skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all the bubble talk...if there is any sign of a bubble, it is Bitcoin. Bitcoins are completely worthless, they have no value. The price action shows it - they are currently bouncing between $230 and $235, six months ago that was $260, and one year ago it was $400. It is headed to $0.

The smell of scam is all over it. The inventor hides his identity. Bitcoin companies are awash in scams and criminal charges - Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs etc.

The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this. You can get a Florida real estate swamp land sales shop, or MLM organization running for a little while, but eventually it folds.

I'm glad to see that two people who have had a long, long history of observing financial markets agree with me - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. They've been around long enough to see every snake oil scam under the planet. That's why Munger says Bitcoins are "rat poison" and Buffett expressed similar sentiments.

Incidentally, I knew this when Bitcoin was $460 and even mentioned it on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753545 ). Those who listened to me saved themselves from losing half their investment. Soon enough I will be pointing to this post when it halves again to $115-$118.
The Open Workspace
That's down to comfort, yes. Haskell lets me work faster because I'm over the "hump". Just a question of investment.
It’s impossible to reasonably understand statistics without studying calculus. Everyone I’ve talked to who took a statistics course without first studying calculus had an overly formulaic, theoretically wishy-washy, and often wrong understanding of the meaning of basic statistical distributions and techniques.
I have updated these quite a bit, the bounding boxes are fixed and there are various API mapping a including yahoo. Check it out.
It gives you a publicly writable database that is only secured by people desiring to throw away large sums of computation in an environmentally unfriendly manner.

Writes are also slow (10 mins...) and requires relatively high bandwidth and space to be used securely.

There's no reason that AirBnb or Uber would want their database to be public, slower, and broken as soon as people lose interest in splitting up mining.

In fact, the more valuable stuff goes on a block chain, the more people will want to break it in order to be able to manipulate that information.

It's neat how the generals problem can work when the blockchain is for money. If it weren't for money, then why would people have an incentive to throw computation at it? To secure their AirBnb trip? If it's only AirBnb that has such an incentive, then suddenly it's a massively expensive enterprise to do so compared to running a normal distributed database that they control read/writes to.
Well, I can also just not use the software at all, if it's written by someone so goofy that they think "boogeyman" is an offensive word.

Or at least, I can avoid using the software until Github or Reddit or somebody gets bullied into adding it to their site backend. Then things get awkward.
I believe when Thoreau was arrested for not paying his taxes in opposition to the Mexican War he had walked into town to have his shoe fixed. So yes... it's a common misconception he lived out in the middle of nowhere. He really didn't at all. There were many many people at the time much more isolated and solitary than Thoreau... they just didn't generally write books.
"Tree" is also a mental construction. It is just a bunch of particles that form a recognizable pattern in the features and scale we've evolved to discern in the world. Examine two trees in enough detail, and the vast differences may make the tree-scale similarity seem utterly insignificant. But alas, "particle" is also just a mental construction...
Ben Horowitz’s Best Startup Advice: Be Prepared to Get Ridiculed
Do you write test cases? If not I'd recommend it. The decoupling required for effective tests leads you into modularizing things you may not have otherwise. I have seen myself that after this started code re-use in general has jumped due to the modules already sitting around where previously I may have just written somewhat similar functionality from scratch all over again in a new project.
If you are careful, and parse the whole poem instead skilling the parts with especially nonstandard grammar, you see the inconsistency between the path-walkers thinking and the narrator's thinking and the "ages hence" perspective. You have to reconcile those inconsistencies when reading.
Bill Gross: The single biggest reason startups succeed
It's a demo. Why are you using SSL?
University of California Sells $200M Fossil Fuel Holdings
Could you be more specific? We've got customers working with apps every day and they are happy. If they weren't happy we wouldn't have had time to release it as open source...
"Life" is more than the biological definition. There are things I could do to my life that would make it no longer worth living (and, on the way there, no longer of infinite value), and living in pathological fear of death is basically the broadest category of those things.
People downvote because you come across as either a dummy, or a snake oil peddler. Based on your blog, you know about PHP, Windows... That is great, but does not exactly qualify you to be NHS czar. If you think it does, well... good luck.
This hurts when they deal with equations like

x^2 + y^2 = k

and can't even begin to understand how you could graph something like that.

It took me a while to grok it, so I second his experience of this not being well stressed (30 years ago, admittedly). I did further maths A-level (and got an A), but didn't grok it until uni.
Back to the Future: Rated “R”
OMG Broad, Flexible, Plaintiff-Friendly Law Used in Unanticipated Manner
Show HN: Trott.in, Twitter style character limit for beautiful travel blogs
Hey Hacker News,

Myself and another nomad have been working on this for a few years. It's a travel blog that aims to make it easier to write (and read) by limiting you to one photo and 350 characters per day.

