skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are missing a great and fundamental point. You see Bill Gates was one guy. Clever perhaps, very clever maybe indeed, lucky also let us say for the sake of the argument. But he is only one guy!

He has the wealth of millions of people. How many have gone insane and started feeding pigeons like Telsa, how many have been unable to afford higher education, how many people were denied the opportunity to contribute to the world because they were not born in a middle upper class family as Gates was.

By the way, inflation would not go up, nor as you speculate will things even out and be once more as they are now but Bill be denied of his billions. The world is a zero sum game, it costs that much to produce a certain something and unless people want to make excessive profits like Mr Gates then it would costs just as much.

Maybe I am arguing against the wind, but so too maybe people have forgotten that they could have been born in any environment, that they could be right now starving for food in Africa, that they could be that loony man in the corner of the shop begging for money. We are lucky that we are not, but for how long. People accepted feudalism in the 16th century too. Without acceptance and a legitimate expectation from society that it is acceptable for someone to exploit you to death while they live in luxury feudalism would not be a fact, without the cultural acceptance that it is fine to enslave others and treat them as inferior slavery would not be a fact. What make us think that now it is different, what makes you think or anyone reading this that accumulation of such great wealth for no rational reason whatever is justifiable?
Ask HN: Most Influential Experience?
I know for a lot of people one experience, class, or person had such a profound effect that it radically changed their life's path or a significant part of it.

What was yours?

Here's mine: a programmer was willing to teach my home school co-op group programming. Before I took that class I wanted to "build" computers. (Basically, I wanted to be a tech.) Afterwards, I am looking at a career in programming. (Which, as you know, has a gigantically larger potential.) I doubt I'd be programming if it wasn't for that class.
A Weekend Experiment with the Lean Startup Methodology
Tenant Screening Credit Check Services
Tenant Screening and Credit Check Services.
well, it's simple. if you work on something that you enjoy, you will do well.
Always set small targets. the joy of achieving those targets will motivate you to work more.

It doesn't matter how long do you work but how often do you work. So spend some time daily on that project rather than spending 10-15 hrs on Weekend and not thinking about it at all during weekdays.

hth
Ask HN: How early did you bring in a full-time marketer?
Hey entrepreneurasaurs:

At what stage in your company's development did you decide it was worth it to have a full-time marketer on your team?

We have a three-person team (all developers, although we're learning the business ropes), and we're trying to chart out the money we'll need in our first year; we can get a minimum-viable-product out the door in three months, and then were considering bringing in a marketer. Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated!
Slow Code Competition
Given the totally arbitrary choice between writing fast vs. slow code, it seems that developers unfairly discriminate against slowness every time. It's time to rectify this situation with a slow code competition. Let's see who can write a code snippet that will take the longest amount of time to print the numbers one through ten.

These are the only rules:
- You can use any language you choose, including pseudocode.
- Your code snippet must be ten lines of code or less. Preprocessor directives and such may be omitted.
- It must complete in some finite amount of time.
- Sleep (and similar) statements are not allowed.
- You can't stay awake until 4:00am trying to think of a way to "win."

Yes, I realize this is a stupid competition with lots of loopholes in the rules. I'm mainly curious to see how people who are much smarter than me might approach the problem. Without further ado, here's my submission:

/* Variables /
unsigned long counter1 = 0, counter2 = 0, counter3 = 0, counter4 = 0, currentNumber = 0;
time_t markTime = time(NULL);

while(++currentNumber <= 10) {

/* Wait until the system time wraps.
* This should take a few hundred billion years on a 64-bit system. */
while(time(NULL) > markTime) { /* do nothing */ }

/* Update the time reference so the above WHILE loop doesn't immediately fall through
* the next time around. */
markTime = time(NULL);

/* If every counter has wrapped back to zero */
if(++counter1 == 0) {
if(++counter2 == 0) {
if(++counter3 == 0) {
if(++counter4 == 0) {

/* Print the number */
printf("%d", (int)currentNumber);
} } } }
}
Speaking now as a linguist, I am somewhat bothered by articles of this type—not because they're inaccurate, because they're entirely accurate, but because they walk a narrow line between fascination with and fetishization of language. Research does indicate that language and cognition are linked in a lot of ways, that's true; but the problem with overly aggressive Sapir-Whorf pushing is that it becomes all too easy to simplify the "language affects thought" maxim until it is no longer accurate.

For instance, the statement, "Languages affect how people conceptualize time," is true, according to research, while the statement, "[ethnic group] is the only group of people to feel [some overly specific emotion]," is never true, or at least hasn't been true all the many times I've seen it brought up. (Usually, such claims end up evoking the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone else suggests that maybe members of other ethnic groups are capable of feeling the emotion.) "Cognitive tasks like counting are affected by a person's language," is true, while Orwell's "You can make people more think less by making their language have a staccato rhythm," is not. There's a fine line to walk between recognizing that language and thought are interrelated, and thinking of language as the magical thought-producing-machine that completely determines all mental (and sometimes physiological) functioning.

