skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What the Fed does is actually worse (and more dishonest): they deliberately make "hedonic" or "quality adjustment method" adjustments that push down the inflation rate even more.

I find/believe shadowstats.com to be more accurate than the gov't stats on inflation and unemployment.
You obviously have never been to a Home Depot or Lowes on a weekend and watched in abject horror how long it takes most people to navigate the pin pad to complete their CC purchase! The speed with which the transaction is completed is 100% dependent on the ability of the card holder to navigate all the prompts. At most stores I now have to wade through 4-5 prompts for input before my transaction is complete, this takes up to 30 seconds. This is nowhere near as fast as cash is if one is prepared and has their money out.
The effort to isolate North Korea is mutual. They're not exactly itching to join the global community.
Owned one. Enjoyed the heck out of it.

Lots of torque, lots of pep, though from what I heard, the US version (mine) had substantial increases in pollution controls which hobbled the car. Always first off the line when I wanted to be.

Yes, it burned oil by design. I'd add a half-quart of non synthetic 5W-20 maybe every 1000 miles. The rear bumper required additional car washes, as it'd get a black film, no doubt from cold starts. That wasn't much of a problem.

The big issue it had was flooding the engine. To trigger the condition, turn on engine, let it run for less than 1 minute, and turn it off (like pulling it in or out of a garage). Unless you floored it in neutral before shutting it off, the car would end up near-bricked.

The fix was to have it towed to the dealer where they'd clean out the engine for a few hundred dollars. Later I learned you could tow-start it if you could get it up past 20mph. It'd put all kinds of foul smoke out the back when you did that but in terms of hassle, it was much better.

The car had a POS OEM fuel pump under the rear seat. On hot days you'd get a vapor lock. Not the rotary's fault. Took years to find that problem, and didn't get very long with the fixed version before the stork came and the rotary had to leave.
easychain – a python exploration of blockchain ledger concepts
https://github.com/davecan/easychain

I wrote this over the weekend after doing quite a bit of research into how blockchain ledgers work. I know there is some grumbling about what a blockchain is and is not, which is why the following statement is made in the project:

"This implementation focuses only on the hashed ledger concept. It specifically does not include any concept of mining or any other form of distributed consensus. It also abstracts the concept of a transaction to that of a message in general. The concept of a header and payload in messages and blocks is adapted from Bitcoin."

The focus here is on understanding how the ledger itself works. Distributed consensus is out of scope, though I would be interested in exploring a mechanism for distributed consensus of a shared blockchain. But for now it is out of scope.

Includes a few unit tests. Any feedback appreciated.
How do they pay their employees if margins are razor thin? They'd have to operate on a huge scale to have enough profit to cover expenses and especially payroll. I would love to see a comparison of the balance sheets between some German and U.S. small businesses. Small businesses don't have the huge scale to live on a razor thin margin, so that's why I'm curious.
Author here. Did not knew about Céu till now, just watched the intro video. I maintain a behaviour tree [1] library called alter-ego [2] (code needs cleanup) which already contains some of the constructs. In behaviour tree terms par/or is parallel selector and watching is a interrupter node. [3] So it can be done in Ferret on a general purpose PC using C++11 concurrency constructs, for embedded targets it will require co-operative multitasking which is on the roadmap.

[1] https://nakkaya.com/2010/06/29/alter-ego-a-reactive-ai-libra...
[2] https://github.com/nakkaya/alter-ego
[3] http://aigamedev.com/open/article/parallel/
Announcing price cuts on Local SSDs for on-demand and preemptible instances
I grew up in Peru and knew lots of kids who didn't know anything about their own country outside of their little get-rich-quick schemes, and hated anyone who rocked the boat, even as fierce critics sounded warning bells of challenges ahead.

The fact that some aspiring-rich techpreneur reduces his complex gambit like you do here is not at all surprising to me.

___

hn is stopping me from replying downstream so:

And yet you use ad hominem to advance your own perpective, weird!

"I'm greek don't question me on this!"

