skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It was once a given that you could build your own device from scratch and change out any part you wanted to. You could keep systems usable for 10+ years this way and we got a generation of hardware hackers and enthusiasts who went on to make cool things.

The only thing we've been able to customize to the level of extent you're talking about is desktop PCs and they have't gone away.

The chances of you being able to replace your phone's battery or upgrade your laptop's RAM yourself has gone down but there is still a ton of demand for build your own PCs met with a supply of ever-improving products.
Completed 8 bit input system. Soldered and optimized
Nigerian grad student uses magnets to 'prove' gay marriage is wrong
Narratives are powerful things.

The article says: "And, basically, inflation did end, and the country's economy turned around. "

This is Brazil GDP per capita: (1)

It falls in 1992 (they forget to tell us that), exactly with the intervention that the article mentions.

Then it goes up, then down and then kick off spectacularly in 2002 (the year that lefty Lula Da Silva wins the election, by the way)

the article says:
"Brazil became a major exporter, and 20 million people rose out of poverty." and finish with "Everybody was very happy."

This is Brazil poverty headcount ratio: (2)

We can see an amazing trend down from, again, 2002.
Unfortunately I can't find the data from 1992 but that would be interesting in order to check the "everybody happy" thing.

(1): https://www.google.es/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...

(2): https://www.google.es/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&m...
Your first outing with climbing is like someone going out BASE jumping having never used a parachute before, accompanied by people who had also never done anything remotely akin to skydiving, who also didn't have the foresight to even do some research on how to rig or even put on the parachutes. Yes, that's dangerous.

Climbing has some inherent danger, obviously, but with a bit of knowledge and staying within some reasonable safety limits, the likelihood of dying is nowhere near BASE. I think part of that is that, at least amongst the climbing community, the celebrities aren't wholly people pushing the limits with danger. Sure, we have Alex Honnold, but we also have Tommy Caldwell, Chris Sharma, Adam Ondra, Alex Puccio, and so on, climbers who are pushing the limit in difficulty but not really danger. Perhaps that's because "difficulty" and "danger" are not inexorably linked with climbing. You can have a close-bolted route in good rock with modern bolts that's not particularly dangerous that's still really, really hard. La Dura Dura is the hardest sport climb in the world. I probably wouldn't kill myself on it, even if it's way above my pay grade (assuming I could even reach the first bolt). I don't know that you can do the same with BASE.
Few people have to use calculus or advanced probability or number theory, but everyone relies on it. The article missed this point.

Need some examples? Public key cryptography, machine learning, physics simulations of the aerodynamic properties of an airplane. I could go on and on. Just because a vast majority of the population never has to think about how this stuff works does not imply that it is somehow useless. We would not be where we are today without all this mathematics.
Microsoft Toolkit 2.6 Windows and Office Activator Full Free
Because they make no money!
I wouldn't be surprised if the concern were less about morality than about ingesting unduly high doses of hormones which might have some metabolic effect on humans as well as on fish.
So you're saying a countable infinity can be occupied, so that there is no room for one more.

You must then disbelieve concepts such as that the even integers can be put in 1:1 correspondence with all integers; i.e. that there are exactly as many even integers as there are integers.
CONFESSIONS+OF+A+BEANTOWN+SPORTS+JUNKIE
The Thinker: How I Escaped My Prison
Hello, non-US fellow here. Can someone point out to me, why this is not the case - I assume that is the reason this got slightly downvoted - or do people just have different opinions about the meaning of "control"?
That's why we can't have nice things - for longer than just a while, at least.
It's unclear how high the "repayment cap" (principal plus effective interest) is set for the lender mentioned, but as folks have noted the article said 15-30% higher than banks. The SBA apparently caps those between 5-8% so we're likely talking between 6-10%.

I then wondered how they avoid the downside (lending an early-stage startup money at even 10% sounds crazy) and see that they're trying to make a much safer bet. From Lighter Capital's FAQ [0]:

> We’re currently offering RevenueLoans® ranging from $50k-$2M USD. You can qualify for a loan for up to 33% of your annualized revenue run-rate.

And

> We will look for a percentage of revenue (in the range of 1% to 10%) until the total repayment cap is reached.

These conditions make it much more like a small-business loan, and less like the "get $1M for big expansion". Has anyone gone through this process with this lender in particular? I'm curious if they take growth in revenue into account (I would, it makes that 33% of ARR number much easier to bet on). Does the PayPal Working Capital or Square Capital form ask that, or do they simply infer it from your known-to-them receipts?

[0] https://www.lightercapital.com/how-it-works/faq/
>>The second argument is the one I always hear around the mathematics department: mathematics helps you to think clearly. I have a very low opinion of this self-serving nonsense. In sports there is the concept of the specificity of skills: if you want to improve your racquetball game, don't practice squash!

