jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I have tried out LearnObit and it is amazing. It is kinda like RemNote but with a few more features. RemNote has a better design currently though I am sure LearniObit will catch up pretty soon. The founder (Sungho) is pretty cool and Responsive too. I recommend you folks giving it a try at least.
> This is really beginning to concern me. I think we’ve created a fake plastic economy built on face plastic house prices. By stoking the bubble, the purchase and renovation of housing keeps pushing money through the economy.

This has been an issue for a long time now. There should have been a crash in 2008/2009 but instead the government in the UK decided to prop up house prices with various schemes. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, for many people, house owners and people looking to purchase, this helped people stay out of negative equity/allowed people to purchase their own home.

> By constantly remortgaging, new value is “created” which allows people to have a new kitchen, go on holiday, buy a car, extend their house. But it feels like a trick to me. I’m not an economist, but where’s the wealth creation here?

I'm not sure remortgaging is creating new value. All money is loaned into existence, remortgaging is just creating new debt secured on your home. It still has to be paid back. People could still get loans, just not perhaps at the same favorable rate.

There has been a lot of money printing over the past 10 years or so, I think rising house prices are a natural result of that. I think it's more of a case of decreasing purchasing power of the £ in your pocket, rather than homes rising in value. Have a look at this chart when house prices are compared with gold[0]. It's also a function of the availability of loans, since now you can borrow cheaply over long periods, this increases the total amount people are able to borrow, as it's much easier to service the debt.

What's more surprising to me is that we're not really seeing inflation in other areas of the economy, such as wages or consumer goods. Inflation has been surprising low since the crisis of 2008/2009.

[0] http://pricedingold.com/uk-house-prices/
This "simple" approach will also lead to all kinds of problems quite quickly once you grow past one concurrent user.

If you really must use JSON, at least use SQLite in place of open().
SQL is not a functional language. Sure, it's non-OO, in the sense that data structures don't encapsulate functionality, but so is C.
> since they lose 100% of the stuff that made BTC attractive in the first place

Not so. They still allow speculation on BTC price volatility and "get rich quick" gambles is what drove most of Bitcoin growth in the past few years. If anything, the big exchanges make Bitcoin even more suitable for speculation than if it was on the blockchain, since you can trade way more if you don't have to wait several blocks for your trade to be confirmed.
If someone cannot think about a topic without classifying the genitals of the discussed people irrespective of what they are talking about, you'd probably not be wrong to take notice of that.

Not that it matters, but, expecting the whole world to share the same perversion is a bit too much..
Causes is hiring software engineers & sysadmins in Berkeley (soon to be SF): http://exchange.causes.com/jobs/

25MM+ active users, Ruby, distributed databases. Lots of scaling challenges.

Oh yeah, and it's all to raise money and awareness for charity. You know, saving the world. But actually instead of kinda.
But: the 'secrets' about this model were pretty much as expected. Improved iPhone models are released like clockwork each summer. And the meme "your Apple product will be replaced by a better one in 6 months" is so strong it's a recurring joke on talk shows and late-night TV. So I think your 'hard-to-quantify' on buyers is in fact 'negligible' -- or failing that, 'outweighed by knocking news of all competitors off the front-pages for a couple weeks'.
Yea for me its Comcast or bust and I live in Pittsburgh... So about that competition.
raising the retirement age to 70

That's idiotic. The official US unemployment rate is nearly 10%. The U6 unemployment rate, which is probably closer to what one actually means when one asks "how many people are looking for work" is twice that high. One in every four Americans who wants a job does not have one and we're going to raise the retirement age? What earthly good will that do?
I'm the same way.... the only problem is that there are clear health-risks associated with the reduced melatonin levels you get from sleeping during the day (unless you can REALLY effectively darken your room).

Worse, as a company founder it can be very difficult living on that schedule. A frightening amount of life occurs before 9AM for most people.

I don't really have an answer... I struggle with my sleeping habits every day. I do know that I'd really like to be on a sun centric schedule, however.
If someone has a recent clone and the licence was compatible, is there a reason a fork can't be started?
Unfortunately most places (AFAIK) don't actually have options between high-speed ISPs (I'm excluding DSL). The market doesn't work so well for utilities...I'd almost prefer government regulation, just not in this direction.
>only goal is to take 1 penny and turn it into 4 pennies

That reminds me of what he said about "the thing that feels least reasonable is some early-stage valuations." His interests lie in driving early stage valuations down and later stage values up. And that's exactly what he's saying here.
What I see as the underlying problem is that most of those topics are fairly limited in scope. They are interpreted as controversial and potentially mind-expanding topics, but they are only controversial in the sense that sports teams are controversial. There might be mutual understanding, but it probably won't be that deep.

