jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I agree with the conclusion, and to a lesser degree, the argument.

The newish book Money (Jacob Goldstein) presents a compelling argument for why Bitcoin won't succeed as a currency; in the history of humanity, not once has a fundamentally new kind of currency been created intentionally. Specific currencies (for example, the US Dollar) were created intentionally as a currency, but when we're discussing new kinds of trading liquid wealth, its never intentional. It was always something that we (as a species/community) look back on and say "oh shit, I guess that's been a currency all along".

The book doesn't present a strong argument for why this is always the case, except to say that it always has been the case.

More tangibly; I think modern money theory (MMT) has proven itself to be a startlingly powerful tool in keeping our fragile society going. Many people are discussing cryptocurrencies in the vein of "we don't trust the Fed, they've been fucking with the US Dollar for too long". I tend to think that the world would look very different today if the Fed hadn't spent the past 100 years fucking with the US Dollar. Its very likely you wouldn't be alive, and that HackerNews wouldn't exist, and society as a whole would be significantly more "wild west".

Bitcoin, and other cryptos, are interesting as an analogue to Gold. They're horribly uninteresting as an analogue to the US Dollar, for the exact reason why people mistakenly and, frankly, stupidly, believe they are interesting; they're difficult/impossible to manipulate.

Additionally, I think the Electricity and Silicon arguments are profound. If Bitcoin reaches a similar level of money velocity to the US Dollar today, the network would consume more electricity than the entire planet produces. Land area the size of US states would have to be converted into power plants and silicon manufacturing facilities. The Bitcoin community attempted to enact technical changes which would make its transaction processing more efficient; it failed the vote. Because Bitcoin Monetary Policy is a democracy (of the people who can afford mining machines, which has coalesced to a handful of rich organizations, most of which are in China), even Fundamentally Good Changes can fail, because of misguided ethics, greed, etc.

And that, at the core of the argument, is why this "down with the Fed, down with centralization, up with Bitcoin" position is so insane. Bitcoin has monetary policy. This monetary policy is implemented as a pure, technical democracy. That's fantastic, except, 99% of people don't get to vote, and will never be able to, because votes effectively come down to "hashing power", which is expensive and only going up in price. Bitcoin was designed as a democracy, but in effect, it will create the most pure, cryptographically secure, cyberpunk corporate future. Like communism; looks great on paper, but that's only because the papers always fail to account for the most basic human motivation: Greed.
This includes solo freelancers though? So I've always seen the advice that to earn more, you can't be seen as a replaceable commodity and you need to attract clients that want to work with you in particular. This ruins that?

I heard that as long as your contract includes something about how you could be replaced by someone equally skilled, you can work around this? The client can still terminate the contract if they didn't like the replacement.
> What happens if you set up OneDrive and Dropbox (and Google and Apple) to sync the same folder.

Chaos, potentially. Think about deletes... delete a file from the web UI of one service, its client deletes the file locally, but that same instant the _other_ service sees the missing file and happily restores it, the first client deletes, the second client restores, etc. etc. until you've blown gigabytes and gigabytes of network bandwidth.
it's the stream of consciousness of a 15-year-old
There’s a whole thing with growing or making your own food as much as you can. We keep outsourcing food production. In affluent areas that’s a boon, in others it’s an active problem.

Probably we will see the same play out here.
Transaction revenue increased $633.2 million, or 137%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 compared to the year ended December 31, 2019 primarily due to a 142% year over year increase in Trading Volume.

Subscription and services revenue increased $25.0 million, or 126%, for the year ended December 31, 2020 as compared to the year ended December 31, 2019.

Wow, $1B transaction revenue and $44M subscription revenue. These guys are making a lot of money for a pure digital product.
No. It means it’s possible to find a second job when you only have one. It doesn’t mean that once you’ve found a second job you still have time to search for an improved job.
If your Google account is in the corner it’s because you’re surfing the web while logged into Google.
> Even the Muppets can’t make Facebook Portal seem less creepy
(linked article at FastCompany) [1]

The Muppets pushing anything is and already was obscene (Kermit sipping Lipton meme, anyone?). Their first feature film, which is roughly as old as I am, revolved around Kermit following his dream and specifically not selling out his own species by making an advertisement.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90409198/even-the-muppets-cant-m...
Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Only something like $500B is attributed to direct subsidies or foregone tax revenue.
I think various electronics companies have test rooms for this and govements have actual EPM test rigs
The situation is absurd. healthcare.gov is supposed to help us figure out what's best but you can't export any of their info. I have to hand-create a spreadsheet every year using information from the that website in html form and then for the plans that look promising I have to go into multiple PDFs and pull out information. It's all so opaque.

It's even more difficult in my case because I can decide on my income ahead of time since it's almost all capital gains. The only way to see how the plans change when your income changes is to delete your current application and resubmit it, fortunately the info is all still there. But you still have to repeat the html and pdf -> spreadsheet process.

