skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And this from the country with more proven oil reserves that's any other - including Saudi Arabia.

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-largest-oil-r...
Is sci hub dead then? DNS doesn't resolve the host anymore
> shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?

Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.
A 5% difference is hardly what I would call beating Google handily.
Why not a vacuum?
Can you tell us a little more about your startup? What industry are you in? B2B vs B2C? Enterprise vs SMB? How did you capture the lead to begin with?
I don't really care for this article, Wired seems to have forgotten how to write (it's been an ongoing problem for years).

However, I would sit down and watch a half hour documentary about that engine. That is the kind of scifi engineering that was predicted decades ago, finally coming to fruition.
No. Rent control does lead to shortages. I have about $6 million to invest in rental properties. San Francisco is not being considered.

I'm actually liquidating all my California assets, as the INCENTIVE to operate rentals has been destroyed.

Have a read of this:

"Due to Rent Control, S.F. Has 31,000 Vacant Housing Units As Frustrated Landlords Give Up"

The Bay Citizen -- "In San Francisco, one of the toughest places in the country to find a place to live, more than 31,000 housing units — one of every 12 — now sit vacant, according to recently released census data. That’s the highest vacancy rate in the region, and a 70 percent increase from a decade ago."

The reason? The city's pro-tenant, outdated rent control laws that make it difficult to raise rents or evict a tenant.

"Increasingly, small-time landlords are just giving up, like one who has left two large apartments on the second and third floors of her building vacant for more than a decade, after a series of tenant difficulties. It’s just not worth the bother, or the risk, of being legally tied to a tenant for decades.

“Vacancy rates are going up because owners have decided to take their units off the market,” said Ross Mirkarimi, a progressive member of the Board of Supervisors. He attributes that response to “peaking frustrations in dealing with the range of laws that protect tenants in San Francisco that make it difficult for small property owners to thrive.”

Perversely, that is hurting the city’s renters as well, as a large percentage of the city’s housing stock is allowed to just sit vacant, driving up rents that newcomers pay for market-rate housing."

MP: As we know from basic economic theory, rent control laws are doomed to fail with many predictable unintended consequences in the long run: fewer new rental units are built or made available, many apartments are removed from the market, a decline in the quality of housing, lower rental rates for long-term tenants but much higher rents for new tenants, inefficient use of housing space, etc. In other words, rent control laws guarantee that there will be less affordable housing in the long run, not more.

PRICE CONTROLS CAUSE SHORTAGES.

When there is no incentive to produce a good or a service, 2 things happen:

1) the SUPPLY of the good or service will drop (no incentive to produce)

2) if the DEMAND stays the same or goes HIGHER (San Francisco demand for rental units) -- the price will go up for the reduced SUPPLY of the good or service.

That's why SF has high rents.

Huge demand. No investment in affordable rentals. ZERO.

Thus, SUPER HIGH rents.

Same in NYC.

- See more at: http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/because-of-rent-control-...
I really do know the feeling of no feedback. I agree that hiring is really broken, only 2 months back I went on various interview rounds for a Front-end position and couldn't quite understand how an Algorithm would help one with CSS floats. I think I was lucky to interview with a Startup that really knew what they wanted and all I had to build was an app. I got the job and I love the job, I don't think I've ever been more in love with my job like this.

PS: The startup's not American, American startups have an inflated ego.
Totally agree. I have gone through academia and am now in industry; the other day I wanted to read and browse basic papers in IEEE Explore for basic knowledge on new topics. Since I am no longer a student, I am willing to pay money - as much as hundreds to get unlimited access. Instead, for hundreds, IEEE explore offers a measly ("generous") 25 downloads a month or some such non-sense It just seemed so miserly of them. We researchers had formerly given them pretty much free research to publish, and they turn their back on even legitimate paid avenues for us to get the papers. We are willing to pay; but where is the option?

Anyone that has gone through research and academia knows that you often need to browse many papers to even find the ones worth reading. 25 paper cap includes browsing PDFs; you will easily hit that cap in a single day simply through browsing.

IEEE and IEEE Explore can go something themselves. This is coming from a published IEEE author and academic researcher.
Just as a note about who gets denied access.... I work in a US research lab but my department got spun off into a company. With the loss of my university credentials came my loss of library access.... I still need to read papers in random journals to do my job though.

EDIT: A cash poor company.
> Better start coding, except no one will accept your patches to bump up the 21 million bitcoin supply...not so democratic.

That's a horrible change.

