skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll fight tooth and nail for every minute of my own independent life... But I would never dream of crippling my children's future just to exist in an "assisted-living" retirement home. Personally, that's an undignified life that's not worth living... modern day vampires.

Again, this is just my personal position regarding my life's value vs my descendants. I'm advocating the questions, not my answer.

This is a hard problem, which means the questions are hard to ask and the answers are difficult to accept... Death has never been easy. However it's a conversation that families and society at large need to have.

Culturally, we are lagging behind what science can do... We can do so much but never stepped back to ask if we should. Society needs to make conscious decisions instead of blindly following our biological instincts.
Terrific data (okay, so it confirms a preexisting bias on my part). I would like to see the numbers for Visual Studio -- I've completely sworn it off at my day job in favor of Sublime Text + command-line MSBuild, for typing latency alone. I'm curious if my perception aligns with reality.
Show HN: Every year I create interactive Christmas greeting. Here's this year's
He probably says things like this because the resulting media attention is a profitable strategy. Being in the media often confers a sense of legitimacy, making it easier to fundraise.

Just look at Donald Trump. He has mastered the art of getting free media attention by saying 'earthy' statements.
Lightning (which is shorthand for Hash Locked Bi-Directional Payment Channels) is a trust-less net settlement system built by leveraging the smart contracting capabilities of bitcoin.

Such a system enables transactions to occur between a limited set of participants without the requirement that the entire world know about them.

Avoiding telling the entire world reduces the cost of transaction processing by many orders of magnitude (something on the order of 1,000,000 times cheaper).
When something is this difficult to do, maybe the rational thing is to ask whether you should be doing it at all. Agriculture in California uses more water than industry and households combined. Yet, when the drought hits, households are asked to cut back on watering their lawns, while the state is looking at spending literally billions of dollars to subsidize farmers who planted water-hungry crops (like almonds, or alfalfa) in the middle of a desert.
Lux language home: https://github.com/LuxLang/lux
Right, the issue of overpopulation is huge. It's going to need a different kind of society with very different values than the ones we have today. Capitalism can't grow like it has been once we realize the issue of overpop and work to reduce it. We have a crazy new world coming. And the transition has be fast.
"In 10 years, he predicts mobile phones themselves could disappear" Oh wow crazy. I doubt it. People even say laptops and desktops will disappear too, but I doubt that too.

It seems like some day we'll live in a world where no one really owns anything, not even a phone... Just use some table phone at a cafe... Maybe use the chip in your arm to sign into the table phone app.

Somethings I think the future will be awesome with all this great tech, and other times I think the tech is going to destroy us or imprison us all in a prison without bars.
Wow, this would make my CS learning goes easier.
Modular corgo bikes
New York Builders Paying Huge Buyouts to Tenants in Their Way
This is a stupid idea. I don't want a million "smart" devices in my house with crappy unreliable software running on them. Either they'll all be un-updateable with bugs and vulnerabilities lasting forever, or they'll constantly be pestering me for software updates that change their functionality and behavior, and I don't know which is worse.

In the future I want fewer smart devices than I have now. I want to replace all my smart devices with one robot servant. Why have an internet-connected doorknob or light switch or thermostat, with all the reliability and security concerns that come with that, when my robot servant can unlock the door and turn on the lights and heat when I get home? Why have ambient screens and displays on every surface shouting information at me constantly when my robot servant can just tell me relevant information when I need to know it? Why have a dishwasher when my robot servant can "hand" wash the dishes? Etc.
Okay a few things:

1) I understand that people want free WhatsApp (etc), but I can't base internet policy on crowning WhatsApp as a free service. Indeed my whole position is that ISPs should not price-discriminate based on apps.

2) The fact that people used WhatsApp, Facebook & Twitter when they were zero-rated and continued to do so even when they are paid doesn't detract from my point about zero-rating being a unique advantage, quite the opposite.

3) Picking three services with strong network effects over the course of a few years is not what I meant about the fundamental nature of the internet. The point is that before WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter got popular, during their early growth, these apps and their users benefited from net neutrality. If apps become zero-rated over the long term their incumbency changes the nature of the internet from the state it was in when they were released.
I've seen both good and bad societal outcomes from low barriers to entry. Similarly, I've seen both good and bad societal outcomes from unregulated free markets.

I would argue that there is a distribution of outcomes as well as a distribution of "degrees" of free market possible in real-world markets.

To me, it makes far more sense to look at the outcomes desired by our society and create policy to "force" those outcomes - regardless of the degree of philosophical advocacy for or against "low barriers to entry" or "unregulated free markets". It just makes more sense to focus on the desired outcomes for our society.
Yes, sorry - I was criticizing the article, not the poster.
"Levine easily admits that 16 and Pregnant is unlikely to be the entire story. One data point his theory has trouble explaining is the steep decline in teen pregnancy rates between 2012 and 2013, long after the MTV shows' ratings had peaked.

