skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin has too high a barrier to entry for normal people, especially impoverished citizens of Greece.

Attempts were made with Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) which from the sound of it were adhoc swap meets / bartering exchanges which would peg an alternate currency unit [ (Greek: Τοπική Εναλλακτική Μονάδα ("Alternative Monetary Unit"); abbrv: TEM ] to the Euro and in some cases debt was accepted between individuals.

TLDR; a ledger/local credit card system might be useful for these communities.. BTC would not help because none of these people could be expected to mine or purchase the coins to begin with.
Dear Google,

Wake me up when you and Amazon can stop hissing at each other like cats on opposite corners of the room so I can get Amazon Instant Video, and Firestick users can get Youtube natively.

Until then,
Zzz...
Sadly a lot of reviews sound like iVerge these days - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5xnkLk8IA
That's not the point - grammar doesn't have an underlying truth so there's no reason why one order is right and another isn't. The point is to give an example of how people are able to make progress in successfully using and understanding English without having any awareness of one underlying rule (people will even argue - as they do here in these comments - that there is no underlying rule, even though there certainly does seem to be, even though native speakers are generally never taught it).

That does make it different from mathematics, where there are reasons for the rules (you can't divide both sides of an equation by a value if that value might be zero, for example). But the point is more to suggest that it could be possible to make progress in carrying out and understanding mathematics without understanding some of the formal underlying rules beneath a concept. That seems like a valid point.
About time. If, back in March 2006, the length of an SMS had been, say, 220 characters, a tweet would've been 200 characters long. There is nothing inherently special about 140.
More generally, there isn't a natural law that says that compensation should be proportional to output.

There's just a natural tendency of a company to want it that way since this maximizes their profits. Once regulations and conventions held-in-check the tendency to profit from the exact measurement and control of workers. Those hindrances seem to have broken down and the advance of fluid financial capital and technology seems like a freight train with enough momentum to batter down any and all limits to their advancement regardless of our opinions on the subject.

I don't see visible force standing in their way.
Spotify announced support for Chromecast (and Chromecast Audio) a few days ago[0]

[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/spotify-might-best-new-thing-ne...
So does that mean that normal USB A connector for some reason can't handle the current? That seems odd.
Great! I do see legitimate [dead] comments occasionally.

How will this affect shadowbanned users, though? Can a shadowbanned user's comment ever be vouched from the grave?
$0.575/mi isn't a good indicator of actual cost. It's a method the IRS created to reduce the complexity of tracking all car expenses separately (good for both taxpayer and IRS). In most cases it's very generous. For example:

* ~$0.30 is for gas, but if you're driving a fuel efficient Prius then your actual per mile cost is lower ($3.00/gal / 50mpg = $0.06/mi; though offset by battery replacement cost, don't know how much that costs or how often)
* If your car is over 5 years old, you wouldn't be able to claim depreciation on it. But the standard mileage rate includes depreciation, so you're getting to deduct additional cost if your car is >5 years and you use the standard mileage rate.

That's not to say wear and tear isn't a significant cost...just that your actual cost is usually much lower than the standard mileage rate.
Very promising announcements, Sam and Dan, although I have a few questions:

1) How does spinning out YC as its own service affect a) the job posting system and b) the YC class qualifiers in submission titles? / What does "editorial independence" mean in the context of his announcement? YC submissions had a lot of points, true, but I had thought that was attributed to the high YC user base.

2) Will users be able to vouch for [flagged] submissions in addition to [dead] submissions?

3) Due to the vouch system, will the use of banning in general be readdressed, since there is now a way to address false positives/negatives? Shadowbanning was implemented at Reddit as a last resort (that the new CEO wants to remove), and it isn't respectful to the user to not know if they are banned.

