jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The typical claim is stock market returns are entirely random, not based on skill, so any returns that beat the perfectly efficient market are purely due to chance.

Beating the market (no matter the margin) is purported to be a 50-50 chance, and doing so 40 times in a row would happen by chance less than 1 in a trillion times.

(That is, if you accept the premise that stock market investing has no skill component.)
Successful social businesses have a big moat in the form of network effects. If it were any easier to cross the social-networking moat, Facebook would not have paid $19 billion for Whatsapp. Attracting and retaining users is hard.

I know of multiple ways of trying to estimate the magnitude of network effects. All come up with social networks creating O(n log(n)) value for users. If true, that result demonstrates that network effects are significant, but a better competitor does not have to have nearly the scale you'd think to be able to compete head on against the big giants.

That said, I wouldn't recommend going head to head versus FB for your next startup. But there will be no shortage of future companies posing a threat to FB like the one that FB posed to MySpace before it. And like MySpace posed to Friendster earlier on.

Let's be honest. FB has a lot of advantages here. They are the first mover, they have a ton of resources, and they have appropriate levels of paranoia about this issue. But still I'd give them substantially less than even odds of being the social king when, say, 2030 rolls around.
I wonder what "put it under the mattress" even means anymore. Inflation seems like an obvious way to push money to ever more risky investment, but that comes with plenty of other problems.

Maybe limiting the supply of Treasury bills would somehow make that money find a better return. Limiting "risk free" structures is the only way alternative i can think of.
Huh. I never knew that was there. I'll remember this next time I'm around Charleston.
And what happens if there's a server wipe while installing SSL? How can you accurately recommend improvements to query data in a data set if you don't know the schema/scale?

Magic is fine for a no interface interface since no human interaction is necessary. If a random faceless person on the Internet was touching my technical property, there had better be sufficient assurance of liability in play because there is no element of trust.
Because it is wrong. The comment is claiming that the comment author has overturned well understood results, when they have not done so.
I could never put more eloquently. Chilling effect and slippery slope.
There are also plenty of reasons it might not suck too. A negative spin can be put on any situation, and I agree that not everyone has a posh commute in a nice car, or in a nice part of town, or on a nice rail line.

But the way I see it is that you have two choices: you can change the situation or you can change your outlook on it. Sometimes you can do the first one, but it doesn't always work out. At this point you should look to do the second one. If you don't do either, well I guess you can wait for a covid situation to do the changing for you.

Also, cycling absolutely increases the risk of accidents...doing almost anything at night increases the risk of something going wrong. I don't see how that point plays into anything. If my ride home is 30 minutes and I need to stay focused not to crash, then I ride attentively and consider it a workout. Yay I just worked out 22 extra days a year.
What is consumption? Food? Sure. House? Car? Art? Insurance? Medical?
It’s not easy. Neither is income.
We are merely observing the footsteps of compiler gods.
I love cycling, on the Summer, no way I am arriving completely wet facing blazing rain, icy roads or snow.

Not my thing.

As for public transportation, that is a great option, when it isn't a single bus every hour, taking 1h 30m to destination, which can be done in 30m with a car.
Car centric infrastructure forces people to own cars.
This is unhelpful because it's unclear what your intent is, other than a general rebuke.

More helpful would be something like
"This is not correct. Anecdotally I've found ..." or
"It is unfair to expect that everyone can ..."
Hi, thank you for the list.

I'm now learning Clojure and simplicity and power of lisp just blows my mind, really happy to write on it. But I wonder what of these books do you recommend to read to those people who are using Clojure?
I didn't know that in most countries it is forbidden to hide money under a mattress. This is news to me.
Those too, but Coinbase will generate pretty constant revenue (depending on trading volume) while GPU manufacturers have the additional expense and risk of R&D, production and distribution.

Not to diminish Coinbase's work of course, they're dealing with a ton of international regulation. Their trade is probably more a legal one than a software engineering one.
> We might get there with Uber-like carpods if autonomous driving ever succeeds.

In theory, why not? However, this relies on car-oriented road infrastructure as it is today, which has a serious environmental price (seriously look it up), and also some social impact. So it's still a very "expensive" solution.

But even given roads, it would be interesting to run a survey of ecological impact of autonomous electronic vehicles compared to conventional (gasoline) cars. I'm pretty sure an autonomous vehicle full of electronics would have a considerably more negative impact, if only because of all the gasoline needed to mine/refine all the fancy rare earths and metal you'll need for that (but there's considerably more externalities to account for).

Also worth considering: here in southern France it's really not uncommon, when the bus is not too crowded, that i just ask the friendly driver to take a small detour and drop me where i need. That's the kind of thing you can envision in a civilized society, where not everyone is only thinking about their own personal duties and desires.
Would love to hear others experiences. I’ve used both firebase and amplify.

