skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fractional banking deployment is the equivalent to nuclear power discovery, nuclear fusion can used to create energy using nuclear power plants our to destroy using atomic bombs.

The same way Fractional banking can be useful by increasing the credit supply and destructive when over leverage.

Simply put Fractional banking creates a derivative instrument on money.
What a wonderful article. I've learnt several useful things just by skimming it, even if I never end up using Kolmogorov-Smirnov in anger.
All I'm saying is that more freedom causes economic growth, which is not a controversial statement. I think you're saying that economic growth will lead to more freedom. I'm sure that's true to some degree, but there are counterexamples. The Soviet Union experienced dramatic economic growth, but freedom never improved, and eventually the economy stagnated, as will China's (I predict).

In any case, surely more freedom in China would not be a bad thing.
> When they give (say) a $1 million loan to a business they're writing $1 million of new money into existence in their account, money which is just as good as printed cash.

Actually, it's exactly the cash from the depositor, loaned out. What the depositor gets in return for his cash is a "bank account": a freshly printed promise from the bank that, at a later date, he will be able to extract his cash. So the depositor takes a risk and makes an investment, and is rewarded with an interest.

When you are insisting on 100% reserve banking, you are denying the bank the option to lend out your money.

I assure you institutional investors, like large corporations, pension and investment funds and which provide the bulk of the funds, very much vote with their wallet. They are not protected against bank failures and it's not like they can cash out billions and keep then under mattresses. The mere threat of a liquidity problem will make the bank very risk averse and focus on improving it's position at the expense of it's market share. So banks don't need to fail for the banking market to work, the diligent bankers will be those providing liquidity.
In British English if something is 'scuppered (often someone's chances) it is destroyed or sunk. I assume the author was going for this verb usage.
>the level of debate is relatively high and the populace make far better choices than you would see in a country without the same situation.

What about the Swiss referendum on an absolute ban on the construction of minarets? (note: not a ban on building mosques)

Switzerland, like many other European countries, has planning laws that decide on the architectural appropriateness of a building in its surrounding environment on a case-by-case basis. But this referendum, passed by a majority of the Swiss population, placed a complete ban on a minaret ever being built again in Switzerland. That was a completely democratic decision by the people of Switzerland. But was it based on informed debate? Or reactionary and emotional appeals? [1]

[1]http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/files/2010/11/ch-1.jpg
Anyone or a startup looking for a product focused person?
I'm looking for a full time job in product management, open for remote and relocation.
But on the other hand, if you're Microsoft, you've done the same thing so often that it's logical outsiders think you're extremely hypocritical when pulling stunts like this.
Oooor...

1) You realize hydroponics has nothing to do with growing pot. 100 % of pot growers breath air. You don't use that to single them out.

2) You make sure the tested substance is actually pot. No test can be perfect, but it can be a LOT better than "sometimes it works".

3) You don't pretend you are military. Just knock the door, have chat with the white couple instead of pushing their face into the floor, pet the dog instead of shooting it, and have a look around for the pot growing operation instead of searching the entire house for something else.
A modern architecture for functional programmers
> Microsoft should not have been allowed to patent this particular design because

...it is a design, not an invention. It is as simple as that. Patents should only apply to things that advance technology and/or science.
Aren't they taking a page from Apple's playbook here? "You can do mostly whatever, as long as you don't duplicate functionality of our existing - or planned applications; in the latter case we'll retroactively pull you from the market."
Many people are just not very smart.
It's already happened. Groupon is a public company and we got to watch it go from ~$26/share to ~$3/share in real time! https://www.google.com/finance?cid=10792264
Developing MVC Using Django and Visual Studio2015 Part 1
PAPIs Connect 2016 – Call for Proposals on Track
In British English, 'scupper' can act as a verb effectively a synonym of 'scuttle'. The Economist used British English.
True. However ... any central bank is free to do that in any currency they please. So the ECB can do it for Swiss Francs today, for instance.

If you now proceed to say that that is lunacy ... I'd agree with you. But it's still how it works.
As somebody in a long distance relationship, thank you :)
He's upset with the following:

"An Angular "service" is a singleton object created by a "service factory". These service factories are functions which, in turn, are created by a "service provider". "The service providers are constructor functions". When instantiated they must contain a property called $get, which holds the service factory function."

He programs his front end in React. I'm not an expert in React in any way, but let's look at some sample code:

"use strict";

var HelloMessage = React.createClass({
displayName: "HelloMessage",

render: function render() {
return React.createElement(
"div",
null,
"Hello ",
this.props.name
);
}
});

ReactDOM.render(React.createElement(HelloMessage, { name: "John" }), mountNode);

In this code, I see what looks like a singleton object called ReactDOM, which would be an Angular service. There's a factory function "createClass" (a service factory), which is created by an object called React - which looks suspiciously like an Angular service provider.

