jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Stocks are also IOUs on a certain level but they are not far removed from a real productive assets creating real value (the company that the stock gives you ownership of). Things can get speculative with stocks too, though usually far less than in the cryptocoin realm.

If you add up all the IOUs in the economy, financial assets are cancelled by financial liabilities and what remains is real stuff which in economics is called "investment". The nomenclature can be a bit confusing because in finance they use the same word to mean the contract, the claim or the IOU not the physical asset.

The equation for GDP is Consumption plus Investment (sometimes government consumption and investment and exports are broken out). Investment is not financial assets or money or bonds which all cancel out at the global level. Investment means factories built, equipment built, less tangible things like knowledge and intellectual property count too in theory but are sometimes hard to measure. It's important to have a good level of investment. Promise hoarding can crowd it out when things get too speculative. The economy can get into a bad Nash equilibrium where people are chasing IOUs instead of producing real value.
Different people have different priorities. For some, it's about health from the purified air - that's the top metric for success.
I genuinely don't see the reason why non-cryptographic random number generators exist outside of niche applications.

The main arguments I've seen are speed and determinism.

However, a cryptographically secure, deterministic PRNG can be built from hash or block cipher primitives that have hardware acceleration, making them quite fast. Seed (and potentially periodically re-seed) it from a strong source of randomness, and you've got a fast and cryptographically secure non-deterministic PRNG.

I thought that "classic" PRNGs like the widespread Mersenne Twister even had issues that can cause practical problems when used in certain kinds of simulations (Monte Carlo, possibly) that rely on large amounts of random numbers, but I haven't been able to find a clear source for this.

I'm certainly defaulting to secure ones, and I'm surprised modern languages and libraries don't do this by default for their standard randomness functions.
I like vornado, but it’s hard to find the analog potentiometer controlled ones these days. Almost all of them are three speed.
cd /tmp. Unzip some file with some system image - usr, etc, lib, the usual - that should be unpacked in /. Do what needs to be done. rm -fr /usr.
WAIT, NO! ^C.
"Backup, could you be so kind as to restore the ABC server /usr tree? I think I made a huge mistake. Thank you."

Good times. Learned a lot about why I need a VM with an image of a given system.
one way you can do native code integration with chromeless is using JSCtypes: https://wiki.mozilla.org/JSctypes

I hacked up a trivial proof of concept on this branch:
https://github.com/mozilla/chromeless/tree/jsctypes_play
I spent a semester at a less-than-stellar school for CS - the easy 4.0 was nice, but I know what you mean. Some things I did to help myself feel better about it:

- I got ahead - I found some small projects related to the next semester's material, and had an easy time in a class that others struggled in.

- I talked to the professors - the students there weren't motivated, but the professors were nonetheless interested in their own field, and they were especially happy to find a student who was interested. This is especially key if you need recommendation letters for transferring, study abroad, or grad school.

- I found a better curriculum online. At some point it's going to come down to what you know, not where you learned it, so just do your best to reduce the gap between you and people who went someplace with a better curriculum.

- I transferred out. You don't necessarily have to go that far, though. Whether you're in a bad job, school, or situation, one of the best things you can do is to come up with a solid plan to get out of it, or to at least compensate for it. The light at the end of the tunnel gives you the motivation to do everything else.

- I took my general education classes there. When I transferred, I fought to get credit for them, and so I was able to spend more time on classes in my major and minor. Also, don't overlook your side interests - things like study abroad also look good on resumes and the like, and are useful for networking outside of your field.

Things I didn't do that I wish I had:

- Went to user groups and conferences and networked. Networking is one big thing you'll miss out on at a school that's weak in your field.

- Worked on open source projects, or smaller personal projects. My biggest mistake in college was lack of balance - I spent a lot of time reading the best material I could find (and still do), but I've got very little that's concrete to show for it. In interviews, a nice github account and some practice coding at a whiteboard goes a lot further than your college's name.

If you're worried about grad school, one thing you could try is picking a subfield that you like, and getting in contact with professors from schools that you'd like to go to who are in that field.
I completely agree with your original post. Relying entirely on Facebook is foolish as they have complete control. On the other hand, ignoring Facebook is also foolish. People share links, and for major news sources/outlets will continue to do so but there's a lot of value in being present on a social network.