"The continuing, rapid decline is the part I find a little confusing," he said. "The recession and the show get you a lot of the way through 2011 and 2012. But I was a bit surprised by the most recent, rapid decline in the 2013 data."

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/5987845/the-mystery-of-the-fall...
I'm more concerned for the baby's prospects than the teens'. (Baby is utterly innocent.) The teen situation is also unfortunate, but was also of their own doing in almost every case.
Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge [pdf]
Interesting. But then again, I've seen spiders making tools to catch other insects :)
"Bitcoin Unlimited" has no maximum block size, hence the name.

There are many problems which arise from unbounded transaction rates in Bitcoin. The most fundamental is that long term the coinbase reward is zero, and transaction fees are the only reason to create new blocks. Without artificial scarcity of block space (artificial in the sense of beyond what hardware can support) transaction fees would tend to zero, and mining would no longer generate revenue.

LN is proposed to allow many users and many transactions (when nodes cooperate) while keeping the security properties of Bitcoin (when nodes don't).
That's certainly unusual behaviour, since the parent says you can convert the value from hex to dec and it will show the correct unsigned decimal value.

One thing programmer mode really needs is a signed/unsigned option when converting between bases.
Facebook is not doing this for altruistic reasons.
Almost 300 years without a duvet
Nope. Retirement savings are typically in 401k and IRA accounts, which are untouchable (without enormous penalty) until age 59.5. It's entirely possible (though irrational) to have six or seven figures in retirement savings but no emergency fund.
"and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes."

I've always pushed for this to be in the remote terminals by default as my prototypes took almost no effort to implement. With plenty of benefit, too, for anyone that values instant feedback! That was a throwaway, though. Thanks for the link to a real app doing it. :)
Roughly: LN allows you to transact instantly, but with a limited group of people (it takes one normal bitcoin transaction to setup your group, but then transactions are instant). Whereas bitcoin allows you to transact slowly (block confirmation time, i.e. ~10mins) with anyone.
I'm deeply offended that you called my URL structure un-REST-ful and challenge you to come up with an API spec that's more REST-ful than mine.
A cool little known feature about the old Win95 (Win32API) dialogs and error messages was: one could press Ctrl + C to copy the text content.

Sadly the devs who created Windows NT, the Windows shell, Office in the 1989-1998 era all retired. And the overall high product of Microsoft products went downhill.

In 2006 with the Longhorn and WinFS debacle it was already clear that dotNet wasn't fast enough for desktop usage. Up to Windows 7 there were no dotNet desktop included, everything was in the good, trusted and fast C++. Now with development partly transfered to Microsoft India and another CEO you get a mess of UX/UI/privacy that is Win10 and WinRuntime. All the old programs with an old code base are still okay or goodm but I can't stand their newer development (written from scratch apps). Maybe it's a culture clash, maybe their QA process is wrong, maybe their vision.
reduces the cost of transaction processing

I never heard anybody complain that the transaction processing is too expensive. Both miners and users seem to be quite happy.
I enjoy keeping up..., defo not horror show.

I just don't understand the negative reaction towards kardashisans. I consider them to be pioneers in their field, hackers of reality tv.
Makes me wonder how many per cent of them became vegetarians as a way of changing to a healthy diet. Mens sana in corpore sano.
It's funny how there is no Skype code in Skype for Business.
Haven't you heard? They fired all the testers recently.
Where do you get this number?

In the store (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/windows-calculato... ) it says "Approximate size 3.07 MB - 5.79 MB", on my installation it says "368 KB" in the settings app and all "%ProgramFiles%\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsCalculator*" directories are about 5 megabytes together.

RAM usage exceeds 47 megabytes with about 5 or 6 calculator windows open.
`try` is different from `try!`. the new lonely operator is like `try!`, which asks only if the object is nil and then calls the method on it if it's not (and will blow up if the object doesn't have the method publically defined). `try`, in contrast, asks if the object is nil or responds to the method and returns nil if it doesn't.
And of course it's not surprising among people who post on Hacker News that they would be among the top 5%. It's just that having friends only in your socioeconomic level will put you in a bubble regardless of how much reading you do about the poverty of others. The level of empathy for others can really only exist if you have personal connections.
The teen pregnancy rate in the United States is falling dramatically. It just reached a historic low and has dropped by 61% since 1991.

However, nobody really knows why. Theres a lot of hypothesises going around (this being one) but the real reason is probably a combination of many factors. There is probably a positive feedback effect going on as well, lowering teen pregnancy leads to even lower teen pregnancy.

I read an article several months ago that gave (I believe) 9 factors that probably play a role.