Finally, a lot of people read "language" and therefore forget the importance of things like dialect and culture. There's a common tendency to become obsessed with 'untranslatability' as a marker of language and forget that a lot of untranslatable utterances are untranslatable not because of an inherent feature of their host language, but because language and culture are also deeply intertwined. If in Russian I made a joke about "preved" or discussed samizdat, and you didn't understand it in translation, it wouldn't be because of any inherent differences in the mental processes of Russian-speakers versus English-speakers, but instead because of cultural differences, which are an incredibly important part of communication.

This is my two cents, I suppose—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a seductive idea and it's produced a lot of compelling research, but it's very easy to go too far with Sapir-Whorf and turn language into something much more powerful and more magical than it really is.
You are asking people to turn over personal info based on 1 vague line about discounts up to 80%. I think you need to provide a good bit more info- why does this free membership save me money? are they going to send me ads? etc etc etc.
It depends on the type of work. For safety critical avionics software, it can be three eLOC per day. For tools, web and others, it can be a few hundred to two thousand per day.
It appears that the survey button at the bottom is broken...like our hearts will be? jk
Well, I am from Bay Area but dont visit coffee shops and any places for that matter.

I usually spend weekend playing pool, swimming, bowling, hanging out with friends or online.

You should visit coffee shops near Palo Alto area, Casto Street if you are interested to meet techie people.
The problem with one year futures is that they do not track the spot price of oil as well. The whole purpose of an oil ETF is for it to give you the ability to buy or sell a bunch of oil at any time without having to deal with the actual oil. Thus, the value of an ETF should track the current (spot) price of oil.

But if the fund buys one year contracts, their costs will not reflect the current price but what people believe the price will be at the end of the year. So the ETF will be mis-priced in relation to the current price. I think that is why they try to buy contracts that are relatively short, because they track the current price better.
For the same reason that everyone who retweeted an #iranelection did not book a flight to Tehran to fight with their comrades. I have things to do, and my immediate needs to take care of: that pretty much means Common Lisp, which I depend on for my work.

My advice is just that, advice, and it's given in the hope that with our mutual situations improved, maybe we can meet for coffee somewhere down the road and kick it back.
Top  Enlargement
Is Mahir an angel investor now?
Isn't the line:

while(time(NULL) > markTime) { /* do nothing */ }

some sort of sleep mechanism?
What's the point again?
1, 4, and 5 are all called for in certain circumstances.

I've seen a lot of 2 in shell scripts that aren't under version control, and it's necessary. Though I once slimmed a script I didn't write down from about 1000 to 200 where a lot of that was comments and duplicated functions. (As in, the script would repeatedly define the same function with a different name and a different path hard-coded in, and then call each function in turn.)

The only one that I would say is in a class you legitimately should never do is #3, but no one would ever write that comment except to be flippant.
I worked on an inherited project that had /* FIXME: 8372 */ except we no longer owned the bug database. Really wished the comment actually explained WTF was broken, instead of leaving me perform exhaustive tests with a SOAP sandbox halfway across the world, and a security/performance hack that involved keeping track of a per-request nonce AND a 5s sleep :-/
"I'd agree with this general sentiment."

Are you saying you don't necessarily agree with the specific sentiment? :-)
This is the reality of Wall Street, any time you tie your self to a certain predictable future behaviour, people will figure that out and figure out a way to exploit you.

Those exchange traded funds screwed themselves because they committed themselves to buying contracts at a specific time. So other traders knew about it and made sure the prices of the contracts at that time were extra high.

And it does not seem like there is a good answer. On one hand you can have the ETFs stop their requirements to buy or sell at a particular time. Thus you would entrust the managers of those funds to find good times to buy and/or sell. But then again can you trust the managers? There is a huge incentive for the managers to take bribes from another trader to buy or sell at times that are bad for the fund but good for the other trader. Or, maybe the managers simply are not very good and choose bad times. In a way you have an agency problem, and ETFs were invented in order to remove any agency issues. That is, the whole philosophy behind ETFs is for them to be automatic so you do not have to trust the judgement of some manager to buy them.

I think the only answer is for investors is to buy the contracts directly and not to go through ETFs. Of course that is a bit dangerous, because if you do not clear your position in a timely manner, you always risk somebody actually delivering a thousand barrels of oil on your front lawn, but hey that is a risk you have to take if you want to be commodities investor.
BASIC, php, and javascript
Ask HN: What are some good ways to find local web design/dev work?
Is going door to door to small businesses effective? Flyers around town? Ad-words?

