skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are two things to consider when talking about productivity. The best way I can explain it is with a little story.

There was a contest where contestants had to find a box in a forest based only on a photograph of an item. There were two contestants. One was a spry young fellow who has never been to this particular forest. The other was a limping 60 year old woman who has lived nearby and knows these woods like the back of here hand.

The pistol fires and off they go. The young man takes off running. He runs here, runs there, runs circles, looking for something familiar from the photo. His endurance is uncanny and his ability to jump across branches second-to-none.

The lady looks at the photo and studies it. After a few minutes, she takes her walking stick and limps off. She recognized the rocks in the photo and knows more or less where to go to find the box.

The young fellow is much more productive in "miles ran per hour", or "acres searched", or in "O2-consumption-per-mile" metrics. For the lady, the above metrics are dismal. However, she beats the man in the most important "boxes found" metrics.

Nowadays, in the US, a lot of the grueling and repetitive work is done by machines. In order to be successful (whatever that means) you often don't need to run quickly, but you need to know where to go and how to get there. So what if 151 million people are working 1789 hours per year (1) for a total of 27 billion hours worked, if a good number of those hours are productively spent doing things which are in the end deemed useless, are unnecessary, or are done incorrectly.

It all comes down to quality vs. quantity in the end.

(1): https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
Maybe compile time can be faster at the same time?
""Some of the volume data, such as power and rail freight and even (bank) credit, are interesting because there is less incentive to massage them at the local level. But they reveal only part of the truth, not the entire truth," he said.

"This would be a useful measure for steel and cement production. I'm not sure how well it would measure retail sales.""

This is what one Chinese official uses to get a better sense of the economy rather than relying on massaged numbers. It's still far from perfect obviously, but I find it interesting.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-wikileaks-id...
There are two types of innovation. Random "out there" market ideas? Yes, because upstarts have to find something to upset the monopoly, so they're self-selected to have something interesting. But long-term, actual innovation? Pretty much only monopolies can afford that. That includes governments, and that includes R&D departments of various corporations that can stay cost centres for years before accounting notices.

There are of course exceptions - like Elon, who has and for whom the profitability of the company is only a secondary, supporting concern.
While he might have been free by now, he would still have been labeled a felon.
The remaining currency just becomes worth more.

This is the key point that addresses why hoarding makes no difference to Bitcoin's utility as a currency.
Your commas at the beginning of the lines are making my eyes bleed
I really liked these books. Would love to know about some that you would recommend, then, you seem to be harder to convince than I am :)

Also, it seems he is currently writing a new trilogy in the same universe (The Chronicle of the Fallers), the first of which is already out. Haven't read it yet, however.
ES has all of those things except for requiring that a statement ends with a semicolon.
Well, they do need to employ a highly paid CEO... /s
Socket.IO down – Error establishing a database connection
The Federal Reserve is very well aware[2], cyclical movements in the economy promotes the creative destruction required to grow the economy in the long run.

At the same time, it's mandate given by the Congress is to minimise cyclical movements in the economy, through maintaining price stability, maximising employment, and moderating long-term interest rates.

Regular periods of price volatility, temporary, massive fall in employment, and sharp interest rate volatility are required for releasing ineffectively used capital and labor in the economy, to be hoovered up by stronger businesses. But the Federal Reserve's mission isn't to promote creative destruction for long term economic growth. It's mission is to maintain economic stability, even if it is anaemia to long term economic growth. In fact, it's mandate doesn't even mention economic growth or productivity.

Why do politicians create a Federal Reserve to do this, and to let it keep this mandate for the past hundred years? Why does President Obama want Federal Reserve to maintain economic stability, even as it corrodes American economy, month by month, year by year?

It's election year, and President Obama wants to convince the world the American economy is doing great.

Reject pessimism, cynicism and know that progress is possible. Progress is not inevitable, it requires struggle, discipline and faith.[1]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/23/barack-obama-...

[2] https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/economic-perspective...

Because a firm’s failure frees the labor and capital it employed for use at a more profitable entrant, this process may be described as creative destruction. Although there are costs associated with creative destruction, such as the lost labor of temporarily unemployed workers, it benefits an economy in the long run by moving productive resources into more profitable uses.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2006/200623/200623pa...