We are mostly stuck in eternal bikeshedding.
Important note for those unfamiliar with Suzuki: this quote is usually understood to be praising the beginner's mind, which is full of possibilities and without prejudice,[0] and pointing out the weakness of the expert's mind.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
Yes. I'm confident that a charismatic person could walk into any bar anywhere in the world, and get some of the people there to sing along with an offensive song. I'm not quite sure how someone who's familiar with bars or alcohol in general could doubt this.

I'm equally confident that most of the people who sang along did not actually want to throw Jews down a well.
I could never put my finger on what makes social advertising more scary than traditional media until I read your comment. Maybe the solution is that every ad needs to be published in a public form that people can review and comment on.
I worked for about half a year on a DHS contract and quit once the family separations started, and spoke to someone last night about why they're still working there: "Well, if we don't do it, someone else will."

Which is, I guess, probably true, but man is that a weak way to justify contributing to an atrocity.
>Going uphill on mountains means you're going downhill which not only doesn't use power but regenerates power to the battery.

If you are pulling a trailer (let's say a camping trailer) you are likely going to stay a few days at a place before returning home and going down those hills you went up.
It's about the aims.

Sacha Baron Cohen does it for comedic effect. Others do it to influence elections, destabilise societies, hurt minorities etc.
>Probably yes,

real vote of confidence there.
Great ideas -- thanks! A couple of people have suggested similar, though selling to hedge funds.

Right now, I think the greatest growth is still from adding more brands and making them more accessible (improving search and navigation), to yield more traffic. Spinning up a new product and sales channel might be a distraction, but definitely worth thinking about as the site grows.
I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Paul Graham and Robert Morris started their own company was because they didn't want to take a job writing software for Windows.

I also believe the guys who started ITA software wanted a problem domain where they could justify using Lisp.

So there are a few precedents for finding an excuse to use more expressive languages to solve challenging problems, in a way that makes money.
Not really an answer, but the flicker fusion frequency varies between subjects and depends hugely on both the subject's physiological state and the kind of flicker. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold lists seven factors (size, color, where it occurs on the retina, contrast, etc)

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/User:Eugene_M._Izhikevic... shows some curves that show the effect of several of these factors.
What I don't get is why they didn't inject a script into all html passing through the firewall. That would have achieved a much greater effect if they really wanted to take out GitHub - the Baidu Analytics tracker is just a single script.
My modest contribution to the discussion:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3949

The paywalled (published) version is here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=675419...
That's the price that's paid for such leverage. High employee count is better protection from competitors but more expensive. Leaner teams are cheaper but may be susceptible to competitors. Of course, caveats abound as many times leaner companies are the ones that can move faster, see startups.

This is all very similar to standing armies. The more people, the more expense but better protection. What countries do, therefore, is let other countries do part of their jobs, ie US protecting many other countries who don't have large militaries. I'm not sure what the analogue is in business, maybe partnerships?
A messaging app is not a personal choice like using Debian or FreeBSD, it is about community.

I have iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram on my phone. Each one is used to reach a certain group of people. I also have Signal, but nobody is on there and I never use it.
Just wanted to say thanks for your extended answers. I haven't had time to look at the links yet, but this is exactly the sort of detail I was hoping for. I appreciate it!
On google.com from the US, I see "Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline".
Perhaps you're right. But when I wrote the post, I was a grunt intern at a little known startup.

Fast forward just over a year, and I'm the CEO of an innovative education startup with investors that backed Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, etc.

Things have changed drastically in the past year, and it's because I'm going as fast as I possible can.

But you're right, there's more to life than work. I suppose it's all just a series of trade-offs.
Like you, I can't find the exact info, but I'm pretty sure it was an episode of Aircrash Investigations. I saw a repeat with that episode a few months ago.

I didn't come away with the impression that they'd actually implemented blast-proof though, just that they'd redesigned so that some blasts wouldn't dramatically cause airframe failure.
I don't think that server side frameworks will become irrelevant. There is still a lot of value they add between the database and the HTTP interface. The part that will become irrelevant is the servlet/ASP/JSP/ERB and similar view-layers, where page-rendering policy is executed on the server. With more & more clients getting ever more powerful processors (including iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and Android), the client can do the job of executing the page-rendering policy.