The first part was easy (making it work for us), the second part took a lot longer (adding all the polish to make it usable).

Mostly it's a passion project borne out of lack of alternatives. If we were going to monetise it would probably be by adding a feature to turn posts (trots) into postcards, and make a small markup over a printing API like lob.com. Probably not a huge market, but I know my family / friends would love a postcard every now and then.

I'd love some feedback on the homepage ...
http://www.trott.in/

Here's a big trip that we did recently:
http://www.trott.in/trips/unomas-all-the-way-down

If anyone is out there doing a big trip, or has a trip that they want to put online to share ... I'd love you to take trott.in for a spin and let me know what you think.
I especially like how it explains the meaning behind the oft repeated mantra that cancer is not a single disease, or that cancer is not a single disease therefore there will never be a cure for cancer. Both these statements reflect true facts about the nature of cancer, but out of context they sound like weird illogical platitudes.
I vaguely recall that Ruby promoted spaces inside parents, in part because Japanese (where Ruby started) programmers have some trouble with quickly visually separating parentheses from English letters when scanning code.
Ask HN: Any software to parse a PDF word by word? (maybe into SVG)
I'm looking for a library or software to convert a PDF into SVG where the SVG renders the text grouped word by word.

I've seen the software pdf2svg produces an SVG where everything in the PDF is rendered into individual shapes. Each letter becomes a shape! So that's too fine-grained.

Inkscape produces groups of words and can't break it down further.

Anything else out there that can actually figure out the individual words in my PDF?

Actually, I'd be okay with parsing the PDF and getting a list of words and their positions. No need for the SVG.

Any suggestions?
Wasn't this the plot of Prometheus more or less?
The Art of Writing: Omission
Linux Light Bulb:Enabling Internet Protocol Connectivity for Light Bulb Networks [pdf]
I don't understand. What we've done here is replace the web app architecture with a desktop app architecture. Desktop apps don't have customization or expansion problems so I wouldn't expect any here. Could you give me an example?
So you don't have to? Does reading about it really satisfy that impulse (if you have it)?
Honestly, I don't know. It's an experience. Some might like it, some might not. An idea to build this sparked up, when I needed something like this.
> People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe.

How much of the value people see in Nasdaq is the technical systems that execute the trades?

I'd argue that the technical systems that reliably execute trades are important; Nasdaq would fail if they didn't work reliably, but having a reliable system to execute trades doesn't make it easy to setup a competitor to the Nasdaq, you know what I mean? The technical systems are necessary but not sufficient; the rest of what you need to set up a stock exchange is absolutely huge.

I'll make the analogy of e-bay. I think most people would agree with my assertion that the technical challenges of building a competitor to ebay are trivial when compared with the effort that would be required to get the buyers and sellers to leave ebay and join your new platform.
Every year this story comes out, every year I double-check to see if it's a repost from last year, and indeed, every year it's a new report about how ever more Americans have renounced US citizenship because of the annoying and even spiteful tax and accounting policies we have in place for Americans living overseas.

I wonder if it really is reaching a plateau, as the end suggests might be happening. With "only" ~4,000 people giving up US citizenship/year, it's a relatively small drop in the bucket of the 3-6 million Americans living overseas.
Interestingly, not with emoji.
Unchecked exceptions are for programmer errors. They are an important part of the language since humans (who write the programs) are error prone. They are unrecoverable by nature. Checked exceptions should only exist in situations where the caller can definitely recover from them. Arguably almost nobody does the latter correctly when choosing checked exceptions and the consensus is, as a result, this is the kind of exception that should have been omitted from the language.
That doesn't appear to be under California law; from his Wikipedia bio it sounds like he was in some state that allows non-competes like that.
Quantum computing!
I don't know if there's too much calculus, but there's definitely too much of the wrong type of calculus.

Congratulations, you have just learned to integrate. Let us now spend the next three years running through several thousand different examples of analytic integration of one-dimensional continuous functions.

More dimensions? Path integrals? Numerical integration methods that you'll almost certainly have to apply in the real world because most functions don't have analytic integrals? Differential equations? Never heard of them. Now let's all integrate (x^2 - sin(x))/coth(x).
Me too mentality; Bloomberg journos have been extra gullible with regard to BTC. One of them actually had his coins stolen because he showed a QRcode on tv. Like every other journalist these days they'll just print whatever the PR agency sent them.
Perhaps, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. TCO literally just says tail calls are optimized, and I personally see an advantage to making your intent to make a TCO-ed tail call explicit, so like in Clojure you get a compilation error rather than blowing your stack at runtime.

It certainly looks more elegant to do it silently, but Clojure doesn't strive for that sort of elegance.
As obvious as it is, I want to remind everyone to just read through the relevant RFCs as a primer before diving into more usecase'y or best practices information.
> Reliable and safe trades can now be done by a swarm of computers running free software, and they only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage.