EDIT: Reordered to match dang's responses.
They have a benchmarks page where it compares quite favorably to SageMath. I don't know but I'd kinda assume that Sage uses Sympy under the hood.
Exactly. Terry Tao calls this having a "post-rigorous" understanding (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there’s-more-to...). We can't think the formal rules are sufficient. (And in the case of adjectives, it seems explicit knowledge of the formal rules aren't even necessary for fluency.)
The main contrast is with LL. LL(1) is trivially parsed with recursive descent; you start with the root production in the grammar, and you never need more than one token of lookahead to figure out which alternate to parse next. This maps naturally to turning productions into functions and alternation choices into switches on the next token. The parse tree is built from the top down, like a pre-order traversal, because the current production is chosen before the constituent productions and terminals are parsed.

LR parsers build the tree from the bottom up. Productions / terminals get pushed onto a stack (shift) until there's enough information to decide what parent production to use, and children are popped off and replaced with the parent (reduce). The tree gets built post-order; the parents are built after the children are already built. The hard bit is figuring out whether the productions on the stack are enough to compose a parent rule or not.

LR parser generators figure out a state machine for making shift / reduce decisions quickly.
Someone who lives in this rural place will find it quite profitable to become the town's Amazon delivery person. Drive to pick up packages in the morning, come back and deliver during the day, then go home.
Why I Love Rockstor as a NAS OS
I believe it will still work fine via the USB socket on the TV, but my qualm with that is that many TVs don't send power to the USB unless the TV is on -- Which means you can't turn on a TV using the Chromecast app and that the Chromecast needs to boot-up every single time.

On the last iteration, my Chromecast would only connect to my WiFi about 2/3 times after reboot which hopefully is better with the new WiFi since the hassle was enough that I gave it up for an AppleTV. I bought 2 Chromecasts the first day they were announced and evangelized a fair bit to my friends and family but they ended up not being as useful as I had hoped.
What Does Probability Mean in Your Profession?
Interestingly enough Google cloud bills by the minute after the first ten minutes.
As a long time Linux user and a long time Google product user, I'd be willing to go all in on Apple if:

* They were truly, actively committed to defending a user's privacy.

* They allowed using your own domains (I currently have around 30 domains pointed to the same GMail account).

If both of the above were true, I'd ditch my Cyanogenmod-running HTC One M8 and buy an iPhone today. My privacy is worth more to me than the ability to install whatever music player, keyboard, etc that I want or drop to a command line (though I do love having that ability and would miss it).
Holy shit! Those benchmarks look absolutely incredible, outperforming Magma by a factor of 5 on average. Incredible work. This is the kind of work that makes Julia really look like the next step for scientific computing.

http://nemocas.org/benchmarks.html
My N4's battery life is really hit-and-miss. If I wander into an area with poor HSPA+ coverage the battery just tanks.
> If we notice abusive vouches, we'll take away vouching rights

That might scare some people away from vouching. Could you clarify whether it'll be more like, "If you wrongly vouch for even one single thing, we'll silently and permanently remove your vouching ability forever with no possible recourse" or more like, "If you show a repeated pattern of bad vouching, we'll reach out to you and explain what you're doing wrong, and only if it continues, take away your vouching privileges as a last resort, perhaps only temporarily" (or somewhere in between those extremes)?

P.S. I couldn't be happier to hear about Dan's promotion. He has an expert touch for community management, and (I learned after an opportunity to join him for beers one night) some deep wisdom on the subject, too.
Huh? I read the article as being about simple code that is easier to understand and maintain because it's not semantically overloaded with abstractions, and picking data structures that fit the need of your process, instead of some patterns because Herb said so or something. Usually you don't need code samples for that because it's such a common bad thing.

The ultimate data-first man would be Chuck Moore.
Paris’ Day Sans Cars
> On the other hand, by having Amazon control the to-the-door experience, that gives them incredible granular controls over how things are done, when, by whom, and how they do it, including how they are supposed to treat you at the door (if you're there), what to say, etc. etc.