The analogy with sports fails miserably and the author seems to not understand this. Math is a brain skill and we do need to apply brain to understand a given situation in a better manner, to abstract away some things and focus on some other things. So, if you expect someone to better understand complex situations, then you need them to have some knowledge of higher math.

One may ask where do you encounter such situations?
Insurance, debates of fiscal policies, debates about racial biases and social structures, anything to do with modern finance, language structures, medical decisions. Take your pick.

So, if you have to do anything complicated in such social areas too, you need to have some knowledge of higher math.

Skills in sports are not of such versatile nature, hence the analogy fails.
Yes, agreeing to do something is very easy compared to actually doing it.
Payment of dividends isn't either interest or a repayment of principal, since there is no obligation to pay dividends. They're also not expenses, since the company would generate the same revenue with or without paying dividends.
How many of those 'respectable' economists predicted the 2008 crash? I'm skeptical of the entire ability of the profession to make any large scale policy decisions.
Are there any popular HN clients that support tagging? It seems like something a good number of people want. Maybe it could be added on top of HN by a third party if a client app/site had enough people to support it.

It's never been something I've wanted, but I can see the appeal.
In burnaby $1500 will get you a 2 bedroom. For $2500 you can rent the main floor of a house.

http://vancouver.craigslist.ca/search/apa?bedrooms=3

$125k is a great salary for Vancouver. It probably puts you in the 95% percentile provincially. Developer salaries seem to be comparable to most other white collar jobs however, so you may take a big hit if you ever leave Amazon.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...
I don't think it would work. Tweets don't really classify as 'content'. Also you can never rely on donations - People only pay money when they have no other choice.
People would just argue about the rules and logic embedded in the tagging algorithm.
>How long you have been using HN?

><6 months

>6 months -1 year

>more than 1 year

>Other

Why?
That's not really relevant, just hollow words. His actions since then indicate very clearly what he really meant.

He said for years that he couldn't act unilaterally on immigration because "he isn't king". Yet once he realized he'd blown his last chance to get a friendly Congress to pass his agenda, he went ahead and acted unilaterally anyway.
Thanks for mentioning that. My experience could be unique to the industry that I'm in, or even just to the places where I've worked.
Liberals don't push 'Keynes' - they push 'big spending all the time as a means to redistribute wealth' - and use the cover of 'Keynes' as credibility.

'Keynes' advocated for gov. spending in downturns and saving in upturns.

The problem is:

A) Progressives want to spend, infinitely. There is no 'saving period'. Ergo - it's nothing to do with Keynes really.

B) It's really hard to tell what a 'downturn' is. 'Restoring confidence in markets' and picking up some infrastructure spending when industry is in a lull - this is on paper - a great idea. BUT - when a market has undergone a 'secular shift' - meaning that the lost jobs are not due to cyclical issues, but are permanent ... then the government ends up throwing good money after bad.

Put another way: Keynes urged spending in down cycles to level out volatility and stabilize employment. But any given downturn may not be a 'cycle' - with an impending uptick. A 'downturn' may be permanent - like 'lost jobs to China' etc..

The 'solution' to a downturn has to be commensurate with the causes: cyclical shift? Ok, some infrastructure / gov investment might help. Millions of jobs lost to China? Gov. spending will only delay the inevitable. Better to invest in 'retooling' the workforce etc.. But this is not an 'economic' solution - it's a business/strategy solution and it takes intelligence.
> But publishers on the web, as opposed to passive users who merely read pages, should be accountable.

This seems severely lacking in nuance, unless one doesn't mind classing the expression of dangerously unpopular opinions as a form of criminality.
I can't use a service that limits me to 140 characters. Sorry.
All I'm reading is that my next upgrade will see me move to Linux full time.
This pedantry is not constructive.
Good grief ...

If we have an entity X and we use the function name(X) to inquire about its name property and obtain "Mohamed Ali". And then if elsewhere we use name(X) and it evaluates to "Cassius Clay", then name() is not a mathematical function.

You have to find a way to reason about an object and its properties so that they are functions. If it can have multiple names, you have to model that appropriately.
Some time ago there were discussions on whether those engineered mosquitos would lead to drawbacks in the future, and that fuming was safe and kept mosquitos under control.

Some years ago, there were also discussions on bees disappearing from the wild on from the farms.

Then this news. It surprised me because fuming (at least, with some components) isn't safe for other species, after all. And, perhaps, some bees that disappeared from the nature suffered the same fate of these ones.

But I don't know whether the cost/benefit of killing bees x having zika around x other products.
I studied undergrad CS including the required math department classes. Recently for my Android app ( http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unwrappedap... ) I wanted to list the most popular wallpapers. I had a problem though - I was continually adding new wallpapers. How do I compare a new wallpaper which a few people took versus a very old wallpaper which hundreds took?

