jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
It forces people to read the comments and judge them on their own merit

I understand your argument. Just keep in mind that there are multiple ways that HN is useful. Some of us want to go deep into a topic, will read all the comments. And some of us are in a hurry and want to a quick feel and extract a summary.

In the first case (I call it "researcher mode"), not having votes is a good thing. But it prevents me from browsing in the second mode (the "quick update mode").

I wish you could set this in my preferences, but it wouldn't fulfill pg's original goal of staving the decline of HN (that I don't see - but that's another discussion).
Salary has nothing to do with work.
Getting and keeping high salary is all about luck and cunning.
Your work does not have to be extremely useful or valuable.

I don't know where this idea that world is fair comes from.
This looks really cool. Does it have cross-origin resource sharing enabled? This would be useful for sites that would like to use it directly from javascript.

EDIT: I've just seen the login mechanism; I don't think CORS would be useful with this.
Very true. A friend of mine, who worked for a very large company at the time, once described the perfect system for achieving recognition as a developer. Firstly, write code that's full of bugs and is hard to maintain. Secondly, once the code is shipped and starts going wrong, make sure you step up to the plate and fix all the bugs that you created. That way, you get kudos for delivering code rapidly and for all the customer support work you do. Contrast that with the guy who writes good quality code who doesn't ship as rapidly and who doesn't have half as much customer contact.
Disagree!

I'm on the business side of things as well and I started learning PHP last year while freelancing and then switched over to Rails when I started my work with a Rails dev shop.

I have found that the process is that I dream up an idea, figure out how to code it, and repeat either step as necessary. Sometimes you have to tweak, sometimes you have to redo, but I have never really felt the constraints of my ability to code as a limitation to my creativity.

It becomes easier as you get better. :)

EDIT: I have also found that it helps for me to create a lean canvas for my projects - the money aspect is somewhat important, and it helps me figure out the MVP of a product so that I don't slave away for weeks on a non-profitable idea.

http://www.leancanvas.com
Contrary to some of the other comments appearing, for me this kind of thing is excellent. The biggest mental hurdle I find myself facing when learning new languages and having got beyond the "hello world" stage is "how do I go from here to structuring an app?" An opinionated prescriptive guide is what I need then. When I know more later I can choose to go against the grain if I feel I understand the risks, but structuring projects varies a lot, and being helped to find the idiomatic way is great. It's a whole class of problem I now can ignore and concentrate on the design of my code.

It was a while before I understood how Erlang project structure worked. But I knew where to look. Ditto when I try things like Scala and Clojure (as I'm no longer familiar with Java, really). This is a good and useful step.
Running a business/entrepreneurial productivity != programmer-as-a-skillset productivity.
No point testing both brave and chrome, as they use the same engine.
Let me rephrase "just hack it": Feature expressions are a low-level primitive for platform switching. If you have cross platform abstractions, consumers of your code shouldn't need to use feature expressions. However, they are very useful in the implementation of such abstractions.

As for the programability complaint: I just don't see why it is important. If you are generating code, you can already add/remove content from the generated code. That is: you can always just write a "feature macro"! Feature expressions don't add any power you don't already have: Only affordances for humans.

Unrelated thought: Haskell/GHC uses the C preprocessor to address this problem.
Yes. See Taleb’s concept of the most intolerant minority getting their way.
That's a link I'd be willing to spend some time reading. Please?
Another comment gave you the gist, but it's also worth noting they can give you control over how much can be debited, how often it can be debited, etc. You can even use them to make budgets for yourself. The leading provider that I know of for this is https://privacy.com/
Real-time infovores, high-value segment
Quick follow up:

When I was putting together my report I found some wild stuff. I had to share this gem from their terms:

>The relationship between Federal and State Agencies, the privacy of records, and non-participation in [medical insurance]: In addition, I understand that, since the Association is protected by the 1st, 7th, 9th, and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, it is outside the [jurisdiction and authority of Federal and State Agencies and Authorities] concerning any and all complaints or grievances against the Association, and Trustee(s), members or other staff persons. All rights of complaints or grievances shall only be settled by an internal Association Committee. Therefore, for the benefit of the association and its members, I agree not to seek any remedy for relief in the [Public Domain]. I agree that my violation of any part of this membership contract would result in a [no contest legal proceeding] against me. The privacy and security of membership records maintained within the Association, which have been held to be inviolate by the U.S. Supreme Court, the undersigned member waives [HIPAA, ADA, FDA, FTC privacy rights and complaint process].

https://www.clear.software/pages/clear-companies-private-mem...
Curious what people with experience using Unreal vs Unity for film/animations feel.
I'm tired of people minimizing the problem by nitpicking. Like the conflict, which is what this is, a conflict between incompatible interests, just vanishes once I open up the dictionary. Oh! That's what that word means! Alright, let's go home everyone. Just World Hypothesis still holds. Nice work.
My mom refused to believe that I could taste the difference between caffeine-free Diet Coke and the normal Diet Coke. She was trying to get me to decaffeinate myself.