Do you have an example of such a market today?

It's actually not NASDAQ that makes trades reliable and safe. Sure, they're involved in many trades, but the more relevant entity in this context might be DTCC [1]. The fact that almost no one here will have ever heard of DTCC before may help illustrate the size of the gap in understanding between the US securities markets today and "Let's use the blockchain to trade stocks for free."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...
The Truth Behind the Unruh Civil Rights Act Lawsuit Against Chic CEO
I think almost 50% of my Go code is checking for errors. Every time I see:

foo, err := somebullshit()

if err != nil {

// bleargh

}

I feel as though I've experienced a very slight but irrevocable grand mal seizure.
I've been a fan of this system for years now. Eyeballing the capsule design, I think it could go much faster than 150 mph. However, there would be tradeoffs in the infrastructure design. Think about comfortably travelling at 300 mph anywhere in the country with a 5 minute walk or golf cart ride to the nearest station.
Really? Please list all of the amazing pharmaceutical breakthroughs that have come from purely public money.

Hell, look who first sequenced the human genome! Public vs. private and private won.
Indeed Project Gutenberg[1] has for a number of years been putting out-of-copyright books online. They take great pains[2] to make sure the books are no longer in copyright.

Another very important difference is that PG books are proofread by human beings and have a much, much lower rate of OCR errors than the bulk-scanned Google books which are, often, abysmally, disgustingly full of blatant scan errors, sometimes to the point of being unreadable.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
You can install Yesod, Snap or Spock and make a website.

Check out Servant while you're at it, it's awesome.

If you don't like writing the client-end in Javascript, you can use Haste or GHCJS and do it in Haskell.

WAI already supports HTTP/2.0 (before Apache has got around to it).
Blockchains can be built without 10 minute block times or wasteful proof-of-work for mining. You can just pick people the users trust to make blocks or use proof-of-stake mining.

Blockchains are harder to break than most corporate databases.

Reading up on Ethereum will answer most of your questions.
Having long been fascinated with computer graphics this bit was easy for me to get. I imagined a computer raster-scanning the plane and plotting a point when the condition in the equation was true. I just had to scale it up in my head from screen resolutions to infinite resolution and infinite extent and... oh boy, this is already starting to make my head hurt...

But the gist of it I got. And I admit, I'm unusual.
> People pay Nasdaq to make their trades reliable and safe.

People pay Nasdaq because they have to pay someone. Only SEC-registered exchanges and ATSs can confirm a transaction in publicly listed equities, then the DTC actually transfers ownership. And the amount you pay to transact stock at one of these places is the best deal you could find to transact virtually anything. I can't think of any popular good whose intermediary takes as little as exchanges like Nasdaq take (e.g. to buy $62,000 of Google stock, Nasdaq takes like 50 cents).

> Reliable and safe trades can now be done by a swarm of computers running free software, and they only charge a tiny margin over the costs of bandwidth, energy and storage.

When Nasdaq runs their own software, it's still free, and they pay zero margin over the cost of bandwidth, energy and storage. If you don't trust Nasdaq specifically, then you can use one of the other myriad exchanges and ATSs to trade on. And the existence of all of these trading venues have already pushed margins to an extremely competitive rate.
WHO cares
Making a value immutable instantiates trust in a system. Systems that have trust in them are, historically, worth more than untrustworthy systems.

Blamers, like you, spend most of their time trying to convince others what to do based on biased arguments. Biases are cheap hacks/workarounds to establishing human trust and have no value to anyone, even if they did listen to you.
> How much of the value people see in Nasdaq is the technical systems that execute the trades?

Quite a bit. They do a good-sized business selling their technical systems to other markets (mostly outside the US). An example from the opposite side of the globe: http://www.world-exchanges.org/news-views/bursa-malaysia-sel... .

Of course, NASDAQ has plenty of other assets, such as its ownership of not just one but three of the national exchange registrations (it bought BX and PHLX). Not to mention all the US companies which are listed on NASDAQ (there may be a bunch of places to trade them, but NASDAQ is "home" to Apple, Facebook, etc.).
There are a few other exceptions and borderline cases. Some mines (mostly coal, but I believe the old Cornish tin mines were also this way) extend under the sea.

Near-shore mining has been producing gold in Nome, Alaska for over a hundred years. I imagine a gold strike as rich as the original Nome find would be economical to work at quite a considerable depth, and it seems almost certain there are some of those.
How does this compare to omp? It just started learning about this in my HTC course.
The title should really be "Stuff that I wish I had quick reference material for when learning Haskell". You might need a few of those sections for specific application areas (and that's how they are organized), but you can safely ignore the rest.
Honestly, yes. It does enough to sweep away my romanticised image and replace it with one containing a realistic share of insects and boredom.
re: "Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman - they are literary giants because they truly lived an experience."