It's become very helpful to understand cutoffs like 200% FPL and 218% and 400% and concentrate around there.

I'm happy for ACA as it allows me to contribute to the industry outside the confines of a medium or large company, but it’s clear that the whole healthcare system needs to be burnt to the ground eventually.
I was surprised at the lack of any simple or straightforward libraries to create flowcharts in JavaScript, so I made my own. It's very easy to implement, and it has all the basic functionality - drag, drop, rearrange, and delete. I also included a demo of a marketing automation tool (similar to Zapier, but with flowcharts) made using the engine. Hope you find it useful!
Just wait until they turn all photos public even ones deleted in the past.

It is in their terms if they choose.
> we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.

You mean we will have to pay less to deal with the health effects of air pollution and and the economic effects of global warming? I'm not clear what subsidy we "miss out on" here.
A company like google should be publicly owned. What they provide as a service shouldn’t have to make a profit.
Looks nice.

I already made this: https://idbloc.co/

Good luck! It's unlikely you'll be able to keep it free for long due to the volume of spammers who will dive in once they discover it (speaking from experience).
This is the part which saves crazy time:

The loving part of VBA is its interoperability across the Office suite, but there's no reason why that couldn't be done in, say, Python

I agree with you, but Python and pretty much every code environment is missing a few things that create a pretty high barrier to entry:

For a whole lot of cases, VBA is not even needed. People put data into cells, operate on it with formulas in other cells that drop output into still other cells which are then used to get output.

Input can be almost anything these days.

Formulas have a well defined, easy to understand syntax that work across a wide variety of operators. Simple copy / paste operations make sense, often with the intended data mapped right in. (given people are a little organized)

Output can be almost anything these days too.

And it's live. Make a change, see it happen.

That's real power! People don't have to know much to make it all work either.

I have been using Excel to transform business data for years, model business and a lot of other things, and as a rapid prototype system. I can write code too. Often I do, but the more specific and or variable the task is, like a one off need to solve yesterday, the more attractive just banging it out in Excel becomes.

Should one get super crazy, have one of those outputs from Excel be a working program. No joke. A script file is one of my favorite outputs. Mash the data up in Excel, and once the plan of attack is clear, execute the script and watch it run on the real system.

Check this thing out:

https://github.com/tilleul/apple2/tree/master/tools/6502_ass...

It's a perfectly usable, and I would suggest one of the easiest, assemblers I've ever seen! I ran it on my mobile. Crazy.

I just used it to knock out a little routine for a retro-game project I'm working on and was kind of stunned at how lean, accessible, functional this really is.

For Clarity: Replacing VBA with something else costs more than the value add at present, and it's because Excel is the gateway drug into VBA. By the time people reach for VBA, they already are familiar with a lot of it.
> Hum, your definition of quote is very generous to the NYT, given than most of the 10 list items you mention are four words long or less.

A quote that is not a blockquote is still a quote.
Coffee can be burnt bean water if it’s not made well.

I have a few coffee snobs in my life and they slowly are helping me see a light.

I am ok with caffeine being medicinal as needed than seeking a transcendant experience.
> IMO, the sweet spot starts when something was a fad ~5 years ago and is still reasonably popular.

That would mean it's okay to use Angular today, but dev trends (and Google's support "policy") would advise against that.
Technology as a platform has stretched out communication to reach nearly everywhere, but arguably, the speed at which composition and publishing of writing can now occur has led to oddities in the realm of human expression -- more specifically in relation to the burgeoning technological ether. Are these oddities increasingly nuanced, sophisticated, even exquisite? Or are they reductionary, villainous, and whack?
Strong, as opposed to weak, implying that there is type-constraint checking; it's just done at run-time in Python.

You could also describe Python's type system to be dynamic in that instances of the type meta-class define the constraints and objects (instances of a class) can have constraints added and removed at run-time. Python is still fairly strong in this regard in that the built-in classes are immutable (ie: it is a TypeError to assign a bound method to an attribute on a built-in class such as str).

I suggest "instancely-typed" because categories, unions, and type theory. I'm only coming to grips with that in that OCaml's type solver can be both awesome, annoying, and cryptic. And at the end of the day I'm still not sure what it's buying me other than proving exhaustive pattern matches in certain conditions, fast pattern dispatching, and requiring specialized operators (+, -, , / for ints... +.,-.,.,/. for floats... etc). I'm sure the enlightenment will come when it stops becoming such a PITA to write a basic program.