My concerns with firebase are: Google kills products at a whim, security rules are horrible.

Amplify seems more powerful so more likely to work long term, directly uses AWS “full strength”.

Concerns with Amplify: their npm libraries seem to be a colossal mess (they have old and new libraries that have to be partially used in tandem, and the docs use a sprinkling of each), plenty of odd bugs seems to crop up, the DataStore cache confuses me, idiomatic usage is not obvious - the fact that it’s composed of so many layers means it is not obvious which level of abstraction to interact with, and CLIs have flaws that seem blindingly obvious in design, which makes me worry about quality overall.

Should I stick with Amplify of return back to warm and fuzzy firebase (before Google dump it at random) and risk its limitations?
It’s only less complicated if you exclude the years of research into the techniques and we’re seeing delays manufacturing because those are not easy to scale. This work started in the 2000s so I think it’d be closer to thinking of how long it took to build a bomb after you had developed the physics, built the mines and processing systems, etc. To me it really highlights how easy it is for us to forget how much science depends on less publicized work - there must have been hundreds of people whose careers went into the manufacturing techniques alone.
Whether your claim is true or not, there’s more to a product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects poorly on the Linode team.
It varies a lot. For many years I mostly listened to heavy metal or hip-hop while coding. I've also always listened to classical music instead, at times. But more and more over the last couple of years I've drifted to listening to synthwave / darkwave / retrowave type stuff when coding. It's still a mix of "all of the above" but the ratio has gradually skewed more and more in favor of the synthwave stuff.

Every once in a while I'll opt for something completely different like one of those "coffee shop sounds" tracks or something.
Interesting counterpoint. It would come down to how things net out. And it won't be stable over time. I'm still of the view that programmers systematically overvalue their convenience, because it's a value/cost tradeoff that they directly experience.
Not what you're looking for, but your comment reminded me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_%28short_story%29
When the right control most of the media "We will have 20 hour work weeks!". When the left control most of the media "capitalism will destroy us all!".
I would, if I could ssh to my linode.
I'm a big Forrst fan, thanks for the site! It has become my new place to go for inspiration/motivation when I need it.

Now when do we find out what Acorns are for? ;)
Awesome course, I've been really enjoying it, for the first lecture and a half or so it was review (for me) of the MVC paradigm, but it was explained very well and actually gave me some new perspective on it. I love that Stanford gives this away!
If they are so predictable then you must know how they will respond to being provoked with condescending names such as "Randroids?" Is there a specific response you want to see? Are you trying to exploit some known stack overflow bug in this specific Randroid model?

Why be so dismissive and insulting and then respond to the same poster you advised others to ignore?

I'd much rather read the predictable respectful discussion than a presumptive judgement designed to prevent discourse.

Edit: removed a redundant adjective.
>guaranteed minimal income always reduces it

Not necessarily - simply provide everyone, no matter their income level with the basic payment; that also decreases the paperwork and the power of the bureaucracy to bully the recipients. Then, since everyone has the minimum to live on, have a fairly high, fixed percentage, income tax on all income. There would be no effects on the marginal utility of work, and shouldn't be too much on the average utility, provided the minimum really is only a minimum subsistence level.
I'm troubled that this comment was so ferociously downvoted. Of course as far as science is concerned, the burden of proof/evidence lies with those who make claims about the effects of low-energy radiation to make their case. But that doesn't mean your personal health strategy should work the same way. The skepticism tilts the other way here: Don't unnecessarily expose yourself to things you're not sure are safe. Why? Because you don't get repeated experiments with your own body.
Can someone transcribe loosely for the video-disabled?
Wordpress moves editing to a place away from your site. A non techie might be confused on what content he is editing, and where it is. I don't see Wordpress as a modern CMS because this kind of editing has been done in the last 20 years.

I'll look into the ux of Polopoly, thanks.

Edit: had a really hard time getting info out of the PP website, could you show me some screenshots?
Setting up SBCL+Emacs+SLIME is really easy if you use Ubuntu or some other distro that contains packages for them. All you need to do in current Ubuntu is

$ sudo apt-get install sbcl emacs slime && echo "(require 'slime)" >> ~/.emacs

and then start emacs and press Alt+x, write `slime´ and press enter (M-x slime for the initiated).

Now using all the available features of that combination will take a lot of time, but starting isn't really hard.
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

I have been living full time on this since I launched paid plans in May this year. My annual revenue goal was surpassed in first two months. But to be honest, I was very scared the week paid plans were launched. Thoughts of what if I don't even make equivalent to my previous salary haunted me (I had left my full time job 2 months before launching paid plans -- so my family and friends thought I was doing nothing for 2 full months). But, it has been profitable (touch wood!) and I am very happy about it. Been approached by investors a couple of times, but the revenue generated is good enough to expand the team by itself so I don't see a reason to take any outside investment.

