skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Aren't taxes a zero sum game? If one "dodges" any amount the state must make up that revenue somewhere so the actors with finances and ability to best take advantage of the system then end up not paying their fair share?

It seems that you're beginning with the assumption that the expenditures are all sensible or necessary, thus the "need" to make up the revenue. To be sure, a deficit is a deficit, but when we start talking about people paying their "fair share", they're probably going to want to know, "fair share of what, exactly?" If politicians keep spending themselves into debt, regardless of how much more money they extract from the population, can we speak of one's "fair share" of the irresponsibility of the people holding the public purse?
The state is the reason you only have to worry about getting robbed by entities small enough you could potentially beat them up.
My point is that we cannot hope to dictate in advance what public platforms should look like, how they should be structured, and so on. Instead, we need to let people decide what they want to treat as a public platform and then base decisions around that. It's what's going to happen anyway. We may as well spare ourselves the wasted effort.

I haven't failed to recognize the issues you raise. I have opted to let them be until we collectively know what we actually want our public platforms to look like, as expressed through individual choices. Please, I beg of you sir, do not mistake silence on a subject for an explicit endorsement of corporatism.
I'm the PM for this project, and can answer questions. Don't speculate about this project, ask me instead!
Are ISIS Geeks Using Phone Apps, Encryption to Spread Terror?
>Founders at Work, her book of founder interviews, is stunningly good.

It is indeed. I wish she will write more books or even essays like PG. I am excited to see if Founders at Work will one day be in an audio format.
Of course they should - at least the ones pertaining to their official duties.

I do not understand your next two questions.
Agreed. But lending to a riskier counterparty for 24 hours is usually going to command a lower risk premium than lending to anybody, even the US government, for 10 years. That's the essence of the story here. You make a valid point though: until now it has been riskier even to lend for 24 hours to a bank because of the binary nature in which banks go bust: they're solvent until they're not, and the run can happen in an event-wise, unpredictable fashion.

The real story then is that even taking into account this high banking-sector risk, the US government is now riskier. But this has much more to do with the unlimited printing of debt (the real story) than the IRS market swap spread, and my wider point is that daily margining has been ignored by many of the people (here and in the financial markets chatter) who are talking up this issue as some kind of rubicon moment. This has been in the making for years and the slow grind below zero is not something that should be seen as extraordinary, nor, given the aforementioned slow grind lower, should it come as any surprise that it can go negative.
thanks PG for writing this. it needed to be said.
> Developers use it to build bitcoin-payable apps and services.

I'm confused as to what problem this is actually solving. I thought I could build bitcoin-payable apps using my laptop?
I would guess that (almost?) all successful startups have a lot going on behind the scenes that doesn't make it into the press.

My company isn't even particularly successful, but it's incredibly difficult for us to get anyone who writes about us to mention that I'm a co-founder (not the founder, let alone the fact that the community that does most of the important work) and that there's an entire team behind what we're doing (that it's not "my" thing).

The single-man myth is just a lot sexier, even if false. There are great founders, to be sure, but every time you talk to the person who is the "single man" they talk about how the company is successful because of a fantastic team. In fact, a lot of the work of a founder is assembling a great team and making them work well together. I don't think I've ever seen an exception to that - even Jobs, Musk, etc.

In fact, the real moral of the story is that the tech press is almost entirely bullshit, and that is mostly to be avoided.
They aren't selling this as a self-financing investment so the ROI from BTC alone is not entirely relevant. The value prop is to get access to bitcoins and the network for development purposes, if I'm not mistaken.

The better question might be is this a problem people are willing to spend $400 to solve?
I made a newsline of Jessica Livingston, that compiles many of her interviews: http://newslines.org/jessica-livingston/
Thanks for this PG, it's wonderful to see Jessica get the long overdue credit she deserves.

That essay is also comforting for me on a personal level because like Jessica, I'm uneasy with attention, public speaking, etc and that's a tough thing to struggle with when you're a startup founder, where a big part of your job is to be the affable, extroverted face of the company. The thought of doing a YC or similar interview makes me sweat, even though I know what I'm building is awesome, cool and valuable. If ever Jessica is giving lessons on how to get over that, sign me up please!
Does that really look better to you? More understandable? Methods with the word "and" in them are really awful smells to me too.

Comparing your code and mine, I ask you this: which one do you thing is more maintainable after 5 years of edits?

Each time a new developer needs to add a new case, a new rule, a new whatever, on my Optional (ab)usage, they just add a new line in the appropriate spot, a .filter or a .map or whatever. In yours it's far less clear.