Sometimes not having to satisfy the constraints up-front makes exploratory programming (where the constraints are not specified and known up front) easier. Python is going the annotation route in newer versions of the language which is rather useful so that tools could be written to verify consistency up-front (or at least provide hints).
I'm a developer on Bazel, and AFAIK there is no white paper. We definitely don't want to "throw it over the wall," we're going to try to push more and more development into the open over time.
So how is this different from the container service from google?
Hear hear! It's even the wrong word. Isomorphic means "same shape", which that means that the "shape" of the code is the same between client and server on these apps.

Huh? What's the "shape" of code?

It's not actually the "shape" that's the same, it's the HTML that it produces. It would be more accurate to call this Isohtml or Isoproduce or Isooutput apps.

People say Isomorphic when they don't know what they are saying, and want to sound smart in greek. Idiots.
This really resonates with me. On the one hand, you have the desire for greatness and importance, and on the other, the sobering realization that unless you do something completely absurd - inventing free energy, for instance, or getting us into contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence - your work can only have an impact on a limited number of people, and will almost certainly be unknown to the vast majority of humans.

I look to the great minds of history, people like Aristotle, Newton, and Nietzsche, as role models and examples of who I want to be like, but then I remember that even for them, the majority of people on earth don't know their names. To say nothing of actually being acquainted with their work.

Perhaps a good compromise is that, while you might not be able to impact everyone alive, present and future, you might be able to impact all people who share some property X. Most people don't know who Gauss is, but everyone who is a part of the mathematical community and studies mathematics to a certain level knows who Gauss is. In that way, some kind of enduring immortality and greatness can still be achieved.
Should individuals be punished for income disparity that is a larger function of society?

Imagine this in the context of a business relationship. You put $200k into the business every year, your (female) partner puts in $60k. If for some reason after 10 years the business goes south, will the fairest way to distribute the resulting assets and liabilities be in a 50:50 ratio because there is an income disparity in the broader society?

[Admittedly my analogy is imperfect, but hopefully there's a point in there.]
Very nice idea, have subscribed.

200 for a score is much too high. Every post except one in the front page of HN has under 120, with the majority of them under 20.

For example, this submission has a score of 15 (at time of writing this comment, which was 5 hours after post submission)
Overall, this hit a lot of good points and is a good read. I can't say I had any good takeaways, but I was nodding my head in agreement with many of the authors points.

I am a web developer before I am a web designer, but I've honed my abilities over time with a few simple rules that I'll share for anyone else who struggles:

1. Care. More often than not, lazy design comes from not caring or even thinking about it. If you don't give a shit, your design will be shit.

2. Experiment. Try different alignments, ratios, spacings, colors; take things to an extreme and then tune it down till you like it. Try it on your phone. Try it zoomed out. play with it and see how it reacts to what you do.

3. Iterate. Sometimes you can bang out a design and it's done; but more often than not you'll get better quality by iterating over it a few times.

4. Embrace fonts. I still struggle with their nuances, but a good typeface can really add a feeling to a design. google fonts is a great resource, and ranks by popularity which is not a bad reference. I know I suck at them, but I know they're important; so i feed off of what i like from other designers uses.

5. Optimize for readers. If your design has any text element, you should probably optimize for the text first. Everything else is secondary. If you find it hard to read at glance, or lose your place in a paragraph, you probably need to tweak something.

Also +1 for "don't make me think" - one of the most pivotal books I've ever read that changed how I view and make websites. Would have never expected that from such an otherwise brief and light read; a beautiful exercise of intelligence in countless ways. Even the title is useful to keep in mind. Highly recommend for anyone looking to do better, no matter the skill level.
Playing the game from a weak base and trying to win through tricks (sleeping in a car, caffeine, etc., etc.) is not a good approach. It's like switching from the poker game to the slot-machines so you can try to hit the jackpot with those last nickels.

Having a strong base to build on is much more powerful. Have good health. Good relationships. Good savings. Good income potential. Use that base to build your company on; when the base breaks down rebuild it first and only then resume work on your company.

It's much more powerful in the long term; and especially so after 30 when your body can no longer handle everything that's thrown it at.
Yep, I got all excited until I saw the domain.
A lot of people are suspicious of integer programming because it's NP-hard, and there can a bit of wizardry involved in formulating a problem well. It doesn't help that the mainstream solvers are black-boxes packed to the brim with their own peculiar heuristics.

I definitely agree that it's undersold, though.

Nonlinear programming I'm a bit more suspicious of, but mostly because I have a lot less experience with it.

Dynamic programming, on the other hand, I don't think should be taught in the same way at all -- to me it's something in the algorithmic toolbox, slightly less vague than "divide and conquer", mostly just a way of thinking and approaching problems. It's incredibly useful once you "get it", but I don't trust anyone who tries to systematize it by trying to reduce it all down to Markov decision processes and the Bellman equation. Maybe I can get behind someone saying "Dynamic programming is upside-down memoization," though.