You can't exert control (e.g. uniforms, greetings, etc.) over independent contractors, so Amazon would not be able to do any of this under their current model.
Kant and Hegel were not journalists. In the context of philosophy, value (qua influence) is more easily quantified by the breadth and depth of citation networks, which are already the object of some study in academic and legal circles.

I agree with your overall argument that we should be careful about which premises we begin with, as they can easily become axiomatic and stifle thinking (a perennial problem in politics). But I think Cowan in choosing his premises here to illustrate how technology that liberates capital flows has the potential to undermine capitalism by limiting people's ability to freely participate in it.

Of course such observations summon the ghost of Karl Marx to whisper 'I told you so.' I wonder how many thoughtful observations of that philosopher are overlooked because of a misplaced reification of his labor theory of value.
Why don’t future engineers learn real-world skills in school?
We haven't built that integration yet, but it's totally possible! Really all it should take is a Machine Step that calls out from Python to, say, Pivotal's APIs (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pivotaltracker).
Should you start a business with your best friend?
Introducing the VelocityReact Library
> ...original model supported only 2.4GHz...

That's what's implied when you say 802.11b/g/n rather than 802.11a/b/g/n or 802.11ac. Both 802.11a and 802.11ac are 5Ghz-only protocols [0], and 802.11ac implies[1] support for 802.11a/b/g/n. :)

[0] And 802.11b/g are 2.4 Ghz-only protocols.

[1] Or it might dictate support, I haven't read the text of the standard.
Sure, but they'll have more trouble getting cooperation from non-US companies you're using.
This happened to me. I just upgraded my router to a new Airport Extreme, and all those problems magically went away.
How is that tracking different for a full time person vs a person who works for flex? Basically full time employment makes the workforce more sticky, and whatever performance quality process you run with the workforce will retrain or remove people who don't perform.

With flex, it's likely the same quality process, only the workforce is larger and more likely to churn. So no matter what the performance of the quality process it has some non-zero time to detect and correct worker performance, so I don't see how one avoids a larger rate of delivery faults just from the workforce dynamics.
> but I cannot believe that you are sincere in this article overall, unless you are just naive.
> The markup in Germany, and presumably the other EUR-countries, is enormous.

Elections have consequences.

Presumably the great mass of your countrymen are happy getting additional social services in return for higher taxes.
I know this is a young project, but right now it looks like a terrible waste of Rust's features. Raw pointers everywhere, most allocations unchecked, and 264 unsafes in just the kernel.

unsafe is a necessary escape hatch, but the temptation to use it to write C-style code is strong.
The potential deal breaker for me is the storage space. You can't just rely on having WiFi everywhere you go. Cell phone plans have data caps. I need to be able to store data on my device. I really don't understand their reasoning. I can get over not having a removable battery, but not having expandable storage is idiotic.

They also just updated the apk file size limit from 50MB to 100MB. On top of that, they made the video camera capture at a higher frame rate which will take up more space.

My iPod from nearly a decade ago has 80GB of storage. I don't want to have an extra device just for music anymore.
I was a Nexus 5 owner up until I dropped it a few months ago, shattering the screen, and was banished to an iphone 5s. Wireless charging was one of the things I missed most about my nexus, and I was fairly disappointed when I heard these two wouldn't be including it.

If I still had my Nexus 5, I doubt I'd even be considering a 5x or a 6p.
it would have been nice to have the flexible part as a replaceable micro-hdmi to hdmi cable than a built in part.
Nope. Just nope. I'll stick with choice and privacy over promises of privacy by a for-profit.
Discovery of a Mechanical Gear in a Living Creature (2013)
Yup. But as a competing future employer--- I'm okay with an employer making that kind of mistake. I'm tolerant of a variety of life circumstances that the curmudgeon employers might not be, and I'd be happy to have an easier time hiring those people.

