skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is similar to another, well-known, paradox. Something about a game show, and there are 3 stalls, and one of them contains a car. The game show host opens up one of the empty stalls to show there's no car behind it. You have to guess which one of the other 2 has the car behind it. And there's a way to play it that makes your chances better than 50%.

Anyone got a link to this paradox?

Update: it's called the Monty Hall Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Well, I know what I'm doing for the rest of the day.

(if it wasn't obvious, playing around with pixijs!)
318,000,000 ÷ 25,000 = 12720

That's a little excessive, don't you think?
Convex Optimization by Stephen Boyd (Stanford EE364A) available on itunesU. There's also a CVX101 Mooc[1], but I don't how it's different from the original material. IMO it's not the topic itself, but the invaluable material for machine learning, statistics and applied mathematics. And Boyd has such a huge insight on the topic it's always a pleasure to watch his lectures.

[1]https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/Engineering/CVX101/Win...
It doesn't seem to silly to research aspects of the startup ecosystem that one is part of.
I think the appeal of basic income to HN crowd is that is a solution that an engineer would like. Very neat.

Some people can't manage their money though, however complicated that is.
> ... web developers pretend like they're actually doing something good or useful...

Many "Web developers" are to "the web" as rapists are to sexual reproduction. They achieve short-term gratification and (perhaps unintentionally) pass their traits on to the next generation, but they couldn't care less about the longer-term consequences of their actions.

The web started as "clickable citations." Now it's mostly hostile surveillance with cat pics.
I wasn't sure HN was gonna deliver this year. But, now I know to continue reading for another year.
> But how do you vet the idea itself against other ideas?

Apologies for missing the essence of your question (4 am here...)

I don't have a foolproof algorithm for evaluating single ideas but when I look at a number of ideas side-by-side I go through a number of exercises to figure out which one I'll devote my time to. Some of these are formalized, SWOT analysis for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis which can be useful if not taken religiously, trying to sell others on the idea, simply trying the idea in a limited setting to see if it gains momentum or if I have to push it forward all the time. The better ones tend to stand out.

A really good idea tends to have the 'I can't believe this doesn't exist yet' feel to it, coupled with a word-of-mouth element once it does get implemented, even in the most basic version.
It's because his post is entirely opinion, albeit one that frequently shows up at the top of HN comments sections because it's such a popular opinion in the hacker community that we forget it's not actually the majority's opinion.
There are a lot of founders:
Wish
Slack
Credit Karma
Uber (both founders)
Xiaomi
Minecraft
Tumblr

There's a lot. I suspect question comes from status anxiety. I don't really think it matters.
This is another thing I've been investigating, and so far I've come up dry. I really wish there were some way of scheduling it to go into a sleep state, and wake up every 30s or every minute, something like that... you'd think the mobile processor would have some way of doing this, but so far all my searching has been fruitless :(

There are hardware add-ons like the Sleepy Pi[1], but that's a large added expense, and makes the management of the overall platform a lot more complicated.

[1] http://spellfoundry.com/products/sleepy-pi/
> we'll not lose the text-linking place we've grown accustomed to.

It's just a minority of users who are accustomed to the old web.
And with monthly paychecks? (and monthly rent)
The whole album is pretty fantastic: https://lazerhawk.bandcamp.com/album/redline
And this is why Perl is awesome: IBM mainframes are the opposite of sexy, but some people use them, and Perl will work there.
Awesome, a real counter argument. I can't believe that worked. Hacker news rocks.

Edit: Seriously I'm shocked. I wrote in hopes of getting a good response and figured this was the best chance, but the political environment lately is so polarized I expected the worst in any comment section anywhere.
This doesn't work in the long-run. I'm an independent consultant and when I was just starting out I had the same thoughts. And it was great to be in full control and always use the latest shiny new things.

However I eventually got shiny new fatigue. In the long-run, the real thing I found motivating was completing valuable work for clients in the most efficient way possible.