In some sense all of these should "come before" machine learning because they're often used in particular machine learning algorithms. On the other hand, most ML pedagogy is at a higher level than all that, so maybe it's not needed so much.
There's zero harm in taking care of your body now. Any progress is good progress.

It's only part of the equation though. For a healthy body you also need a healthy mind. If childhood mistreatments still haunt you, ask for professional advice. Nobody wants to live in the shadow of their parents.
I suggest you put OpenELEC on it: dead simple distro for Kodi (XBMC) that just works! I used it to replace my WDTV Live that died recently and I couldn't be happier.
It appears that the next MacBook Air will feature power charging via a USB Type-C port (the only other port on the laptop is a 3.5mm audio jack).

http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/06/macbook-air-12-inch-redesign/?...
According to Wikipedia, alt modes include DisplayPort, MHL, PCI Express, and Ethernet. I really hope USB doesn't make the terrible mistake of exposing an insecure protocol like PCIe over a "public" port.

With FireWire, I could just destroy the port physically since I didn't use it. But if USB gets the Apple treatment of giving DMA access to anyone that can get a peripheral connected to your machine -- well, that'd suck.
I am grateful for each and everyone of you who is innovating and contributing to moving us forward and giving each other feedback and motivation.
That's interesting, because Cialdini's classic Influence covers this same ground (http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...). Has anyone read both books? I'm curious as to whether Superfreakonomics added anything over Cialdini's treatment.
I don't care that much what admissions offices do, to be frank about it. If they want to put bigoted "holistic"/nonacademic bullshit into their admissions processes, then that's about #43,207 on my concerns list. I don't have kids so I'm at least 18 years from this being my issue and the whole fucked-up mix will be different by then (better? worse? who knows?) I don't think the fault is mostly with the admissions offices themselves. The academic signals they get are not always reliable; high-school grades are hard to standardize, and the SAT is pretty preppable and doesn't go high enough on the math. (The SAT-M should have harder problems that extend it out to ~1000-1100. Or AMC/AIME scores can be given weight in admissions.) But right now, the SAT is too preppable and the relative lightness of academic merit in the admissions process isn't the officers' fault. They are, as you've noted, working with crummy data. In order to believe they're doing better than they would at a dartboard, they have to convince themselves to "see things" in a bunch of 17-year-old strangers.

What would be of value is to reduce the importance of these brands in the world at-large. It's not that I give a damn either way about Stanford or what it does. I do think the pedigree whoring that has crept into "tech" has been to its detriment. Twenty years ago, Silicon Valley was much less pedigree-obsessed. You didn't need a Stanford degree to raise capital. These days, we see pedigree being the most important factor in the Valley determining who gets to be a founder and who is merely "Engineer #2" on 0.1% of a $5M company, and we see absolute shit founders like Spiegel and Duplan tapping into that private welfare system. A bit of reversion-to-truth in the power given to brands might be a good thing... not only for the world, but also for elite universities, which would be pushed in the direction of using academic merit again, because the mystique they get in admitting rich idiots and making admissions appear "holistic" would be blown. That would be good for them, because it would force them to admit better students.
So far I've just dipped into it at the bookshops. Maybe a little bit inspirational and personality-centric, but overall Malone seems to be fairly well-informed (I am not a topic expert) and not concerned to sugar-coat the bad. For a book billed as a joint biography, it's disappointing that the author doesn't seem to have had any direct access to the subjects. But if you're interested in a popular history of Intel or the first decades of the semiconductor industry then I think this should do nicely. (However see this lukewarm review on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZKDIXCGFBZ02/ref=cm_cr_rdp_pe... .)
Could you list their main drawbacks as you see them?
Common Lisp, as should be expected
> the early adopters of that technology were probably upper class people who could survive with and deal with a financial snafu of 1000$

While there's undoubtedly an intersection between the set "tech geeks who want to be early adapters" and "people for whom losing $1K is no big deal", they're not identical. Remember that the original iPhone was $399[1]; losing 2.5x the cost of the phone to somebody's dumb software joke would not have just been an "oopsie, I guess we'll have to get a slightly cheaper jar of caviar for afternoon tea, Lovey" moment for a lot of us.

[1]: Technically, it was $599 for the 8GB model, but that initial price only lasted 3 months, and early buyers got a $100 credit in partial offset.
What I like about slide rules is that they're not a black box. You can see it and manipulate as a physical object and you can develop an intuition around it.
Why are you answering my questions about Philadelphia with a link and a quote about Chicago?

I directly quoted your comment. You said "Liberal city dwellers in ... Philadelphia discretely texting me pictures of cars on fire outside their neighborhoods"

That quote can only be read as suggesting that multiple random vehicles were set on fire. If you meant police cars, why didn't you say that? Why would anyone anywhere have to "discretely" text you photos of a burning cop car? It was widely covered - live, in real time - by local and national media!