It would be a problem is 99.9% of employers used the same metrics for hiring, because it would just exclude whole groups of people.
Never underestimate the illusion of choice.
Was excited about this until I saw that it doesn't support Amazon Prime video.
But the customer 'hassle' rate just went up, your internal efficiency also went down by whatever it cost to fix the problem, so there had better be some big benefits to this method showing up in other areas.
gah - sorry, accidental downvote
Google's advert claims "The ultimate Android experience", not the "The minimum common set of features Android experience".
> but how can they make that promise when they don't make the laws?

I agree, like Lavabit... Lavabit had all the best intentions but in the end the law screwed them over anyway.

Of course Apple has a lot more power than Lavabit, so it's nice they are taking this standpoint and being resistant. Hopefully they can contribute to a positive change..
Anyways at least they are trying, something i haven't seen from other big companies, like Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google#Privacy
It's available as a Chrome (and maybe Firefox?) extension[0], then websites can use some JavaScript APIs to control it (with user permission of course)[1].

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-cast/boadge...
[1]: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/chrome_sender
This is true. They removed the exception of insider trading for Congress a few years ago, but put it right back in a year or two later. It's disgusting.
As part of the organizational change, I'd love to see a plan to making the Hacker News site work great on mobile.
There is a certain pleasing physicality to function notion, in the sense that empty parens make a circle into which you put things. () -> (1). Look, I put a 1 in there! f(x) is a notation that is strictly speaking only good for the author of f because they know how to access their independent data; any utility to the caller, by inferring what "x" should be, is purely conventional/accidental.

Function notion in this sense mirrors our counting system, which begins with an empty circle, 0, which we replace with a succession of symbols, until we hit 9, and then 10. It's interesting to imagine what "10" means if you're treating each symbol as a function. But this requires defining some sort of analog to "counting" with functions, which I'm not sure makes much sense in any general way. What is the "successor" to a function? It seems that we have a lot of options. One simple example would be to let f return a function based on an integer input, with the understanding that this is a simple function from 0-9 but then at 10 we return the composition of f_1 and f_0. In this way we describe the composition of 9 functions in any order using only a natural number.

Anyway, back to writing CRUD webapps.
This is exciting! I look forward to seeing the vouch feature in action. I notice a certain classes of stories regularly being flagged off the homepage, mainly those that deal with racism or sexism in the tech community. Being able to rescue quality stories on those topics should provide some interesting fodder for discussion.
The biggest reason is because it's extremely difficult to find cost effective labor in SF and LA, due to (a) higher than average cost of living, (b) difficult geographic structure [e.g. most people who do deliveries in SF live 1+hr away, and SF and LA are impossible to get around in), and (c) too many companies competing for the same labor.

I'd also argue that since most co's start in SF, there is very little brand loyalty (95% of my friends use the ridesharing service that's currently not surging) so it's hard to make your mark anymore.

As someone who previously ran ops at a similar on demand company, they're probably testing a cross section of markets. E.g. does this work in a big city with difficult traffic (NY), a smaller city that has tech savvy millennials but isn't a tech haven (Indianapolis), somewhere in between (Chicago). I'm sure their fulfillment center locations also played a role in the location choices.

I don't think they're avoiding CA due to lawsuits. Labor laws are very similar in other states (except for MA, which is oddly one of the few states that has ruled pro-contractor recently). The class actions are happening here since the co's have the largest presence, started here, and labor laws are definitely pro-employee. Even the DOL at a federal level released a paper basically saying "if there is any element of control, they are an employee".

[Edit: added last paragraph about laws.]
ThoughtBot launches Upcase.com
Doesn't affect (1) at all. As Sam mentioned, this is formalizing the de facto structure that's been in place a long time, so that announcement doesn't come with any changes to how HN works.

(2) Absolutely. Users can vouch for anything that's dead, including [flagged] and [dupe]. I see the notational confusion there; will ask Sam to update the post.

