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everettForth

The Senate is going to meet May 31st to prevent the shut down from happening. This was their most successful vote on Saturday. 57 out of 60 votes needed. http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/114/senate/1/194

Notice all Democrat Senators voted for it. They are going to spend all this week trying to bring over 3 more Senators by offering to add amendments to the bill.

The time to act is now, not May 31st minutes before the vote. Does anyone know how to reach out to Senators and let them know that we want them to let section 215 of the Patriot Act to expire, and not to vote for USA Freedom Act simply because a few new amendments might be added in the next week?

Re:Senate Blocks Patriot Act Extension on Saturday May 23, 2015 @01:09PM (#9593509)
All the Democrat Senators voted in favor. Why do the Democrats want NSA bulk spying?http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/114/senate/1/194
Here's a live webcast of the senate floor. http://www.senate.gov/floor/
The Senate is holding an unusual weekend vote tomorrow to extend section 215 of the Patriot Act 2 more months. If that vote fails, NSA bulk spying on U.S. citizens is illegal on June 1st.

Here's how senators have voted in the past. http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/patriot-act-reauthor...

This is all assuming that we don't have a space elevator.

tldr; it costs a lot of money to launch mass into space.

Sending 1 pound of water into space costs $50,000. This is more than the price of gold on earth. A space elevator changes the economics dramatically.

Re:C to Go translation tool supporting Go toolchain migration on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @01:39AM (#8915737)
For me, this was a key part of the sides:

"Goal: Automated conversion of our C code to Go. Target: our C code, not all C code."

Re:It's Almost 2015. Update Your Footer on Monday December 29, 2014 @03:58AM (#8809015)
People are talking about how updating the date isn't legal unless something copyrightable has changed.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've been in meetings where management decided the year needs to update, so that's when I started using this snippet:

in ruby html.erb: <%= Time.now.year %>

Too bad it looks like congress dropped this amendment that passed with an overwhelming majority in a backdoor deal over the past 48 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8703331
Re:Ask HN: Who is using the .NET stack for their startup? on Sunday November 02, 2014 @03:43AM (#8546094)
The question reminded me of this classic: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/05/18/ruby-on-rails-...
Re:Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps on Sunday October 05, 2014 @01:19AM (#8411515)
Bitcoin has some limitations with microfinancing.

1. Transaction times are long (6 blocks to confirm)

2. Transaction Fees of 0.0001 BTC could likely incur for transactions smaller than 0.01 BTC. This is about a $0.03 USD transaction fee for transactions under $3.30.

My solution to these limitations is to trade BTC on a distributed, low-transaction fee, fast confirming exchange.

That is why today I launched a BTC to Stellar gateway for my p2p microlending startup at https://onecred.com

I expect to see a lot of things people never imagined were possible once bitcoin's store of value combines with a distributed exchange that is good at the things that consumers need (speed, low fees, security, decentralization).

Re:How does SQLite work? Part 1: Pages on Sunday September 28, 2014 @05:04AM (#8379288)
I have heard SQLite described as "alien technology".

Super fun blog way of looking at it!

This sounds like some trivial code, not even fully functioning, that was written during a hackathon. Why does New Jersey care?

It wouldn't even make sense as a business model anymore, because asic miners are so much more efficient than GPUs, but I heard many people talking about building this kind of service years ago.

NJ could pay a software developer to write them code to let people generate small amounts of bitcoin in a browser. Why would they possibly want this MIT student's code so badly?

Re:“The Mess We're In” by Joe Armstrong at Strange Loop [video] on Saturday September 20, 2014 @02:11AM (#8343824)
Thermodynamically speaking, a perfectly reversible computer which erases no bits (and creates no entropy) approaches zero watts per operation to run.

Kurzweil has pointed out that one can think of the 10^15 state changes per second going on inside a 1Kg rock with no outside energy input as a computation device.

Ok, so at 28 minutes, he's referring to some quantum mechanical lower bound to change a bit. I imagine the rock is using that really tiny amount of energy from the outside environment.

Re:Show HN: Famous Outfits on Thursday September 04, 2014 @08:31PM (#8271634)
The jacket Ryan Gosling is wearing has a front pocket. I don't think it's the Perry Ellis Bomber Jacket.

His boots also don't look like Steve Madden boots.

This is a great concept, but it would be a lot more meaningful to me if I knew I could trust the product listings.

Re:Show HN: Ospry – Simple image hosting for developers on Friday August 22, 2014 @05:25PM (#8214043)
Assuming you perfectly use the maximum capacity, at which point, the service is probably useless because no one can upload new photos.

It's super easy to do this if you're already running your website on ec2, and S3 for a few hundred photos will cost you less than a dollar per month.

Is this for Heroku users because running a single dyno to resize images costs $30 / month?

Re:The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real on Thursday August 21, 2014 @06:44AM (#8206705)
This is the only person I know who is testing it empirically: http://thedanplan.com/
Re:Stellar account with more than one million stellars on Saturday August 02, 2014 @05:42AM (#8124513)
Facebook has nothing to do with this.

If everyone on Earth were given 5000 Stellars right now, how many people do you think would be willing to sell all of their Stellars for a beer?

It's basic economics.

Re:Stellar account with more than one million stellars on Saturday August 02, 2014 @04:48AM (#8124434)
I almost didn't even want to comment on this, but it really isn't a big deal. It looks like a screenshot taken out of context of someone who sent a private message asking someone to look at my account.
Re:Stellar account with more than one million stellars on Saturday August 02, 2014 @02:51AM (#8124253)
Hi everyone,

I'm just excited about Stellar, and buying it early on. I'm also a software engineer, so if anyone has some cool ideas for things that could be built with a large stellar wallet, please let me know.

I'm especially interested in things Greg Brockman has been talking about lately, like this gateway, and making up his own currency: https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective

Re:Stellar on Thursday July 31, 2014 @10:26PM (#8118128)
Does anyone want to sell their Stellar?
Re:Ingredient delivery for restaurant recipes on Thursday July 31, 2014 @07:09PM (#8117526)
This looks a lot like Tomato Sherpa, a startup in Berkeley. http://tomatosherpa.com/
Re:Bitcoin Markets React to US Marshal Auction Close on Monday June 30, 2014 @05:02PM (#7967688)
"A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers." "Let's use them to build narratives!" --http://xkcd.com/904/
Rep. Thomas Massie ( https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie ) , who is partially responsible for this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/eff-statement-massie-l...

is going to serve on a hearing about lost IRS emails soon.

Supposedly, a "crashed computer" caused 2-years worth of Lois Lerner's emails to be lost, though many emails were recovered through "other sources."

He wants to know, does anyone have any questions he should ask the IRS? He says on Facebook that he will personally review all questions sent to him.

As a general rule, I think that stock fluxuation news should stay off of HN. However, in this case, we're currently looking at a 9.88% decrease in AMZN. That's roughly a $14Billion change in the company that nearly every startup uses as some kind of hosting provider. To put it in perspective, that's very close to the size of the Whatsapp deal. I think this is relevant to startups in this special case.

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