I think the smart thing to do is to take precautions. Host your content and auto-post it to Facebook, Twitter, etc. You should also have some way to contact your users/fans directly so that if things like this happen you can notify them.
It all comes down to having a decent place to eat, use the restroom and sleep. After that the only necessity is electricity and internet.
Well, loldongs was taken!
8500 series
The article seems to downplay the 2-day shipping aspect of Prime. I think they're missing the point -- yes, free shipping is nice, but for many people, getting what you ordered in two days in very nice.
Yea it's interesting. When human organizations grow big they usually opt for dictatorial control. Rome got an emperor because the senate became dysfunctional as the empire grew. China was unified under one kingdom, one emperor.

It must have something to do with information overload. In huge groups there are many special interests vying for control, ultimately decisions have to be made but those groups put out so much information its impossible to base decisions on it.
This shouldn't be downvoted just because it's disagreed with: it's a cogent and well-sourced argument, which should be met with a rebuttal rather than silent disapproval.
I think it's because we believe that once we pay for something, it's our right to do whatever we want with it...

So, if you rent a car, does that mean its OK to drive it around the corner and sell it to someone else? you paid to get hold of the car, so it's yours, yes?

Oh, wait, no it isn't. You paid to rent it for a finite period under certain conditions, and signed a contract to that effect. the same is usually the case where software is concerned, but since you don't like the terms of the software contract too much, you feel free to ignore it, and redefine your licensing of the software as a purchase, granting yourself all kinds of new rights which the original creator never intended to give to end users. Now, you're welcome to say that software is way overpriced or those terms are so onerous you refuse to comply with them, a point of view I have some sympathy with. But at least be honest about the fact that you're choosing to ignore the contractual terms offered by the licensor and agreed to by the licensee.

edit: I don't mind being downvoted, but at least point out why you think the argument is flawed. Otherwise you're just blaming the weatherman for telling you that its raining.
I love it. I hate going to the store and standing in line, so now I'll end up buying something on Amazon and just wait the 2 days to get it instead of driving to the store. It doesn't hurt that it's usually cheaper, either... And you never have to worry about it being out of stock when you get there. You can always see right on the site for sure.

I wish they'd do groceries and then I would have to deal with that, either.
I think everyone is missing the one main reason blackberrys wont be replaced. The blackberry enterprise server that allows buisness's to control everything. I may be wrong in assuming the iphone/android dont have the same, but as far as I know they don't.

Having that control is very important to most companys.

Just my two cents.
I'll have to show this to my girlfriend later. She's been diagnosed as Schizophrenic, but has never agreed with that diagnosis.
I'm still working on http://plumrss.com/. What should have been an MVP has evolved into something slightly more than that, but we're still pushing features in where we can.

Hopefully it'll be crammed full for November, but there are a few big features that have been pushed til December.
I would say much the opposite.

Given the fact that schizophrenics seem to have different brain morphology, it seems that whatever causes it has organizational, not activational effects.

That is to say, the brain is permanently damaged during a critical period in a child's life, which leads to these effects later on. If it is a virus, perhaps it could be prevented, but almost certainly not cured.
I hate the idea of installing a million apps for every little service out there. If you ask me, building a simple mobile website which caters to the most common things people will want to do with your site. I think Google calendar is a good example, and both Commonwealth Bank and Bendigo Bank in Australia have done good mobile sites.

Frankly the trend towards device specific appllication support is a massive PITA. It's like we only just got over the problems of people having to choose which web browsers to support and we are approaching some semblance of standars when Apple and the iPhail come along and ruin it all over again. now everything is apps apps apps and device vendors (especially Apple) are actively taking steps to prevent people from using solutions that make cross platform deployment easier.

Boycott the apps and return to reason!!!
http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

By Cory Doctorow
#DIV/0!
Site says "SNAP development is currently on hold" (http://snap.sonydeveloper.com/). Dead on arrival?
Translated to English:
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...
It's frankly ridiculous how you guys criticize Mozilla for all these things, when they are practically the only organization in the whole internet which continues to value privacy.
Possibly spec explosion but it is there:

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-display/#the-display-outside
All of which doesn’t say whether it’s the host or the attendee that gets to determine whether this feature is on or off.
It only tracks if the Zoom window has focus, not via facial recognition. How is that bad?
Yet.

There is an incentive to do so and they have taken measures to legally protect themselves if they do. That's grounds enough for alarm, even without evidence of them actually doing it.
I don’t see why this was downvoted as it is certainly an interesting discussion- will this crisis prompt the wealthiest nation in the world to enact a suitable response to a viral pandemic?

My opinion is a strong no. After hurricanes and floods, we simply rebuild houses where they once stood and forget they ever happened. Our modern hurricane response is nothing to be proud of.