But it's a perfect example of the ultimate democracy. Everyone has the freedom to listen to you, they're choosing not to.
MailChimp Kill Mandrill Links
It looks like MailChimp didn't just cut-off all Mandrill users (without MailChimp accounts). All those important links sent out are now dead.
You have it backwards. It's Google that's slashing prices. The others are begrudgingly reacting.
Very effective trolling sir.
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Man found dead at Apple identified as Edward Mackowiak
Here's an example of a dead link:

http://mandrillapp.com/track/click/30536868/web.snaploader.c...
SpaceX also does it 40% cheaper with over 38% MORE personnel. You'd think the ULA would be able to reduce costs with all these successful launches. I have a sneaking suspicion they increase the cost each time using the rationalization of, "look how many successful launches we have. You're paying for reliability."
Bingo. Until a few heroes like [that Fields medalist who works with Tao] stood up and took their prestige elsewhere, nearly all academics were happy to let Elsevier run all the journals and make everyone pay. Field-leading academics and institutional administrators chose to hand over control of researchers' careers to Elsevier.
Because most of leading academics were happy with the system and don't care about open access. This is slowly changing as the Internet generation takes over.
Everything for it is now on GitHub too https://github.com/NETMF
Tips on creative advertisements for hiring
My theory is that many big employers have structured to carry more part time employees over fewer full time. Worse, many part time employees are working two or three jobs to stitch together enough wage to live. Both part time work and multiple disjoint work contexts reduces efficiency.

Also, there are fewer and fewer small to midsize businesses and too many huge businesses. Somewhere between, the ideal scaled company actually has the highest productivity, but we've been skewing larger and larger which is also a drag on productivity.
Nice :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM
Because hard drive heads "float" on a bed of air as the disk spins. Helium allows the heads to float closer. This wouldn't be possible in a vacuum.
This is the book I didn't know I was looking for. Thanks.
Yeah, I guess we're at the point where 50tb arrays are not infeasible. Not sure where I'd get 50tb of bandwidth though without someone gnawing off my left foot.
It looks like this is EXACTLY what is needed to distrupt this abusive industry. There have been numerous attempts of enforcing a change in positive ways - open access journals, campaigns by researchers and so on. But none of these had any effect.

Let Elsevier go down in flames. I have published more than 50 academic papers and have actively avoided Elsevier. To be honest, this was not too difficult, as they have a lot of journals addressing specialized subtopics that rather seem to appeal to manuscripts that were rejected in first tier journals.
I think they'll have some trouble. Those Russian engines they use aren't cheap, aren't getting any more plentiful, the machinery is getting progressively more scarce and the folks who designed/built them are either dead or no longer have sufficient knowledge to recreate them.

Not to mention the supply of those engines is highly predicated on maintaining a solid relationship with Russia for what that's worth.
ULA is responding to competition from SpaceX..
Corporations generally do not have the ability or perceived authority to absolutely determine and enforce rules in a geographic area, which is one of the defining characteristics of government and a primary reason that central planning tends to not work with governments.
The heads in an HDD don't actually touch the surface, they ride on the layer of gas above the spinning platters.
Interesting, I encountered problems with image decoding. Image.src = dataURL stopped being reliable. I suspect that the code was refactored to support createImageBitmap (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/03/createimag...), and some kind of race condition or something causes some decoded images to be correctly sized but blank.

We fixed this by making users that support it use createImageBitmap, but I've also seen some Windows Chrome crashes that I suspect are from that call.

EDIT1: Also, thanks for the tip about the WebGL error. I've been seeing that too.

EDIT2: D'oh it looks like you also spotted the reason for the src attribute as well. I should have clicked the link before responding. ;D
> so you can ride out getting "disrupted"

They do get disrupted. By themselves

If Apple manages to continue to do that, then they will go on
Do academics have time to read every paper?
Colin Furze Invents Hoverbike That Actually Flies
Meanwhile, Daniel also did a C-like language back in the day: FPL. It's never seen widespread use, but was the macro-language for his editor, FrexxEd, for the Amiga.
Unfortunately the GPL is not magic pixie dust and is often outright ignored. To fix that you need lawyers, such as the FSF or these folks getting compliance:

https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
Were they stocked ;)? I'm always doubtful about public policies since I discovered that the 3 suicide lines in France were only open during certain hours, and certainly not at night.
That is not 100% true. My AMZN stock vests in October for example, granted I'm an odd case.
Captain America: Civil War Movie
The fact Icahn exited his position in February gives other investors the impression his model makes accurate predictions.
Some of their home computers competed pretty well.

The Atari 8-bit series (400/800) had a significant chunk of market share in the early 80's. Not among the top three, but there were so many incompatible platforms in those days, and Atari 400/800 was one of the more common and well-supported ones for sure. http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/

Then, the ST didn't do so hot in the US, but here in Europe it was a well-known platform, nearly as popular as the Amiga. Roughly 75% of sold Atari ST's were sold in Europe.