"How dare you bring up my background?"
Why are you transitioning in to freelancing phase? Products business is slowing down?
I would love it if meritocracy could work. Sadly, it probably won't be accomplished by humans. Maybe after the singularity. :)
Coursera Deep Learning Specialization (Andrew Ng)
How to Enable Night Mode on Android 7.0 Nougat
Our top marginal tax rate starts around $418k(single) to $470k (joint). It seems ridiculous to me that every dollar beyond that amount is taxed at the same rate, whether it's dollar 500k or dollar 500m. IMHO, we should have several more brackets, like for the top 0.25%, 0.1%, 0.01% and 0.001% of incomes, with the rates rising sharply. Tax the shit out of the ultra-rich and spread it around.
It's the smugness that's the problem, right. It's not that the Republicans are trying to take healthcare away from my family and leave them to die just so a tiny percentage of them can get tax breaks. Or supporting policies that eliminate jobs so my family cannot find work (even the article admits that). No, that couldn't be the issue that's causing this divide. Their attack on the existence of my family and our ability to live and survive could not possibly be the reason why I see them and their followers as first cruel and evil and second as stupid. No, it can't be any of that. It must be my own smugness. What a bunch of bullshit.
Who's to say the OP was talking about North Korea's regime? I certainly don't trust Trump to deal rationally.
Saying "women have a harder time leading" is a pretty bold, striking statement, and one that needs some damn solid evidence if you're going to say it. To back it up just by saying "women are less assertive" is not remotely evidence of that statement.

And it is a statement, whether or not it's introduced as a single word. To claim that this is "nitpicking a single word" is like saying that an article that includes the line "Scandinavians are taller, stupider, and blonder than other Europeans" is problematic only if we "nitpick a single word."
Nobody to my knowledge has every measures the costs of cash, it is just something they accept. With credit cards it is easy to measure because you get a number, but with cash it is not, you have to calculate too many different parameters and figure out what applies where.
> the Americans and British are still sending cheques through the post

I'm from Germany, and I have to ask this... WHY?

Related anecdote: When I was still living with my parents, I had to cash in cheques from time to time for them. The cheques came from the lottery which they were playing, but they had no realistic possiblity at all to cash them in (the next branch of their bank was over an hour away by car), but I had an account at the local bank in the small town where I lived.
I grew up in a socialist society - indeed, the very one that you mention.

You're right that you wouldn't get your pick of where to live in most cases.

But you're wrong that they wouldn't supply you with some living space right away, if the one you were living on is gone. It would be a shitty living space more likely than not (e.g. a communal apartment), but you'd have a roof over your head for sure.
This comment makes perfect sense if load is a smooth function. But it is not. It tends to be a step function.

The most recent 2 data points give you is whether the problem is currently getting worse, getting better or steady. The third gives you a sense of whether it has been doing on a while.
Harness Big Data with One-On-one Online Predictive Analytics Course from OSU
The uncomfortable conclusion I've come to recently: the world (and especially the US) has come to terms with a nuclear-armed North Korea being the least bad option in this whole ordeal. Sure, we still need to pass sanctions and throw around words like "unacceptable" a lot for PR purposes. But we've ultimately accepted that there's nothing we can do to stop Kim from getting nukes that doesn't involve laying waste to most of the Korean peninsula, a massive refugee crisis, and the potential that the conflict will already go nuclear.
> some Austrian economists

Aren't there multiple schools of thought about economics? How do I know which one is the Right One to believe? Do they differ fundamentally on some levels?

I feel like googling for some school's teachings runs the risk of drinking one side's kool-aid, without even realizing what the counter-viewpoint is. Is there a good way to get a neutral overview of the different economic schools of thought, other than taking courses at a local university?
In assessing the current poisonous political environment with respect to all parties...

“It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”
-Terry Pratchett, "Jingo"
I think there are studies that probe that claim. In my experience when I told some female friends to ask for a raise because they deserved it, some of them decided not to do it because a list of non-sense excuses (afraid to talk with their supervisors, that they will look for another job in the future, that their bosses don't like them, etc)

Bear in mind the published doc don't have the references the original work had. They removed them when they made it public (not the author)
I mostly mean that I don't have a card that can be used for payment over the usual networks like MasterCard (unless those “Maestro”-cards do work, which I doubt), Visa or AmEx …
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." YMMV.
>Do you want a ride in the cheap, safe, ugly car or the expensive, glitchy, sexy car?

Consumers tend to perceive things a certain way that's not always grounded in common sense.

Also, obstacles close to the ground are easier to miss visually.
We've turned off the flags, but if there's to be a glimmer of a hope for a reasonable discussion we need commenters to leave out the partisan flamebait.
It's a transfer of wealth from people who are struggling to pay their cards off every month to people who have rewards cards and pay their balances every month.
> You're seeing something shaped like an exponential growth curve and missing the fact that it's not a growth curve at all.

Okay, slice the upper quartile and graph it over time. Now it's a proper growth curve, but it communicates the exact same idea.

> On the second, thanks for the reference, haven't read that. Would be interested to hear how you think that change would lead to these effects.