(3) Probably, but I'm not sure I agree with the line you're drawing from vouching to banning. Today's release massively lowers the cost an account of being banned. Instead of having your comments always stay [dead], they're now up for review by your fellow HNers; the community can decide what's good and bad. I'm not sure 'banned' is even the right word for it now— 'under moderation' would be closer.

The reason I say 'probably' above and not simply 'yes' is that there are a ton of issues to consider about it.
I read it as the latter - I don't think it's unreasonable to interpret it as "we may take action if you're using separate accounts to unkill your own posts/repeatedly vouching for obviously abusive comments".
How Invisu helped us raise a seed round
>I don't plan to be very involved--other than as an enthusiastic user (who would, however, prefer that it be easier to read on a phone)

I always assumed not having a mobile style sheet was intentional to slow down eternal September, but if sama is asking for it then that can't be the case, right?
For the multi-room audio they talked about (to be released later this year), has anyone seen anything that indicates if it will work with a non-audio-specific chromecast? For example, I hope to be able to play music to my TV through a chromecast (and be able to see album art on my tv), and then have the same audio playing in my living room coming out of a chromecast audio. Man i hope it will work regardless of type of chromecast.
That's cool until you go to a place that doesn't have cell phone coverage or wifi. Then you are completely screwed.
I block ads because I don't like the idea of ads. I'm tired of the constant attempts to persuade me this way or that. I want my attention span back. Plus, the vast majority of content on the web just isn't worth putting up with ads for. I don't even read the content any more, the comments are much more informative and entertaining. ;)
I guarantee that the only reason the NSA did this was so that some few fatsos could continue to live in Germany, drink great beer with their friends, live in a swank apartment in the old town, and collect their foreign earned income exclusion.
The direct link to the product page should work: https://store.google.com/product/nexus_5x

At least it did for me. Even let me sign up for a waitlist.
Yes, I think I understand your point. Yes, there are many people who use "upper" and "lower" as rough equivalents to "north" and "south".

Here is but one of many examples - "Up and down can be confusing when one talks about Egypt. In ancient times the term Upper Egypt actually meant heading downwards into Africa, while Lower Egypt meant heading upwards on the map, to the Nile Delta." http://motherdaughterbookreviews.com/guest-post-the-magic-of...

My point, however, is that the phrase 'modern frame of reference' is meaningless. At best it's "personal sense of reference" or "a common mistake."

That is, our 'modern' use now seems to be identical to what it was when the terms "upper" and "lower" Egypt were coined.

Also, note that that book review is wrong. At least, according to Wikipedia, 'Lower Egypt was known as Ta-Mehu which means "land of papyrus"' and 'Upper Egypt was known as Ta Shemau which means "the land of reeds"', so it's not like modern English uses a direct translation of the Ancient Egyptian.

So, when was this earlier time that's supposed to be different from now?
http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/7/8/the-architecture-tw...
For Mexico it shows what it seems like a broken CSS page, with the previous models:

http://snag.gy/DCtTt.jpg
Where?

A simple google search yields links like this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1091325-REG/sony_1289_... which is $560.
Not necessarily the most representative benchmark, but:

>>> from sympy import *
>>> from time import clock
>>> var('x y z t')
(x, y, z, t)
>>> f = poly(1 + x + y + z + t)
>>> p = f ** 20
>>> t1=clock(); q=p*(p+1); clock()-t1
53.828634

julia> using Nemo
julia> Rx,x=PolynomialRing(ZZ,"x");
julia> Ry,y=PolynomialRing(Rx,"y");
julia> Rz,z=PolynomialRing(Ry,"z");
julia> Rt,t=PolynomialRing(Rz,"t");
julia> p = (1+x+y+z+t)^20;
julia> @time p*(p+1);
1.593379 seconds (129.24 k allocations: 6.758 MB, 0.82% gc time)

Edit: oops, I forgot a variable which made the benchmark totally unfair!
Medium recently raised $57M in capital