And perhaps that's the true reason OP has found coding boring in the past. Not because of anything he thinks are the reasons, but because he's worked at too many places with inefficient management and poorly-defined projects. If so, new-shiny is only a bandaid on the root problem, and the real solution is to ensure projects are well defined, understood to be useful, and well-managed before a programmer ever even sees it. New-shiny may make it even worse in the long run.

AND...microservices??? I can't imagine a scenario where the benefits outweigh the cons for as small a team as he's got. Of course they're all the rage and people get into microservices for all the wrong new-shiny reasons, but escaping boredom has to be the worst one I've ever heard.
I prefer "manier". "Women are bearing manier children". "More children" sounds like it's a matter of degree, like their children now contain 120% more child.
lol delivering a physical game
Paying the minimum amount of taxes you are legally obligated to pay is the most noble of endeavors. Good luck and God bless.
If demand increases for energy the price of energy should go up. Considering electric cars are a thing, I think it should be a fairly safe bet to invest more.

Europe is going to very rapidly move to electric cars. Especially since places are starting to get fines for their pollution caused by diesel cars. Also car companies have indicated this is in their immediate plans. e.g. VW has stated that is their immediate direction. So far this year electric car sales are up 78%. Public sentiment is there. Prices are achieving parity. The only reason diesel cars were being sold is that car companies made more profit from them. Now with the huge fines, lawsuits, and recalls coming that has been shown to be fools thinking.

Europe desperately wants to stop relying on Russia and the middle East for energy. Especially since both have been abusing the supply for political bargaining.

This should keep the price of electricity up. So the government should regulate to make it safer for these farmer sized investments. Otherwise this could be a nice financial investment for people to bet on. I've already learnt of a number of players in London moving to the electricity markets from financial ones... so there should be plenty of liquidity there.

The hot pipes idea for delivering heating really does work well. Much of Finnland also uses pipes for delivering heat. It's a really efficient method.
Well it is voters not citizens so the number is a little less than this, but no I don't think it is excessive. The current system only works because each member of congress has a huge staff - about one for every 25,000 voters. If you increase the number of members of congress then you get rid of the staff.

Of course you will have a problem fitting everyone into the capital building, but with technology there is no need for everyone to be in the same location at the same time. We need to think of innovative solutions to fighting corruption, not just hoping that things will get better if we wish hard enough.
1) Sign up for intercom.io. It's genuinely the best customer support tool I've used.

2) Get the app and get a notification for every user's question. Try to answer them the second you see it.

3) Don't hire a dedicated customer support person. Stay close to your customers and build a relationship.

4) Watch this talk by Patrick Collison from Stripe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnllRegL_NI

5) Build out an FAQ

6) Make sure your customers are happy.
> if `f(x)` does not return something of type `Complex{T}`

Sorry, meant to say "if `f(g(x)` does not return something of type `Complex{T}`"
Yeah, I would guess that the huge overhead is still more efficient given how poorly some would use the money, but that's just a hunch. I have nothing to back that up (and would love any argument on either side of that)
That assumes that all the people that get elected are capable of doing all the things that staff currently does.

I don't think that's a good assumption.
I would not be so sure about the authorities. Consider:

1) Get cash out of bank. At this point, it is possible to record which bills you received from the bank.

2) Spend cash at store.

3) Store deposits cash at bank.

