensation package, the quality of the idea and the quality of the founders, any insights would be helpful. Thank you in advance!
I cut my teeth on a S/38 as an operator.

I was the worst data entry person. I have dysgraphia, cannot touch type, and am a world class champion of bad spelling. Not a good combination for transcribing acuities from intraocular lens follow ups.

My supervisor was on vacation and the manager needed a report for the FDA so, eager to help, I set about trying to convince paradox (a 4GL) to give me what was required.

I got the report to print but the sorting was all wrong. It was in date order and not grouped by model. Finally, by looking through the in-line help system (1992, no googling), I figured it out and got the report to my manager.

His reaction was not what I expected; he looked exceedingly perplexed.

"Something wrong?"

"It's grouped!", he replied.

"Isn't that the way it should be?", I responded.

He then proceeded to explain two things; he had been asking for the report this way for months, and I was going to be terminated that day.

The best part was that, unbeknownst to me, they were shipping the S/38 from Virginia and needed an operator to work from 12 noon till 3 am and—instead of being fired—I was just about to be offered a new job!
Yes, this is my project. I probably could have made that clearer.
I agree, though a correction: PCs very much did exist by the time of AS/400, and particularly when OS/400 (IBM i) introduced LPARs, though analogues have been around in plenty of IBM's prior systems.
"explain like I'm 5" is almost certain to be understood regardless of the reader. "Eli5" is unintelligible unless you are part of a particular, narrow, culture. I had no idea what it meant.

(In truth, the "like I'm 5" part is not obvious so could be misunderstood, but is easier to grasp the meaning.)
Betting on Salieri's not Mozart's
I have a friend who made several web games that went viral (i.e. he is from Australia, and when I was in Sweden I saw people I didn't know playing it in the lecture). Very simple clones of other games in terms of mechanics, however he wrote them himself and made them topical to current events and pop culture. He put a link to his email and facebook in the footer (he had barely heard of github), and got several job offers from it.

Note this guy was studying electrical engineering, but decided to pick up coding himself. These games got great publicity and landed him the job within 6 months of learning to code.

If your game is trivial, boosting your profile from it can be a much greater reward than monetisation. Granted, this advice isn't as helpful if you plan on being an indie game dev.
On code clarity: you can't be proud of something I can't read
"I don't see why his affiliation with Doctors Without Borders carries argument-ending weight here. They do noble work, but their interest is the well-being of people outside the U.S."

That's quite an interesting interpretation of "without borders".
Ask HN: Tips, and resources on staying focus and engadged at work for dev
How do you stay focus at work ? Have you done/read something that help you increased you ability to work longer hours and be better focus?
Please share
Until they make THAT (switching off your phone for 1 or 2 cells and turning back on 1 or 2 cells over) a crime. And start compelling cellphone companies to provide them with the records of everyone who does that. And start targeting those people. Like structuring [0].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/us/law-lets-irs-seize-acco...
Are the 23% from PACs money given directly to campaigns or does it also include independent expenditures?

Additionally, wouldn't it be better to look at expenditures in later elections such as the 2012 presidential election? Using the 2010 data is a bit biased because the Citizens United decision was only ruled on in 2010.

As for your point of donations being illegal for federal elections, it is true that direct donations are regulated, however outside "independent" spending by corporations is not illegal.

Additionally, Super PACs can accept unlimited contributions from corporations as long as they use the money for independent expenditures.
Starting myself :
1 - Maybe the most effective way to worked longer for me is to take a nap during my break. My afternoon are so much more productive after a good nap.
2 - Not eating anything heavy during lunch
> This would be fun response to the usual interview white boarding question.

i don't really understand what you mean here. may you please elaborate ? thanks !
This isn't just SystemD. you should ask rasterman sometime about his stint at RH Labs. There was a great interview with him and Havoc Pennington back in 1999 or 2000 where HP couldn't say a nice thing about the guy or his code, because he just didn't fit in with the redhat culture (he liked to wear formal wear to work - a subtle protest of mandatory office attire).

The entire Red Hat corporation has been like this since about the 5.2 release, when they removed "Redneck" as a system language option.
Grasshopper: An orthogonally persistent operating system (1994) [pdf]
Any possibility or getting Erlang and Scala logos?
Mostly real browser synthetic monitoring from 24 locations. Obviously that's not exactly real world (since those servers are in a datacenter), but it's reasonable close.

I also use Nuevo Cloud (and have used other CDNs) on one of my ecommerce websites that gets a couple thousand people/day. So there's google anayltics timing stats, but those aren't the most accurate.

Of course, this is very different than the performance monitoring that's done for Nuevo Cloud. It's much easier when you have access to the actual servers to track performance stats and work to improve those (compared to trying to compare real world performance versus another CDN).
Can't say I'm overly fond of the standard library for Date/Time in Java prior to Java 8.