Explaining Cyclical Movements in Employment: Creative Destruction or Changes in Utilization

https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/money_12848.htm

The Congress established the statutory objectives for monetary policy--maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates--in the Federal Reserve Act.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is firmly committed to fulfilling this statutory mandate.
Hope you enjoy it -- it's one of my top 5 favorite scifi books!
Doesn't work for me. It just says "creating profile...".
Yeah that was the first thing I noticed as well. I'm somewhat surprised (a little sad, even) that the BBC chose not to write it in the subjunctive mood, which is precisely what is required here.

I thought when I read the headline that Instagram was insisting (that is, reiterating) that Littergram was already renamed.
Pretty impressive if Bill Clinton managed to make UK teen pregnancy rates fall as well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35761826
And another pile of patents.
Thanks for all the interest everyone..

Got a nice selection of emails and am going through them to optimise them... Will post the results up in here!
The laws are silly, I think we all agree on that. The big record labels are silly, most of us probably agree on that too.

It still feels wrong when popular artists do not get paid for their work because it's more convenient for people to pirate it.

I mean, creative/artistic efforts take a lot of time, regardless of how easy reproducible the results are. By paying for their previous songs, you're basically funding their next songs, something you should be interested in as a fan.
Interface from Data: using React to sync updates and offline edits across devices
The saddest futurama episode ever.

Only seen it once, it made me feel too depressed.
Well this has just introduced me to Haxe in general. This looks frankly, amazing. Where has it been all my life.
German here; whenever I read workplace stories from the US I can usually follow along just fine, just at the end, it seems like someone HAS to be fired, always leaving me a little confused. Why no reconciliation? Why immediately resort to such a drastic measure?

In my professional life I've come across a handful of colleagues who were demoted when they couldn't handle a certain role, or who have committed various kinds of misconduct, yet remained at their companies just fine.
Just my two cents, as someone completely oblivious about management: maybe because previous performance, while not great a indicator, is the best predictor of future performance?

To put it more obviously, as a manager of "another part" of the same company, wouldn't you rather have the opportunity to recruit and hire, instead of being handed someone (which you know already failed)?
To be fair, they may well be very well aware, but can't decide when to finally pull the plug. There are other issues right now such as the UK Referendum on leaving the EU proto-state Customs Union, plus the forthcoming US Presidential Elections.

Nobody wants to deal with the fallout anyway, but at a febrile time politically it would be even worse. Hence keep putting it off.
Not to mention the potential impact of the usual breakthroughs that are always just 20 years away like working nuclear fusion reactors, quantum computers and AGI. Having AGI could mean productivity growth so stratospheric than humans are essentially obsolete.
Helium-Filled: yey ! Seagate: hmm..

Aren't Seagate the least reliable HDDs in most of the HDD statistics from data centers ?
Hello - I said "somewhat similar animals" by which I meant very early primates who were a bit like squirrels and mice. I should have made it a bit clearer!

I did get the date wrong - I should have said 65my.

Here is a link

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-prim...
you have to type in some text in all 3 textfields, that's why, if you skip steps it will not be able to show you a response
Correction: It's HGST (now merging with Western Digital), not Hitachi, and the HGST Helium-filled drives have been available for several years. Seagate is playing catch-up.

Disclaimer: Works for HGST/WD
and you have to use a PC/Mac (you sure you didn't use a mobile device?)
Como engordar saudavelmente
Kevin Trudeau was imprisoned for contempt of court, not for selling false information.
Even more ironically, the actual distribution mechanism is hundreds of times less expensive, more efficient and rapid way of providing access to the material!
If we expect to see the "brightness of the blackbox caused by the radiation of a Type III Kardashev Civilization", and we inspect galaxies that are maybe millions of light-years away from us, would we not be looking at how did those galaxies look millions of years ago?

That is, maybe there are Type III Kardashev Civilizations and their usage of the energy of their galaxy in fact radiates energy that would be visible to us... except that they've evolved to that point much later that the light we're receiving since it takes millions of years for that light to reach us.

In those millions of years they could very well have reached that technological level, but it will take some more millions of years for that to reach us... by that time mabye that Civilization doesn't exist anymore... Maybe our civilization doesn't exist anymore...

In this case we extract information from the radiation that comes from those galaxies, and the information is too slow to travel such vast distances, since it can't go faster than the speed of light.

In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.
Personally, I think it has at least these important aspects:

- built on a foundation of open source software

- new ways of presenting and consuming should be encouraged and easily discoverable

- completely outside the influence of the current publishing industry

There's a community of us working on this stuff. We hang out on gitter (https://gitter.im/codeforscience/community).
Ask HN: Thesis writing – LaTeX vs. word
I am in the process of writing my thesis, which has moderate mathematical content. I am most comfortable writing these kind of documents in LaTeX. However, my supervisor (who is less technical) is in favour of word. The ability to track changes, plus his familiarity with the program, are the important factors.