So, she made me take a blind taste test. I proved I was right and that I really could taste the difference, and she stopped trying to force me to decaffeinate myself.

She was quite surprised and unhappy that I was right and that I really could taste the difference. But to her credit, she upheld her end of the bargain.
Irrespective of how justifiable the anger is, the root issue that compulsive anger is both poisonous to mental health and that it gets in the way of critical thinking in ways that make it easy to be manipulated are both true.

Things don't need to be morally equivalent to have the same mental, emotional, and physiological effects. It is also possible to be mad about stuff and take productive action on them without regularly having to stoke the outrage fires. In fact that's critical to being able to think strategically about it.
It's just odd watching large sites repeat the same mistakes. First digg, and now the entire Gawker sites. It's as if they paid no attention to how badly a major change can have on their viewer base from past experiences.

Seriously, if you are going to make major changes to your website, do what many other sites have done. First you put up a discussion with features and looks that you want, then wait and see the reaction. If it's positive move to the next phase, create a beta page and randomly divert a viewer to the beta site. Then have an option to input opinion so you can see reactions.

Shocking your viewers with change is a horrible way to go about updating your website.
Here's the one question/problem I see-

How often do you really want to show someone something badly enough that you are willing to block your local dev environment to do so?

I could see it working if you are interactively talking to someone in chat, but over email, often times you could be waiting hours for someone to actually try out what you want them to see. You could certainly get around this by setting up a separate local 'dev-show' environment, but if you are going to all that effort you really could/should just set up a dev version on a vps/cloud server.

If you are talking to someone interactively, chances are they are another dev, which means they really don't need to see your environment running, they should be capable of using their own.

Also, in this thread I really feel people are exaggerating the level of effort to set up a 'showable' environment on a cloud instance. For rails as an example, I can go from server launch to a running app with db in less than 15 minutes (easily) with manual config and I really doubt I'm the exception here. Remember, this is a 'dev' environment still, your apache/nginx config doesn't have to be airtight, it just has to work for the single user you are showing it to (all defaults on everything is going to work at least as well as the built in rails server).

Not to mention the fact that if you aren't thinking about automating deployments yet, it's a really good investment of time and would work just as well for this case.
To me it immediately sprung to mind as almost a combination of The Last Question (about 'the end') and another one of my favorites, The Library of Babel (about permutations) by Borges.

http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel

By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...
Y Combinator has several companies each doing something unique in the event space:

Lanyrd YC W11( http://lanyrd.com/ ) - Lanyrd is a directory of conferences, events and speakers.

GrubWith.Us YC W11( http://grubwith.us/ ) - Grubwithus builds friendships over food by sharing reservations.

Venuetastic - YC W11( http://venuetastic.com ) - An easy-to-use event venue marketplace.

Swagapalooza YC W10 ( http://swagapalooza.com/ ) - Free stuff for event attendees.

AnyVite YC S08 ( http://anyvite.com/ ) - The easiest way to create event invitations.
Gradually? I'm an independent musician and though I may form a label (read: trading company) it's all DIY. My friends are the same - some of whom have been quite successful. I live in New Zealand, if you think the US industry doesn't get it, the Australasian arm is worse. It's been like this for a while too.
I am very new to Clojure and only semi-experienced in CL, but I ran into a problem today that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I had something like:

(defn foo [bar]
(let [whatnot (+ bar 3)]
(frobnicate whatnot)))

(defn frobnicate [quux]
(println "Hello" quux))

And it threw an error, since frobnicate hadn't been defined while it was dealing with foo. But I didn't know that. And using and commenting out my (ns spam.core)--and trying various compilation incantations with SLIME--were confounding variables such that the call to frobnicate sometimes worked if the ns call was removed and you held your nose right. Finally I gave up and posted to Stack Overflow, thinking I'd jacked up my namespace somehow. Instead they told me to either move frobnicate's definition to be above foo, or else declare it.

It never occured to me that a modern, not-low-level well-received language would have this limitation. And I feel like I'm part of the target demographic for Clojure. I'm an experienced Java and Python coder. I know and like Lisp. I'm interested in learning a new language. And I did what I thought I was supposed to--I read the list of differences between Clojure and other Lisps on the official site. I read a tutorial that concisely addressed Clojure syntax, data structures, special forms and so forth in a way designed for people who already knew how to program.