Most famously, nearly every recording studio you'd care to name would have ST's in the control room well into the 90's and in some cases early 00's, due to their built-in MIDI capabilities.
This is exactly right. All I see now in mainstream news is corruption and undisclosed agendas, and just a general insult to intelligence.

When mainstream news is reporting stories about reality TV and sports "stars" from the same network, you know for sure it's all a big charade to sell advertising.

Of course, reddit has it's own problems as a source of truth... But there's always /r/thathappened to set us straight.
I've just had a paper accepted last week in a traditional journal (peer-reviewed and paywalled) and I'd share a few things I know and feel about scientific publishing from an anthor's perspective.

The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further consideration it was forwarded to three peer-reviewers who may and may not be reimbursed for their time. After several rounds of comments and changes, the accepted draft was sent to a publishing house in India for typesetting and proofreading (They've done a very thorough and professional job with it) before it was ready for print. There are a lot of man-hours spent of making this happen and if the hours were billed individually it will add up to a pretty hefty sum. Earlier versions of this paper had been submitted to other journals and were eventually rejected - more hours of work done without output.

Open access journal such as PLOS ONE charges a non-trivial sum ($1500 and up) to cover these costs and all I could say is that you get what you paid for: How much does a good lawyer/consultant charge per hour? Most people only submit to OA journals if they are ideologically compelled or have ran out of other avenues.

The quibbles between Elsevier and librarians is actually an old one (the article linked below dates from 2003) because they own a number of high impact journals and can bundle less popular titles with high impact ones to increase their margins. While this is a pretty underhanded tactic to use, these less circulated journals would probably have gone out of print without the practice.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/426217a...

Piracy has been around as early as universities had been around. There were more than one usenet groups dedicated to these activities and reddit's /r/scholar remains as its latest iteration. I was quite active on a medical forum where doctors and academics help each other out with paywalled papers on a quid pro quo basis. (Doctors are probably the most affected since their job requires access to latest research articles yet few hospitals have the budget for it unless they are affiliated with a university) All because there will always be a few odd journals that are not covered by my university's subscription but others might do. Publishers mostly turned a blind eye because their use are limited to a small group of people who cannot be persuaded to pay anyway. Sci-hub is something different since it is much more accessible and comprehensive, which threatens the current business model of publications.

P.S. This thread from another HN front page submission offers an interesting parallel on paywalls and access to journalism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11592293
The description towards the end is horrifying and quite frankly, it scares me. In my country (India), we have a population which is very diverse. Maybe because of that reason we have not proved vulnerable to such kind of single-minded stupidity. The impact is constrained to a state and/or time-period. This also ensures that even good ideas do not gain much traction, so we continue in this limbo of poverty and growth, sprawling malls and garbage on the streets, farmer suicides and billion dollar unicorns.
What’s Inside a Black Hole?
Times have changed. I think Congress may have seen the error of its ways on this one

Either that or Congress realized they can't sweep under the rug how much taxpayer money they could be saving.
> Socialism (the real deal, not capitalist welfare states) does not work. Nationalizing industries does not work. Price controls do not work. Central planning does not work. The most skilled leader in the world couldn't make this program work.

Socialism is not nationalization of industries, price controls and central planning. What you describe is a very specific form of authoritarian socialism which people (as in masses, not individuals) only seek in deep desperation.

Actual socialism, as in workers control of the means of production, ie. workers owning and managing their own workplaces, does not require centralized power.
HN Guidelines clearly state:

Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

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

The original source here clearly is the announcement post by Facebook
I still can't find the SET patent. How do I make 100% sure that it doesn't exist? Should I skim through all the existing card game patents released in a plausible time frame or what?
The effect seems different for regions of countries rather than countries as a whole.

For most of the first half of the 20th century, the Saudi Arabia of the world, in terms of oil extraction, was the United States.

But the situation was moderated by a few factors, at least as I see it:

1. The US had an industrial capacity (though much of that developed over this period), largely in the northeast. Much of the oil production was in economically underdeveloped regions of the country, particularly Texas and Oklahoma.

2. There wasn't a large world market for oil initially. Oil demand was being built up as supply was established. Flooding the market with cheap oil money simply didn't happen. Actually, demand was so low relative to extraction costs that oil prices hit a low of two cents per barrel after the 1930 East Texas Oilfield discovery (see Daniel Yergin's The Prize for an extended discussion of this).