Theres also a lot of successful programs going on at a very local level in many cities/towns/states such as this one in Colorado - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-colorado-lowered-their-teen-...

Addressing the teen pregnancies caused by birth control failure - The American Academy of Pediatrics just released their recommendations that IUDs should be a first line contraception for teenagers. 10 years ago they were only recommended for parous women (those who have given birth). The importance of this can't be overstated - IUDs are extremely effective as well as reduce the chance of human error to basically zero and require no maintenance by the user.

I strongly caution giving too much credit to any one thing.

Its all very fascinating stuff.
Walmart has been pouring money into RFID as a replacement for barcodes since the mid-90's. Analysts have said that by mid-2000's, every product package would have an RFID chip. Fast forward to 2015 and we aren't any closer. Andreessen is a fool who got lucky.
I think he was mocking other commemters?
Indian here, they even started Television ads showing zuke. It is getting out of hand. There VP of Internet org will be doing an AMA on reddit today !!
I once sat in a talk by a NASA Ames director (?) about his belief that even the tremendous cost for a manned mission to Mars would be "worth it" for the inspiration it would provide to the youth of the country to pursue STEM fields.

But then I thought -- wait, wouldn't it be much cheaper if we could harness the same kind of inspiration through Hollywood storytelling?
Baha'ism is an of-shoot of Babism (a cult created by a terrorist merchant called the Bab that was dedicated to destroying anything and anyone that didn't believe in him). Babism is itself an off-shoot of Shaykhism (created by a deviant man called shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i who believed in the existence of a city filled with women that would impregnate themselves using a Penis tree).

Contrary to what they claim about being peaceful, the Bah'ai rules are very violent and they are very intolerant of non-Baha'is. The founder called Baha'u'llah was put on death row for collaborating to Assassinate the Shah of Iran. He would also routinely refer to those that denied him as donkeys, pigs, and bastards. His son Abdu'l-Baha following the footsteps of his father, would routinely slap people he disliked in the face. He would also state sentences like the following which are whitewashed in translation of Baha'i texts to English:

“A Baha’i nigger is better than a non-Baha’i nymph”!

Furthermore they have some of the worst punishments known to mankind. Arsonists are to be killed by being burned alive and thieves are marked on their foreheads (like cattle?!!) and kicked out of the cities to live like hermits.
Well watching Hoarders does make me feel a sudden urge to clean...
Why are you posting a link to a link?

Please just post the direct link:
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/679430638919782401
Url changed from http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/12/24/the-unknown-browser-with..., which points to this.
> What if you could make calls on Reliance to only Reliance folks? Or what if Airtel charged you Rs. 20/min for calls to Docomo, but Rs 1/min to calls on Airtel?

What if Facebook gave everybody in India free phones and free calling, even if it was only on Facebook phones? Would anyone have to be the errand boy for their neighbors' calls?

I don't see how your experience where most could not afford any access (let alone restricted access) to basic telephony applies to this scenario where a restricted service is being given for free.

(I also spent my childhood vacations in rural areas where our house was the only one with a phone for miles around. And even then they would trouble us only for issues of some urgency. I have a hard time believing any of the people who'd walk all the way over would prefer doing that over getting a free but restricted phone service.)
The quest for an efficient software development environment on OS X
#PURPOSE #JUSTINBIEBER #2016LIVEWITHPURPOSE #FORTEFEMME
When I read headlines like this, the first thought is "fuck off!" - luckily, it won't come true.
Unfortunately it isn't widely known that Plan B can be gotten at Planned Parenthood for cheap to free. When I was poor and 50 dollars would break the bank I went to Planned Parenthood hoping they'd have better prices than the pharmacy. I nearly fainted (in a good way) when they gave it to me free, no questions asked. I couldn't have been more thankful.

To be honest I think the pharmacy prices are a sham. Extremely disappointing from a public health perspective.
Right, because the wrong kind of Internet access could kill people.
Every day is Christmas when it comes to HN using the font tag.
Interestingly, Wikimedia also engages in zero-rating, through their Wikipedia Zero program. But their motivations are genuinely altruistic. (After all, it brings them no direct benefit and costs them money.)
Try pissing off a crow sometime. If you irritate it enough, it will tell its friends how to recognize you.

You'll know when this happens.
GlueStick: A Command Line Interface for Building Web Applications Using React
It makes one wonder, 47MB of what? I don't have Win10 so can't easily find out, but for comparison I do happen to have an old version of Mathematica which is command-line only, and it's a little over 7MB (considered huge at the time - it needed 6 floppies!) I doubt the Win10 calculator has anywhere near the functionality of Mathematica.