Call me a cynic, but this rant looks like an uninformed screed, written by someone who thinks that creation patterns are only creation patterns if they are called factories, singleton factories and factory-functions (or constructor functions).

If he can't identify patterns in use in his favourite tool that are precisely the same as the ones he criticises, then I'm not sure he's as good a coder as he thinks he is. Even if he enjoys writing in Erlang.
Show HN: Meshnotes – a utility to create and share rich-text pages fast
> Remember that Web Assembly is designed to run in a JS engine.

Is it? It's a very low-level bytecode that's designed to be efficiently compiled in one pass, and completely unrelated to the JS engine. It isn't meant (at least at this time) to have an optimizing JIT (like HotSpot or V8). It is meant as a good target for languages that don't rely on/can't benefit greatly from good JIT optimizations, such as C/C++ (or Rust).

Of course, one could compile a JVM to wasm, provided that wasm allows applications to write to executable memory (which I doubt).
This is quite nice! But does anyone else knows more useful websites such as this with down-to-earth explanations of statistical tools?
Barely on topic, but since you're the person to ask, would the use of OpenJDK on Android mean that it'd support Pulsar/Quasar?
Pattern Matching for Modern JavaScript
I have just started teaching my daughter to program. I would certainly agree that starting off is not nearly as easy as it used to be.

Kids love interactive and graphical environments and trying to do this in any mainstream language quickly becomes non trivial.

I chose Python and pygame but it gets confusing for the child to see things like:

from pygame.locals import *

and

for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == QUIT:
pygame.quit()

and

size = (120, 640)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size)

One can tell her to ignore these and just accept they are necessary but it does cause issues and looks very intimidating to a beginner.
Facts on Fats – New Year New You
Basic is still alive and well, providing a simple programming environment for beginners.

It has returned to being a hobbyist scene, just like in the 80s. Basic compilers are written by hobbyists for hobbyists.

For native applications my favourite is PureBasic: http://www.purebasic.com/

It's a nice variant that compiles to a tiny, dependency free executables for Windows, Linux and OSX.

It also provides a nice gateway to the underlying assembler. http://www.purebasic.com/documentation/reference/inlinedasm....

It also has an online version called Spider Basic that compiles to JavaScript: http://www.spiderbasic.com/
Einstein said that everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. In the case of certain enterprise apps (yup, such things exist!) frameworks like Angular are often required.
Asimov, Isaac The Gods Themselves. 1972,
That's my favorite Sci-fi novel of all times; the aliens come in triads; one is the rational, the other the emotional the third one is the parent/Mother. They have sex by melting into each other, when they become one - because the weak nuclear force is so weak in this universe; Pure Genius.
In case you're not just trolling, I'm wondering if your argument would change in case of matters that require medical or nuclear engineering expertise.
Ebook sales growth is not stagnating its only the big 5 publishers that are seeing ebook sales decline as they have jacked up the prices. And self publishing is taking over many of which don't use ISBN numbers so are not counted.
Sure, in the coworking/startup world. Not in the corporate world.
My problem is that they didn't explain with sufficient clarity and succinctness why the split was performed. It was eventually clear that the intent was to delineate between community recommendations and social sharing. (No doubt this made overwhelming logical sense in their strategy meetings, but reality always ends up being messier.)

All the arguable benefits of breaking out Swarm could could have been achieved with some considered use of interface design within a single Foursquare app.

Instead they confused new users and triggered irrational yet predictable anger within a portion of their user base.
I remember being dumbfounded when they announced they were removing check-in functionality. It was the main thing I associated with the Foursquare "brand" and I was a heavy check-in user at the time (the game mechanics were great).

They must have known everyone was there for the check-ins, and it seemed arrogant of them to believe they could force all their users to migrate to some other app. (talk about shooting yourself in the foot)

I never downloaded Swarm on principle (i can check in with the Facebook app if i really want to). Foursquare did this to themselves.
I was actually going through a list last night of Amiga/Atari games. Lots of memories.. Beverly Hills Cop, Barbarian, Commando, Leisure Suit Larry etc.

Did any of these game developers make money from the games? All I can remember was borrowing floppy disks from friends or downloading from BBS, we barely had places that sold games in Sweden.
Those who have more wealth put it in stocks, bonds, or index funds. They seldom keep it in cash.

How old are the people? All I can give you is anecdotal evidence of quite a few older people I know. People aged between 50 and 80. Many have the bulk of their money in bank deposits. Quite a few people don't own a single stock or mutual fund. That's today.

And if you go back perhaps 50 years, then hardly anyone invested in stocks. The vast majority of people kept money in the bank or in real estate (their house or farm). I'm of course not talking about millionaires, I'm talking about average middle class people.