Because of how little a lot of cash tends to circulate before being returned to the banks, it is possible for the authorities to get a fair idea of how you spend your cash. This is still better then cards, but not nearly as good as it looks.
Great work, silly but ingenious. For some reason I find the "depth map" creepy to look at on its own.
Ever tried to download a boardgame / tabletop? It's hard :)
Believe me, I'm sympathetic. I work on a project with a million or so users, and a very small team supporting it. I'll try to find ways to follow up more directly on stuff like this. As I said, IRC (and the specific IRC channels of the modules I use, like drupal-commerce) has been occasionally helpful, and can occasionally nudge someone into looking at my tickets/patches. I've got a handful of new patches that I'd like to submit, will try to follow up more directly with the relevant devs, rather than just dropping them in the issue tracker and forgetting about them.
Woz dropped out of Berkeley in 1971. Perhaps we should use the past tense when comparing the two schools?
Render Slide to Graphics and Presentation Rendering to Different File Formats Java
Pointless? Hardly.
Yeah, the course is really cool.
I can hear my mom yelling that at me every time someone uses it incorrectly.
I agree with the comparison to web browsers, but even then how much deliberately implementation-defined behavior do modern web standards contain compared to C? I can think of Javascript object property enumeration order being unspecified, but nothing else springs to mind.
> try something new every couple year and get a kick out of it

Or it's the only reasonable way to get a decent raise. Staying at one job for too long can end up losing you a lot of money in the long term, unfortunately (and make it harder to get a new one when you decide to go looking).
'UFO' photo tweeted by NASA astronaut spending year aboard
10/10 will print each frame and hang in fridge
Another reason, I think, is a general belief that human nature is mostly good and if given a chance most people will do what's right with the money.

There would be problems sure, but I would say use that money (that would've been spent at the front of the pipeline) and find the problems in an audit process at the backend of the pipeline. Don't withhold money because people are irresponsible. Use part of the funds to audit, and then also to "recuperate / rehabilitate" those who have problems. I can't say for certain, but I've read many stories that lead me to believe that it's more expensive for a state to withhold basic things like food and shelter than it is to simply give it to them.

When all is said and done, those who turn out to be problems and never figure out how to turn their lives around, even after given every chance to fix their lives and become productive members of society, simply end up dying knowing they lived an unproductive life. I think in the modern world that will turn out to be enough of a penalty / incentive.

EDIT: I think we can all agree those who turn out to be problems, even with Basic or Minimum Guaranteed Income, will show up on the radar. Won't be hard. They'll be in prison, regularly in hospital overdosed on drugs, etc. So I doubt the backend audit would be more than a fraction of putting that cost at the front.
My guess would be avoiding the scourge of systemd.
its a delicate and complex balancing act of weight, lift, drag, and thrust of both the airframe and any rotors, and the power output and energy stored aboard the craft.

longer wingspan means greater lift, allowing more payload, but also means more drag, and the additional payload and longer wings also increase the mass of the craft- leading to greater power requirements, which means more powerful motors, larger rotors, and larger batteries, which are also heavier.

The point is, drone/aircraft design and logistics like this cannot be solved with a simple answer like "longer wingspan".

How much longer? What about all the cascading effects on all the other aspects of the craft? This all needs to be addressed and optimized to be implemented properly.
It has been over a year and I haven't finished it yet, but I find it the most interesting. It's Harvard's philosophy course [1]

Also, intro to comp sci by Harvard's open courseware. Without these, I might've dropped out of comp sci in my second year [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-OxzIC6pic&list=PLvJoKWRPIu...
Building a Native Soundcloud Android App with React Native and Redux
Being someone who's against the obsession with pedigree in SV. I've noted a few that came up outside of the Ivies:

Jan Koum, CEO/Founder of Whatsapp - San Jose State

Aaron Levie, CEO/Founder of Box - USC

Suhail Doshi, CEO/Founder of Mixpanel (almost a unicorn) - Arizona State

Logan Green, CEO of Lyft - UC Santa Barbara
How is it better than ever if people are complaining same as before?
It's from the last tech go-round, but Rackspace co-founders Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorff went to Trinity University in San Antonio.
Different approximations for the same sales tax rate
Seemed silly at first (well, still does, but in a good way). But from the comments in this thread, I realized this is actually a pretty cool demo.