But before getting to this point, I had toyed with numerous ideas and coded a bulky conversion optimization platform for more than a year. http://www.wingify.com/product/tour.php Showed it to patio11 and others who all said: "you know what it has to be simple". So, redone the whole thing and that's how Visual Website Optimizer came about to be.

I have been lucky to have learnt many great lessons: what to make, how to make and how to get covered in TechCrunch even if you are bootstrapped :)
That's my question too...
There's a reason there's such a thing as a cache hierarchy.
I'm sure its no coincidence the Office Online team has an I Am A… scheduled for this Friday on http://www.reddit.com/r/iama
Some more screenshots

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2265086/c6897dba-9e...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2265022/bb148a20-9e...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/2988/1796891/85e69ff2-6a93... (animated gif)

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241795/ba4827d8-9c...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241819/f8418cb8-9c...

* https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/671378/2241519/04791a24-9c...
I tried to edit my resume, since I don't have Word on my personal laptop: formatting is inconsistent with standalone Word.
Wouldn't a better analogy be "my bank got robbed, and now I'm broke"?
WOW. So usable. I'm sure everyone who doesn't trust his affiliation with Wikileaks will just sit right down and punch that in.
I try to explain North America to others like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Nations_of_North_America
hide a stone among stones and a man among men
If that is such an advantage, then show me one bookstore owner who encourages theft for that purpose. And special give-aways don't count, since those are chosen by the business owner.
Thomas is very right, but I was more interested in my reasons why I don't use Tor based on all the crap I see going on around it.
It's important to know what sort of problems US schools face. It seems likely based on a lot of evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) that US schools are no worse than EU and Asian schools. However, American schools do have a different problem because we can't simply accept the inability to educate a huge subset of American students merely due to their culture or ethnicity. Less diverse countries may seemingly have an easier problem in education, but that doesn't get rid of our need to cultivate a literate and educated citizenry.

But there are even bigger unexamined issues at play here. Firstly, are we able to accurately measure quality of education through these studies? Given the increasing reliance on college degrees as necessary credentials for basic competency in core skills such as literacy and math it seems likely the answer is no. Secondly, what confidence do we have that modern public schooling provides any educational value? Given the similarity of educational achievement on standardized tests across much of the developed world when adjusted for socio-economic status one has to wonder. How much of a students basic educational competency would they acquire regardless of public schooling merely due to the educational status and expectations of their parents and peers?
Cool. And thanks for student subscription! https://hackermonthly.wufoo.com/forms/student-subscription-p...
Ever been to Costco? They sell $50 gift cards for a bunch of different stores, and you only pay like $45 at the register.

I know, $5 isn't much, but it is still lower than face value.
Sure, but who actually considers Pittsburgh part of the midwest?
A crypto that has no anonymity in 2021 when multiple technical solutions to the problem exist ... pass.
“It’s also not the case in 99% of US claims.”

From what I observe with people I know the number is way higher. If you have a serious disease like cancer you there is a very good chance that you will spend a lot of time fighting providers and insurance. It can turn into a full time job.
Your posts can be summarized as "Europe messed up in the past but now it's totally not their fault because the US is just too big to do anything." My post was "the US isn't that big and Europe has plenty of options so Europe is still messing up due to it's own fault even if you keep deflecting that point."
And depending on how they detect “down” they may also start the DHCP server under normal conditions.
It had a trojan.

It is beyond me why anyone would trust an app owned by Tencent and has intrusive ads, whereas the alternatives for most people (Adobe / MS) offerings are free.

America somehow seems to have this political correctness complex. There is nothing wrong being weary of such things.
> The aliens are only observing a black box system that spits out "white wins" or "black wins," they are trying to determine if there's any reason to develop the means of probing the contents of the black box. Regardless of whether you start by modelling the players or the board, you are still assuming the winner is determined by some complicated model with numerous hidden variables which you would have no reason to believe unless you start with the assumption that this is not a random number generator - an assumption for which you have no evidence.

If you actually did that, you'd start creating complicated hidden variable theories to explain every random coin flip you could see, despite the overwhelming majority of them actually being random coin flips.

> The author's thesis is that assuming a complex explanation for a black box's behavior is reasonable because that's the only way that leads to experiments to probe the contents of the box.