Would they have been smart to have more in stocks? Of course, but that's hindsight.

Even now I don't blame anyone for staying away from equities. In October 2007 the S&P 500 hit 1576. Then it bottomed at 666 in March 2009 (hard to forget that number!). Now it's 2056. It's easy to overlook that volatility if you have a steady six figure income. But when you're retired, when you'll never earn another dollar of income in your life, you tend to be more cautious.

I personally have almost all my money in equities and in real estate. Nothing in bank savings. But I'd never try to talk anyone into taking money out of the bank and putting it into the stock market. If they make money, they think they're geniuses. If they lose money, I'm a schmuck for giving them bad advice!
I beg to disagree.

One need error correction to fight disk/OS failures and compression to conserve bandwidth. Both tasks are highly specializable and good candidates for FPGA implementation.

Having tool like FPGA at your disposal makes you look at problems differently.
It's just an educated guess. For general stats (http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-os-ww-monthly-201509-2015...), 90% of the world uses windows while 10% use macs. This reflects directly at companies and large development teams. For developer stats (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...), 54% use windows, 21% use macs.

I'm not stating that these stats are the ultimate sources of truth. But those are good references. If you were to measure the reality in most countries, I doubt those numbers would swap places.

In Brazil I see lots of devs using Macs too. It's just not the majority of them.
State Dept Announces Accomplishments for 2015: Bringing Peace to Syria
actually, you were bang on the usecase ("typically where there's some UI missing or not yet implemented "), but not for debugging.

In fact, if I'm not wrong there was a startup that got launched on HN or PH or somewhere that just builds database connected spreadsheet-like webapps.

The thing is - in operations driven startups, the early days are built on top of spreadsheets. Which can get unmanageable within days. So then you start building your webapp. Something like dbeaver turns into a godsend because you then use the database as a spreadsheet, while you take your time building the webapp.

A spreadsheet is so much more common than a webapp with an opinionated UI - it was so surprising that when I handed over dbeaver to an operations guy, he actually had zero trouble using it to do his work. In fact the UI we are building now is on top of Handsontable (a JS spreadsheet component) rather than a form-like web component. Everyone is just so used to copy pasting rows, manipulating data,etc.
Why anger?
I trust democracy to decide on complex financial issues as much as I trust it to design a chemical factory or offer medical advice: not at all.
It's rather physiology, not physics.
Never Pay for an Introduction
I like how the "anomalies" of different chips in Amiga 500 are put together into a rigid intertwined system.
It's a republic not a democracy. The problem with a democracy is the majority rules. If the US were a true democracy the civil rights movement would have never happened. The white majority could have simply out voted the black minority. Pure democracy is mob-rule.
One of the reasons I immigrated to Switzerland is direct democracy and stability. Since two hundred something years Switzerland is politically neutral. It is ranked the most stable economy in the world and the most competitive nation (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Switzerland-the-most-competitiv...). The Swiss Franc is the sixth most-traded currency in the world. If you get your salary in Swiss Francs, you maximize the chances that the salary you earn will actually be worth something in the future and is not just paper.

If you look for a tech-job in Switzerland, I work as a tech-recruiter in Zurich. Check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... and / or send me a mail to the address in my HN-profile.
[from Chris at OpenCorporates]
Thanks for all the useful comments. Wondered if anyone tried the Advanced Search, and particularly the experimental 'search by relevance', which gives Apple Inc as the top score. It's experimental in part because what two users my not have the same view of relevant as each other (one reason why Google wants you to be logged in when searching, so it can return searches on what it thinks is relevant to you).

Re the number of results, with over 95 million companies from hundreds of official sources, there are a lot of companies with the same or similar names -- that's part of the power, and why OpenCorporates is so widely used by journalists, anti-corruption investigators, lawyers, law-enforcement etc. The more we loosen the search, however, the more results you will get -- so it's a balancing act, and the advanced search and the API is part of us trying to make it work for users, and we'd love feedback on both -- just email us at community @ opencorporates dot com

For large listed companies such as Apple or Intel, it depends on what question you are trying to answer. If it's just an overview of the corporation, then Wikipedia or something like Yahoo Finance is the best route. The former gives a narrative overview, using the collected expertise of hundreds of contributors; the latter includes highly proprietary data (which was also for the most part collected by offshore humans) to build an overall picture.

However, for official, provenanced data under an open licence about legal entities, OpenCorporates is by far the best option -- the Facebook example is a good one. Contrary to many people's expectations, Facebook is not a California Corporation. However, because they operate in California they have to register as a branch (aka Foreign Corporation), and if you land on that page (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_ca/C2711108) you'll see that we actually link to the home corporation, in Delaware (https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/3835815), and there we list subsidiaries and other branches. Why don't we have Instagram? You can check from the source of the subsidiaries we list (e.g. https://opencorporates.com/statements/37307675 which links to the SEC Exhibit 21 filing at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001326801150... ), and you can see there that they don't list Instagram (possibly because either there's no separate company for it, or because it doesn't count as a material subsidiary).