I've heard they've gotten better since Java 8 and Joda isn't as necessary now, but haven't used it since Java 8's release to know firsthand.
Thanks for pinging here. Could you forward your info to my email? I will check that it was processed appropriately.
Thanks, I just saw that on your profile. Normal practice would be to include "Disclosure: this is my project" or similar in your comments.
... and they're still called LPARs today on the modern boxes :)
nginx doesn't die. It just reloads the config file and applies the changes. I can't remember what Unicorn does because we almost never change its config.

Also, we're using daemontools not runit.
Agreed. I really love my 12" greybook - the 15" feels absolutely GIGANTIC after a couple of weeks on the Macbook. I've got a 27" iMac on my desk for when I need some real horsepower, but I find myself using the 12" 95% of the time.
I didn't click on the link before reading the comments... or even after, now that I'm here.

Turns out that momentary pause is a killer.
Yeah, you're right. I made a perhaps bad/loose equivocation for System/38, which I think predates IBM PCs, to AS/400, which showed up in the late 80's.
This is chapter 8 from Capability-Based Computer Systems, a book by Henry Levy published by Digital Press. Here's the TOC:

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/

I remember reading this chapter in the mid 80's when I was starting to develop business software for this minicomputer. The System/38 hardware and OS were not well understood outside of IBM, and Levy's book gave me some sense of what was going on under the hood to make the system secure.
I'm happy to recount that I solved a problem by recognizing exactly what kind of parser was needed, but there was also that time Nate took a month of vacation, and I'd only written 30 useful lines of code for his project when he returned. Development is a creative process and therefore a mess of too much effort and too much ego. So I count projects and times the client was happy, or we got hacked the first day of deployment, or our work won the next grant.

But try this: Find someone friendly and interested and buy them a beer or an Amazon gift card or a snazzy keyboard in return for reviewing some of your code. Learn and get socialized, like taking your pup to the dog park. Make yourself acceptable enough to be hirable, and maybe that's enough.
I would agree if the app only has features to offer and not some kind of community,marketplace, etc around the app.
I don't have a link handy or even recall what the situation was, but I recall reading of at least instance where law enforcement acquired cell site "dumps" of every connected phone. What I mentioned isn't too far off from that.
Isn't terrorism the use or threat of violence and destruction to achieve a political goal?

What goal are these guys trying to achieve? Is there even a "these guys"?
I'd go 100% OpenBSD if it wasn't for my deep-seated love affair with GNU and it's concepts (if not the figurehead). I'm starting to see the GNU boat being sabotaged, though, so I might be forced to abandon my compromised vessel and build a new 3-clause ship.

Gentoo is honestly the best of both worlds; linux compatibility, tons of applications, can be rebuilt from source, and a version of ports that doesn't suck. Their steadfast refusal to adopt systemd is pretty much icing on the cake at that point.
This is hyperbolic nonsense. If terrorism is everything we don't like, then it's just a pejorative. Whoever is doing this is doing a very poor job at instilling fear in anybody.
Ask HN: Monorepos with GitHub?
I'm not really interested in discussing the tradeoffs of a monorepo here (http://danluu.com/monorepo/), but I'm curious if anyone has experience using GitHub to host a company wide monorepo.
Says the guy who is an expert in Ruby and Node. I'm an expert at putting on pants in the morning. I'm also an expert at walking and chewing gum at the same time.
> I like revolutions better! Especially, where the guilty heads roll, figuratively at least.

The average Greek in the streets is more likely to blame German politicians than their own, so no revolution is likely. (And I'm not sure they'd be wrong either.)

> result in a humanitarian crisis of mythological scale, visited upon the poorest and weakest members of Greek society.

Honestly, I'm not sure it'll be much worse than what's already happened. The "internal devaluation" Greece has been forced to weather has been brutal, to the point that default and a "real" devaluation offers real hope of improvement.

> So why don't EU states let Greece have that much needed meltdown, but use their money to aid those most in need during the ensuing crisis?

The entire issue is that the rest of the EU (including some parts which are actually poorer than Greece, and have zero moral obligation to be sympathetic) really has no interest in spending their money to continue aiding Greece. Their voters, especially, do not. If they did, Greece wouldn't be heading towards default and exit of the Euro. But they don't, and as such, I don't think there's any good solution here.

In retrospect, Greece should never have joined the Euro.
Its not the ISA. Its always been about what simplifying the ISA got you: longer pipelines, simpler register-collision resolution, bigger caches on-chip. That's where the speed came from.

Now that entire complex ISAs can be implemented in a fraction of the real estate of an L0 cache, it matters less. And super-scalar, hyperthreading etc have taken the baton from pipelining.
Yeah, I did read that afterwards. I still do better when I do hit it for every time, even if they are the same. My record is 10101 now.
Epic DockerCon notes
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