Completely unrelated to WebGL, but you might want to have the music loop forever or use a long playlist. That'd be neat - I have it open in background because the music is really sweet.
Only if that is a factor contributing to or reducing the likelihood of success.

If it's completely orthogonal, it is a waste of time because that's time you could use doing/learning something that does contribute.
Is SystemVerilog the COBOL of Electronic Design?
I'm one of the co-founders of http:/ww.horizonapp.co - which is hospitality exchange (aka couchsurfing) for groups. Think Peace Corps, Teach for America, Stanford alum, Kiva Fellows...but it could be any existing group/community -- such as members of HackerCouch, or Hacker News even.

Unlock code for the "Hacker News" group on Horizon: hn2015#$

I'm happy to create a private unlock code for Hacker Couch if there is any interest.

*Note most of our effort thus far has been on iOS version -- the web version is still basic (we're currently working on adding a few pieces of functionality). Recently started development on a native android version.
"and in that case, noticing that your dynamic un-toolable language won't get wide scale adoption shouldn't matter."

That's what I'm reacting to, and I still disagree. People should have an eye on what getting traction would require, even if only a tiny fraction of language designers can make it.
Intercom.io for all your support and customer tracking needs. It also handles DRIP[1] e-mails and doubles as a sales live chat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_marketing
Hacked Facebook Machines?
All of your criticisms seem ill-founded.

The actual number SkyTran is designed for is 3.2 cars per second, but I rounded down for ease of calculation. That gives you 9 meters between the fronts of cars, not 5. It turns out that when you can decelerate at human-body-safe 6 gees, which you can do on a SkyTran track but not a regular railroad track or street, then you can stop from 100 km/h in 6.6 meters.

As I've explained above, although conventional trains do work on long, straight stretches, they do not in fact work very well for short-range trips, delivering end-user speeds an order of magnitude lower than their peak speeds. Even that they can only deliver at the cost of enormously expensive infrastructure to support the massive cars needed to make conventional trains cost-effective.

Long, straight stretches are not necessary for SkyTran; you can go just as fast around curves as you can on straightaways, because the cars are suspended from the tracks. Some other PRT systems do not have this advantage. You need to keep acceleration loads manageable, but that's not difficult.

Merging at high speed is a trivial problem with a centralized real-time control system. If you can ensure that cars on the same track are at given relative positions to each other, then you can just as easily ensure that for cars on different tracks that are going to merge to gether.

I'm not familiar enough with SkyTran's design for transferring between tracks to know what problems you see with it. Can you elaborate?

If you had everyone going to (or from) the same station at the same time, you could have station traffic jams. (And I think SkyTran's per-car capacity of 2 passengers is probably suboptimal for this reason, among others.) But since the stations are all on sidings, that only happens if you're going to the same station and there isn't a siding free at that station. You can solve this problem by going to another station nearby — I think the station spacing for most places would ideally be around 50 meters, but if that isn't enough for high-traffic areas, you could build stations there every 25, 10, or even 5 meters, thus further shortening the walk in the average case while removing the bandwidth bottleneck in the overload case.
> And yet, FaceBook rules, the network effects they baked in are just too strong and that's a very important part of why I think their execution was excellent.

Are the network effects really that strong? I've never seen another company even come close to providing the value that Facebook does. I feel like if there were really a social networking idea that was better right now than Facebook, then that company would have already found a way around the network effect. For example, plenty of people have challenged Craigslist first by crawling their site, however illegal that is. None yet have succeeded, but that tells me that CL just provides a better product.

I think the real reason nobody has dethroned Facebook yet is that Facebook meets everybody's needs and hasn't yet gotten complacent. Perhaps they'll make some strategic missteps in the future a la Microsoft and someone else will eat their lunch, but right now, they're still the best available. Ditto Apple, ditto Google.

Examining ideas is important in that it can tell you what not to try to do.
No disagreement here. I was just pointing out that what the GP wanted already exists in the form of Lisp (with different flavors of macro being different "API" to the parser, so to speak).
Yeah that's either biased or just plain lazy reporting.