Before WW1, Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world. They controlled the seas of the entire world and despite having one of the smaller populations, could bend huge populations to their will (e.g. India). It took only 4 years for an enormous transfer of wealth to take place from the British Empire, which had itself been sucking up the wealth of the world for centuries, to the United States. The financial hub of the world moved from London to New York. I could certainly see it moving again, and right now the most likely candidate is Beijing.
I saw an image of the rate of total diagnosed cases per day of Italy vs the USA and the curves appear to overlap suggesting were going to see a similar swell and they're preparing for it. I've not confirmed any of this but everything else I've read seems to suggest that this may be the case.

I live in NYC with elderly family members as well as at-risk family members. I also have family in CA. My Friends are also in the same boat.

Unfortunately my business is critical so it will remain open though they are taking this very seriously. They have a rigorous cleaning policy as well as split shifting a crazy schedule to minimize people in the building at once yet moving production along. All office people who can work remote (not me, im tech) are home with laptops. Thankfully I have my own microwave and fridge in my pretty isolated office so im hunkering down there by myself. Only bringing food prepared at home which I have a little stock of. They also said I am free to hide all I want unless it's an emergency which is usually once a week when some old machine decides to throw a hissy fit.
That doesn't even remotely follow from what I wrote.

But thanks for your very helpful link to wikipedia.
The analogy is not about the difficulty of quitting, but about externalized costs. Quitting oil won't improve your life in any way, and if you look at the lists of reasons to quit fb, most of them are not of individual concern. Just like climate change, they are collective problems. Asking people to change their habits to improve society almost never works. Taxes and regulation work.
I don’t begrudge them their money. But I feel a lot more at ease depending on a company whose business model is I give them money and they give me stuff and that they are doing so profitably. That’s part of the reason that I’m a big fan of companies like Backblaze and JetBrains.

I worked as a dev lead for one company where we were our vendors largest customer (over 60% of their revenue). I recommended that we either don’t depend on that vendor for our new implementation when contract renewals came or that we insisted on them putting their code in escrow in case they were sold and they abandoned the software.
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did.

Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?

In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
> People in power exploit those they control to get more wealth and power.

True, if we include bureaucrats. Otherwise that's a just-so story leftists tell to cement their grip on power.

Despite the US Federal government controlling over 36% of all money spent in the economy, it's not enough cause oligarchs. Meanwhile our nomenklatura are pure of heart, selfless with only the interests of the people at heart.
Does anybody have some words of wisdom / articles / tutorials / books on TDD for your typical web applications?

I am asking because for me, writing tests before the code is a natural choice for pure functions where I can easily map inputs to outputs. I cannot imagine writing that kind of code without tests.

But the usual task is gluing together tons of components and 3rd party calls (e.g. starting from an HTTP request, doing some transformations, calling some APIs maybe, persisting stuff in the database).

All of this depends on tons of side effects and hard to mock components. The only test I can write there easily is a full contract that mapping the HTTP request to HTTP response.

This doesn't help me with developing the internals (definitely not TDD), it only verifies the end result.

Even worse if there is no clear response but the result is piped into some queue over the network or something similar.

I am either completely incompetent or I develop applications that are tons of hard to test stuff (especially with simple unit tests) with only tiny core of functionality that seems easy to test.
The way we ascribe consciousness to entities other than ourselves is based on similarity to ourselves.

Obviously other living humans have the highest similarity, so they are automatically deemed conscious. Next are other primates, followed by other domesticated mammals, and other animals.

Furthest from the status of conscious are creatures we see as automata like dung beetles rolling their food, or jellyfish ... jellyfishing.

Presumably we'd apply a similar process to hypothetical AGIs.
> A custom virtual DOM engine is in place, which is incredibly fast since there is no need to parse templates. It can achieve up to 30.000 real DOM manipulations so far.

Without context or comparison, statements like this are useless fluff. Is 30k high or low, depending on how you arrived at that number, it could be either. How does it compare to other existing solutions?
Since the western lifestyle produces 17 tons/person/year, even if that $100/ton we're a scalable reality it would still be way too expensive. One way to pay for that would be a carbon tax, but it's becoming pretty obvious at this point that environmentalists are going to lose the argument for doing anything at the coordinated global governments level, so that means the only possible salvation is going to come if someone can figure out how to make money from it. The price needs to be negative per ton. Let's hope that capitalists can save us.
I believe there is a bug here. If the first character is an instance of c, then it will still be copied. For example, calling the function as condense_by_removing ("loup-vailiant", 'l'), will return "loup-vaiiant", where it should return "oup-vaiiant".