Does anyone know of any way to reliably convert latex documents into word? Or some other solution?
I don't think anyone was questioning that.

Also FWIW, so am I and it's not all that bad.
No amount of runtime predicate dispatch is going to tell you if a particular occurrence of `nil` is intended to be used as a list of ints or as a list of strings, because runtime checks can't “see into the object's future”. On the other hand, a type checker can easily infer this, in some languages.
Bloody hell. So we are looking at a 2,000% increasing since the 80s?
The Benefits of Mobile Apps for Business
It depends on the venue.

In my field of computer science (visual analytics / visualizations) at least some of the leading journals/conferences officially allow you to put a version of the paper on your website.

Just today we submitted a paper where the copyright form explicitly mentions that.
One of the many problems we have as humans and citizens of the world, is our dependence on US laws. It's not like it's cataclysmic-bad but there are some issues that would greatly benefit, to the rest of the world, from a little push by US citizens on US law makers (It's not like we can do something about it, we're not invited to the conversation).

This is one of them.
While true, I think the rise of Linux and FOSS, alongside embedded development helped C stay around.

On Mac OS, Windows, Symbian, BeOS, even commercial UNIX with CORBA and Motif OO libraries, developers were already transitioning from C to C++ when Linux and FOSS, which depend heavily on C, started to gain adoption.

Then you have the embedded space, specially with micro-controlers, where even packing C into the EPROM is already an exercise.

As for C++, the new standards rely reinvigorated it, with Apple, Google and Microsoft pushing it forward.

One of the reasons I updated to Windows 8 (now on W10) was to be able to use C++/CX with XAML. Visual C++ finally catched up with C++ Builder in terms of RAD experience.

This where I see Rust still needs to grow. There are lots of use cases where Rust still does not provide an out-of-the-box solution vs C++ tooling does.
Ganeti can use either Xen, KVM and LXC hypervisors -- I've actually only used the KVM backend.

I've used Ganeti Web Manager[0] in the past, but would probably try out Ganetimgr[1] for future installs. The command-line tools are very good however, and I don't think the web interfaces expose the full functionality (i.e. rebalancing, node evacuation, master-failover, etc).

0: https://github.com/osuosl/ganeti_webmgr

1: https://github.com/grnet/ganetimgr
This is why the scam is so insidious. The journals are really squatting on academic output so they can be gatekeepers of academic status and of career prospects.

The product of publishing isn't the dissemination of insight and innovation, but of gold stars academics can put on their resumes.

Sci-Hub doesn't just threaten copyright, but the entire status factory.
I wonder if there would be a Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The vile excess and inequality of the global fashion industry
From a utilitarian perspective this will cause more harm than good to golang. Enabling users to ship binary blobs instead of open source openly audible code will decrease the over all quality of golang libs. Its the job of those who write the compiler to move the project in a direction which is best for golang, and this direction arguably is not good for golang.
Vulnerability in Java Reflection Library Still Present After 30 Months
No, borrowing and repayment are not included in GDP.

But there are some almost similarly absurd situations. If you paint your garden fence and your neighbor plants some potatoes, that doesn't count into GDP. However, if you buy your neighbors potatoes, and she pays you to paint her fence, those exchanges become relevant (ignoring the fact that small stuff like this is hard to measure).

This is more relevant than one might think. Considering one of the largest economic developments in the last half century was the integration of women into the labour force, growth statistics would look quite different if were to assign a fair value to unpaid housework they used to do.
First port of call, get Littergram to rename their app!
Many researchers do so – but the established magazines are used for evaluating the quality of a researcher, and also used for ranking universities.

You might notice that universities which recommend to their researchers to self-publish do not even show up in any university ranking.
"I live in a place where the echoes of tyranny and the heinous information-apparatus it depended on still ring throughout the land."

But that place only exists in your head. It's not real. It's spring outside - take a walk amongst the flowers, clear your head and enjoy life a bit.
I don't think it's actually a good indicator because performance is affected by so many important factors—including things like the direct manager and the rest of the team.

What it is, rather, is the IBM effect in reverse. Regardless of how good a predictor it really is, common knowledge is that it really matters. If you add a random new worker to the team and it doesn't work out, well, these things happen. If you have someone with a classic "red flag" (most of which are either highly exaggerated or complete bullshit) and it doesn't work out, it's all your fault.