There were at one time millions who lived on the frontier all their lives without becoming great writers. Just being more "committed to the lifestyle" seems unlikely to help much with writing. More likely, you have to have some clear goals in mind when undertaking this sort of experiment. Either that, or luck into some good material. (Although often that sort of luck looks a lot like misfortune.)
Ah yes! I remember way back in the day (1989 or so) you could tell who the _real_ Windows programmers were because they had a second monochrome monitor (and old Hercules card) in their computer so SoftIce could display on that screen while the main EGA screen had Windows.)
The scientist they interview, Jean-Michel Claverie, has done a lot of work in the large DNA-virus world, along with Didier Raoult. One of his best papers IMO (http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/gb-2006-7-6-110) goes into some theories about viruses. Basically, these nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs) look quite a lot like a nucelus in their infected amoeba targets. On some level, going back, who's to say that the nucleus wasn't just some big, DNA virus that stuck around? The parallel to the mitochondria/chloroplast theory is kind of neat to boot. Definitely worth a read.
The Google Art Heist
> Bernie Sanders scam

Bernie Madoff? Different guy.
“Thought Leadership” Delenda Est
Is there any reason to be worried about the ice caps harboring viruses that could potentially wipe us out?
The Fallacy of Placing Confidence in Confidence Intervals
I like to think of Haskell's types as traffic lights. They might get in the way if you're the only driver on the road but the moment you have to deal with other people they are a life saver.

That's why people favor Haskell in enterprise environments because types keep everything sane when you have multiple people working on the same project or you have large third-party dependency trees.
Top 100 Mobile, Wearable and IoT Startups
Well, just for the sake of discussion, would you prefer something like this?

def M2<T1, T2, Result, Action : Monad>(
f: (T1, T2) => Result,
a: Action<T1>,
b: Action<T2>): Action<Result>
{
…
}

The Haskell notation is a simple, concise representation of the actual semantics. If you try to transpose those semantics to a more conventional notation intended for different semantics, it gets complicated due to the mismatch.

This notation I’ve suggested doesn’t even accurately express such details as currying and typeclasses, which the original notation conveys neatly.
Once again I'm not asking for someone to explain the pros and cons of investing. Why do you insist on answering a different question?

Maybe I don't want to invest but simply want to understand how math is used to make trades without human decision making involved once the algorithms are written.
Once again I'm not asking for someone to explain the pros and cons of investing. Why do you insist on answering a different question?
>They do a good-sized business selling their technical systems to other markets

that's a lot like saying that because IBM and HP, ITC and TCS do a lot of contracting of the outsourced worker variety, their value is in the technical people they hire.

The value is in the connections, the name, the fact that large companies will pay a lot for my time, if they are buying that time from a company like IBM or HP, ITC or TCS, while they won't pay anything for the exact same time sold direct through prgmr.com.

The value is that relationship and reputation. The value is that if you hire those companies and things go south, your boss won't blame you for taking a risk on an unknown brand.
Straight up reuse - very rarely. But fairly often I'll just go "ohhh i've done smth like that in that other project" and just go look at the code, paste it in, play around a bit. More about getting into the zone and having the past experiences pop back into the mind rather than reusing code.
Could Neighboring Skyscrapers Cancel Out Each Other’s Shadows?
23 September 2015 – The End of Days (Teaser)
Automating new installs on OS X with homebrew cask
Biohackathon symposium 2015
It's actually used as a way to avoid casting into and out of void* on every line. Think C++ templates. The documentation is somewhat lacking, but it's not too hard to figure out the APIs, and once you do, actually using the library is a pleasure.
Just use that old fashioned thing called cash, funny enough all the stores you named take it. Of course you do not want to use any loyalty cards either.
My biggest pet peeve with Google Books is that too many books which are presumably in the public domain have access to them restricted. Not sure if this is oversight, or on purpose.
It's also possible that Neanderthals prevented modern humans from leaving Africa until their populations were already in decline for other reasons (disease? inbreeding? infighting? overhunting?). In that case we may have just sped up the inevitable.
Wow, really impressive. Sometimes specializing by cutting out functionality is the right approach. In this case eliminating greedy/non-greedy matching (and others) means this can work as a high-level triage and something with more specificity can do the precision work once you have a candidate match.

It looks like this could have a good place in a real-time streaming architecture somewhere.
> The Bitcoin hype machine can't answer one simple question - why do Bitcoins have any value? They can't give a rational answer to this.

The answer is simple:

Because there's enough number of people that agrees to use it as commodity money and medium of exchange.
> pretty much sure

Are you willing to risk your life on "pretty much sure" ? Especially when there's no experiment you can devise to test it?
>iterators mean that the bounds only need to be checked once.

How is that possible with random access or mutable containers?
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
How Culture Enables Startups to Scale