The community that for months has been preaching the virtues of the currency nobody can control is suddenly arguing that a middleman should roll back a bunch of free-market transactions.

I decided a while ago that arguing against the "bitcoin has no problems" crowd was futile: people are too enamored with the idea to see problems like this until they happen.

To the Mozilla developers in here:

Although I am not going to install this version on my laptop (I am a chrome guy), I would like to take the opportunity and thank you for the great work you have done for the internet users and web developers.

In the days before firefox+firebug, we were alerting all the way in order to find an undefined / unassigned variable which was causing bugs and terror.

You have made the web a better place, you have made IE a better browser, and I tend to believe, you also made chrome a better browser, and chrome developers work harder by setting the bar that high.

I love how Pinboard deals with this issue: site remains online (albeit with limited abilities), all data is secured and backed up, users are encouraged to use the export tool if they feel the need and there are status updates on Twitter.

Keep it up Pinboard!

We're not down. Our main DB server is unreachable and there is limited service (no API, search or feeds) while we run off a smaller backup server.

See http://status.pinboard.in/ or @pinboard on Twitter for updates.

From the message board:

"Folks, in the grown-up world, trades are unwound when the market malfunctions. --Jeff Garzik, bitcoin core dev team"

In the grown-up world, currency is controlled by governments, the financial industry is regulated, and money cannot be transferred large distances anonymously. The whole sales pitch of BitCoin is that it is free of all this control. Invoking "the grown-up world" to describe BitCoin is absurd.

Somewhat disconcerting that I am a Dropbox customer, yet neither the breach nor the explanation has been communicated to me by email; I've had to find out about it by reading HN.

Uh... it's very much the other way around. Haskell's building the future of concurrency, even if it isn't going to be "the language" of 2020, and Node.js is a throwback to late-1990s to early-2000s solutions that repeated and consistently failed to work at scale, with no real chance that Node.js is going to escape the same fate any more than the several dozen event-based frameworks based on languages very similar to Javascript before it did. (If the manually-compiled event callbacks, cooperative-multithreading scheduling approach was going to be the Next Big Thing, it would have happened years ago.) It's Node.js that needs to worry about how it's going to "stay relevant" as it walks a dead-end path, not Haskell as it blazes (relatively) new trails.