And there's a lot of things I like--better data structures, the lambda reader macro, the judicious use of brackets to avoid paren soup, Java interop, and more things that I'm only discovering as I gain more experience.

But I'm still kind of in shock about having to declare methods. A completely unexpected wart.
Curious, why? I've looked at Flash perf on my machine (Thinkpad, Core2Duo, Win7) and streamed 1080p video at 35% CPU utilization. I've never noticed any perf degredation using Flash and never had a crash as a result of it. I know people generally dislike it on mobile devices, but for a laptop/desktop class machine it seems pretty lightweight at even the biggest tasks.
Sounds like joke.
I’ll give you two counter arguments and if they don’t work I think our best bet is to agree to disagree. First, I think your premise that apps are not what the web was built for is flawed. Sure, this isn’t what the web was built for, same as the Internet wasn’t built for the web, and the phone and cable lines were built for the internet, and so on. The web had a vision that changed mid way. No we can either try to go backwards and give up a really important feature (forthcoming) or we can move forward and push past what is essentially a tooling problem. In other words, just because in the 1980s web apps could not be envisioned does not mean that they shouldn’t be envisioned today.

The second argument is that there isn’t a technology today that supersedes the web in one crucial feature: no installation required and updates are transparent. Various app stores are trying to solve this in a platform specific way but do you really want to live in a world where to publish an app you must include Apple and Google and Microsoft in your deploy path? You and I may be able to go to GitHub and download OpenStreetMaps code, then download all the data, install it all locally (most of the documentation last I checked was still in German BTW), and then use it to find directions to the nearest Starbucks. An average user will give up before spelling out “GitHub”. If you can point at any platform that lets me type in the name of an application and stat using it in under 1 second without installing anything whatsoever on my system, I will eat my hat.

That isn’t to say that we can’t have nice things. With time and effort you can create such a platform and get all OS vendors to support it and all the developers to move to it. But I will postulate that fixing the JS frontend mess will take at least an order of magnitude less effort. Therefore the web is where these types of applications will live.

Again I am not talking about things that are static. This isn’t about a blog. This is about whether a real application is better server-rendered or as an SPA and I argue that in 99% of cases an SPA will be a cleaner architecture AND provide better experience to the user. The fact that coding one up is annoying (arguable at best) is a temporary tooling problem, not a fundamental design flaw.
As far as I am concerned the iPod has become completely superfluous. I am surprised that people still buy them - what for?

Also I am not sure I follow the logic: because Walmart has a MP3 player section, suddenly iPods are must-have items?
>In essence, I am building a DIY database such that people connect directly to the database and get that sweet giant JSON object along with a stream of updates

Isn't that Firebase DB?
Yeah, but nobody is going to blame you when half of the internet is down.
In economic theory there is no benefit to diversification (which is what a company does when it absorbs another company) unless there are organisational improvements shared between the companies. If the acquired company is truly completely unrelated there would be no benefit at all as Apple isn't able to improve the running of an unrelated company. Being bought out by Apple might be a nice outcome for any company's shareholders (as they might get a premium on the their share prices), but technically there would be no improvement to the business in terms of expected revenue.
How much is AliExpress shipping for you? It's free (or a few cents) for most of the world, AFAIK.
> No money creation at banks is not controlled by central bank monetary policy

There is in fact an upper limit set by the fractional reserve. I see US has abolished that limit right now (March 2020), but when they would set it to 100%, there would be no money multiplying at all.
A few patterns about rationality I have seen a lot recently:

False rationality - People claim to be rational while touting some dogma they learned somewhere. Not even looking at any data. And when given data or counter-examples they just ignore it.

Anti-Rational - People claim that life is uncertain and data is garbage - while in fact there is a lot of good data available - and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.

I don't think the problem is with rationality. It feels more like rationality is going down because psychological pathologies (narcissm, cargo-cults, dogmas) are taking over.
Can you explain how a currency or hard asset replaces a bank?
According to your logic, wouldn't an alien species smarter than us have the same reflexive attitude toward us: "In which case I don't want to meet them (humans)"?
I'm not gonna lie. If I had 56 billion USD worth of Bitcoin, it'd be interesting to put them all up for sale, all at once, just to see what happens.
The main complaint against Gmail search is speed. With a sufficiently large email history, the built-in search becomes unreasonably slow.
Interesting video of a recent WSBK motorcycle staying upright in a crash: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj9c5poj8Ww
Of course the earth itself does not care, it's a giant clump of mostly molten rock, we're occupying but an irrelevant fraction of its volume.

When people talk about "the earth", they mean the biosphere, the sum of all ecosystems, and when people talk "harming the earth", it's about ecology, about annihilating ecosystems and about drastically reducing biodiversity.