Of course, in reality, the same factors dominate in both cases—things don't always work out, but that's only to be expected. But woe if you can be blamed for it!
Failed at that job, and within that particular combination of people, job requirements and roles to be fulfilled.

Both Lebron James and Cristiano Ronaldo are top players at their sports, and known for their high athleticism. You wouldn't expect them to switch and still be performing at the level they do.

Heck, you wouldn't even expect them to be performing at a high capacity if you just switched positions inside their own team!.
It's not the same industry as AWS in the same way as Amazon isn't really the same industry as catalog/mail order businesses of yore (around 1850s I believe that began).

You could get limited amounts of compute time on a mainframe back in the day, just like you could order flannel and get it delivered in days/weeks.

Now you get massive scale compute resources on demand and fresh fruit, veg and almost anything else delivered within an hour.

Neither of them are dissimilar from present offerings, but neither are the same industry as their predecessors.
This 40 year old patent reveals the secret behind Donald Trump’s hairstyle
For the Go team it is beneficial if more people/companies are using Go and possibly contributing back. Trying to force someone into a specific usage pattern (here, open sourcing of all components) can be detrimental to it. Even if parts of your product might be open sourced, there often are good reasons for commercial software providers (either by selling software or the software being part of a sold product) not to open source their whole stack. Even GCC clearly states that programs compiled with it are not covered automatically by the GPL.
I work at a German company, currently, and have been dealing with someone which - IMO - should be fired. I can understand what you say about not resorting immediately to drastic measures, and my company is actually trying (too hard, again IMO) to do that.

However, you have to consider the downsides of this: is it fair that my workload is increased, because someone is underperforming? I'm not talking about occasional spikes, this is systematic. What does the company communicate to its associates, when "accepting" someone like this? What about quality, how am I supposed to champion quality if the company accepts the low quality output (let's forget "low quantity" for a moment) from someone else?

There's always a downside, and the workplace is an open system. You can't just "target" the low-performer, everything you do will target everyone on the team. If you try to "reconciliation" measures (other roles, extra training, coaching, easing of tasks), you're implicitly communicating something to the other team members. If you do it repeatedly and long enough, you'll eventually get: a) frustration, resentment and feelings of unfairness in other associates; and b) diminishing commitment and quality standards (i.e. "why should I care for quality if it is not demanded from others?").

P.S. I also feel a kind of shock every time I hear/read someone talking "lightheartedly" about firing someone. I'm just trying to highlight the potential downside of "not firing".
Robots Podcast: Mecha Monsters
If we were to work out what makes a journal so prestigious, what are the objective measures that should be considered?
I dont dispute that. Comprehend, admire and appreciate are all words that would fit in the paragraph I objected to. It was precisely the word respect I objected to.
Yesterday there wasn't even an official post for 8+ hours after the mail to the mailing list. Great that gitlab notifies people about security issues and tries to fix them... but no points for transparency here
And Occam's razor is really more of a 'which one should we test first' kind of criterion, rather than 'this one is automatically true as it's the simplest.'
How to you reach that conclusion from those numbers?
I think it's because of a number of reasons:

- We're very open about vulnerabilities and fix them fast

- We have a large install base, in particular >100k Community Edition installations

- Our source code is open and not obfuscated. It's easier to mess around in it for anyone interested, even when it's running.

- We regularly have security researchers perform audits

- Our rate of change (as mentioned by others) is very high
The CODE_n16 startup competition is now open for applications
Does this really "help" in anyone's design? I know some people despise callbacks, but I would much rather read callback-based code than this (looking at example.cpp).
Indian government approves Apple bid to open stores free of 30% sourcing policy
Previous 'discussion' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11587265.

Not sure how the dupe detection works here, but I submitted the same exact link yesterday.
#1 is what most programmers do, basically fragile code that can break at any time.

#2 is what I do. I'm not a great programmer, but keeping this sort of discipline means that my code has fewer trivial (and time-wasting) bugs.
Wow, this is super cool! Thanks for doing this!
If it does not feel wrong, it must be right?

We should strive for a logical explanation that transcends emotional response.
> Card games could only be played with people, whereas Angry birds can be played solo, on a train

Solitaire?
I've had a 100% success rate contacting an author and asking for a copy.
Not just laws against "offensive speech". The report mentions how in Tunisia you've got fabrication of charges founded upon marijuana possession. In November 2015 there were 516 activists (out of over 2000) arrested for the alleged consumption of cannabis.
P2P DNS