This will mean that many applications will be able to stuff their JS (which will have to codify page-rendering policy), CSS, and static files on S3, and use the server just for authentication, authorization, activation, and data. My coding experience with Rails, ASP.Net, and PHP tells me that the most frustrating and error-prone part of using web frameworks is the templating language where you have client-side code and server-side code mixed in in the same source code file in three or four different languages (e.g. Ruby, JS, ERB, CSS).

Authentication is the big issue here, but don't all of the cool kids use OAuth, FB Connect, JanRain Engage or something like that these days? If so, then once you authenticate yourself to your applications via your identity provider, only a session token between a client and server is needed to authenticate per request. (Or you could use an additional challenge-response token to one-up the man-in-the-middle attackers).

The SEO side of this has some interesting possibilities. Of course, this technology will hurt the search engines, because your content will be much harder for them to index. Most folks will find it hard (at least initially) to use Google's prescribed tricks to make your AJAX page bot-friendly. On the other hand, it also means that your application gains some information asymmetry (because your content cannot be easily found and compared with similar content on the web), and you could use that to your financial advantage. The key here is to give the search engine enough static content as index-bait to get your site's name "out there" and on page 1 of the search engine rankings, but not so much that all of your valuable content is indexed and commoditized to the advantage of Google/Yahoo/Bing.
Delphi was, pre .net days.

It had a handful of assembler code to bootstrap it, and from there it built upon itself
"Yeah, as we all know no drugs ever have negative side effects while still having positive effects. But okay, I agree that high people are less likely to perform well. All that is, however, besides the point: if they don't work well, you can fire them. You don't have to bring up pot to make your case; they aren't doing their job well, they're out. The law allows you to kick people out because they don't do the job well."

What I'm saying is the wording of the law that didn't pass in Cali was such that it would allow for people that were pot users to not be discriminated against in the work place. Since it was fairly vague, it could easily be used against the employer if those people were ever fired.

"Again, how many people do you see coming to work drunk? I'd guess not many. Why do they not come to work drunk?"

Are there any specific laws that say that an alcoholic can't be discriminated against by a potential employer? I don't think there are. This is the difference.

Also, it's much easier to detect if a person is drunk (smelling it on their breath, motor skills are affected). I know lots of people that smoke instead of drink because they don't want to get a DUI.
Something like this has been sorely needed. I'm wondering if it's possible to generalize this over different OSes, if the code itself is multi-platform, or there is some way to specify hints for it (or should there be). I also go to Stanford so would be easy to discuss this in depth if you want.
or editing your yc application.
My only regret is not waiting until the next pre-release to report them.
Waiting for the price/capacity to drop. IE: waiting for them to become a touch more mainstream.
Sounds like a humblebrag to me:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870457070457627...
Yes, pure insider trading seems a lot like theft. But it doesn't seem likely that most hedge funds depend on it. It would be a remarkably well executed subterfuge if all those quants were just window-dressing.
Not surprised to be honest. I can see this being on CNN for the next few days and everyone talking about it, but it won't do any harm to that ridiculous apple profit margins.
All winter I've been wearing wool and layers. Id argue that the hot sun makes you sweat more. At least with layers you can peel them off.
I mostly program in ruby, but have been working with objective-c more lately, so I can try to summarize what my thinking with a few examples:

- Why do I have to begin every string with @? I know the technical reason why, and the difference between having it and not having it, but I don’t want to type it all the time.

- Every time I type CGRectZero as an argument, I think "the method should just assume I want a CGRectZero, and if not, then I’ll tell it otherwise"

- It's distracting to my thought process to surround everything with []. That could just be a result of not spending enough time in the language

- Typing the name of every argument becomes tiresome after a while. Auto-complete does help some.

- I don’t see it in this example, but I often see cases which alloc an object, set another object to that object (usually doing some data massaging in the process), and then release the first object. In ruby, it would be a single (short) line.

I think (hope) that as I get better with the language, many of those annoyances fade away. Looking at it now, I think I could summarize it all with: The default of objective-c is to be verbose, and the default for ruby is to be terse.

edit: the "alloc, set, release" paradigm can be found in part 2, step 1.
It falls inline with the: to:, from: cc: bcc: ... operators.
The author's argument hinges on humans creating more intelligent AI, not humans genetically engineering beings capable of evolving greater intelligence than humans. I would also argue that humans engineering new species isn't exactly "natural" in an evolutionary sense. The author even points out that he isn't considering natural evolution in his argument.
Does Posterous filter SEO spam? Otherwise this loophole seems like a perfect opportunity for SEO spam to start filtering in on lapsed accounts that still have some PageRank...
Interesting, but does anybody know why they are all so mad that he was shot (as opposed to killed with a lethal injection)?