XP's calc.exe, which doesn't have all the annoying bugs mentioned in the article, is 112KB.
After the show peaked girls who had grown up watching it entered puberty. They remembered the lessons
Check out /r/Bitcoin sometime for users complaining about transactions fees :)
(Actually more the threat that some day there will be significant fees)

Unfortunately Bitcoin has often been oversold as being "free"; but if transactions are free, and there's a fixed number of coins to mine, who pays for this whole network in 30 years?

The motivation behind the design of LN is to minimize the number of transactions which need to be globally verified (which has a cost) while still adhering to the general model of Bitcoin (decentralized, pseudonymous, etc).

You're right though that with tx fees being on the order of ~0.05 USD, you don't really need LN yet. I've long assumed that fees would become significant, pushing out some use cases. That's already happened with e.g satoshidice.
As with Bittorrent, the solution may simply be VPNs.
Why does my doorknob need to be connected to the internet?

So you can pay to use it: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9XFnbFIMAEj8rF.jpg
Why do you say that it's spam? It looks like a press release from the institution that conducted the study. Such articles are not always great, but they tend to be a bit better than the science-farm sites that crib from them. The standard for information like this on the web is unfortunately rather low.
Signs That You're a Good Programmer
Industrial grade condescension, sounds like Thoreau all right. He could have maybe found real wilderness at either of those places, but then mom wouldn't have been able to bring cookies and do laundry weekly.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum
Originality is not required - being pointed in the right direction is.

This is sadly another one of these "HN does negativity" again (as opposed to nativity, which I would pay for tickets)

Andreessen is right in most of his (yes,bombastic) pronouncements - right in the direction of travel, right in the wave to catch.

Which is what is wanted. Society has a lot of challenges ahead and we need plenty of scouts out ahead warning of the danger and the opportunities. The more scouts who come back, and are right about the lay of the land, the better prepared we will be.

So, are his rationales for the future correct? Mostly. Are his investments based on those rationales profitable - less than previous, but that's only relevant if you are an investor in a16z

I hope he keeps calling them, and I look forward to robust discussions about the correctness of his calls - but don't expect that discussion to occur in mainstream papers - HN is where we should do that.
I'm not sure the prospects are so bleak. I made some tests and I could run the compiled code on another machine with a different directory structure. See https://ilconnettivo.wordpress.com/2015/12/25/ruby-2-3-0-ins...
The NYT appropriately used median instead of mean to discount the effects of the outliers. I'm sure the average would be a lot higher (because of people moving between coasts).
But what's the benefit of adding another detection layer over the existing one? If the GeoIP is wrong, it'll still redirect me to the blocked domain. If I can change the domain and access it anyway, what's the purpose of blocking?

It doesn't make sense to me that they implemented GeoIP blocking by redirection, as it only has added downsides.
I think you didn't realize he was joking. It was Hillary who made the silly statement. Andreessen was "strongly agreeing" to make fun of her. You can see this in his further comments to that tweet.
He's making fun of Hillary Clinton for saying she'd close any school than wasn't doing better than average, which taken to its logical end, means closing all but 1 school.
Thanks. :) I obsessed quite a bit about this about 10 years ago. Yes, it's been 10 years since the important things in Opera Mini transcoding/system design happened. At first it enabled web browsing on new expensive Nokia, Sony Ericsson, etc phones primarily in Europe/Russia, then the focus shifted to Africa and Asia/India.

Back then I figured: when when you are architecturally forced to throw out compliance with lots of fancy newfangled dynamic stuff, why not focus on readability and page navigation usability instead?

(I led the Opera Mini team at Opera until last year.)
I created a snail brain for my snail simulation. There's still a lot of work to do, but my snails have sensors, memories, and make decisions now. I was pretty proud of getting the brain to the state where the snails could decide to eat, mate, etc. on their own.
One Way Our Schools Are Training New Narcissists (2010)
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> the facts on the ground are 80% of Indians do not have internet access

The facts on the ground for everywhere in the world not too long ago was worse than 20% access to the Internet. And I bet the current 20% Indian Internet users have much much faster connections than dial-up.

Things change. Fast. It is disingenuous to ignore the natural connectivity growth trajectory and focus on today's number only. Most will get connected to the Internet, with or without Facebook's "help" soon. The danger is with Facebook's "help", they'll get connected to FBNet (Free Basics Network, aka ZuckNet), diverting them away from connecting to the real Internet.
This. Exactly this.

A personal software agent will make a lot of "smart" devices and many apps irrelevant.

See Apple's vision from early ’90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bjve67p33E
I recently started reading a book called "The Joy of Game Theory: An Introduction to Strategic Thinking" which touches on explaining the grouping of similar shops (and politicians tending towards the centre!) as an effect of Game Theory. Very interesting read so far.
None of those posts had a significant discussion, so they don't count as dupes on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html