3) WWII. The economic climate from 1930 - 1945 was not one of what we consider conventional growth markets. Initially the problem was the Great Depression, during which global economic activity contracted markedly. Then came the command economy of WWII. In the aftermath, the US was both the sole oil and economic power left standing.

4) By the time other countries were establishing themselves as substantial consumers of oil, the US itself had begun importing oil from Saudi Arabia.

I'm not aware of formal economic treatments of this, though it strikes me that the US experience was significantly different from that of, say, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, or even Russia / the USSR.
It does feel wrong, but it feels equally wrong that the government orders the police to prevent citizen from copying bytes.
This. The bus factor[1] is much too high.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
Lucas should have his lawyers send a telegram to Instagram's lawyers explaining where the gram part of the name comes from, and ask them to change their name.

The idea that large companies can own a word, that they themselves have appropriated, is at least egotistical, at worst unethical (imo).
A big part of the problem is always corruption. But can machines plan for an entire economy?
Massive 600kg haul of ancient Roman coins unearthed in Spain
As a grad student at a university with ample access to journals, I still use sci-hub occasionally, as many journal sites are surprisingly unreliable (cough IEEE, cough Nature).
Google is building a new hardware division
Sadly the one with more money wins in these situations even if they are in the wrong.
Has anyone got a breakdown of actual costs incurred by Elsevier? Note I don't include marketing their journals, I mean a breakdown labour costs, rent for buildings (where the building are located) and other production costs.

I'd like to know their revenue, and a full price list per journal they publish.

I very much believe that if we looked at what they make in profits, we'll see that they can't justify how much they charge. I, for one, have no sympathy for them.
I am about two-thirds of the way through Paul Mason's 'Postcapitalism - A Guide To Our Future'. It's a book recommendation I got from some HN comments on a UBI story a while back.

The happy / neutral / depressing theories (more hypotheses) don't cover all the possibilities, of course.

Weirdly, while the 'depressing' scenario is badly described (is the placement of a computer in front of ever office worker an example of 'innovation'?), the initial premise -- that productivity is / has peaked -- may be accurate, iff we try to measure productivity today the same way we have done for the past hundred years. And that's kind of the problem -- we don't currently have appropriate metrics for productivity in a market increasingly based on information, let alone where information components of products are approaching zero cost.

Anyway, I'll pass-on the hive mind's recommendation of Mason's book - I'm yet to finish it, and even further from being convinced of the soundness of all his arguments, but it's the most interesting book on economics I've read.
Let's hope it's not remote code execution on the CI daemons.
Yes, you're right.

And if a community of educated, well-informed, and frequently like-minded technology professionals can't come to a semblance of consensus about this matter, don't be surprised if the day comes when publishers -- with an audience far more diverse in opinion than HN -- just throw up their hands and do all three: ads, paywalls, and click bait.

I don't mean to point fingers, as much point out an unfortunate reality.
Colin could easily have lost his leg twice during the recording of that video.
This startup gets someone to drive you around… in your own car
Learn Breadth-First Search Using Haskell
Coworking is underrated
Yet you still have to statically link all your Go code in one single big binary... the Go team doesn't have their priority straight. People who want to sell closed source, commercial software in Go can already do that by selling exécutables.
Rated drive writes per day (.189) are now lower than SSDs (although drive capacity at this time is higher than most SSDs.)
Telegram and Instacart are next.
well, this is firing too, but in a polite way.
The Peacock _Vir _WOW KIDZ
Awesome cli tool to try python packages – It's never been easier
Completely without source and no breakdown, but I read recently that their margins are in the 20-30% range.
> It's why if the oil disappeared tomorrow, Saudi Arabia would quickly be reduced to impoverished banana republic.

this might not be totally true, the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund is almost as large as Norway's (so the saudis have not just dumped all money on their people) and AFAIK it's quite secretive but somewhat diversified between internal and foreign investments, so they will still have money when the oil runs out.
Drive would be 10 TB, 7200 RPM. WD is already selling similar drives for $700 with mean time between failure of about 3X than usual drives and 50% better rating for workload than non He-filled drives. Given the cost, I guess this won't matter much to consumers for now.
With all the cash they have Apple could go private, what is the rational for staying public?
Yes, publishers historically did that. And they printed journals and books, and reprints. But prices were modestly above cost, back in the day. As recently as the 80s. Now, expenses are much lower, and it's all about profiteering.
I have revolutionary idea - if we create environment where people have a decent chance of making something out of their life - they may have incentive to work smarter. We don't have productivity increase, because we have nowhere to put it. Elites are fine, the bottom people have no expendable income and the middle class is nonexistent.
KLEE LLVM Execution Engine