It just seems that with shooting, we at least know what will happen and how not to fuck it up.
I'd be interested to know.

I know these guys are smart, so I just hope it's not one of these cases where a couple of people think that some products are not well done but that they know how to do it right and clean, to realize later that the reason other sites are like this (plastered with ads for example) is because, in the long-term, there is no other way.

For example, AirBnB came out to solve a problem with short-term rentals, with real people and real reviews from other real people. In my experience, the reality is that most of the offers are actually the same professionals you find in regular rental sites, with sometimes the same unclear and deceptive rates, and without many reviews from real people. (YMMV) When I realized that, I felt that they started out with an idealistic goal that couldn't be really fulfilled. Hoping the same thing wouldn't happen with HipMunk.
Landlines are from a different era of expected reliability. They carry their own power because it was considered too unreliable to depend on your home's electricity.
The site operator himself said that there were pop-ups, it's not a false alarm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844978
All that matters is the behavior, which SQLite has very well defined because it's a bit wonky out of maintaining backwards compatibility. Even the fundamental algorithms will still translate, so all that's needed is to compile it or something logically similar for the system with whatever compiler it allows. Heck, it'd probably be easier than implementing off an abstract spec, especially when you consider most of the optimizations will still translate but do not need to be discovered.

If such a system exists, it won't be able to run the vast majority of stuff out there. Re-implementing SQLite will be the least of its concerns.
Opera Mini doesn't render HTML, it renders OBML — essentially a binary serialisation of a device-specific render-tree. The HTML->OBML conversion is done in the cloud.
I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM.

It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can do:

$ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer -

To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer.

As a side note, I found this humorous:

> It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology.

Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it.

To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is laughable.
The one second launch window made any hold an abort :(
Asterisks * * (in Arc? Or just on HN?) is used to start and end italics, so has a tendency to disappear. I'm surprised to learn you got them with the space - seems to do that when there's nothing to italicise.
Plan to spend a lot of time first narrowing down the time window of interest so it doesn't overflow its recording buffer, and then waiting for it to run at 1/100 speed.

I used to use it. It was so painful and limited that I think it helped only a single time, and was all in all a net loss in productivity.
Yes, please stop selling out your neighbors' data for a few bags of silver.
> The issue is that code is read more often than it is interpreted, written, or compiled.

In a Lisp system, the code is always there and not just in textual forms.

> All the beautiful aspects of lisp make it decidedly unwieldy in production software. There’s a tendency of projects written in lisps to be unwritten in lisps as they mature.

There are two main factors which lead to Lisp software being rewritten:

1) deployment. In the early days it was the lack of resources (memory, speed, ...), but there are other factors like having a robust runtime or the ability to integrate in larger software around it.

2) familiarity. There are not many people available to maintain Lisp software. Not because the syntax is strange, but because the whole language is strange. There are no major other programming languages which work like Lisp, so few people can productively program in it. There are exceptions to it, like the simple Lisp used in AutoCAD and related software. These have millions of installations and the complexity on the Lisp side is not that huge - there it's mostly used as a simple interactive programming language.

What makes Lisp actually difficult for programmers is not the syntax, but the pervasive use of code as data, code transformations, various ways of meta-programming, etc. It's the features it was developed for: computing with symbolic expressions - here even applied to itself.

The language Lisp was built to compute with symbolic expressions, then the idea that a Lisp program is itself a symbolic expression is tempting... this then leads to center programming activities around this idea.
I've seen consulting being suggested freq as a viable gig to support yourself when you run out of money to pay the bills. How does this work? Register on Upwork or fiverr? What if your capabilities as a consultant are inadequate? What if you struggle more than you actually did at a full time job? How do you position yourself for the gig?
As usual, you are both right. There are terrible knockoffs and there are the ones that even people very well versed in all things Lego have a hard time telling from the original when just given two otherwise identical bricks.
And how many people should be working. In a perfect world maybe people should only be working for a couple of months a year for social reasons.

That would show up in the statistics as mass unemployment and total economic collapse.
If that's the type of bot you're targetting, then there are better, simpler methods which don't involve having to make the user jump through hoops. Example:

https://secure.grepular.com/Blocking_Comment_Spam_Using_ModS...

That trick blocks bots from posting comment spam on my blog every single day, and it hasn't failed once since I started using it months ago.