Optional, for me, is wonderful because it lets me have a single return statement. A lot of the code in Java I'm replacing with this pattern is the stuff that has 5 different returns after checks. Crusty old stuff, but the business logic it's running has grown the way it has for good reasons.
How the Pomodoro Technique changed my workday
I'm a little confused. Are you saying you can hedge a swap like a Treasury, but can't do the reverse -- hedge a Treasury like a swap? Why would that be the case? Or am I misinterpreting you?
Came here to recommend this article as well. It's by far the most informative piece I've ever read on ISIS. This should be required reading for every policymaker and military strategist.
Finally we open sourced it! This engine powered a plethora of awesome projects like Suisse Mania, Mountains of Mouthness, the Nike Phenomenal Shot during the Soccer World Cup in Brazil, as well as many others.

It will be great to see what other cool things people can create with it.
Working from home screen with Raspberry Pi
In my estimation the desperate desire to be recognized is behind some of the worst cultural shift in SV in the last 20 years. The article even states specifically how Jessica's very strengths would be undermined by becoming more visible.

If your comment is because you failed to recognize Jessica's talents, you should ask yourself whether that has negatively impacted her life in any way?
Show HN: Spinnaker: Global Continuous Delivery
Shipito is beyond awful.
I'd say they aren't, because most software developers don't write new algorithms to solve tiny problems in ten minutes.

They work within problem domains they know about and use libraries, frameworks and other useful abstractions. They edit existing code, they architect apps, they think about stuff for a long time, working things over in their mind or in code. Being a fast coder is more about memorization and making every problem a nail for tools like memoization and big O analysis, then about long term sustained development skills. Real skills are not solving the problem in front of you asap. It's solving that problem and five other potential future problems using the same abstraction. It's not knowing the fastest solution, it's knowing several solutions and applying the best one.

Real code tests would be like what engineers do everyday.:
Here's some code we want to push to production, or plan to refactor for speed, write unit tests on the computer so we know it won't break.

Here's a design problem, how would you set up a db schema or object oriented design? Okay, now we need to add this feature, how would your design change?

Here's a problem involving calculating something based on a db call and returning it over the network... what's the solution you use if network latency is an issue? What about disk io in the db? What about if it's cpu bound? What about it uses too much ram? What about if at some point this may need to be asynchronous code? What if it's distributed code? What if you need to catch every edge case? What if things are breaking in production and you need to solve 80% of the problem now and worry about edge cases later?

Okay... here's an api, write code to use it to solve the problem, even though the api isn't meant to be used this way.

Here's super complicated code... figure out what it does and document it.

These are all things a software developer may do... I guess I'm advocating testing their ability to work by using stuff as close to work as you can.
Segment: A little JavaScript class to draw and animate SVG path strokes
Inside Mark Zuckerberg's Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook
All the great teams I've worked on had the "family-like" property Paul Graham talks about here.

The first really great company I worked at was explicit about being family-oriented; they'd bring everyone's family to the office and cook dinners, had Christmas at the founders house, that sort of thing.

I left that company and joined a different sort of family, which was more of a bar-fighting sort of family but still had that vibe.

Then I started my first company, which cratered, and which did not have that family feel at all, despite it being largely a group of people who were friends in real life.

I felt like we got part of the way there with Matasano (at least in the Chicago office, which was our largest), but not all of the way. It's tricky to pull off!

I really only want to work at companies that have that feel, for the rest of my career. It makes a huge difference. Also: if Jessica Livingston can generate that kind of culture on demand, that's definitely a reason to be impressed by her!
Check out fugue: https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/fugue -- a proper monadic Option and more. :) (Full disclosure: I'm an Atlassian and I know/<3 the people who write it, but I also use it a fuckton in my own code.)
If the War On Drugs is any indication, the Western world will never stop doing the wrong thing - even with evidence that it's not working.
swift. I like the language, I just hope that they will not be some brutal when they change the language :)
The data should speak for themselves. Unfortunately people who don't know statistics think they can't, because as we found out from emails, the data were "manipulated" via statistical methods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c... Honestly I'd rather we press scientists of all sorts for all their source code and modeling tool configurations including the raw data that hasn't been post-processed to hell in an "acceptable" way (recalling that the statistics involved in generating p-values were "acceptable" for psych journals until recently).
No joins.

I wonder why you wouldn't use PrestoDB to connect to Elastic Search. It provides you with an SQL engine and you just need to write a connector that knows how to get data.

Similar thing has been done in Crate.io.
I think it's obvious that our strategies haven't been working. It's also obvious that no amount of pointing this out is going to change anything. Attacks will continue. Liberties will continue disappearing. And countries that aspire to imperialism like France and the UK will continue to follow the US into un-winnable war after un-winnable war destabilizing whatever country the "enemy" of the week lives in.