Edit: when something is general knowledge it doesn't require citations over and over again, because nothing has changed for over a decade. But fine.

https://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

ftp://ftp.jrc.es/pub/EURdoc/JRC79605.pdf

http://www.digitaltrends.com/music/bittorrent-piracy-increas...

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2...

Let me know how many more you need instead of just down voting me.
Agree, with a tweak.

Conviction may be a more accurate word than passion. For example, a conviction that a current and large problem can be solved using recent developments in technology.

Passion can improve determination, a nice boost to a person who is already customer focused. But an entrepreneur who is passionate and not customer focused will likely end up in the weeds.
THIS is how to pen a retirement announcement
I didn't realize the people behind that were OpenBSD developers. But don't you make a distinction between the project and its members? In FreeBSD we're very clear about things coming from the project itself (and built on project-managed hardware) vs. things coming from individual developers.
Seriously, or are you just messing with us here? Because I don't recall having ever seen or heard "manier" used like that or "more" being interpreted only in continuous sense.
GSM Channel Concept
For the record, flat tax is hugely regressive. It hurts the poor more than the rich. The reason is the marginal utility of money.

With a flat tax of 20%, someone making 80k would pay 16k, and someone making 30k would pay 6k. Sounds good on the surface, except losing 6k hurts the second person far more than losing 16k hurts the second person.

There are ways of simplifying the tax code while keeping it progressive. The bracket system we have for income taxation is good. They just need to close loopholes, eliminate a lot of deductions and tax capital gains at the same rate as regular income.
Overfitting, Regularization, and Hyperparameter Optimization
http://neo900.org/
I would certainly hope the people elected are not capable of doing many of the things that the staff currently do - say like soliciting bribes (sorry "donations").

If there is a need for certain skills then there is no reason that this could not be handled by a pool of experts working for congress - say in the same way the library of congress works now.
For Smalltalk, look at Pharo. For Lisp:

http://malisper.me/2015/07/07/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompil...

http://malisper.me/2015/07/14/debugging-lisp-part-2-inspecti...

http://malisper.me/2015/07/22/debugging-lisp-part-3-redefini...

http://malisper.me/2015/08/05/debugging-lisp-part-4-restarts...

http://malisper.me/2015/08/19/debugging-lisp-part-5-miscella...
I really think the network effects on FaceBook are what keeps it where it is. I know people that would love leave FB, except for one little detail: all their friends, family and co-workers are on it and they use it for everything from planning birthday parties to holidays and staying in touch. That's a very difficult thing to attack head-on.

Craigslist is another example of such a service, you need the market and the goods, if you have only one (for instance by crawling CL) then you still won't have the market.

That's a really nice example of 'good enough' execution combined with a chicken-and-the-egg situation for any followers.

Of some things there can only be one, something similar happened in NL with the Marktplaats website, when Ebay wanted to gain marketshare here they found they just could not beat it so they ended up buying it.
And yet, this doesn't "cost" governments anything, because governments don't need tax to fund spending.

In fact, corporate taxes are stupid, they should be 0%, so should income tax. I like Randall Wray's model of a broad based consumption tax offset by transfer payments to low income earners, a job guarantee and a tax on the volume of your house. Genius.

It's a pity no-one understands how the economy actually works, though!
This is a discussion of corporate taxes not individual income taxes. Much of your comment is not germane.
Just migrated my blog to Hugo. I host my blog on s3 directly, so the most time consuming step in the chain is uploading to S3. Stout and surge are nice pointers (thanks).

I'm currently using a simple script that pulls together fossil, s3cmd and gnu parallel to send the content over to s3. Fossil is used to track what changed, s3cmd is the work horse and parallel uploads multiple files at a time.
Spending your money on drugs and/or alcohol that you are addicted to.

Buying nice things you can't afford on expensive credit.