The answer I came up with was N0e^-λt. Exponential decay. Set N0 to 1. I could set t in various ways, I decided to make it days, so today is 0, yesterday 1, the day before yesterday 2 etc. The lambda I tunes, right now it is 0.04 (or -0.04 times t). So the score added for each use decays as it ages, giving new additions a chance at the top.

Worked real well. Straight out of calculus. I never learned exactly what e was until college. Who knows what I would have done if I didn't know what exponential decay, e etc. was. I can't even think of an "eight-grade math" solution of the type this article mentions.

I had to hash a small list of small numbers once when I had the epiphany - Goedel numbering! I Google'd that and saw the solution was unoriginal, but I wouldn't have even saw those pages without knowing what to Google.

I was looking at a large NP hard problem many years ago and thought I could program a solution. After a complexity class later on, I realized the futility of that approach, in a direct manner any how.

I am not sure where the line is between math and CS. Graph theory underlies graphs and trees and the algorithms which run on them. Math functions and theory of computation underlie functions and methods. Statistics and probablity underlie ML. Geometry and matrix math and algebra underlie computer graphics. I don't get people here who say they program without needing post high school math.

Or seeing the garbage code out there maybe I do. Github is beset with people who make basic errors in mutual exclusion, critical section violations, lack of understanding of concurrency etc. I forget and make these mistakes myself sometimes. I hardly think there is a problem in over-education in these things. On the contrary, race conditions are spun out all over the software infrastructure by people writing code who don't have the needed math and CS understanding of what they're doing. Understanding mutual exclusion and critical sections and avoiding critical sections is not something picked up in an hour, a day, or even a week.
The entire goal of statistics is to build approximations which converge to truth in some manner or another. E.g., a Bayesian posterior ideally converges to a delta measure on truth as N -> infty. A frequentist point estimate converges to truth (with P = 1) as N -> infty.

The entire purpose of statistics is to quantify the difference between our beliefs and actual truth.
In order of occurrence, starting with the smart-alecky and moving into the actually thoughtful (but still probably seen as trollish):

1) From BASE jumping.

2) For no reason.

3) From incomplete cognitive development (risk assessment, awareness of one's mortality etc.)

4) Because the world economy is sufficiently developed to keep them alive long enough to die this type of optional/discretionary death.
Yes, you are right.

URV was a nice hack, but people overestimate its economic brilliance. To confirm that it was something imposed by foreigners, you just have to take a look at the dates when the Latin America hyperinflation ended in each country:

Mar. 1990 Brazil

Mar. 1990 Argentina

Aug. 1990 Peru

Mar. 1991 Nicaragua

You can see a compiled hyperinflation rates in a table in this paper: http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working...

Till today Brazil suffers with a overvalued money. The medium class loves it, because they can travel abroad cheaply and buy imported goods.

You should take a look at this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus
It's also very hard for quality comments to get visibility after a certain point. The points seem to be weighted a little too heavily in the comment sorting algorithm which makes it hard for newer posts to stay at the top.

This could also just be that most people who may have voted have already checked the comments and don't come back.

Perhaps I should have suggested a "new highly-rated comments!" indicator as a useful feature. It doesn't seem like I can go back and edit my response, though, without taking the whole quiz again, and I don't want to skew results.
Leaving Ubuntu out of the subject for personal reasons I would like to recommend you use Debian stable as you must already be accustomed to dpkg and apt utilities.

The way to use Linux that works best for everyone is to start with a very clean installation, and really only install what you need.

This does not only work best because you don't end up with unwanted processes eating up resources but you also get to understand a bit more about each part as you install them, if you're curious enough to seek information on dependencies and explore around the configuration files of every software component you add to your installation.

To do this with Debian is really easy, just deselect every single item in tasksel during the installation process, and later use apt/aptitude to install what's missing.

I prefer not to install meta-packages that are meant to bundle "everything you need" for X (example: task-gnome-desktop) but you get to decide if you like having system components you do not fully understand...

For the sake of an example here is a list of all the packages that would be installed on my laptop if I would install task-gnome-desktop (897 packages / 2,175 MB disk space): http://paste.lisp.org/display/325002

Of course if you have time, or just interest, but mostly if you never went through it before I would recommend Slackware.

Have a fun ride!
> The singular reason people are dying is because they're pushing the boundaries of proximity flying, not because beginners are accidentally stalling once they're too close.

Well put. As noted in the article, the margins for error (esp in wingsuit BASE) are becoming ever tighter.
And, yet, even someone arguing that it began when the last glacial era ended, might have a point. Shore lines where much lower in that past.

It'll be an interesting discussion.
Argh, I'm at 499! I wondered what the secret was to downvoting...
I wouldn't say the software update thing is any better on Linux than it is on OSX (I do love just typing "apt-get install vim"). In Linux I end up installing /a lot/ of things outside of apt/yum just like I install a lot of apps outside of Apple's App Store. There's actually a lot of pros/cons to each platform.
From what I can discern, a few speakers feel "uncomfortable" speaking at a conference with him around.