Of course France will not learn from history just as the US hasn't learned. It's pretty obvious what comes next. And all at our citizens' expense, not anyone else's. I'd say the terrorists have not only achieved their goals, they have surpassed even their wildest imaginations. And for that, they had to do absolutely nothing because the biggest terrorists are the ones passing things like the Patriot and Freedom acts, the ones who send others to die for their own cowardice. The biggest terrorists are indeed amongst us, but they're not Muslim, and you can watch them on CSPAN.
No. Charity doesn't require us to be naive.
In theory, yes. Among ideal rational agents, yes.

But in practice, science depends on the trust that scientists aren't actively subverting the process: failing to consider alternate hypothesis, fabricating data, ignoring data, deliberately filtering for confirmatory data, groupthink, etc.

So an import safeguard is the ability to detect when someone is doing the above, even if the detector doesn't know the literature well enough to refute it.

With that said, that doesn't mean there's enough evidence of misconduct to justify a subpoena in this case; I'm just saying, it's not simply a matter of "just look at the data rather than the people".
Cool! Or, warm depending on parameter.

On Ubuntu includes are apparently broken, complaining about strings.h included from Xlibint.h ...

There's probably a yak to shave in that. However, if you're lazy and hit the same problem, you can compile a functional sct by lifting declarations of i and c outside their loops and dropping "-std=c99" from the command line.
The natural progression for 'lawless' areas is for stronger country's to attack and take land. They don't necessarily take over the whole country just the valuable pieces. Then repeat after that has been assimilated.

Western intervention has stalled this process by imposing arbitrary borders on huge landmasses. ISIS only works because larger state actors have been held in check. But, a true hands off policy would likely lead to some regional wars which would quickly crush ISIS or see it evolve into a more traditional nation state.

PS: Of course the other way this breaks down is when a large and mostly stable nation contains lawless regions. But, that does not really describe the region involved.
Are we reading the same thing? It says:

> The best way to make sure you are in compliance when distributing GPLv2 object code on BitTorrent would be to include all the corresponding source in the same torrent

Not a link to the source, the source code itself.
Quantum Physicist Asking Question to Deepak Chopra
Speaking as someone who's written a book on Bitcoin, I don't either.
I'm not making an ethical argument. I'm explaining to you why people don't understand it: the jargon.

When you say "Swaps are much more like 24 hour loans" most people (here) will understand you.
I think the scientists should release all of their personal emails if these politicians are willing to submit themselves to the same level of transparency.
Sure it makes sense. He tried to explain the influence of term on risk calculation. Nowhere he stated that it is the only factor.
Easy. It's not considered bad if the founders are good people. All humans are exceptional at rationalizing.
I don't know if it's a good idea to leave the Middle East alone or not, but WUT. This sentiment is blatantly racist and should not be tolerated.
The better question is why not just use the bitcoin testnet?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet
Just from PG's essays alone, I've always known how important she was. I remember him making it very clear, so it's sad that the media hasn't really given her proper credit. I don't blame her about not wanting to deal with journalists, though, after all that. I wouldn't either.
By far my favorite explanation of it all, starts simple and explores it very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX40hbAHx3s
But that's not at all what happens. First, the plumbing company buys ad space from that morass of companies in the article's diagram. Then the add distribution network decides who sees the ads. And in the specific case we're talking about, users didn't see the relevant ads until after they made a plumbing purchase. So it failed at every level.

They don't appear to be targeting people who are in the market for plumbing supplies and hitting a few who already have them, from what we can tell. They appear to not be targeting people who are in the market at all until after they're out of the market.
What infuriated you about it? It isn't a smooth scroll, sure, but it suits the content. I get much more annoyed by sites that try maintain smooth scrolling while still presenting "slides" of information. Then you spend 80% of the time scrolling through useless transitions. This site felt pretty easy to consume.
Ha, fun to see the counterexample, totally makes sense.

Definitely more accurate to say that, while volunteerism is pervasive in some fields, it's far less common in others.

I think the fields where it's more common have huge social or moral benefits to go along with the job. Or sometimes they function like a foot in the door in a lucrative field. I can easily see helping out an underfunded school fitting the former categories.

Coal mining will probably be my go to example from now on... ;)
Choosing the Right Cryptography Library for Your PHP Project
Probably she was just sick of the misinformation out there despite not wanting to engage with it personally. If she didn't want pg to publish this obviously he wouldn't have.
Accidents Will Happen
It does have joins.

https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql/blob/5cd6ab639...
Notice that this is a drop among registered users that have declared themselves as gamers. I'd like to see this against the general population for the same period.

Maybe there was a rise during the same time among non-gamers, as others weren't able to use the TV.
I do have a single exit command, so I'm taking your advice. New users only have to remember two commands:

Joe's Own Editor 4.1 (utf-8) ** Type Ctrl-K Q to exit or Ctrl-K H for help **
Regarding Iraq (since it comes up in some other comments) one could (I am playing devil's advocate here) make the argument that the Iraq war was a just war on false assumptions. What reasons do you need to remove a dictator?