(I've not tested this though, I may be wrong.)
> Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser.

Also, Instapaper. Marco Arment (IP developer) once wrote that some people use IP not for articles they want to read later but for articles they want to read right now, just because it's so good at making articles readable.
> Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default?

Reader is not an adblocker anymore than Readability or Instapaper are.

You guys are completely insane and blowing this out of proportion. Reader is a manually triggered page reformatter, essentially Readability built in, you have to already be on the page and you have to have seen the ads before Reader is even available.

The ars article is one of the few that got me to headdesk in years, it's unbelievably stupid.
Getting a boob job is not only an action, it's expensive, physically invasive, and is usually done to achieve or fulfill an image of oneself that one believes can't be fulfilled in any other way than by having bigger boobs. I'd say it says a heck of a lot about someone.
And: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385745
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385736
http://imgur.com/IY9uJ.png
Check out hyperbiotics. They had a submission here a while back, and have both probiotic and prebiotic products. They were started by microbiome researchers.

Also I’ve heard promising things about fecal transplants for biome restoration.
Shouldn't a protocol as important as HTTP get more than two weeks?
Happened in 1981:

Mortgage rates: https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-...

Housing prices: https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices...

Inflation-adjusted housing prices went down about 20%. Nominal home prices basically stayed constant for about 2 years, then resumed marching upwards.

Also note that the actual bloodbath happened from 2006-2012 (when the housing crash took prices down about 35%). It does not correspond to any major increase in interest rates. The primary driver seems to be foreclosures, which in turn was driven by ARMs and poor lending standards. Conclusion might be that interest rates just don't matter that much as long as a majority of people are on fixed-rate mortgages, while they can matter a lot if folks are on ARMs they can't afford. (Interestingly, we may get a similar crash of multi-family housing in the near future, since all the tenants not paying rent now is having a similar effect on mortgages.)
Apple exposes standard aarch64 to developers.
Oh no, this is not available in Canada?
I didn't read this article but I did decide to use Prolog (which I didn't know prior) for this year's Advent of Code. I ended up solving the first 8 days (so, 16 puzzles) and it was fun.

What I got out of the experience:

1. Intellectual confidence - it's not often that we get to learn not just a new way of doing something but a new paradigm. I am 38, and while I try to challenge myself in all areas of life, how often is something a true mind-bender? The fact that I was able to wrap my head around (some of) the Prolog way of doing things proves to me that I "still got it" and is good exercise for keeping it that way.

2. One specific thing about Prolog is heavy reliance on recursion. I probably "get" recursion better than an average CS grad but this took me to the next level - I will be able to apply it in other languages.

3. There's something about Prolog that makes programing feel like this: a ton of thinking up front, but once you do it, the implementation is bug-free (versus lots of fiddling around in other languages). I guess that's probably true of non-imperative languages in general, but it was a nice change of pace. I am not a full-time programmer anymore (product manager) so for me coding is mainly fun/intellectual and doing it in a way that removes the fiddling is great.

4. Prolog feels very retro, I can't really explain it but it doesn't try to be cool - it's the opposite of say the latest JS framework that is polished to the 9s. Prolog feels more like the cockpit of a fighter jet - sparse and powerful, but you have to know how to use the tools.

5. The community is cool. I found the IRC channel and folks were very generous with their time, though to be fair I asked questions like: "I implemented X like this, is that canonical?" vs "how do I do X?"

6. I am glad to have Prolog in my toolkit. I can imagine problems down the road where logic programming is the best tool and I know I can reach for it now.

Bonus: a few posters in this thread asked about the ROI of learning a retro language given that they could be learning something else. I think it's totally up to you, but looking back on the list above, almost none of the benefits I enjoyed are that I now know Prolog. So I guess you have to pick and chose your challenges, I wouldn't get the same value from learning Fortran77 and I wouldn't expect anyone else to either. Prolog is different enough from whatever else you're doing that it can grow you beyond learning some minute detail of React Hooks (which are great, btw!)
Isn't this essentially what they're doing with Amazon Basics and probably almost every other Amazon-owned brand?

They will let sellers scout products, and then squeeze them out after they have a product that's proven to move. It's better for Amazon this way, you can externalize lots of risk while still making a fat commission + assorted fees.
Hella pivot.
To save you a click:

- Because the author likes it.

- Because it's different.

- Because very few other people like it.

Is this really an effective pitch to students who are looking for an efficient way to use their limited resources?
That's crazy, how about we lock up the janitorial staff as well. They were the toes