And feedback loops we're setting in motion will only further that.

Will the earth itself survive? It's not living in the first place.

Will life survive? You bet it will, it's not the first mass annihilation it'll go through.

On the other hand, will the Golden Bamboo Lemur, the Dhole, the Axolotl, the Saiga, the Kakapo or the Hawaiian Crow live through it?

That's pretty damn unlikely.

Oh, and the earth does not "defend itself", we're just setting in motion reactive feedback loops we can't control. Essentially, we're shooting ourselves in the head and describing the bullet going through our collective skull as the gun defending itself.
It is not that easy - that's why I added the comment - to start the discussion about open source and trademarks.

From wikipedia (sorry):
"Trademark law is designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. By identifying the commercial source of products and services, trademarks facilitate identification of products and services which meet the expectations of consumers as to quality and other characteristics."

Trademarks exist to protect consumers, not the "owning" companies. In case of open source projects, this does not work so well and there are problems you have mentioned in your reply.
I hope you're not trying to suggest the community was trying to extort Oracle.
There is an example installation here: http://allynbauer.com/software/statuspanic
Every time I read about prediction of where climate change is going, I can't help but feel that people are just hopelessly naive about our ability to predict.

The greatest problem with current models is that they have simply no idea how the biosphere is going to react, and the biosphere has the capacity to undo every perturbation introduced by humans without raising a sweat.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is no global warming, or that humans aren't responsible - they are, the evidence for that seems pretty clear these days. But what we don't know is how that is going to change our world.

Recent studies in evolution, are starting to indicate that species can (and do) evolve very rapidly in response to changes in climate. We are used to thinking of evolution as being something that happens over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, but we have now documented so many evolutionary changes that happened rapidly, from the iconic peppered moths to Galapagos finches, that current thinking is more that rapid evolution in response to a changed environment is the norm, not the exception.

We predict, for example, that a whole swath of calcium-based lifeforms are going to go instinct if the Earth's oceans continue to rise in acidity. I would think that it is much more likely that some (if not most) are very rapidly going to develop mutations that allow them to fix calcium even in an acidic environment. If we start having more bush fires, then forests are going to rapidly evolve to rebound quickly from such disasters, or to reduce the likelihood of a bush fire getting out of control.

Or what about on a more global scale. Who would like to bet that there won't be an algae that evolves that efficiently sucks out the heightened amount of carbon in the atmosphere introduced by humans, making the whole climate change debate null and void.

Until we can't start modelling these times of changes in the biosphere, predictions based on models are pretty much useless, certainly once we get out beyond about 10-20 years.

None of which is to say that we shouldn't be fighting against climate change - we should, if nothing else than because, for the reasons listed above, we can't predict the ways that climate change is going to impact us. Unpredictability is generally bad for economic development, which is pretty much the equivalent of saying that it is bad for human sustainability. But I really am sick of reading predictions for our global future that just can not be based on anything like a realistic understanding of how the biosphere is going to react to our continued forcing of the climate...
That's really unrealistic. Governments are run by people -- who can be influenced fairly easily.
Just sent it - let me know if you get it (you never know with the spam filters).
try to think in terms of statistical models, rather than absolute statements. Imagine a continuum in which things you mention receive a numerical score. Growth is a number. It is a number which will have a non-zero correlation with the numerical scores of the things you mention. You can also build models that try to forecast growth based on those scores, and vice versa, forecast those scores based on growth. Once you think in those terms, you can dispense with terminology such as "irrelevant", "useless", "absolutely nothing", etc.
An example of some of the vi commands that less(1) has adopted. You can also:

* page forward and backward, including using numeric prefixes to indicate a lineno or indicate "repeat 'n' times".
* launch vi if less(1) is working on a file (versus (eg) stdout of some process)
* search fwd/backward
* start examining a new file w/o leaving less(1)
* ...
That's not what I was saying. All I was saying is that people 1000 years ago were innately as smart logically as you are today. I'm not talking about a posteriori knowledge.
They are claiming there is a point where money stops being important.

There is no such point.

There is no reason to favor any particular income level. If you use the happiness graph to make an argument that $50k is all anyone needs, I can use the same graph to show that $400 is all anyone needs.

If the 'up to a certain point' hypothesis was correct, with the graph leveling out, there would be a maximum happiness-from-money. You could say "oh well 85% of max is plenty, the ideal income is X". But the data says that's not true.

---

Humans intuitively understand logarithmic scales. Arguably even better than linear scales. A lot of our senses are logarithmic, after all. It's obvious that one dollar does not buy one happiness, given that millionaires aren't in ecstatic shock. But every time I double my income I gain the same number of happiness units? Sounds like money buying happiness to me.