0) He does not respect territorial integrity of neighbour states

1) He houses international wanted terrorists, makes it possible for them to hide

2) He commits crimes against humanity (unjust prison and death sentences, violent crimes against political opponents)

3) He is ignoring UN Resolutions

Saddam Hussein was guilty of all of the above, that said:

0) There was no direct connection between Hussein and 9/11

1) There were no WMDs found

Three questions:

Should the United States (and the other opposing parties in the Gulf War) have left him in power or removed him then? Maybe they should have removed him then

Was the Iraq war based on false information, false reasoning and some deception? I would say yes it was

Was it still "just" to remove Hussein? That's the 1 million dollar question, and I am not 100% certain how I should answer...

[And to clarify: I am no fan of George W. Bush, indeed no fan of the Bush family, I do think the Iraq war was wrong, but I am always open to other arguments. Christopher Hitchens made an interesting pro-Iraq war case, you should look some of his articles from that time up]
They should remove bullshit claims like "provides you with a constant stream of Bitcoins". People might actually think that this is a miner, which it really isn't. It is the equivalent of digging for gold with a rusty spoon. You could spend 10 times less on an exchange and that would provide you with a bigger "stream of Bitcoins" than what this thing could make in a year.
Most likely, their obstinant attitude will be whitewashed in history by those on their side.
Develop Mobile App
What are the key qualities required to develop a Smartphone app ?
"After that she told the PR firm to stop."

Oh wow I disagree with this totally. One reporter gives a bad slant to a story and that is enough to make you give up on setting up and getting other PR? What am I missing here? Anyone who has ever appeared in a story in the news (I have multiple times) knows they always get things wrong and always angle to story to what they think is something interesting that will allow them to sell advertising. That is the business they are in. With all due respect to Jessica (who I don't know) this sounds to me very thin skinned and not exactly an example of overcoming adversity in the entrepreneurship world. Of course it's her right to not do interviews if she doesn't feel like doing them but the way PG presents the story it's as if this one incident was enough to sour her taste (and there were no other factors at play).

Edit: As would be expected say something (not delicately or gently enough) about anyone closely associated with YC and get downvoted. Maybe that's just because people will pay attention to the comment more and tend to react more emotionally than rationally.

Edit#2: As far as those who say "YC is successful Jessica doesn't need to be in the limelight it's important to realize that people read these essays who are not in that position. Or even close. So perhaps PG could have pointed that out in a more direct way so that those learning from his writings could understand the nuance of the decision.
Importance of screenshots for more app downloads
You can do it with a couple of lines of shell script too, using the xcalib utility:

https://gist.github.com/hrj/e9ed0d73d2daaa98b2d2

Been using that for more than an year with great results.

I also have another version of it:
https://gist.github.com/hrj/6561271

(this version cuts the green and blue equally)
vegabook comments below that swaps are much more like 24-hour loans than the underlying 10-year loans, so it makes sense that they should trade at a discount due to risk differentials.

I don't know the mechanics of swap settlement well enough to understand if that is correct, but it seems plausible.
What? I have no idea what your question is getting at.
Facebook is hard work? Scaling it might be somewhat difficult. But it's nothing particularly special. Facebook's success has almost nothing to do with technical achievements. It started as a simple PHP app, after all. One I could write (heck, I've made two different PHP social networks).
Well, implicit in the question is, what better way is there to measure the damage? Local fish production I could see, I guess maybe I could see the bacteria. The others are clearly worse than visible oil.
They should be forced to work on an old Windows XP laptop with a tiny trackpad for a month.
Syscalls are hugely expensive. Not for those reasons, but because of the way they trash the cache, causing reduced performance for a long time after returning control to userspace. This is why to really achieve the performance the hardware is capable of, both for nvram ssds and for high speed network interfaces, you need to bypass the kernel completely. You can do a little better using calls that amortize the costs of the syscalls over multiple units of work, but even with the best optimizations it's still an order of magnitude less than what the hardware is capable of.
The fact that the tone and method of delivery for various conversations affects who participates in them and how was lost on me for most of my life.
Three hundred years ago, people literally sold themselves into temporary slavery and sailed across an ocean because of advertisements that a different place would be nicer to live. I don't think the power of advertising has changed much.
Yea, that confused the hell out of me.

edit: To me, the problem is that they're using `Google+` as branding, and `+` as an identifier like `@`.

> Goodbye Twitter@ Photos, Hello @Twitter Photos

Would be equally weird, imo. (Albeit, less weird because we're used to @foo and #foo)
Can you expand on what you were saying about a co-existing forum? I don't think I understand what you mean, but I'm intrigued.
Can you beat it?