Quick thought experiment that expands on my explanation in the original comment: Suppose you have (a) a wage-earner who spends 90% of their income on goods & saves/invests the other 10%, and (b) an investor who earns an income from assets, spends 10% on goods and reinvests the other 90%.

Now (for the sake of simplicity) suppose inflation is 10% per year. What happens after year 1? What about year 2?
Ask HN: Best tools/services for a new US startup?
Hi there,
I am incorporating my new startup (after using a temporary company for a few months), and I am going through the usual process of picking service providers (lawyer, CPA, etc) and tools (HR, payroll, equity, etc). The company will be the usual Delaware C-Corp, with offices and HQ in Silicon Valley.

I have some obvious, easy picks (e.g. eShares), but I would be happy to get advice from you on everything else. Important areas: insurance, HR, payroll, healthcare (super important), bank account (super important!), expenses.

Let me also know if you know an amazing CPA that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, with some international experience. Our team is currently in SF, NY, Europe, and soon in a few other countries in Europe, and potentially Argentina and Iceland a bit later on.

(small shameless plug): What do we do? We want to reinvent how cities are built and operated, trying to make the world a better place for a lot of people.

I don't want to post any link as you might find it "spammy", but let me know if you're curious and you want to hear more.
The whole "across cultures" thing in that 1 (importantly, one) study is easily explained by a couple things:

- men grow more muscle faster and that used to be important

- childbirth used to be (and in many places still is) very dangerous for women

Consequently most societies defined gender roles in similar ways, leading to similar effects across them.

Or you can go even simpler and say they're more neurotic because their odds of being raped by a man are terrifyingly high. Or they get paid less than men and charged more for things like health care, car loans and mortgages so they carry a higher financial stress burden. Or their health plans are inadequate and they're worried about what will happen if that matters. Or they're being harassed in the workplace.

Or you can dispute the premise entirely and say the standard for "neuroticism" was based on a culture created and still dominated by men.

---

A lot of people are saying things like, "he didn't really write anything that was sexist or misogynistic", but women and people of color are far too familiar with fucked up policies justified by "biological differences". There are real, deep, life and death social problems right now caused by misogyny and they all stem from the fundamental idea that women have their role and men have theirs.

What does this lead to? Health care policies that cost women more and don't even meet all their needs. Health care systems that service women less effectively than men (stroke symptoms are often missed in women, childbirth mortality rates in less progressive parts of the US, etc.), jobs that pay women less than men, laws that ignore or oppress women, etc. etc. etc. etc. And every time, it's justified with "women are just biologically different than men".

Why can't you express such an opinion in the workplace? Because that opinion is responsible for the oppression of billions of women throughout the entire history of humanity. It's not at all like arguing for wind over solar, or honestly other political debates over private vs. public health care or whatever. When you're talking about social issues, you're talking about systems that have oppressed, brutalized and murdered unbelievable numbers of people, and continue to oppress people that you work with and see each and every day. They're not idle thought experiments or a curious hobbies. Treat them with the sensitivity they deserve.
> It's something I haven't really thought much about before. The simple answer is to have redundant equipment (tunnels, tracks, cars), but few would stomach the cost.

Given that your premise is that everyone is on transit, presumably some of the incredibly gargantuan subsidies that are handed to private vehicle drivers would be used. I don't know if it's the just-world fallacy or what, but people always seem to have trouble grasping truly how inefficient car travel is. In a situation where gov't doesn't heavily subsidize them (and the drivers aren't paying the high costs associated with cars), I can't imagine that the cost of redundancy equipment required for no-downtime upgrades would be un-stomachable.

On the other hand, the other thing I know is that the electorate is far too stupid and far too selfish to grasp simple concepts like this: my own city has to fight tooth and nail against car drivers as a political bloc in order to claw back a fraction of the outsized privileged position they have in the transit infrastructure. So you may be right that it won't be politically feasible despite being less expensive than the alternative.
i appreciate the article for pointing out a nuance often lost in this kind of situation: that teasing out positions and perspectives requires a careful reading, and summaries are often (intentionally) misleading.

but let's be clear: the memo was a political document (in the common sense of the word, rather than about government machinations). sure, james damore may have been trying to have an honest conversation (and honest discussion should totally be encouraged), but the guy's biases and position were clear right from the title onward. he was attempting to assert what he thought was a superior position and got shot down. now others who (secretly or otherwise) share some portion of that position feel vulnerable and defensive, and we get heated discussions driven by primal emotions using otherwise rational-sounding words. it's politics.

that's what the media is zooming in on, because that's where the charged emotions are. cynically, yes, that sells papers (or whatever), but less cynically, that's also where we collectively seem to want more discussion because the social norm is (potentially) shifting and not at all well-defined or collectively understood. the media didn't make a mistake so much as it instinctively cut right to the chase.
He said "women generally having..."