I'm looking for short term work so I can continue working on my own projects.
Good points, thanks. Will include link to privacy policy and elaborate more in description. Was trying to cut down the copy to a minimum but I guess I went too far.
It has been argued (http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0905/0905.4641v1.pdf) that this theorem is flawed (the premises don't match reality).

After briefly studying the matter, I agree, and suspect the flaw is that Conway and Kochen assume that, because the two experiments are separated by a great distance, they may be treated as separate random trials. I believe you can see from the multiple universe interpretation of QM that this assumption is incorrect.

I'm not a physicist and have only spent a few hours on it, so take this comment with a big grain of salt. I'm curious to hear if there's a consensus among physicists on the resolution.
Rather than tell you how fast I code, I'll hopefully provide some insight in to how to become someone who codes quickly:

1. Coding environment. Part of this is the physical space around you, distractions, mental state, etc., but you can probably figure this out best for yourself. The other part is inside the computer. You need a good editor, and you need to be comfortable in it. Vim, emacs, or an IDE. Whatever it is, it needs to really understand the language and libraries you're using (code completion, syntax highlighting, build/run/debug integrated, documentation integrated (emacs has M-x man, vim has K)), and if your language supports it, have a REPL at hand too. The most important thing here is knowing that, no matter what you want to do (move text, change variable names, start a debugger, set a breakpoint, etc.), you don't need to think about it. Your hands and your machine need to become an extension of your thought process, to the point that you think something about the code, and it happens, with as little overhead as possible.

2. Familiarity with language/libraries. If you're spending over 20% of your time looking up documentation for language features or the standard library, you're never going to code as fast as you want to. If you're a C programmer, spend more time with K&R, A Book on C, and sections 2 and 3 of the UNIX manual. If you really invest the time to memorize your language and common libraries, you can cut your development time down substantially. Of course, to do this, the best thing you can really do is just to spend a lot more time coding slowly, so go do that now.

3. Project preparation. Before you sit down to code, you need to know what it is you're coding (unless you're doing exploratory programming, which, while wonderful, requires even more of #1 and #2, and will never be "fast coding" per se). Sit down with a whiteboard or a pad of paper, or just sit and think if you have a good memory, but plan out what you're going to code. Here, YMMV a lot. For some, it's very important to have classes, interfaces, functions, etc. planned out before they code. Others need to plan out the UI to great lengths first. Personally, I think about data flow and constraints and let the function organization emerge (and then stress for a long time about the UI anyway). You should play around with how much preparation you need to do, but you definitely need to do some preparation.

4. Knowing when to stop. Apart from looking up documentation, I think I waste the most time making the code more and more optimized or more and more beautiful (read: unnecessarily clever). If you really want to code fast, you have to let go. When it works, it works, and you can stop for the moment. You can always clean it up later, abstract things away, refactor code, whatever, but you'll be more satisfied if you say "okay, my project works now, I'm going to go have a snack/smoke/nap".
If you're really a noob, I'd try to be a little less careful, personally. The best way to stop writing shitty code is to write a whole lot of it so that you realize why it's shitty, not to blindly follow best practices from the start.

Of course, if you're writing production code at work or something like that, it's another matter, and you should obviously try to make sure everything that gets checked in is good quality. But for me, at least, knowing what not to do in the abstract never made the same impact as doing horrible things in my code and then feeling the pain later on - the personally earned lessons are the ones that I remember the best.
Microsoft for one would love to have a big chunk of Internet real estate that couldn't be found and indexed by Google.

It's funny you mention Facebook. I would say Facebook's chief motive right now is to stop Google from encroaching upon their territory, so Facebook wants to put up as many speed-bumps as possible around Google. Basically that means keeping Google sandboxed—it's okay to let Google index anything they want and throw that up on an ordered SERP, but no way can we let them grow elaborate ivy APIs and web-based UIs around our walled-garden of user generated content. (i.e. Buzz.)

Given Microsoft's ownership and early partnering with Facebook, Microsoft and Facebook have aligned interests in keeping Google in the sandbox.
I write most things two or three times. I am not clever enough to hold a whole system in my head at once --- so doing it wrong the first time gives me somewhere to hang my ideas.

The first time through is very fast --- lots of code written and deleted and commented out and back in again.

The subsequent rewrites are much slower; a day might have negative net code as likely as not.
I've never seen anyone able to design something away from keyboard that doesn't change significantly once it's written

It does change once it's written.

The idea is to get a clear work plan on a "close enough" design. I estimate that my first cut of anything is maybe 50% or so.

The idea is also to avoid sitting at the computer all day and then being disappointed with how little I accomplished. Activity != accomplishment.