The thesis only holds if it's actually common to have a complex hidden detail inside a black box that is nevertheless somehow completely impossible to infer from the outside. And what I'm saying is that that's actually absurd; in cases where there are meaningful details to be found out, it will be apparent from the outside that there is detail in there, at least the overwhelming majority of the time.
I have a huge problem with this. My problem is getting started. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by what I have to do that I either don't want to start or I don't know where to start. However, when I begin, I can code/study for hours on end. Maybe some of you are in the same boat.

Here are some tools I'm using to keep myself focused. Concentrate (http://getconcentrating.com/) blocks websites that distract me, opens/closes apps, blocks distracting apps (RSS reader, Twitter), and reminds me every ten minutes of my goals via Growl. I'm also using it with Vitamin-R (http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/index.html) to help me work in pomodoro cycles. Hope you get some use out of those apps! :-)
You're in a good company, Paul Graham himself wrote about this problem several times.

http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
Calling anyone a crackpot says more about you than them. Please keep it on reddit.
Agreed.

Additionally, this takes on a second, perhaps more significant meaning: if the Apple of the smartphone market is the same Apple of the MP3 player market, then you're looking at a very different outcome. Think about this harder guys: is designing and building a phone closer to building an iPod or a desktop?

The Mac vs. PC analogy is inadequately nuanced to be taken seriously. The mobile market doesn't resemble the PC market nearly as closely as people would like to think. I'd encourage people to think about it more deeply. The app lead and cost advantages enjoyed by clone makers does not exist in this market. Also this is a consumer driven market and not a business driven market, so factors like design and ease of use weigh in more heavily to buying decisions than they did in the PC market.
You'll live a very "interesting" life if you choose to filter your world view through the comments sections of Reddit.
It's more likely that the Feds will figure out another way to make themselves immune.
What if you are moving from a low cost area to a high cost area?

I just checked out an online cost-of-living calculator and my salary in Austin would have to increase by 2.6x to have the same quality of life in Palo Alto.

How many HR types are going to realize that 50 in Austin is 100 in San Fran or Manhattan?
This is a weirdly bleak assessment.

You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype.

But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all.

Is that what you mean to say?
"Do you subscribe to any poetry publication? Poetry, New Yorker, three penny review and plenty other big and small publications have great contemporary poems. I would rather argue we are much worse in reading poetry now."

This is all so subjective.

Very few poems resonate with me... maybe something like 1 out of 100, and almost always they're old poems, like those by Kabir, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.

It's exceedingly rare for any contemporary poetry that I've read to come anywhere close to being as moving, interesting, or deep as some of these classics.

That said, 99% of old poetry doesn't move me either.

I'd read a lot more poetry if the signal to noise ratio was higher, but sadly for my taste it's not.
It's not fair to say SC doesn't have a product.

They have an alpha that's fun to mess around in and gets big updates 4x a year.

There are plenty of games that cost $60+ that are worse than SC for $45 and the promise of bigger updates.

If CIG folds after a decade, that's not a scam... that's just a mismanaged studio. CIG has delivered a product. You can judge whether it is a good product, but they have delivered and continue to deliver.
That is the typical on-call experience, getting woken up for 15-30 minutes each night

There is no "typical on-call experience". Some teams have an on-call rotation that goes a year without being used. Some oncalls get paged once a week and it's a serious issue that will take an hour or two to resolve. Some oncalls are impossible to handle, with alerts every few hours.
a chance at escaping quarantine without understanding the risk.

Yet it appears that the FDA makes no attempt to understand the downside risk associated with NOT taking the vaccine. I don't see them talking to economists trying to understand what damage will be done to our businesses, and how people will suffer as a result of that; or even of what lockdowns are doing to our mental health. The ONLY risks they're considering are on the side of taking the vaccination.

And this is always how it works for them, both in normal times and during the pandemic. Consider last March, when the CDC's covid-19 test was defective. Despite the fact that the assay is a simple matter that any decent hospital can do in their own lab, the FDA would not allow anyone to do it. That set America's pandemic fight back by a couple of weeks. If we could shift the spread backwards by two weeks, how many thousands of lives would we be saving? The FDA's hidebound refusal to look at both sides is responsible for this.
First of all, on-call without the latitude to prioritize operational improvements (making the cause of the pages go away) over feature work is a non-starter.

To address the question in the post title, a team I was on was able to re-negotiate the on-call terms. Our team didn't have any operations to speak of (we just wrote software, and didn't build services) so we were lumped into a rotation for the org we were in. When the pager went off, not only did we not have any familiarity with the system, we didn't have permissions to do anything anyway. We just ended up having to page someone else for every little thing.

We ganged up on management, told them that we simply were not empowered to take any actions during shift to address issues or off shift to improve things, and got taken off that rotation.

Where I'm at now, if someone has a rough night or a couple of rough days, we'll trade part of the shift to give the person a break.