You said "women may be more..."

What he said is fine, what you said is sexist.

He is talking about a distribution curve, you are talking about an entire gender.
Someone made an insightful comment on HN a couple weeks ago: "housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14857591 ;) )

With interest rates as low as they are currently, housing prices are correspondingly inflated (via increased purchasing power for a given/fixed monthly payment). That's pushing us towards the "good historical investment" side of the pendulum, but if interest rates were to return to the 1980s' double-digit figures, it would swing back towards affordable.
I did read it, where did he outline the failures of the existing diversity program that wasn't also a lie? For instance, a lowered standard for interviews isn't a thing.
> Black holes are by far the most boring and conventional of the existing theories

I was ready to start arguing, but then I realized you were speaking in the context of dark matter theories. :)

I feel there's gonna be a few interesting years or couple decades ahead. Maybe not as big as the early 1900s. Maybe as big. Maybe even bigger.
I don't remember all of the stories in State of the Art, but I'm finding it hard to see the ones I do working as a movie for people not already immersed in the Culture universe.

I could see Consider Phlebas or Player of Games as a miniseries though.
You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts.

But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this.

So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
No.

This is precisely why we're stuck where we are in the first place. If you allow people to call "dog whistle language" and attribute "malicious intent disguised as thoughtful rethoric", you give everyone a fully general counterargument against anything. I could accuse you right now of using "dog whistle language" and there's literally nothing you can do to prove me wrong.

Those ideas are conversational equivalent of bioweapons. Once people start to use them, everyone loses.
A useful link. Boiled down, there are really two options: attack NK or leave them to slowly but surely advance missiles and warheads. The former is a bad idea because it is likely that millions of people will die, most of them in South Korea. The latter is a bad idea because it may mean that millions will die in the future.

But war is not inevitable, anymore than it was with the Soviet Union, and it's possible that the regime will eventually collapse. So rather than pursuing the near-guaranteed path, we delay and hope.
Good point. So it was seen as not being able to pay in full for groceries? Despite the fact that bad cheques can kinda do the same thing as not paying the credit bill?

I would imagine however, that over time a personal reputation is gained for writing bad cheques. I guess the difference is whose problem it becomes: a credit agency, or the person who knowingly accepts a potentially bad cheque.

It's funny how we judge each other for using new tools.
The author of the article, Mark Bowden, was interviewed by Sam Harris on his podcast: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/must-we-accept-a-nucl...

To call this problem intractable is an understatement.
The ICOs are like 80-90% ETH based though.

Good luck on the short . . . many hedge fund gods were "right" on the tech bubble but lost their shirts trying to short it before the exuberance subsided
Pretty comprehensive and allows you to inspect pages issue by issue:

https://insites.com/

Doesn't currently support API key checks but that seems like a good idea! I'll suggest it. (I work at Insites)
Does the religion allow for this? Not sure that it does.
It's not exactly the same as a diesel engine. Diesels use a stratified charge (SCCI), meaning fuel is injected at the end of the compression stroke and burns immediately, without having a chance to mix thoroughly with the air. This engine uses a homogeneous charge (HCCI), meaning fuel is injected at the beginning of the intake stroke but does not ignite until the end of the compression stroke, therefore having time to mix with the air. This subtle difference makes the engine much harder to control, but should yield lower NOx and particulate emissions as well as higher power output.

Also, the engine is capable of running in HCCI mode under light-ish load. It still has spark plugs, and can run as a normal gasoline engine (HCSI) when high power is demanded.
You read the previous statement backwards. OP meant: dynamic linking allows you to use LGPL libraries with proprietary applications; to use GPL libraries in your application you have to make your application free even if you are linking dynamically.
That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.
This is also the same argument about the success of the TSA in stopping terrorist attacks. They've stopped them, but refuse to show you the data.
Sure, but it's better to play than to not (if you care, of course). It's just like when I browse, always in private mode haha.
I am just wondering - if this were a computer game, it would be like the last moment when I still could strike the enemy to wipe out their capabilities before they acquire the capability to hit me and cause unreasonable damage.

So this looks to me like war is unavoidable as after NK manages to get ICBM/MIRV/submarine launch done, nobody would be able to stop them ever again (baring some virus) and they could ramp up their requirements. While having nuke capability as means to prevent an invasion is understandable, the question is if other nuclear powers would like to invite another member (I doubt so).
What kind of apps? I had an app project I turned down as I had no more bandwidth for more work. Maybe they are still looking for somebody to make app for them.