So the question often becomes (and news stories are problematic for multiple reasons), where can you find the linkages that can be parsed into structured, provenanced data in a reliable way. We're focusing on two areas: looking for sources of public data that can be combined together to give insight to all, and building up a community of users to help us do that: http://impact.opencorporates.com/contribute/

Please do consider joining us in this important mission, or just by pinging us with suggestions of how we can do better.
According to wikipedia it was valued at $13B when floated. Then lost ~90% of its value. That means $11.7B. Wow.
ELI5: did anyone profit from this other than the founders?
The story of rising rare book values
Except that Foursquare/Swarm isn't entirely valueless. Depending where you are on the planet, there can be a lot of great data in there — some of it particularly invaluable for not being intensely gamed like TripAdvisor/Expedia are.

When I was traveling around Europe this year, in many places Foursquare recommendations were consistently accurate and of good quality. (My one wish: integrate Google Translate for tips! The locals' tips would surely be the most worthwhile to read.)
You can open it in a debugger. C is something pretty much every developer knows and has a ton of documentation. LLVM is nicely documented but not exactly in that league. Its more like working with Java bytecode, possible not trivial.

E.g. if you have a bug in the LLVM translation code, good luck tracking that... With ParparVM just open it in the debugger and see what went wrong.

Look at the referenced quote in the readme from a guy actually going thru the LLVM path (CEO of RoboVM). Its theoretically easy but in all practicality its pretty far from easy and you have no way of knowing what Apple will do with LLVM in the future. But they pretty much guaranteed they will support C as its an officially supported language.
Used in anger is an expression that roughly means 'used to achieve something.'

I think it comes from 'shots fired in practice' vs. 'shots fired in anger' (i.e. in combat, for the purpose of killing).
I got a low-ish offer from them four years ago, and the HR person tried to talk up the value of the equity, saying "Right now, this equity grant is worth $XXX, assuming our valuation doubles in the next year, your equity will be worth $YYY!

For what it's worth, also included in the list of perks was an Rdio membership.

In spite of this, I actually wish I hadn't turned them down, since everyone I'd met interviewing was awesome.
I would add: Jack Campbell, The Lost Fleet series. Excellent spaceship
battles, actually accounting the speed of light, vast distances, space-time
distortion to some degree, and plenty of logistics and manoeuvring.
Hey guys, feedback welcome. I'm happy to answer any questions you have!
> I never downloaded Swarm on principle

On what principle?
To "use something in anger" is a phrase, meaning to use something "for real" - in production, etc. rather than just to try it out.
Getting links to each search would be something I would like to see in future! Anyways, awesome product (y)
Montetary Reform: A Better Monetary System for Iceland [pdf]
"(It doesn't, for example, COW away all the memory benefits as a naive fork would.)"

That's not the case any longer, posix_spawn() is used on recent JVMS rather than fork().
Life with an OpenBSD Laptop [pdf]
Can someone explain the "invest on food because of water"?
As many others I was startled by the mention at the end of the movie.

I understand the reasoning behind "water cannot be easily transported".

But this part:

What became clear to me is that food is the way to invest in water. That is, grow food in water-rich areas and transport it for sale in water-poor areas. This is the method for redistributing water that is least contentious, and ultimately it can be profitable, which will ensure that this redistribution is sustainable.

With such a broad definition of "investing in water", my understanding is that his strategy becomes "invest in nearly everything". Water is needed for food production (which is already a very broad area for investment) but also in countless industrial processes: paper production, silicon chip, anything that uses water a solvent or as a way to cut through things...

My reasoning can not be right because it would basically mean "invest in anything". Can someone please help me make sense of this?
I don't think it is that stupid. There's a whole lot of designs available for a slider. It is just a design patent so it won't hurt any other company's/product design, they can easily swap it by making little changes or designing an entirely new design for such a small thing.

As many people already linked the Corel Calc user interface design, which is exactly same as Microsoft's Excel. I don't think Microsoft is doing wrong by patenting their design elements.
I see what you mean.

You can create such new types with std.typecons.Typedef https://dlang.org/phobos/std_typecons.html#.Typedef

Though it's less pretty.
Is there a GPG plugin ?
probably, thats why people like Bill-Gates is investing in things which produce drinking water
That's why it's not a utility patent, but it instead a design patent.
I prefer this style of interview to the 'quiz' oriented style which revolve around the interviewers ego 90% of the time.
> [...] (hint: they aren't. The President is no better than me and no better than the garbage man).

I would be surprised if he would be better than The Garbageman.

http://dilbert.wikia.com/wiki/The_Garbageman