A little more background...

First term freshman year, 90% of science students took Chemistry I. On Mondays and Wednesdays, only 50% of the seats in the dining room were taken for dinner. Chem Lab started at 1:00 p.m. and dinner was at 6:00 p.m. So, most freshman chemistry students took more than 5 hours to complete their lab work.

This never made sense to me. I took Chemistry I second term freshman year. My lab partner and I made a pact to never miss dinner. We did everything we possibility could to expedite lab time. We did all the reading, planning, and reviewing other people's results before we entered the lab. We even wrote our reports in advance, filling in the results as we went. Our longest lab took 2 1/2 hours. Our shortest took 1 1/4 hour. (We also both got A+.)

I still practice that methodology today. My computer is my lab and my bed or sofa is my lab prep. Preparation takes as long as it needs. Labs go fast. If they don't it's because I wasn't prepared enough when I started.
This is a very interesting problem. Basically the algorithm for when to roll needs to be:

1.) Random and hard to predict before-the-fact

2.) Totally verifiable after-the-fact by the public (or by an uninterested authority the public trusts)

That means a randomized algorithm whose seed is something the ETF manager knows before the general public, but which everyone else can verify once they publicize the info.

Quick brainstorming:

1.) They seed based on a hash of their total AUM or PNL on a certain date, down to the penny, which is almost impossible for outsider's to predict but which they know internally and can publicize in the next quarterly statement.

2.) They tell the SEC a list of state-run lotteries in secret, then the seed is the winning lottery number on a particular night. The public can never know which lottery is the one that matters until after-the-fact.

3.) Seed based off a hash of the concatenation of every employee's birthday or social security number, which is never public, but if there was ever a serious investigation or audit, they could verify to authorities that they followed the rules.
My first advice is figure out what type of marketer do you want? There is a huge difference between a business development specialist and an online marketer. Generally a business development specialist is focused on distribution, partnerships, sales, and potentially affiliate programs if you are lucky. A traditional internet marketer will be focused on SEO, content development, user experience, email etc.

My advice is that if you can make the time you should start looking now, even if you are not ready to hire. It is going to take some time to find the right person to mesh with your personalities and if you do find a great person they need to be as excited about your product as you are.
Would you like to take issue with any specific points, or just attack the source?
I assume that "free-willed" in this case is being used ironically?
My own startup is nowhere near needing that but my experiences with startups would say: not anywhere near that time-frame. For one thing, it depends on what you're thinking about in terms of marketing.

Are you thinking customer-development and incorporating feedback into the product? That should be done by the founders and product people.

Are you thinking of people who do things like social media and PR? For that you can hire a more experienced firm or consultant with a hire hourly rate but likelier to do more in that hour than some junior "marketing" major.

If I had to put some value on it, I would say: once you have built a "fully" viable product that is market tested and its value is confirmed.
I won't venture to saying anything about CL libs - I don't know or use them. But clearly you don't know much about the Clojure library landscape. All the ones I use are Lisp-y and delicious.
TODOs and FIXMEs are, at least in my opinion, things that aren't manifesting as bugs right now, but might in the future. Having them in the tracking system will just confuse management and QA. Just put them in the code, which has the advantage of putting the FIXME right next to the thing that needs to be fixed.

They've saved me many times, and I've had exactly the situation I describe above occur, so while I sort of am with you in theory, in practice they should go right in the code.
Poll: Are you a Programmer?
We all have an interest in the internet I think that is obvious, so I mean specifically programming, like C+, JavaScript, etc.
2 girls 1 cup is some of the most horrific scat on the net. Have you seen it? It's probably illegal in most countries.
Bring in a marketer ASAP! Getting your product and company's name out should start from day one. You should have a marketer who is going to events, making connections within the industry, networking with VC's and investors, and playing a dynamic role with the team. This may require you to give up equity to bring someone in if you are bootstrapped but it is definitely worth it for long term success. Best of luck!
There have been a variety of hog-farms that have experimented with generating heat from methane from the hog pens.

But putting humans in the sorts of conditions needed to make it viable would generally be frowned upon by society.
To be clear: No evidence of a decrease in mortality with the intake of anti-oxidants. The study does not target vitamins as a whole.
Mezzanine is a CMS platform built with Django, BSD licensed:

http://mezzanine.jupo.org

A few days ago I blogged about all the different roles it's lacking in, UX is one:

http://blog.jupo.org/post/845040660/an-open-source-brief
The "no sleep statement" rule is just there to prevent a pseudocode solution from being too easy.

The point is to see if someone will submit something that makes me think, "Oh wow, I would have never considered doing it that way." Thus expanding my software horizons forevermore. It's a simple problem with potentially several creative solutions.