Here's one person's opinion on it: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but I honestly think this particular community is taking Doug waaay too seriously. The community claims to want diversity... Unless that person thinks differently.

There are some explicit examples of how Doug was hateful in the reddit comments... And it really just came down to him calling the "old web" promiscuous, and that translated to "slut shaming" The entire web.

It's situations like these that make me ashamed to call myself a Javascript developer, but I know that drama happens in all communities.
I think it's valuable for companies much earlier in their lifecycle. If you've suddenly launched something and now have $30k in MRR, these guys will lend you upwards of $100k with a 5-year payback horizon at a "cost" of ~$10k.

For someone with maybe 10k in assets in the companies bank account, that $110k repayment loan sounds pretty good if say you'd love to bring on a second developer "right now". I agree that if you just wait four months, you're there already. But if you're at month two after launch, a $10k "over time" seems like a great exchange.

My straw man though seems unlikely: would someone really lend me $100k for just 10% interest, because I suddenly launched and went $0, $10k, $30k?
Moxie Marlinspike: If it's illegal to advertise that you've received a court order of some kind, it's illegal to intentionally and knowingly take any action that has the effect of advertising the receipt of that order. A judge can't force you to do anything, but every lawyer I've spoken to has indicated that having a "canary" you remove or choose not to update would likely have the same legal consequences as simply posting something that explicitly says you've received something.

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/whispersystems.org/issues/...

Bruce Schneier: Personally, I have never believed this trick would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn't prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren't impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary. And for all I know, there are right now secret legal proceedings on this very issue.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/australia_out...

At the very least, the issue isn't clear-cut, and there most certainly isn't constitutional precedent.
> the OP should conclude that all forms of education should stop after the 8th-grade level for the vast majority of students (and only a minute fraction should need to pursue higher education). That is exactly what the state of education looks like in undeveloped feudal economies

I don't think you have to go back to undeveloped feudal economies. Even a generation ago, the bulk of people in the US effectively did not receive more than an elementary education. Ironically, they were often better prepared than students today to actually enter the workforce after graduating high school, since vocational education was more in vogue, and so they spent more of the four years of their high school education learning practical skills, rather than the vague, college prep holding pattern that is the norm now.
Donations are only one of many possible micro-payment transactions. Creators/vendors can also provide digital entitlements to their customer/users, in exchange for revenue. Artists can sell digital swag. WeChat offers one example of incorporating transactional workflows into a chat/conversation interface. For some abstract ideas about currency, data signals, identity and trust, see the MetaCurrency project, https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/beyond-jobs-32f65369... & http://metacurrency.org.
I guess I don't use OSX the same way, but in Windows I really miss Alt-Win to move and resize windows that I use in Linux quite a bit. I tried plugins for Windows, but they just don't work reliably.
This! Exactly this. When Apple is doing it that's fine but when Microsoft does it then they are awful. And yet you still get to use tons of old software on w10. I still remember when El capitan came out last year and xcode stopped suddenly working. We all had to update everything. No explanations and no choice in what you gonna run.
I'm a software developer trying to grok Machine Learning. I have to understand trig (e.g. tanh and other sigmoid functions), calculus (e.g. derivatives, gradients), linear algebra (e.g. vectors, matrices), probabilities, etc. Maybe it doesn't happen every day, but I need math.
I do not understand, which cross-platform application are you referring to?
The Rise of Video Is Making 2016 a Weird Year to Be a Digital Publisher
Keith Devlin argues that math training helps when programming, in an article (from 2003) in Communications of the ACM called "Why universities require computer science students to take math" (pdf) ftp://ftp.gunadarma.ac.id/.upload/Communication-ACM/September-2003/p36-devlin.pdf

Sample quote: "Once you realize that computing is all about constructing, manipulating, and reasoning about abstractions, it becomes clear that an important prerequisite for writing (good) computer programs is the ability to handle abstractions in a precise manner."
Or bigger wings. I wonder if it would be possible to make a bat-wing-suit with giant wings with the bones of the membrane connected to your fingers. I mean, deltaplanners do something close to what wingsuit divers do, except their wings are huge and they can soar for hours.
Reddit is too diverse and commenting level is pretty low, especially in the most popular subreddits. Here the number of kittens and memes is just about right. I'd like to see a reddit "defluffer" that blocks all unsubstantial posts (10 second rule, if it takes less than 10 seconds to consume, reject it) and comments (by reading level?).
Isn't there a bit of a trick here in knowing when is "as late as possible" and not "too late"? Does this not require knowing exactly how long everything will take?
> I can't talk about Finland

Here's a map for the carrier in question: https://elisa.fi/kuuluvuus/